Stephen Baskerville is an American author and political theorist who has taught in colleges all over the US and Europe (usually ending up sacked for his anti-feminist politics). He chats to James about why feminism is more dangerous and insidious than Marxism; the corruption of the US divorce courts; why Conan Doyle nicked his family name; the Civil War; Iran; and much else besides. His books include Who Lost America? Why the United States Went ‘Communist’ - and What to Do about It and The New Politics of Sex.
https://www.stephenbaskerville.comhttps://stephenbaskerville.substack.com
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James Delingpole’s Big Birthday BashAugust 1st. Starring Bob Moran, Dick Delingpole and Friends. Tickets £40. VIP Tickets (limited to 20) £120
Venue: tbc Central England/East Midlands - off M40 and M1 in middle of beautiful countryside with lots of b n bs etc.
Buy Tickets* / More Info:https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Live/bob-moran.html
If you have any questions regarding the event - please contact us via our website:https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk/#Contact
Please note: there aren’t physical ‘tickets’ — your name/s (and emails) are added to a database list to be checked on the day of event.
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How environmentalists are killing the planet, destroying the economy and stealing your children's future.
In Watermelons, an updated edition of his ground-breaking 2011 book, James tells the shocking true story of how a handful of political activists, green campaigners, voodoo scientists and psychopathic billionaires teamed up to invent a fake crisis called ‘global warming’.
This updated edition includes two new chapters which, like a geo-engineered flood, pour cold water on some of the original’s sunny optimism and provide new insights into the diabolical nature of the climate alarmists’ sinister master plan.
Purchase Watermelons by James Delingpole here:https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/
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The official website of James Delingpole:https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk
xxx
Welcome to the Dellingbot with me James Dellingpole and I just wanted to tell you about something really exciting coming up quite shortly.
It's James Dellingpole's birthday bash.
His big birthday bash I believe it's been called.
Can you guess why?
Well unfortunately I've got a big birthday coming up.
I don't normally like to celebrate these things but this one is kind of unavoidable.
It's not actually on my birthday, it's on August the 1st.
My actual birthday was held on the anniversary of the day when the atomic bomb didn't go off over Hiroshima because nukes aren't real and it was an apalm strike.
But that's another story.
So my big birthday bash is on August the 1st and the highlights include, well I suppose the highlight is me chatting on stage doing a delling pod live with Bob Moran.
Now apart possibly from my brother Dick who's obviously easy to talk to because he's my brother I think Bob is one of the people I most enjoy chatting to him because he's bright obviously.
He's got hinterland.
He doesn't take prisoners and the conversation could go in any direction and it probably will.
I'm really looking forward to our chat so thank you Bob for appearing on the stage with me.
Also we've got Dick.
Dick will be there of course and he'll be playing bass with unregistered chickens.
I've also got some of my friends from the world of natural health coming up and if you arrive early enough you might be able to try some of their potions or even their treatments.
I'm not sure what they want to do but there'll be stalls and things to look at and there'll be pizza.
There'll be pizza.
Really delicious.
The last time, last event I had, we've got the same caterers.
Food is extra obviously but the pizzas were really good and they also did these really nice I'm quite fussy about food.
These nice, I think it was pooled beef, something like that.
It was just food you'd want to eat.
I think the best thing about these events isn't even about me.
It's about all the other wonderful people that turn up.
You'll be amazed.
These are like the best friends you've never met because you'll suddenly feel, hang on a second, I'm not alone.
There are other crazies just like me.
They're really, really fun, these events.
I would do them much more often, but unfortunately I get so knackered because of my tedious illness thing.
I mean I've barely recovered from the last one.
It's in the middle.
It's in central England I will tell you.
It is surrounded by beautiful countryside.
There'll be BNBs and stuff you can stay in.
I would do that if I were you.
It's on a Friday night, August the 1st I mentioned.
But you might want to make a weekend of it because there's lots of stuff to see around and about.
Or you could come early and have a walk.
I don't know.
Whatever.
Anyway, I hope I will see you there.
August the 1st, James' big birthday bash.
It's going to be fun.
Limited number, strictly limited number of tickets.
There's only going to be 20 VIP tickets for reasons which will become obvious if you buy one.
They're for people who want to have special quality time with James.
Otherwise, I just get a normal ticket.
You will have fun, but please be quick because there are limited tickets.
They're being very strict on numbers, the venue.
So get in there as soon as you can.
And won't it be great?
Like, August, I think, is a really boring month.
Everyone goes away.
You'll need something to cheer you up for the fact that you're not in Ibiza or Greece or wherever you would like to be.
This will make up for the fact.
And we'll all be able to commiserate with one another and have a really, really good time.
I'm so looking forward to seeing you there at James's big birthday bash.
Thank you.
Can't wait.
Can't wait.
Global warming is a massive con.
There was no evidence whatsoever that man-made climate change is a problem, that it's going to kill us, that we need to amend our lifestyle in order to deal with it.
It's a non-existent problem.
But how do you explain this stuff to your normie friends?
Well, I've just brought out the revised edition of my 2012 classic book, Watermelons, which captures the story of how some really nasty people decided to invent the global warming scare in order to fleece you, to take away your freedoms, to take away your land.
It's a shocking story.
I wrote it, as I say, in 2011 actually, the first edition came out.
And it's a snapshot of a particular era.
The era when the people behind the climate change scam got caught red-handed, tinkering with the data, torturing till it screamed, in a scandal that I helped christen ClimateGate.
So I give you the background to the skull juggery that went on in these seats of learning where these supposed experts were informing us.
We've got to act now.
I rumbled their scam.
I then asked the question, okay, if it is a scam, who's doing this and why?
It's a good story.
I've kept the original book pretty much as is, but I've written two new chapters, one at the beginning and one at the end, explaining how it's even worse than we thought.
I think it still stands up.
I think it's a good read.
Obviously I'm biased, but I'd recommend it.
You can buy it from jamesdellingpole.co.uk forward slash shop.
You'll probably find it right.
Just go to my website and look for it, jamesdellingpole.co.uk.
And I hope it helps keep you informed and gives you the material you need to bring around all those people who are still persuaded that, oh, it's a disaster.
We must amend our ways and appease the gods.
Appease Mother God.
There we go.
It's a scam.
I love Dellingpole.
Don't subscribe to the Podcast, baby.
I love Dellingpole.
Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James Dellingpole.
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silver every month with monetary metals visit monetary-metals.com forward slash dellingpoll to earn more welcome to the delingpod stephen baskerville i should say that i i get i get people sending me messages at below my sub stack and or on social media or whatever um recommending various people and a while back somebody said you must
Stephen Baskerville on to talk about feminism.
I haven't come across you before, but before that recommendation, I hadn't come across you.
But it's a good topic.
If you want to talk about that, we can talk about other stuff as well.
Because I know you've written about why everything has totally gone wrong in America, which it has.
And tell me about yourself.
I know you're a professor at Warsaw, and university in Warsaw.
Yes, I'm more or less semi-retired now, but that's my most recent post, was the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw.
But I've worked at various universities over my career in Europe and the United States.
Right.
And my field is politics.
I'm especially interested in political ideologies and comparative politics.
And I kind of made my name.
I mean, most people know me because of work I've done on feminism, but more specifically on the feminist role in the system of marriage, divorce, child custody, family courts, these sorts of things.
And that's what I've written about the most in the last 25 years.
And I imagine it's made you very popular on women's studies courses.
Yes.
Yes.
The irony is appropriate.
They tend to cut me off without a word.
Yes.
I mean, anyone with your politics who can survive as long as you have in academia in any form at all is got to be a bit of an escape artist, a bit of a Houdini.
I mean, how did you manage it?
That's a very good question.
I've been, if I counted all the universities I've been dismissed from, it would be, it would be quite a long list.
Yeah.
I, I don't last very long.
And well, I, I do sometimes last a while if I can keep my nose clean.
But as soon as I start talking about this issue, I'm shown the door.
and it's, it's taboo.
It's absolutely taboo.
Do you get, out of interest, do you get a payoff every time you, you, you get booted out of these establishments?
Oh no.
And they never tell me why.
They just decide, they never tell me that I'm terminated.
They just tell me that, you know, my contract is not being renewed or, or whatever, or it's budget cuts or it's, it's always something like that.
Right.
Yeah.
But it's, it's clearly the fact that I write about these issues because I'm stepping on some very powerful toes.
One, one is the feminists and the other is the bar associations, which in North America are extremely powerful.
And that alliance is really a, a very, very, very powerful one.
Yeah.
Well, that was one of the things I picked up on.
I, I've, I've been, uh, skimming over your books.
I, sorry, I, I, I haven't done my, my, my research as fully as as as you you deserve but i noticed that you you were suggesting that the divorce industry is making a lot of a lot of it's good money for for lawyers, and they don't want it to stop.
They want to make it as easy as possible so that they can process more clients.
Is that right?
That's precisely what they do.
But it's actually even more serious than that.
I mean, it's, it's, um, I describe it as the most repressive system governmental machinery ever created in the English-speaking world.
And it really is, especially the North American, American, and Canadian versions of this.
Now, in Britain, it's not quite so bad yet.
In Europe, it's pretty awful, but it's not quite as repressive.
Men don't go to jail for the rest of their lives or indefinitely.
They're not, well, I don't know.
It gets worse all the time.
But in the United States and Canada, it's very repressive indeed.
Men go to jail for what?
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes.
Well, you name it.
It's an amazing system of a processing system.
I describe it as a system, and I'm not the first to describe it as a system of organized crime.
You can be put in jail for almost anything, most immediately if you're involuntarily divorced.
You can be jailed for trying to see your children when you're not authorized.
You can be jailed for domestic violence accusations.
There was a time when you could be jailed for, you still can be jailed for child abuse accusations, and these are rife in these courts, knowingly false accusations of child abuse and even more so domestic violence.
But in North America, the main thing that men go to jail for is non-payment of child support.
Once they take your children, they take everything you have.
They immediately order, institute a child support order on you, and it can be for 50, 60, 70% of your income, even more.
And if you don't pay it, you can be incarcerated without trial.
And it's quite amazing.
I'm pretty sure it has not gotten this bad in Britain yet, that aspect of it.
But that's the worst part of it in North America.
That is extraordinary.
I think certainly 95%, 99% of UK viewers and listeners will not be aware.
I certainly wasn't aware of it.
I knew there was something rotten.
I don't know whether you're aware, Stephen, that in the last five years, I've become what's known as a batshit crazy tinful hat conspiracy theorist.
But even in my days as a kind of libertarian stroke conservative commentator on these issues, I sensed that there was something rotten about the US which I couldn't put my finger on.
And it was this dichotomy whereby, on the one hand, I looked at America as kind of a beacon of freedom.
I believed in your checks and balances.
I thought you're a kind of model of how the free world should work.
But I realise now this is all propaganda that I'd imbibe.
But nevertheless, this is what I thought at the time.
I always used to love my trips to America.
I always used to find all the different Americans I met just delightful company.
And I like your variety of scenery, whether it's the Bayou or whether it's the Grand Canyon, all this stuff.
I used to love America, but there was something about it that bothered me.
And it was something to do with your, well, the way that legalism is embodied in everything, that every other person seems to be a lawyer, which I thought was suspicious making.
But secondly, it was exactly it, what you described, that it's very easy.
America's fine until you fall through the cracks, and then suddenly you can find yourself in hell very easily, which is not what you would expect in the land of the free.
That's absolutely correct.
Yeah, the American judiciary is, I think, perhaps the most crooked institution on earth.
It is quite amazing.
And it really shows why the United States has the largest prison system, I think, except per capita, except for perhaps North Korea, is because of the corruption of the judiciary.
Yeah, it's gotten to the point, and you can see this very starkly in family court, where the criminals are sitting on the bench wearing the black robes, and they're consigning the law-abiding citizens to incarceration, to jail or prison.
And it's quite amazing, that respect.
It happens a lot.
It started with low-income communities.
It started, a lot of it came out of the welfare system, the American-style welfare system, which, as you may know, is not a middle-class insurance scheme like the European welfare systems.
It's a safety net for the poor.
And I describe it as the first deep state.
My most recent book is called Who Lost America.
And I describe it in some detail how the welfare system became the first deep state and how the lives of poor people, especially, came to be controlled by a quasi-totalitarian system of bureaucracy and judiciary that basically took control of the private lives,
the family lives of poor people, especially low-income people in places like the inner cities and Appalachia and poor states in the American South.
And because poor populations are not resistant to this, they can't.
It's hard for poor people, low-income, uneducated people to stand up to this.
So it really began with the welfare system, and gradually it spread through the divorce system.
It spread to the middle class increasingly and became a very, you know, and you look at today, the American judiciary, the way things are, you know, basically what some people call assembly line justice, where men, and it's usually men, sometimes women, line up for hearings that may last, you know, one or two minutes, and they are sentenced to Months or even years in incarceration.
And it happens in the criminal law, but the most corrupt of all, I believe, is the family law.
Right.
Did this start under, was it LBJ?
Was this the Great Society?
It had a big boost during the 60s with LBJ.
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, there had been a welfare state.
Before that, it had preyed to some extent on low-income people in the eastern seaboard, but it was nothing like that.
With the Great Society program of the 1960s, it expanded enormously.
And it really imposed a system of incarceration, fatherlessness, and repression on low-income communities, especially low-income men.
And the feminists got a hold of this really gradually.
The feminists, Welfare from the Very Begin, not only in America, but in Britain as well and elsewhere.
Welfare from the beginning had been to some extent a feminist project.
It was begun in the early 20th century in the United States.
It was started by feminists, radical leftists like Jane Addams.
And it was gradually over the decades taken over increasingly by feminists.
And there were big debates in the 30s and again in the 60s and 70s about how to get people off welfare, how to get people back to work, all this.
But the feminists increasingly realized that welfare was a system of empowering women.
So it went from being a necessary evil to being a vehicle for feminist aggrandizement.
Again, starting with low-income populations and increasingly spreading out to middle-class ones from there.
So how does welfare benefit women?
Well, welfare doesn't benefit anyone else.
Welfare pays benefits directly to women, usually with children.
Men don't get any benefits to people.
So in America, welfare means payments to women.
Oh, entirely, yes.
And this is why, for example, you don't hear about this a lot.
You think, you know, American conservatives always say, look at all this money we pay to blacks.
Look at all this money we pay to African Americans.
LBJ's, you know, great society, welfare, housing allowance, food stamps, you name it.
There's all kinds of burdens.
Why are the blacks happy?
Why do they stop committing these crimes?
Why are they so violent and angry all the time?
Well, these social programs don't benefit black men.
They don't benefit black men at all.
They entirely benefit black women.
And they allow black women to emasculate black men, to throw the black man out of the home, to take the control of the children, and to raise them as single mothers.
Yeah, and take the checks without having the man around to share the money with.
Or the decisions.
Exactly.
Whoa.
Exactly.
And this is what did when the divorce system came along, the system of no-fault divorce in the 1970s and 80s, this spread to the middle class.
Divorce became a system for middle-class women to do the same thing, to throw the man out of the house, to take control of the children, to demand a child support check.
All of those programs, domestic violence, child abuse, child support, these have been started for low-income welfare families.
They were never intended for middle-class families.
This was the beginning.
This gave social workers police powers.
Social workers became plainclothes police, feminist plainclothes police.
And they threw black men and low-income men out of their homes, and they empowered the single, low-income black and other women.
With divorce, all that machinery was greatly expanded to middle-class households, and the middle-class white feminists were able to take control in the same way that the black feminists had done previously.
And presumably you're suggesting that things like no-fault divorces meant that women could be much more frivolous.
They could use divorce as a kind of lifestyle choice or as a power play.
Exactly.
You could divorce for any reason or no reason.
One writer, Maggie Gallagher, called it the abolition of marriage because it meant that marriage was no longer a legally enforceable contract.
You could simply declare a divorce, you would go to court, and the case would have a predetermined outcome, a predetermined verdict, and the woman would get the divorce.
And this is why women file, they say 70 to 80% of divorces.
When children are involved, it's virtually 100% of divorces.
And I would imagine that this had a very deleterious effect on the moral behavior of women, on the psychology of women, because we know, I think you'll probably agree with me here, that there are certain traits in women which are fantastic.
The ability to multitask, the ability to spot stuff, spot dirt, to look after children.
They're very capable.
But there is a flip side where they can be vindictive, irrational, all the cliches about women which are true.
And I would imagine that these policies weaponize the worst female traits.
Oh, absolutely.
This was an amazing power play, power grab.
It happened without virtually any debate or any opposition.
It was snuck through.
The first no-fault divorce law was snuck through in California in 1969 under the signature of no less than Ronald Reagan.
It quickly spread during the 70s throughout all the American states.
There were hardly any opposition or even debate in the legislatures.
It spread very quickly to Europe and the entire Western world, Australia, New Zealand, Canada.
And there was no pushback.
A few legal authorities warned that this would be disastrous because, after all, the very concept Of no-fault justice is a contradiction in terms.
It's an oxymoron.
You cannot have no-fault justice.
So it not only destroyed the family, it also destroyed the integrity of the judiciary.
And this is why it's such a devastating revolution to have snuck in under the radar screen because it destroyed the integrity of the family.
Obviously, by destroying marriage, you destroy the family.
You destroy men, and you destroy the integrity of the judiciary.
There's no other judicial procedure like it.
It's got a predetermined outcome.
The verdict is decided in advance.
Evidence doesn't matter.
The imbalance of power it creates in a relationship is extraordinary, because if I'm understanding rightly, a woman can just use the threat of divorce and presumably getting automatic custody of her children as this massive stick with which to beat her husband with.
Absolutely.
Yes.
No, so you're right.
Even in intact marriages, the husband is often subordinated by that.
I have a story in my first book on this topic where a man says, anytime I disagree with my wife, she just pulls out the divorce papers and starts filling them in.
And I know what will happen.
I'll lose my children.
I'll lose half my income or more.
And I'll be thrown out of my home.
So, you know, men are coming to realize this.
So here's the thing.
There are lots of middle class.
Well, your definition of a middle class is slightly different from the European middle class, isn't it?
But let's say the educated classes in America, they're kind of invested in America being a great place and they're proud to be American and stuff.
Have they not noticed what's happened to them, their country?
Well, this is astounding.
Yes, they are noticing, and this is a big reason for the appeal of Donald Trump.
But I don't think they know where it came from.
They talk about the deep state.
They blame the FBI, the CIA, the Homeland Security, these obviously, you know, these governmental police, basically.
And they're right to do so.
But I don't believe it originated there.
I think it originated at a humble level.
Tyranny often takes place, as the Marxists understood, among low-income populations, because low-income, like I say, they can't resist it.
And I think that's what happened in this case, is this totalitarian state seized control of the poor.
But you're right.
The power balance is just amazing in this.
And in my most recent book, Who Lost America, I try to show how this gradually worked out from the welfare state to engulf all of America.
And even today, MAGA Republicans, Donald Trump followers, people like Tucker Carlson, these dissident journalists who incur the wrath of the left and claim to, you know, and are, you know, are respected and admired by MAGA Republicans, they won't touch this.
They won't go anywhere near it.
They won't criticize feminism.
They won't criticize the welfare system or the family courts or the divorce system or single mothers.
It's a massive system of power that is just off-limits to criticism.
Right.
And do they...
I don't think so.
No.
Trump has conspicuously, in both of his terms, he has conspicuously avoided any kind of family policy.
He's never done anything to attempt to reform federal family policy or state, you know, to influence state family policies.
When you consider, go back a few years in the United States to the 70s and as late as the 80s, there was a massive dialogue, massive conversation going on about welfare reform and family policy, because even then it was obvious of what was taking place.
And today the problem is much worse, and yet there is no discussion of it whatsoever.
Trump has never taken on family policy.
He's never taken on the crisis of fatherless homes or single-parent homes, the crisis of marriage.
He won't touch it.
And these journalists, these MAGA journalists, like Tucker Carlson, who are very courageous in their way on certain issues, but they won't touch it either.
Why are so many educated Americans lawyers?
Because, well, I describe lawyers as surrogate citizens, professional surrogate citizens.
They're people we pay to do our citizenship for us.
And so basically what lawyers are, they're people who have taken, to whom Americans have farmed out their citizenship.
Now, why did this happen?
It happened gradually.
I think to some extent it came out of the English common law.
The common law always conferred enormous power on judges.
Even if you go back to the 17th century, Sir Edward Cook and so forth, judges had enormous political power in England.
But like many things, the Americans took English traits and they take them to extremes.
And the judiciary, with the system of judicial review and the separation of powers and the system of the Supreme Court, the Americans took the English common law and they gave it even more power than it had before.
And so that's why the vanguard of this is very much the English-speaking countries, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England also.
I notice English conservatives, British conservatives, especially English, use the term, pardon me, use the term judicial activism to talk about judicial activism, which I think they borrowed from the Americans, Because the Americans are the ones that take this the furthest.
But it's going on everywhere.
An American judge named Robert Bork wrote a book a few years ago called The Worldwide Rule of Judges.
And he showed that this was happening in Israel, in, I forget which countries he treated, but it is happening everywhere.
You can see it in Italy and in France today.
So you saw it in Romania during the election with Ceausescu, the way the judiciary was allowed to just annul that election.
You see it in Poland, where the judiciary has become a football, a political football fought over between the right and the left.
So this judicial power is growing everywhere, and it's very difficult to get control of.
But in America is the cutting edge.
And I think within America, the family courts are the cutting edge of that.
Even other legal practitioners look down their noses at family law and call it a cesspool, which it is.
It's funny, you say things aren't so bad in England, which may be the case, but I don't know whether you ever came across an English journalist called Christopher Booker.
And he was a journalist of the, well, the kind of journalists you think that journalists ought to be if they were doing their job.
And he would research on popular topics.
For example, he became an outspoken climate sceptic.
But another of his particular interests was the, I think corruption was probably the word he used, the corruption of the English family courts.
He said that it was extraordinary how most of their court hearings were held in Canberra.
So there was no possibility of any outsiders forming a view about whether or not justice was being administered here, that they were secretive, that they were...
Oh, absolutely.
That's precisely what they are.
That's their bread and butter.
That's their, you know, that's their...
I can't find you.
Sorry.
There you are.
Yes, I believe I corresponded with Christopher Booker, if I remember right.
Yes, it's precisely, he's right about that.
They do.
But oh, I remember Christopher Booker now, I think.
As I recall, he did make a crusade against this.
But I corresponded with him and I asked him why you only do this for intact families.
Why don't you look at the divorce system?
Because fathers lose their children much more than mothers.
And he didn't want to deal with it at all.
He was willing to stand up for the parental rights of intact families who were falsely accused of child abuse.
But he would not go to bat for if the split was between the mother and the father and the children were taken away from one and not the other, by the other, then he didn't care.
And that's the way it is with a lot of conservative groups.
Yeah.
Right.
Adavants, why do the courts actively want to take away children from families and put them into care?
Well, these courts are very bureaucratic.
They're not really courts at all.
Like I say, they have a predetermined outcome.
There's only one verdict possible.
If you file for a divorce, the judge grants the divorce.
So they're not really concerned with administering justice.
They're bureaucratic administrative tribunals.
And it's like any other bureaucratic system, they make business for themselves.
Charles Dickens said this.
Charles Dickens, in his novel, The Bleak House, said, the one great business of the English law is to make business for itself.
To make business for itself.
And this is what these courts do.
They make business.
They create the very problems they pretend to be solving.
And the more business they create, I quote people like this, and I quote judges and lawyers in my books saying this quite openly.
If you get a good outcome in the court, more people will come to the court and business will boom.
So they want to, like any bureaucratic institution, they're dedicated to creating the problem they're supposed to be solving.
And that's precisely what, and the welfare system agencies do the same thing.
And you can see it's a great business model because, I mean, you look at a couple, a married couple, if they're splitting up, there's quite likely to be some bitterness there.
They know each other's faults.
So they've got loads of ammunition to use against one another.
And the lawyers, as the intermediaries of this process, can clean up, can't they?
Oh, absolutely.
The couple know each other's, you know, they are one another's closest confidants.
They know one another's secrets.
They were the bodies buried, yep.
And what they can do, I mean, basically what happens is the courts offer one parent, the mother usually, a bribe.
Basically, if you file for divorce, you will get the children, you will get the home, you will get at least half his income and maybe more, all tax-free.
You will get the sole decision-making about the children, and you have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain.
On the other hand, if the father gets wind of this and files for divorce first, he may have a chance to do it to the mother.
It does happen.
So whichever one files first wins.
Or at least if he files first, at least he might come out of it better because the judges and lawyers will be grateful to him for creating business.
So it becomes a race to the courthouse.
Whoever files first wins.
It's a game of prisoner's dilemma.
If you file for divorce, you'll get everything.
But if your spouse files for divorce against you first, you'll lose everything.
What is the divorce rate in America?
Well, they say it's over 50% now.
But like you say, many couples live in a state of de facto divorce because one parent, usually the mother, is able to use the threat to basically take control of the home.
In the good old days, whenever that was, what used the divorce rate to be?
Well, I mean, it grew gradually over the course of the 20th century.
I can't tell you exactly, but it was fairly low.
Well, people were lamenting it in the early 20th century.
And it was low by today's standards, but people were saying how awful it is that there's so much divorce going on.
But it grew during the 20th century as mothers got more and more favorable terms, outcomes, as the feminist movement grew.
And really, by the time no-fault divorce was brought in in 1969, it really only codified what was already the practice in many courts of bribing the mother into filing for divorce.
And by the way, one thing that's very important, people don't know this, very few people realize this.
No-fault divorce was the brainchild of the feminists.
They devised it.
People don't realize this.
They were drafting no-fault divorce laws in the 1940s, 20 years before.
Nobody was paying attention.
There was no sympathy for it back then.
They waited until the 1960s.
Everybody's attention was on Vietnam and civil rights.
And the sexual revolution was getting people, acculturating people to sexual innovation, sexual experimentation, sexual liberalism.
And so they got this divorce through on false pretenses.
They peddled it as divorce by mutual consent, which it was not.
It never has been.
It was divorce, unilateral, involuntary divorce by one spouse, whether the other one wants it or not.
And they slipped this through, the feminists, and they're still pushing it today on the global south.
Yeah.
I think that you've argued that part of the armory of propaganda techniques used to facilitate this process is the portrayal of misrepresentation of men as being useless, bad at distracted fathers, incapable of looking after children.
And I've definitely noticed it.
We had this TV comedy series in the 1990s called Men Behaving Badly about these two likable but useless blokes who sat around drinking beer in front of the TV, watching football, while their exasperated girlfriends did all the work, you know, kept everything together.
And I mean, you've got The Simpsons, which is basically that, isn't it?
You've got Homer, and then Mars does all the work.
Lisa's work.
It's everywhere.
It's all over the airwaves everywhere.
Every country now.
And advertising as well.
Shows, cinema, you name it.
The anti-male propaganda is everywhere.
Who was that feminist you mentioned at the beginning?
You mentioned a feminist, Mary somebody.
I mentioned Maggie Gallagher.
No, you mentioned somebody else, different name, early, sort of beginning of the century, you mentioned it.
Oh, Jane Addams.
Jane Addams, yeah.
Jane Addams was a, as I understand it, if I remember right, she was kind of a Marxist anarchist.
She had a family background in Eastern Europe.
She'd come to her family to come to this country.
But she's credited with founding the social work profession.
She was interested in the backstories of these figures, because I don't subscribe to the great men or women theory of history.
These people have normally got back.
Karl Marx had his backers.
Charles Darwin had his backers.
The people with an axe to grind, the people who really control society, tend to pick these figures, these figureheads.
So I'm just curious as to where this woman came from and who was funding her.
Because she didn't, particularly in the past when it was much harder to get a media presence or have any influence without backing, that woman wouldn't just have become a feminist and she'd have been speaking to a void if you didn't have people amplifying her.
So who were they?
Well, the early 20th century was known as the Progressive Era in America.
It was a very liberal period, as it was in Britain.
The feminist movement was very strong, was growing and very strong in the years surrounding World War I. And there were leftism generally, Marxism, anarchism, and so forth, were especially strong in Eastern European communities, immigrant communities, in places like Jane Adams was from Chicago, for example.
And so she was part of that liberal left milieu that was intent on reforming everything, sometimes reforming things for their own sake.
And that was the beginning of the welfare state in America.
It was the beginning, you had the institution of the juvenile courts.
The juvenile courts began, they were the antecedents to the family courts.
And the whole theory of Juvenile courts was that justice for juveniles should be more humane, more flexible, not so rigid, not so tied to statute.
So it gave judges and lawyers enormous flexibility to play fast and loose with the law on the excuse that they were doing this all, as we say nowadays, for the children.
So this was the milieu of liberalism, especially judicial liberalism, progressive reform, the beginnings of welfare systems.
And Jane Adams was the one who extended this to the social work profession.
And this is very important because prior to this, poor relief, relief of the poor had always been dominated by women, as you can imagine.
In the 19th century, previously, they tended to be married women, church women, Christian women, who did this.
They were supported by their husbands.
They were amateurs.
They were Christians.
And they had a genuine motivation to eradicate poverty.
They did push material relief of the poor, but they also pushed sexual morality.
They insisted that single motherhood was unacceptable.
And they demanded that mothers, that women get married before they had children.
And if they couldn't or wouldn't, then in some cases, the children could be taken from them.
So these amateur Christian women who dominated poor relief previously had an incentive to actually solve the problem, to relieve the poor, to uplift them materially, but also to uplift them spiritually and morally, sexually.
Yes, I mean, the Victorians are often mocked, aren't they, for creating that phrase, the deserving poor.
Exactly.
But actually, why should they be mocked?
I mean, they were trying to use.
Well, by professionalizing social work, what Jane Addams and others did was they created a class of professional paid bureaucrats who had a vested professional interest and financial interest in creating the problem they're supposed to be solving.
If you're paid to solve a problem, I call this the Iron Law of Washington.
If you're paid to solve a problem, you have an incentive to create as much of the problem as possible.
You have no incentive to solve the problem.
You have an incentive to create more of the problem.
And that's what the professionalization of social work did.
It created this army of bureaucrats with a self-interest in creating the problem.
And the way to create the problem, the way to make the problem of poverty worse and perpetuate it, was to drive the men out of the home and make the women and children dependent upon state provision, upon the social workers.
So the feminist ideology dovetailed beautifully with the bureaucratic self-interest of the new professional social workers.
In both cases, whether it was bureaucratic self-interest or feminist ideology, they had an incentive to get the men out of the home.
And with the creation of juvenile courts, later family courts, they had the mechanism to get the men out of the home.
Yes.
I think where I'm slightly unsure about your thesis.
I mean, I'm sure what you say is true.
I'm just a bit suspicious about why these figures.
You said, well, you must be aware that the early 20th century was a very progressive era.
But these things don't spring from the ether.
And I don't believe they actually come from below either.
I think that ultimately, when ideas, when they become current, they're being financed by vested interests.
I remember reading another book.
Have you read Occult Feminism?
No.
About the connections between feminism and the occult?
No.
And I can't remember what her name is.
But she points out that a lot of women really were not, most women were really not interested in things like the suffragettes and interested in feminism.
It wasn't appealing to them, that it had to be kind of forced into the system.
So you've got figureheads like, what did you say, and then was Jane Addams?
Jane Adams.
Jane Addams.
So yeah, these are the focus for people's it's that Jane Adams and she's pushing this.
But behind the scenes, there's going to be you said Eastern European.
I mean, what do you mean?
Do you mean that they're Jewish or what?
A certain number were Jewish, but they came from places like Russia, Lithuania.
Well, I'm just thinking that this is quite analogous to what happened with the Frankfurt School, which again was mostly Jewish intellectuals coming over from Europe, settling in, I think they had a stint on the West Coast for a while, but settling in Colombia and infiltrating the system with what became known as cultural Marxism.
It sounds to me like feminism was the first wedge for this destruction from within of a healthy society.
I'm not sure chronologically where feminism would have come.
I would have said it comes later.
The first loyalty of the Frankfurt School was to a kind of humanistic Marxism and socialism.
And the feminists tended for many years, feminism was on the margins of the left.
I argue in my most recent book that feminism has moved from the margins of the left back in the early 19th century, 20th century, to the vanguard, the cutting edge of the left today.
Now, who profits from that?
I mean, you could say a lot of people do.
I mean, businesses, feminists drove down male wages.
They flooded the workforce with more female workers.
You could argue that the legal profession had a vested interest in this.
I don't know if it's a good thing.
And they put more people in the tax base as well.
Absolutely.
Yes, if you've got a woman, rather than staying home and taking care of her own children, she goes out and takes care of someone else's children and gets paid for it, right?
Then you're putting, you've got more, you can tax it.
You can tax insurance.
So absolutely.
I mean, the state grew enormously during the 20th century partly for this reason.
Yeah, I think you're right.
It is now so far advanced.
You're saying that Trump won't talk about it.
It is now so far advanced that it would be a very bold, indeed controversial man who said that he wasn't a feminist nowadays.
It's a sort of given, isn't it, that we're supposed to be totally comfortable with feminism, that it's great because it empowered women and stuff.
Well, there's a few places that conservatives will push back.
They'll push back on abortion, for example.
That's one thing that they will criticize.
And they'll criticize feminism in very general terms, but they won't attack these institutions that really empowered the feminists, like the welfare system, the divorce system, the system of child custody, social work industry, things like that.
This is the real base, power base of radical feminism, and conservatives won't touch it.
They just won't touch it.
So you've argued in your most recent book that one of the reasons that the left has – I don't anymore.
think that they're two they're two facets of the same problem that that both sides are completely controlled um but i'm interested to hear your theory on why it is you think that the left was allowed to railroad through all this stuff in the in the biden administration and stuff and like what got it got it through in the um what
Well, that's precisely what my book is about.
My most recent book, Who Lost America.
And I say the subtitle is why the U.S. went communist and what to do about it.
But I put communist in quotations and inverted commas because I don't think it really did go communist.
I think it went feminist.
And conservatives don't know how to deal with that.
They don't know how they're completely nonplussed.
They're completely, they don't understand.
They're intimidated by feminism.
And that's why one of the things you hear, I mean, you mentioned cultural Marxism, and I agree with that.
I know the man, I think, who coined that phrase.
And it's a wonderful phrase.
It works very well for certain things.
But I think the conservatives take it too far.
And the reason they take it too far is because it serves as an excuse to refight the Cold War rather than to confront the feminists.
In other words, if what the feminists are doing is just Marxism, just another round of Marxism, well, then let's just fight Marxism all over again.
Let's fight the Cold War.
Let's demonize Russia and China.
And let's talk about free markets and all those good things, because we won the Cold War, didn't we?
We defeated the communists.
So let's go on about that.
But these feminists, we don't understand them.
They're dangerous.
They can hurt us.
They can hurt us badly.
So let's refight the Cold War.
And this is why Conservatives in the United States, and I think in Britain too, basically lose every battle.
Every single battle of the last 30 years in the United States that Conservatives have taken on, they have lost, with the partial exception of abortion, but I think they'll lose that too.
And people are saying the same thing about the Tories in Britain, that they simply, you know, that they've jettisoned any Conservative principles during their, since 2000.
That happened a long time ago, Stephen.
But yes, you're right.
Right.
And so I think the reason is because the Conservatives simply, basically the left reinvented itself.
The left reinvented itself after the end of the Cold War.
They stopped talking about the poor.
They stopped talking about militarism.
They stopped talking about the class struggle and socialism and communism.
All that was passe after the Soviet Union collapsed.
And the cutting edge of the left became sexual.
First feminism, then homosexualism, more recently transgenderism.
And the right doesn't know.
They fight the previous war.
It's like the proverbial generals who are always fighting the last war.
They're always fighting the previous war.
This is what the right, the professional right, the establishment right, does.
They fight the previous war, and that's why they lose.
That's why the left took control in the Biden administration.
And it's why the left is, through the neocons, the left is now wheedling its way into the Trump administration.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When my children were young, I had a good opportunity to observe the different characteristics of male and female.
And I don't think my children were exceptional in this way.
I think they were fairly representative.
In that I noticed that the female would use devious tricks, like pretend to be good, and then secretly undermine her brother.
And the brother would then react angrily and get caught reacting angrily and would get punished.
And my wife used to say to me, why don't you intervene more?
Why didn't you stop?
Because I said, all you do when you intervene is actually reinforce the unfairness because I can see what's going on.
I can see the girl's point of view and I can see the boys' point of view.
But there are, as I've suggested earlier, certain female traits and deviousness is definitely one of them.
I mean, I think, you know, girls are great, don't get me wrong.
I'm just saying that, as we learn in Genesis, they've got to be treated cautiously because they can lead you down a wrong alley.
Right.
Well, I was trained originally.
My original field was political ideas and the history of political thought.
And I've always maintained that for a couple thousand years now, political thought has been devoted largely to controlling and limiting the political power specifically of men.
Not a lot of political thought has gone into, over the ages, has gone into how to control the power of women.
It just isn't, you know, it's not a topic that came up that much.
It came up in literature to some extent, but not in political theory.
So, you know, we have to devise some political ideas on how to counter precisely what you're talking about.
I wonder if George Eliot was part of the PSYOP, of that sort of cultural softening towards, I look at...
I think George Elliott, just not as good as people say.
And I think that these books, they sow the seeds, these characters, they sow the seeds early on and later they get taken up.
I remember now what it was I picked up on in occult feminism.
It was about women's suffrage.
A lot of women saw, at the time when certain women were pushing for women's suffrage, a lot of women said, no, we don't want the vote.
We don't want to get engaged in this particular male world, which is not our domain.
It's not going to benefit us.
And I think those women were probably right.
No, that's very true.
Get saying that.
Take a look at Melanie Phillips' book on the suffragettes.
She talks about that.
And by the way, Melanie Phillips wrote an excellent book on these injustices against men, especially in family courts and divorce and custody.
It was called The Sex Change Society.
It was published there in Britain.
I helped her tried to help her get it published in the United States.
We couldn't find a publisher.
She got nothing but the book was basically ignored.
It was after that that she started taking up the crusade against Islamism, and she became famous.
She wrote that book, Landunistan, and she became famous.
So she became famous for waging war against the radical Muslims, the Islamists.
But she couldn't get off the ground by criticizing the feminists.
So I think she learned her lesson.
Yeah.
Well, you see, my bigger picture lesson from that would be, isn't it interesting that the things they want you to talk about is this Islamist threat, and the things they don't want to talk to you about are the things that are the real threat.
I don't believe Islamism is actually a threat.
I think it's a chimera.
Interesting, yeah.
Thank you.
I'm English, Stephen, so I need a cup of tea.
And it's four o'clock.
It's tea time.
Good for you.
Well, I've had my tea already today.
I have a cup of tea.
I was brought up.
Are you actually in Poland, by the way?
I'm in Romania.
In Romania?
Okay, then how is that?
Well, my job title is Polish.
My university is or was in Poland, but I live in Romania now.
I travel to Poland and to France for teaching.
But I live here in Romania.
And what's it like in Romania?
Well, it's very nice.
I like it very much.
The cost of living is very low.
People have very, like in most of Eastern Europe, people have very traditional values, very Christian values, very strong family values.
They don't have much time for woke ideology or fads, political or ideological fads like that.
And I find it very refreshing.
I think Eastern Europeans tend to be a little bit passive, a little bit too maybe not as active in opposition to the things that they oppose.
They tend to, you know, what's sometimes referred to as the good soldier schveik mentality.
Small nations, small helpless nations, small weak nations don't like to stand up to big, powerful neighbors because it's dangerous.
Oh, I see.
So you're not talking about on a personal level, on the kind of level.
But that seems to me to be a survival strategy born of living under extremely oppressive states.
It is.
Which is that you don't participate in the system.
You pay lip service, but no further.
I'm not sure that's a flaw, because I think when the state has the monopoly of power, do you really want to expose yourself to the force of the state?
You want to just kind of pretend it's not there, live your life, because you're never going to change anything by resisting, are you?
Obviously.
Obviously.
Well, it depends on the circumstances.
I mean, the last election, this election, this presidential election that was basically stolen by the judiciary.
Well, I probably shouldn't talk about it, so I'll save it for another time.
Ah, that's right.
Was this the guy who was...
Colin Georgescu, yeah.
He sounds rather good.
Well, he had some quirky ideas.
I wouldn't endorse him entirely.
What were his quirky ideas?
Well, he used a lot of New Age talk, And he had been at the United Nations and he used a lot of United Nations speak.
Oh, did he?
But he combined some eclectic combinations of the speaker.
That's the problem, isn't it?
That you get these characters, these maverick characters.
Like, I remember there was a period where that Italian woman, Maloney, what was the name, Georgia Maloney, was being sold to us as some kind of outspoken blah, blah, blah.
But then she turned out to be us the stooge of the World Economic Forum.
And then we get Millé in Argentina, who sounds like he's against the, he's going to smash the Greens and stop all that embedded sustainability nonsense.
And then you realise that he, too, is a stooge of the World Economic Forum.
So I'm never sure about these Maverick figures who emerge and seem to present themselves as a sort of saviour figure, whether they ever are, whether they're just more controlled opposition.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Yeah, well, it is difficult.
But I don't know.
Anyway, to answer your original question, I think I find Eastern Europe very a culture, a political culture, including, that's very congenial.
And I've lived in several Eastern European countries.
Right.
And tell me about your own...
Yes.
Yeah.
Because it seems to me that the church has been, all branches of the church have been absolutely ruddy useless in resisting these social changes, which are anti-Christian, anti-biblical.
I mean, if you believe in the teachings of Bible, you would be opposing all of this stuff that's happened, would you not?
Right.
And you would be opposing it more vociferously than the churches do.
They do it, they pay lip service to it verbally, but they don't actually take up any sustained opposition.
I mean, you look, I mean, over the centuries, the Christian church and churches have been, you know, voices of opposition.
They've been the main institution for keeping the civil state in check, under control.
You know, Western history is to some extent a history of brave churchmen who've stood up and said to the civil authorities, you know, you're encroaching on God's turf.
You're abusing your power.
And I just, I don't see that happening today.
It's very strange.
So when did the rot set in?
Yeah, good question.
Well, there certainly is something, again, there's something, I'll just say there's something different about radicalized women.
There's something about it that just makes men go weak at the knees.
You even see it on the right.
It's not just feminism with a capital F. You mean men find them sexy?
Men find them sexy.
Men find them intimidating.
Men themselves are feminized.
They're just even brave men, men who are physically courageous, men who will not hesitate to undergo physical danger and stand up to other men, like Donald Trump.
I mean, nobody doubts Donald Trump's physical courage after the assassination attempts.
And yet he won't stand up to women.
He appoints women right and left, usually young, pretty ones, to all kinds of positions for which I don't think they're very well qualified.
So even very strong macho men will don't know how to oppose women or tell them when they're talking piffle.
Well, I was being slightly flip when I invoked Eve in the garden.
But actually, do you not think maybe we were being taught a lesson there?
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
No, there's a whole theology of that now among some of the manosphere, if you like, the whole theology of Adam and Eve.
Some of it's very interesting.
We were being taught a lesson.
Yeah.
Well, I think so.
Yeah.
I think so.
And you alluded to the beginning that women have their own ways of seeking power.
Women have their own forms of corruption and power grabs.
And I think overall, that involves one of the most powerful tools or weapons that women have.
And they use it without thinking about it, is to raise children without men, raise children without fathers.
If they can get away with it, they will.
What would be the advantage of that?
Because getting married and submitting to the authority of a husband, of a father.
Oh, come on, dream on.
When was the last husband you knew had any authority over his wife?
I mean, that ship sailed.
Well, that's true.
That's very true.
But it's largely because of what's happened in the judiciaries of the Western world and others.
I mean, there was, you know, if you can, if you can divorce, if you can never get married in the first place, if you can just have a sperm donation, then you never have to make any compromise or any sharing of decision-making or anything else with a man.
You simply have, I mean, after all, a woman's source of power tends to be her body and her children.
Those are the two tools or weapons that women can use.
Men are physically more stronger, and they tend to be more risk-taking and more energetic, but women have these two sources of power, and they will, you know, instinctively they understand it.
George Bernard Shaw Said this at one point.
I think he said, the secret desire of every woman is to, you know, to have a child without having to share authority with a man.
I'm very suspicious.
I mean, he may have been on the money there, but I'm very suspicious of anything that George Bernard Shaw said.
I mean, he was a wrong through and through, wasn't he?
Well, he was a flaming socialist, of course.
He was a Fabian socialist.
But you know, one of the great books, have you ever read the book by what's his name?
Bax, B-A-X.
I forget his first name.
Bax.
Bax.
He was a socialist, Victorian era, late 19th, early 20th century.
And he wrote a book about the injustice.
He too was a doctrinaire socialist, as far as I know.
And he wrote a very eloquent book about the advantages and injustices that women have, are able to exert in the system of child custody and family law.
Belford, Belford Bax.
Belford Bax.
Belford Bax.
There's a name to conjure with.
Belford Bax.
There was a composer called Arnold Bax, I think.
I don't know if he was related.
No idea.
I couldn't hum you any of Bax's tunes, but it is a name.
Yeah, I think that...
You think about, for example, mine was probably the last generation that had male school teachers.
I mean, admittedly, I went to private schools, maybe it was different, but almost all my teachers were male.
But I think after my generation, it was women, women teachers.
And a woman teacher is not going to give you the intellectual tools for questioning feminism, is she?
Public education is one of the especially public education, but as you say, even private education is one of the bastions of feminism today.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, you see, we have a woman to thank for our discovery or providing the proof of this.
Who was the woman who was promoted to a senior position in the education department?
I've mentioned it before on a podcast.
I think it was the Reagan administration.
Anyway, she got access to some files which revealed that there was a deliberate dumbing down process embedded in the American education system designed to weaken the populace and render them less capable of resistance to the system.
Do you not know about this book?
Yes, ring a bell right away, but I may.
The education, the Department of Education is a relatively new invention, and it quickly became a bastion, as it is in Britain, education, of feminism, of the radical left.
And any institution that women already controlled, as you can imagine, like the welfare, social work industry.
I mean, look at even the fashion industry, which you would think is the antithesis of ideological feminism.
And yet the fashion industry is one of the biggest funders of feminist causes, feminist groups that there is.
So any profession that's dominated by women is going to become ideologically feminist very, very quickly.
Yes, I've heard it said that women do not like working in organizations which are dominated by women because they get treated much more badly and there's much more bitchery and backbiting and stuff goes on.
Right, right.
Yes, I know.
I've heard that too.
Also, I find it slightly con so many bodies now in the UK, I'm sure it's the same in America, are run by women.
For example, Ofcom, which is our media censorship organisation.
The broadcasting is censored by Ofcom.
And it's kind of Orwellian.
It's like the sort of Ministry of Truth in a way.
That's run by an old friend of mine, who's a woman.
And we've got the new head of MI5 or MI6, who's a woman.
Saw that.
That's amazing, yeah.
I mean, if we play our cards wrong, we're going to get an Archbishop of Canterbury.
I wonder whether they'd do that, whether they'd give us a female Archbishop of Canterbury.
It can't be long, can it?
Or a Defense Secretary, for that matter.
Defence Minister of Defence.
Who's the man who dresses up as a woman in your Defence Department?
Yeah, I forgot his name.
I can picture him.
That's weird, isn't it?
That sends out a signal to the Chinese and the Russians that America is a force to be reckoned with when you've got a kind of general dressed up in a skirt who's a bloke.
Yeah, yeah.
No, the feminization, there's some actually very good literature on the feminization of the military.
I survey that literature in my book, The New Politics of Sex, because there had already been some very good books by Martin Van Creveld was one, and Brian Mitchell, some excellent books on how feminism was being, the military was being feminized 20, 25 years ago or more.
And there again, nobody pays attention to it, how the military has become a giant welfare state.
And this is quite astounding.
But it is.
It is one of the ways in which the welfare state spread, because after all, the military is full of provision for the families of servicemen.
Yeah.
So if you can recruit single women, single mothers, it's a magnet for single mothers.
The military is a magnet for single mothers in America.
They join the military.
They get their children and themselves taken care of.
They don't have to serve combat.
They do clerical work, or if they're lawyers, that's even better.
Yes.
Yes, it's quite astounding.
Yeah.
I hadn't thought about that.
Gosh, it must feel good as a tax.
Well, if you're an American taxpayer, how good it must feel to know that you're funding single-parent women to bring up their kids in the guise of serving the country.
And people wonder why the United States is militarily stretched today.
But no, Elaine Donnelly talks about that at the Center for Military Readiness.
I have to say, Stephen, you may disagree with me on this.
I'm very glad that the U.S. is militarily stretched.
I'm glad that your military is a laughing stock, because I don't like an America with a strong military.
In the same way, I don't want a Britain with a strong military, because when you've got a strong military, you're tempted to use it.
Whereas if you've got a weak military, all you can do is empty posturing.
And I quite like empty posturing as an international policy.
I tend to feel that the danger of the military is when it is controlled by a bureaucracy, when it becomes bureaucratic.
I mean, if you go back in Britain during the Civil War and later in America, one of the very strong ethics of the Republican political thought was the idea of a citizen militia, of a, you know, that a militia is a preserver of freedom, Whereas a professional or standing army, this was the big issue in the Glorious Revolution.
A standing army is dangerous.
A bureaucratic army is dangerous.
Yes.
But a militia is the way you preserve freedom.
So if we could go back to the idea of a militia in which the military is made of soldiers rather than clerks and lawyers, which is what most of the...
Militia being, yeah, the Second Amendment says that.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
I agree, but that's what we need.
This is an unfair question to spring on you because you wrote it a while ago and it's probably hard to sum up in a few pithy sentences.
But I know you've written about the English Civil War.
Well, the Civil War, as we more correctly call it.
What's your take on it?
Who are the good and who are the bad is?
And why did it...
I argue, well, to put it in a nutshell, oversimplify, the real reason it happened was because of Puritanism.
Puritanism was the radical ideology that drove the English Revolution.
There might have been a civil war, anyway, but there would not have been a revolution.
Puritanism, radical Calvinism, was the Marxism of its day, of the 16th and 17th century.
Calvinism spread throughout Northern Europe.
It caused revolts and insurrections in every country that it spread into.
But only in England did it produce a revolution.
And this is my argument, is that Puritanism was the revolutionary ideology that drove, that made the difference between the English Civil War and the English Revolution.
And the implications of that, I'm trying to tease out nowadays in some work.
I mean, it's quite an astounding idea.
I didn't think of it all by myself, by the way, but the number of people that agree with me on that is very small.
Most people think of the radical left as liberalism, socialism, communism.
But the origins of the left were in radical religion.
If you like, the Islamism of its day.
The English.
I've written some pieces recently comparing the English, the regime of Cromwell and the regime of in Iran today.
And it's not a fair comparison.
I mean, I'm overstating it because there are lots of differences.
But religious radicalism was the origins of political radicalism, I believe.
May I ask, Stephen, are you a Catholic?
No.
Are you not a Latin?
No, I'm not.
I'm Church of England, you know, Anglican.
Okay.
So I keep my powder dry.
I see both of you.
You don't have a dog in the fight.
Exactly.
Because I get so much...
He started it all, right?
The rot sitting with Martin Luther, exactly.
Yeah, no, I see certain problems with radical Calvinism and Puritanism.
I think there are some things.
They're good on the Psalms, though, the Calvinists, I've noticed.
They're very good on some things.
I mean, I think you can make a very good case that the prosperity and the stability and the freedom, to some extent even, of the English-speaking Anglophone nations has some connection with the Puritanism of the 17th century.
So I'm not willing to say that it's entirely bad.
It certainly was bad in some ways.
The Irish don't have a very good opinion of Droider.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Exactly.
That wasn't England's finest.
They're right.
I don't want to apologize for it.
I just want people to think outside the box.
And thinking about radical religion, that's why, I guess maybe that's why when I became a Christian, I settled on the Church of England because that's where my family background is.
But also because you can see both sides.
You can see the Anglo-Catholic side and you can see the evangelical side.
And I think they both have things to be said for.
Yeah.
We've got the Book of Common Prayer, which is quite a good incentive to stay in the marriage, isn't it?
Yeah.
The language of the Book of Common Prayer, I think, is pretty unbeatable.
Whenever I'm tempted to look at some of the other...
If they use the 1662 version, of course.
What other versions are there, Stephen?
1525?
No, 15.
No, it can't be that early.
Cranmer did an edition, didn't he?
Oh, I thought that.
Well, I thought that a lot of it was written by Cranmer.
Am I wrong?
It was, yeah, yeah.
He was obviously earlier in the 1662.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I thought the 1662 one was basically...
I think it basically is.
And this is me being naughty.
I can sense that you are ideologically perhaps where I was in my heyday as a sort of political and cultural commentator of the right.
And I'm wondering, can I at all lure you down the rabbit hole?
You mentioned conspiracy theories in your most recent book, and you suggest that there might be something to conspiracy theories.
Are there any that you will engage with?
Oh, I think they are.
I think so many of them recently have turned out to be true.
There's no denying any of it.
You can't deny it.
Which ones are you thinking of?
Well, the one around the COVID epidemic and then the one around the vaccine, you know, the corollary.
The ones around the farmers in the Netherlands and elsewhere.
Ukraine war.
I think there's, I wouldn't refute them for a minute.
I have no problem with conspiracy theories.
I guess, especially when they're true, I guess I, you know, and they have a long pedigree, of course.
You go back to the Popish plot at the time of the Glorious Revolution.
The Puritans engaged in some conspiracy theories, although they also debunked them as well.
So, you know, I have mixed feelings about that.
I think if conspiracy theories result in resignation or frustration or apathy, then I'm opposed to them.
If they result in energy and motivation to get people to act, then I have no objection as long as they're true.
Well, what if the result is to turn people to God when they realize that what is taking place now is ultimately a spiritual war?
It's being played out in the earthly realm.
Oh, I have no quarrel with that at all.
I think it very much is.
I don't doubt it for a moment.
In fact, one thing I point out in the book, and I owe this to the Puritans, is I argue that in many ways, you know, divine vengeance is actually a very sophisticated political concept.
We think of divine vengeance, you know, these crazy Puritans ranting on about divine vengeance, but people have this idea that divine vengeance is blaming all evil on your enemies, right?
It's these wicked homosexuals, it's these wicked feminists, it's these wicked communists.
They're guilty of everything.
No, that's not what divine vengeance means.
Divine vengeance means they will get their comeuppance.
God will deal with them in his own time.
But if you and I don't do something about it, God will deal with us also.
So divine vengeance is not just a way of blaming evil on your enemies.
It's a way of motivating your own people, your own supporters, to get off their duffs and do something and act and work, or God will judge you too.
So divine vengeance is not our crazy idea.
It's a very constructive idea, I think, that the Puritans used to great effect at the English Revolution.
Well, I'm not sure that what you say is totally true.
There is an argument.
For example, I'm thinking of the beginning of one of my favourite psalms, fret not thyself because of the ungodly.
And the whole course of the psalm is essentially to reassure you that although these bad people are around, they'll soon be cut down like the grass and be withered as the green herb.
Right, that's very true.
But there's no mention in the psalm of thou must take action against the evildoers.
It's just like saying, yeah, don't worry, God's got it.
I mean, this was a criticism, wasn't it, that was made by Gibbon, I think, in Decline and Fall, where he argued that one of the main reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire was Christianity.
That the sort of the passivity and the deferral of everything to the afterlife meant that they were no longer going to engage with problems like the barbarians at the gates.
Well, the theme you mentioned is one the Puritans went on and on about in their sermons.
They said precisely what you just said, that God will, don't let your heart be troubled at the prosperity of the wicked.
Evil men prosper in this.
Not only do they exist, but they prosper.
They do well.
But don't worry.
God will sort them out.
So be calm.
Don't be resigned.
Don't be discouraged.
But then they'll turn around and say, but if we don't do something, it's our job to worry about our own sins first.
Worry about your sins and my sins and overcome those.
And then you can do God's work on his behalf.
So the two things, what I'm saying and what you're saying are corollaries of one another.
They're both part of the message that the Puritans used.
And other people used it too.
It wasn't that the Puritans did this all by themselves, But the Puritans popularized it.
The Puritans made it, they went into every parish in England and eventually New England, and they preached it to the people.
They made people, you know, they inculcated it on people's minds and made them understand it.
So it's all one thing, fine to have it in a theological treatise or in the 39 articles of the Church of England.
But the Puritans went out, they took these ideas and they popularized them.
And that's what made the revolution.
Yes.
Do you think it made America a worse place that the fact it was founded by Puritans?
No, I don't think so.
I certainly don't endorse everything they do.
I don't know exactly what they did to the Indians.
I've not investigated the primary sources.
Gave them flu, I should think, and killed them all off with...
I'm sure that's plausible.
But I've never examined the documents so that I know how much they are to blame for things like that or what they did to the Irish.
I'm sure it was pretty awful.
So I don't, you know, nobody's, you know, the line between good and evil runs through all of us.
But I think on the whole, and in some cases, radical religious movements can be awful.
I mean, look at Islamism today in Syria.
Look at Islamism in most countries where Islamism has taken root in Syria.
It's funded by the CIA, though, Stephen, to be fair.
Well, yeah, yeah, no, and it's done horrible things.
I mean, it's caused great debilitation.
ISIS and al-Qaeda and these radical Islamists.
Both those organizations were founded by the CIA.
That's the problem.
Yeah, and they're funded and supported by the CIA.
But I don't think that this is the case in Iran, for example.
I think Iran is fundamentally different.
Iran has a much more complex political culture.
The Islamist role in Islam, in Iran, is one of many ingredients, one of a very complex mix of a very old and sophisticated political culture, of which the religious drive is even the fanatical religious drive is something which, you know, I don't know.
It's certainly been excessive at times, but if the Iranians can get the Islamism under control, the Shiite Islam, in the same way that the English and eventually the Americans got Puritanism under control, then I don't think it necessarily has that same devastating effect that it has in places like Syria and Sudan and Libya.
Isn't one of the reasons that we're currently being swept by the media and the political class towards this war, which none of us wants with Iran, isn't one of the reasons that, a bit like Libya did until Qaddafi was ousted, that Iran has been resistant to the Western banking system.
It doesn't want to become part of that.
That it doesn't want to engage with a system which it knows is deeply corrupt.
I mean, I respect the Iranians for holding out this long, and they're now being punished for holding out because they know what the score is.
They know Western liberal democracy is a fiction.
I think that's true.
There's a lot in.
I think that the Iranians have been fiercely independent-minded.
And they've been outliers.
They don't want to conform to the Western, as you say, the Western liberal hegemony.
And this is what's intolerable.
This is why this attack took place in Iran.
It wasn't to stop their nuclear program.
It was to change the regime.
It was to end the regime.
Everybody knows that.
And I don't want to say that that's entirely because of Shiite Islam.
But I think Shiism in Iran, in combination with other things in their history and their culture, has a role in their independence.
They adopted Shiite Islam, by the way, in the 16th century as a way of specifically creating a specifically Persian approach to Islam.
They wanted to demarcate themselves.
The Safavid dynasty wanted to create a Persian version of Islam in counterpoise to the Turks and the Arabs and make Iran, Persia in those days, a center, the center for Islamic power.
And there are people today think that if there is an Islamic civilization emerging in the world today, that Iran is the most likely headquarters for it, the most likely leader for it, that it's got the most sophisticated, complex political culture, that it could create a modern Islamic state without the repression, without the fanaticism.
Egypt would be maybe the other candidate for that.
But Iran has a much more complex society than we are told, or I think that the neocons give it credit for.
Yeah, the neocons are a rum bunch.
Don't trust them for them.
I can spit.
Before we go, tell me a bit about the kids that you teach.
Do you still teach students at...
Yes.
I do teach at a Catholic university in France as well.
And what sort of age group are you teaching?
Are these undergraduates or postgraduates?
Mostly undergraduates, yeah, 18 to 21, 22.
And how do you find them?
I think they're very good students.
Yeah, I think they're quite good.
I've taught a lot of students in a lot of countries, mostly in Europe and America.
But I find them, you know, I find them.
Well, a lot of these students are, I think, atypical.
For the last 20 years, I've been teaching mostly students at conservative Christian institutions.
In other words, they're raised as Christians, either Catholics or Protestants, and they are sent to universities where I teach by their parents, specifically because the institution offers a traditional curriculum rather than the latest fad.
So they're not typical by any means, but the students that I've been teaching, both evangelical and Catholic, I think are very good students.
Yeah.
I think they're better than I was when I was a student, put it that way in the 70s when I was an undergraduate.
I think there was a lot to be said for people who've had a Christian grounding.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I grew up in the age of progressive education, both in secondary school and university.
And I was part of it.
I stood for it.
I grew up on the left very much.
I had a very left-wing upbringing.
And I was in favor of all that progressive education and all that.
Now I feel just the opposite.
What was your turning point?
A variety of things.
Having children was a big thing.
I don't see how anybody who's a parent can be a leftist.
It just doesn't make any sense.
And then when I became exposed to the divorce system, I realized that, you know, well, my parents had both been civil servants.
They had both worked for the federal government.
I was taught to respect civil servants, federal employees, the federal service.
We didn't use the term bureaucrat in our household.
My parents spoke about the federal service.
And I realized when I encountered the divorce system in America, I suddenly realized that my parents had been very atypical civil servants.
They had not done the kind of things that most federal civil servants in Washington do.
And I had had a skewed upbringing, a skewed exposure to government service.
And that most of the bureaucracy was much less admirable than I had been led to believe.
And did you end up divorced yourself?
Yes.
So did you experience firsthand the horrors of the situation?
Oh, yes, I saw it.
It turned me around.
It conservatizes many men, if I can use that word.
Many, many men who start out on the left, when they see the divorce system, they become strongly anti-feminist and sometimes anti-judicial, anti-judiciary, and they almost often Christian, often much more, much more conservative.
Did you lose custody of your children?
Yes.
Did you lose access to them?
No, no, no.
No thanks to the court.
No thanks to the judiciary.
It's a long and complex story.
But you were able to see your kids growing up.
Yes, but I had no decision-making authority over them.
That is...
I mean, it probably is a long time ago now, but I'm very sorry.
Have they grown up?
Do they get on with you now?
No.
They won't speak to me.
No.
This happens very often.
This is very common.
They will not speak to the father.
That is awful.
It happens a lot.
It happens a lot.
The father is held responsible.
Because they've been programmed.
Yeah.
there's a number of theories about that but yes basically i think we all have our Yeah, I get that.
Definitely.
To put it succinctly as I can without long explanation.
But yeah, you could do another show entirely on that.
But Stephen, that's awful.
That is really so No, never.
Well, I'm really sorry.
They both live in the UK.
That's horrible.
I'm so sorry.
I can see.
Yeah.
And this is very common, by the way.
Very common.
Men who have done absolutely nothing wrong, legally, literally no fault of their own.
And this happens all the time.
I have to say, I would call that system satanic.
I think it's doing the devil's work.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Probably by design.
Oh, absolutely.
I say anybody who doesn't believe in a...
Anyone who doesn't believe in a personal devil has never seen the Western divorce system because only an evil genius sitting there with a, you know, a T-square and a ruler could have designed...
It required an astoundingly brilliant evil genius to devise.
Stephen, you're talking my language now.
I mean, I'm not afraid to say this because I really don't care whether people think I'm a religious fruitcake or whatever.
I just say it as I find it.
But it seems to me that we know from John that the devil is the God of this world.
And I don't believe that the system we've got could have been created without being informed by the supernatural genius of the prince of the air.
The devil is the prince of lies.
That, okay, humans can achieve so much, but the way All this has become embedded in our culture, the way that we're in a world where everything is falling to bits.
And I think that that is designed by somebody who hates God's creation.
No, it's certainly, I think look at the system of divorce, child support.
If you ever need evidence, show that to your atheist or your skeptical friends, and they won't have an answer to it.
It's been, I'm sorry that we had to end on this sort of rather sad note, but it's been a delight talking to you, making your acquaintance.
Tell us where we can find your books.
First of all, let me just say I've enjoyed the questions.
I've been very intelligent and very perceptive.
So thank you.
The best place probably is my website, stephenbaskerville.com.
That's Stephen with a PH.
And it's got all my books and most of my recent articles, but it's also got a link to my substack.
And that's where my most recent writings are, is on the substack.
So stephenbaskerville.com will give you my books and my substack link.
Has anyone mentioned to you that you do sound like a character from an Umberto Echo novel?
He was called William of Baskerville, I believe.
Yes, William of Baskerville.
Yes, I remember that.
Exactly.
I didn't realise there were actual Baskervilles.
Did Conan Doerr borrow your surname?
Oh, yes, he did.
He did.
I think it was basically he had to find a prominent aristocratic family that was not powerful enough to sue him.
So I think he took a formerly noble family who had basically all become peasants.
So that's what he did.
There weren't any powerful Baskervilles left.
So he used that family name and they couldn't come after him.
It's a very fine name you've got.
Stephen, it's been a delight talking to you.
And yeah, thank you very much.
It's been my pleasure.
If you've enjoyed this podcast, as obviously, obviously you have, because all my podcasts are great, pretty much, you might be tempted to support me.
So consider, please, subscribing to my sub stack or supporting me on locals or buying me a coffee, maybe, or several coffees, as lots of people want to do.
Or you can, well, no, and you can support my sponsors as well.
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In fact, I might even announce it at the beginning of this podcast with a filmed insert.
