James chats to investigative journalist (The Cradle, Declassified UK, MintPress News, and The Grayzone) Kit Klarenberg. On the menu: the sinister but oh-so-polite Ministry of Defence committee behind the D-notices that silence the UK media from reporting anything that matters; MI6/CIA influence on popular culture - including children’s TV from Sesame Street to Blue Peter; Britain and the US swallowing their own hype on the Ukraine proxy war, and how Kit would have been an ideal recruit for the services if he’d landed on the ‘other side’. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg, find him on Substack www.kitklarenberg.com, and check out his podcast https://www.youtube.com/@DeclineAndFall-d5k.↓ ↓ ↓Brand Zero is a small skincare and wellbeing business based in Nailsworth in the heart of Gloucestershire, with a strong eco-friendly, zero-waste, cruelty-free ethos. Brand Zero sells a range of wonderfully soothing natural skincare, haircare, toothcare and wellbeing products, mostly hand made, with no plastic packaging or harsh chemicals. All our products are 100% natural and packaged in recyclable or compostable tin, paper or glass.Discount code: JAMES10www.brandzeronaturals.co.uk↓ ↓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/↓ ↓ ↓Buy James a Coffee at:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jamesdelingpoleThe official website of James Delingpole:https://jamesdelingpole.co.ukx
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Welcome to the Delling Pod, Kit Clarenberg.
I'm really interested, actually.
There's so much that you know that we could talk about.
And I don't know what, we're not going to fit it all into one podcast.
But I want to know more about you first.
I mean, where did you come from?
I imagine you're the kind of person that actually in their dreams, MI6 would love to have working for them, but they didn't get to recruit you in time and you went to the other side.
Is that a fair analysis?
Well, yeah, funnily enough, at my university careers fair one time, I did approach the MI5 slash 6 desk and I was told in no uncertain terms, you're too tall for field work, so you'll probably be trapped behind a desk analyzing Russian economic data.
And the pay is terrible, so you won't enjoy it at all.
But yeah, I mean, I've always, well, for a very long time, had an interest in, call it the secret state.
And I guess I'm had this kind of lifelong belief in, well, if someone tells you to not do something, then that's maybe an indication you should do it.
And I am a firm believer that government shouldn't dictate what we do and don't and can and can't know.
So yeah, perhaps they missed a golden opportunity to recruit a fruitful officer or asset.
But now I'm, yes, I'm very much on the other side for want of a better phrase.
Did you lost lost you there for a second?
Yeah, no, and I wonder.
I sometimes wonder what it's a bit.
Yeah, well, I mean, it is actually a recurring theme of my podcast appearances that when I get into certain subjects, there are technical issues either at my end or my interviewers.
But yeah, maybe it's just a coincidence.
But yeah, as you say, an enormous amount of things that we could talk about and probably, yeah, too much to fit into a single broadcast.
But I gather that your interest is my latest on Britain's D-Notice system.
Yes, I'm interested in that, but you probably got cut off before you could hear the last bit of my question, which was, I want to hear a bit more about you first, because I can imagine if I had been the MI5, MI6 recruiter at university, I think you would have been one of the people I would have been after.
And I was going to ask you, did they ever approach you?
Or do you think they're kicking themselves now that they didn't get you?
Well, quite possibly.
And I think a number of years ago, I really cut my teeth in this field covering something called Integrity Initiative, which was this kind of secret British intelligence black propaganda unit.
A bunch of their files leaked online and I kind of printed them off and wallpaper my home with them.
I did a bunch of reporting on that topic.
I spoke to one of their operatives who was a kind of like longtime MI6 officer.
And he said, yeah, it's a pity he didn't enlist with us.
His name is Gatesy now.
He's an MP and he's since passed away rather sadly.
But yeah, Rupert Allerton, I think was his name.
Rupert Allison?
Yes.
Is he dead?
Yeah, yeah, he was the, no, no, it's not Rupert Allison, sorry.
But yeah, no, he was here.
That was how I kind of got my in really to writing about this kind of thing, at least to a larger audience.
But yeah, I think that the I think it's quite clear that the secret state does take a keen interest in what I'm writing about and researching and who I'm speaking to.
Of course, I was detained under counter-terrorism legislation the last time I flew into London, which means my city of birth is not particularly high on my holiday destination lists.
And I also noticed, kind of relevant to this discussion, the DSMA committee, for a period, it published detailed minutes of its meetings, which often included very revealing disclosures about the kind of stories that they were suppressing and or seeking to censor, prevent journalists reporting on.
And ever since I started working on this story, they've stopped uploading their minutes.
So, I mean, again, maybe there's a connection there.
Yeah.
Did you ever have a proper job before you entered this shadowy realm?
A proper job.
I mean, I started off.
I mean, I started off as working as an advertising copywriter, but I always wanted to be a journalist.
I spent some time writing for mainstream financial and legal publications.
But I was always, you know, had different objectives in terms of what I wanted to write about.
So I'm rather taken aback about having the opportunity to do so and have some kind of audience for doing it.
It is weird.
The way that the opening up of the process that is apparently known as disintermediation, where one no longer needs a newspaper proprietor to distribute the funds to enable you to write for a publication that he can then distribute.
And we can all be journalists now and reach an audience.
And you found that.
Did you, when you were a copywriter, I mean, copywriters get paid quite well, don't they?
Was it fun?
Yeah, I mean, it was great larks.
And, you know, we went on all sorts of, you know, junkets paid for by the agency along with our clients.
We went to top restaurants, even went on holiday a few times.
And yeah, no, that was, that was, I mean, that was good fun.
I mean, I was ultimately, you know, selling cars and, you know, other tat to consumers, but I suppose, you know, someone's got to do it.
Someone's got to do it.
Well, I think it's given to very few of us not to be part of the beast system at some time.
I mean, that's how they get you.
We're all their slaves.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think it's an interesting, it's a very interesting time because I think that social media, even though it is, you know, obviously heavily controlled and censored still, it has opened up avenues for people who would otherwise never be able to reach any audience whatsoever to actually connect with people.
And that's why it is viewed as such a threat.
And that's why there are ongoing efforts by every Western government, particularly the British and the Americans, to try and directly or indirectly crack down on what appears.
And the DSMA is certainly part of that.
I mean, I might add that if you search my name on Google, you can't find my Twitter account or my imaginatively titled website, kickclarenberg.com.
They just don't appear in the search results when they're usually the first things that crop up if you search for someone.
That's quite an impressive achievement.
When they detained you, what was it like?
They stopped you at the airport, didn't they?
Yeah, well, I mean, I flew into Luton in May 2023, Luton being one of the worst airports in the world, of course.
And the pilot announced on the Tannoy, everyone have your passports ready because Border Force are waiting just on the tarmac.
And in my bloody-minded naivety, I thought, well, maybe there's been a renovation of Luton since I was last here.
But no, they were specifically waiting for me, six armed counter-terror police.
And then I was bundled into an airless, windowless back room In the airport, and given the option of subjecting myself to a six-hour interrogation during which I would have no right to silence, and I would have to hand over the PIN codes to my electronic devices or face arrest for non-compliance.
And this was conducted under the 2019 counter-terrorism and bordering, which the UN has said is draconian and it is effectively a suspicionless crime.
They can stop you for any reason they like.
If someone has flagged you as a potential wrongin.
And yeah, there's all sorts of very strange language in the legislation, which I was given a copy of as a kind of maybe as a pamphlet or to hold on to, which explicitly states you can be suspected of working for a hostile foreign power on the basis of literally nothing.
Police don't have to define which foreign power they think you're working for.
And my answer, the question was and remains none.
I'm very keen to maintain my independence.
And yeah, I was grilled intensively for six hours on topics ranging from my love life to whether my electricity bills were included in my rent.
But a lot of very invasive questioning about my personal and professional life.
I had to, funnily enough, explain in some detail to the apparently quizzical interrogators whose names I could never learn.
They referred to each other as via call signs and they at one stage seemed to forget whose call sign was what.
It's like, are you A1 or B2?
And yeah, it was a deeply unpleasant experience.
And I think that the full weight of it didn't really sink in until much later.
And particularly when I received an email from the police saying that they were going to hold on to a memory card of mine they seized because they think they thought that it might be relevant to a criminal investigation.
So I may well still be formally being probed.
But I don't know.
And I don't want to risk finding out.
And I think that we've seen an enormous number of people.
I thought that the negative attention that my stop generated might have served as a deterrent to British authorities doing this again.
But since then, there have been numerous instances of people like George Galloway, like Craig Murray, Richard Medhurst, Steve Sweeney.
The list goes on, people being detained, having their electronics and devices taken in many instances.
And yeah, a number of these people have since left the UK because they're concerned about their safety, which is kind of understandable.
That is really frightening, isn't it?
Because you and I, I imagine, both of us grew up thinking that we were the goodies.
And that, I mean, I can't remember when the point came in my life that I was sort of given to understand this alleged fact.
But there did come a point where I was given the impression that contrary to the reason that James Bond has a license to kill is because he's a fictional character.
But that in the real life intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, they're just not allowed to do that.
They're not allowed to kill people.
I mean, that's a sort of it's one of those things that people know, isn't it?
But it's not actually true.
No, I mean, it's actually enshrined in law that they're allowed to do this.
And I believe it was 2021, there was some public outcry about the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Act, which allowed assets of the British Security and Intelligence Services to commit crimes, including torture, rape, and murder.
Yeah, but I mean, the funny thing was, was that yes, this did create some public scandal, but they were just what the authorities were doing were enshrining in law what these agencies already did so they wouldn't get in trouble for doing it.
You know, and I think if I looked up the relevant law, it would say that they're allowed to engage in rape and torture.
Who's allowed to?
The intelligence services.
Yeah, well, I mean, the people that they use as assets and agents to infiltrate.
I've got the excuse that we're operating in foreign countries where this is the currency and therefore it's okay, kind of thing.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And I think, I mean, it must must be, it must must be stressed as well.
But I mean, in a vanishingly round example of the BBC actually doing serious journalism, I think it's maybe a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.
A few years back, the BBC reported on how MI5 had employed as an asset a violent fascist who was infiltrating all sorts of groups on their behalf and passing on intelligence.
He was attempted to murder, I think it was more than one woman with whom he was romantically involved, and MI5 intervened to prevent him being prosecuted.
So that might have served as some kind of motivating factor behind the CHIS bill as it's known.
But I mean, we see this all the time where in the wake of Snowden's disclosures, the British government moved to make what the GCHQ was doing illegally legal.
Whenever the security and intelligence services get busted committing serious crimes, the response is to give them the legal power to do this so they don't face any repercussions.
And it must be, this is something that I wrote about from my website a while back, that the Parliament's Security and Intelligence Committee is theoretically meant to oversee and scrutinise the work of the intelligence services.
I mean, it was set up by David Davis in the early 90s, and Davis has since reported that his sources in the intelligence sphere often laugh about how, well, the committee only knows what we tell them.
Currently, they're facing a very severe funding crisis, and its chief has repeatedly stated millions is being spent on operations by MI5, MI6, GCHQ, and we've got no idea what they're doing.
And we must ask ourselves whether this is by design.
Yes, well, quite.
So your latest expose, tell me, give me the brief outline.
Yeah, sure.
So I've kind of mentioned on a couple of occasions since we started talking, there is a very little known body called the Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee.
And in theory, it is a voluntary system whereby major media outlets submit requests for advice on stories related to national security.
And in turn, the body issues what are known as D notices, which they ask journalists and editors to consult with the committee if a story has been published in the media or they think a story will be published in the media that is of some sensitivity and might contain information that the British state doesn't want in the public domain.
It is again theoretically an independent body, despite the fact it is funded by the Ministry of Defence.
It is headquartered in the Ministry of Defence.
All of its staff are Ministry of Defence employees.
And again, while voluntary, it has an almost total success rate in terms of getting journalists to not report certain facts or certain stories out wrong.
And I mentioned Edward Snowden a few moments ago.
The British media, with the exception of The Guardian, didn't go near the story because, I mean, this was a global scandal.
Not a single major British publication apart from The Guardian reported on his leaks.
And this has been rather forgotten.
Similar to Wikileaks releases, a D notice is sufficient to get journalists to voluntarily not report on particular topics.
So it's a very British fudge.
And I've had some dealings directly with the DSMA committee in the past.
They're extremely polite, like extraordinarily nice in their communications, and they try and be helpful.
But I think that overall, it is actually very sinister that this operates.
And the declassified files, because the DSMA claims to be independent of government, I noticed in some of their publicly debated, sorry, they're not subject to freedom of information requests, but I noticed in some of their minutes that they were advising the Australian government on how the system works because the Australian authorities were interested in maybe emulating the system.
So I and my collaborator, William Evans, we hammered the Australian government with FOI requests.
They fought tooth and nail for many months to prevent the release of this material.
And then finally, the Australian Information Commissioner forced them to hand it over.
And it offers an absolutely extraordinary insight into the internal workings of this committee, which is a public body that nobody knows about.
And there's all sorts of references to how, well, considerations of the public interest, which when you're studying journalism, you are told is like the key thing to consider and whether to report on something or not, do not factor into DSMA considerations whatsoever.
It talks about the DSMA committee offering one-on-one assistance to journalists to the extent of editing and rewriting their articles for them.
And any publication that refuses to toe the line is branded as extreme.
But as they repeatedly boast in these files, this almost never happens.
They have a 90% plus success rate in getting journalists, if you can even call them that, to toe the line on stories of national security, which is, of course, a completely meaningless, nebulous concept that can refer to almost anything.
So contained within these documents, there is a log of requests for advice sent and received by the body between early 2011 and late 2014.
And it does cover things that, well, you might think quite legitimately the government has a reasonable argument for not wanting in the public domain, which are related to extremely sensitive matters.
In other cases, such as MPs visiting brothels, government corruption, child sex abuse, the Metropolitan Police potentially being implicated in the possession of child porn and a great many other topics.
It's quite hard to see how conceivably this relates to national security.
Now, I mean, this will be of interest to you particularly, I think, James.
I mean, we are very quickly moving to a situation where the security and intelligence services and even the military, at least the Ministry of Defence, are categorizing climate change as a national security issue.
So we are heading into a situation where your reporting on ClimateGate many years ago would be subject to DSMA interference, potentially.
And the DSMA committee is also seeking to expand its purview into quote-unquote disinformation, which is again a completely meaningless, nebulous concept, which means whatever the government wants it to mean, which is quite troubling.
And they also want to embroil major social networks in this system.
So currently, Facebook and Twitter and Google refuse to have anything to do with the committee, but under the Online Safety Act, which recently passed and that critics say ends end-to-end encryption in the UK and will result in all sorts of legitimate websites being banned or subject to significant restrictions on access.
They think that they can exploit these laws in order to extend their tendrils into big tech.
And it's quite an extraordinary prospect that this uniquely British institution is going to be potentially demanding that X remove particular material or even ban users for posting the wrong things.
But I mean, that's where we're headed if they get their way.
And more often than not, by their own admission, they get their way.
Who's in charge of this outfit?
Okay, well, like I say, it's based in the Ministry of Defence.
And on the committee are representatives of all of the security and intelligence services and the military and government departments.
And there are editors and journalists from every major news outlet or TV news network.
And they meet regularly.
The DSMA committee also arranges chummy, all-expenses paid junkets to the offices and headquarters of MI5 and MI6, the GCHQ, as a treat for journalists, which again enhances this kind of rather client-like rapport because you're not going to.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it says that you're not going to write negative things about people who you think are your friends, particularly if by doing so, you know, get a black mark against your name and you're not given special briefings or quote-unquote exclusives or words might be had with your editor saying, make sure they don't do this again.
So, yeah, I mean, it is a quote-unquote voluntary system with an implied threat for non-compliance.
And yeah, overwhelmingly, its quote-unquote advice is accepted by mainstream journalists.
And of course, they don't advertise this because part of their marketing pitch is, well, we speak truth to power, which is, I mean, it's an enormously self-serving view.
And it assumes that the power is interested in the truth in the first place.
But I mean, more than that, if they were to add the caveat, oh, yeah, but we do send our work to the Ministry of Defence for checking and a thumbs up or a thumbs down before publishing, it might rather undermine their credibility.
So you said that this committee is thinking of classing climate change as a denoticable issue.
I mean, how do they have the power to do that?
Well, who makes decisions within the committee?
Excuse me, sorry.
Yeah, no, I mean, it's, as I say, it's effectively run by, it's effectively run by the Ministry of Defence and its secretary and its assorted apparatchiks are answerable to the Ministry of Defence.
Now, I mean, the reason I mention that the DSMA itself has not mentioned national, sorry, climate change as a national security issue, but there are numerous government reports that have.
There was an extraordinary November 2021 report published by the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee, which covered behaviour change for client to achieve climate and environmental goals.
And it consulted all of these behavioural scientists, PR people and other people with a more suited to propaganda and marketing rather than anything related to science.
And they were talking about how, well, the reference is made to we should just copy what we did during COVID in terms of affecting behavior change.
And it is discussed the prospect of categorizing and framing climate change as a national security issue, which would then, by definition, make it the purview of the DSMA committee.
So it's like, this is why it's very important to keep an eye on what these organizations are doing.
And like I said, they've stopped publishing their minutes online for whatever reason, whether it's my digging or not.
So it's like, well, I mean, you know, they go further and further underground.
And I might add that the DSMA committee, it is just one component of the British government censorship toolbox.
Also, what's known as the National Security Online Information Team, which is a bit of a mouthful and sounds rather Orwellian.
It was previously called the Counter-Disinformation Unit.
And it has been admitted that the CDU, as it then was, was concerned with cracking down on COVID quote-unquote disinformation online and censoring, suppressing, and deplatforming people who dissented from the government line on COVID.
And whistleblowers have since come forward to say that, yeah, that we were just cracking down on completely legitimate dissent, people sharing data on official data on transmission and recovery rates, people who were critical of lockdowns or questioned their efficacy.
Perfectly legitimate questions to ask at the time and specifically now when it's become abundantly clear that actually there were all sorts of deeply destructive health and societal impact from all of these measures, many of which were completely unnecessary or indeed counterproductive.
But that was the thrust at the time for the so-called counter-disinformation unit.
So yeah, there are different components of government all working whether directly or indirectly together in ensuring that the British government maintains narrative control.
I mentioned that log of requests received and sent to the committee over several years.
I mean, there is an enormous number related to potential intelligence agency involvement in the death of Princess Diana, which was, I mean, that really jumped us.
There was something like 85 separate requests sent and received on that topic.
Describe how these 85 things would have been from to whom?
Okay, so either the committee would have written to journalists and editors saying, if you're going to report on this, please consult us first, or they would simply say, we would prefer it if you didn't cover this.
And again, yeah, this has a 90-plus success rate.
But it could also entail journalists approaching the committee and asking for advice before publishing on a particular story.
To give you an example of how effective this system is, I believe it was April 2023, the minutes of their meeting that month refer to how a journalist approached the committee wanting advice about a story they were working on that related to the deployment of British forces to an unstated country.
I think it might well be Ukraine, but I'm just guessing.
And the DSMA said, don't publish this.
And they duly complied, although they pointed out, well, this is publicly available information.
It's circulating on social media.
And there is a wide variety of open source information which shows that this is the case.
So despite the fact that this was public domain, they still managed to neutralize reporting on this particular story.
And this is despite in the declassified documents the committee firmly stating we don't take any interest in publicly available information.
So that's just a lie.
But with the advent of social, with the advent of social media and the ease with which information can be spread of every variety, they are almost certainly going to be moving pretty hard and fast to crack down on this.
And I mentioned earlier they refer to publications that don't toe the line as extreme.
One of the outlets that was demeaned in this manner was Declassified UK.
And they mentioned that Declassified UK is not a member of the committee and has ignored its requests in the past, which is a major black mark against them and they'll be being monitored very closely.
But then elsewhere in the documents, it refers to how, well, our system of the DSMA system obviously only covers the UK, but it is also a good means of ensuring that other countries don't report on national security matters related to the UK either.
Now, Declassified UK frequently publishes stories that get international attention, about saying British meddling in Africa or the maintenance of spying bases in Cyprus by GCHQ and the British military.
And that became a national scandal in Cyprus.
Obviously, it's a tiny island, and that led to questions being asked in Parliament, etc.
The DSMA does not want that, to say the least.
And yes, they will probably stop at almost literally nothing to ensure that this information doesn't see power elsewhere.
Yeah.
The Diana things that you mentioned.
Yeah.
85 over a period of how many years?
Oh, this was in the span of six months.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was 85 Intel agency requests surfaced related to Diana's passing.
And I mean, quite why, I mean, quite what was being asked or quite what quite what advice was being given.
I mean, we all know that she died innocently in a road traffic accident caused by paparazzi with their flash cameras.
And there's nothing to see here.
Absolute, absolutely.
I mean, I mean, who would completely ludicrous suggestion?
Yeah, absolutely.
No questions hanging over it whatsoever.
I mean, and this is the thing is, is that, as I say, some of these requests, they refer to people making allegations of being victims of child sex abuse.
And you've got to think by judges and government ministers and things.
Yeah, yeah, or potentially members of the royal family.
I don't want to disrupt our feed any further.
But yeah, I mean, we can use our imaginations as to like, you know, what kind of stories over a decade since this log was committed to paper.
I would imagine that, oh, yeah, all sorts of scandals have been effectively buried.
And it's like, you know, I mean, your viewers maybe will be forgiven for not being familiar or having forgotten.
But I mean, in August 2010, for instance, Gareth Williams, who was this crack GCHQ code breaker, succumbed to MI6.
He died in very strange circumstances.
And he was absent from work for 10 days, but his employers bizarrely didn't notify anyone about his absence from work.
I mean, you would think someone working in very sensitive areas for an agency like that, if they missed one day of work without explanation, that there would be questions being asked.
He was living in a flat in Pimlico that was owned by MI6 at this time.
Then finally, his sister informed GCHQ he was missing.
And then five hours later, the agencies got in touch with the police and they broke down his door and found that he was locked in a zip.
He was padlocked inside a Ziploc bag.
I remember because I lived in London at the time that this caused a bit of a frenzy and there was a lot of speculation about how he actually died and who might have taken him out.
The coroner ruled that the involvement of MI6 in his death was a legitimate line of inquiry which hadn't been satisfactorily explored at all.
And now there were dozens of requests related to dozens of requests for advice sent to or from the committee on that subject.
And it's like specifically related to the coroner's inquest.
And it's like, we must ask ourselves, well, I mean, what were reporters told not to say about this?
And what has been buried as a result?
And the answers might not be particularly obliging from the perspective of MI6.
Have you got any theories on this?
Excuse me?
Have you got any theories on what did happen?
Well, I mean, I don't know.
I mean, I think it was very, very clear that he, I mean, Pimlico is one of the most heavily CCTV covered areas of London by some margin, which is saying something.
And, you know, apparently that the authorities weren't able to determine whether some other people had been inside his apartment, which seems like a completely ludicrous suggestion.
And I mean, it's pretty clear he was murdered by someone.
Whether that was his employer or outside actors is unclear.
It has been suggested that maybe Russia was responsible, although Russia is blamed for stuff like bad weather.
So, I mean, that could be another distraction tactic.
But the point more generally is, you know, there are all sorts of sensitive, well, at least from the perspective of the security state, there are all sorts of sensitive issues which are very effectively buried or outright distorted by this committee, which is totally public, but nobody knows about.
And I think that that's fundamentally wrong.
And I think it should be some cause for concern.
Like you said, I mean, when I grew up, I was very much indoctrinated until I hit my early teens, I think, in this notion that Britain was land of the free and the weird and good guys, etc.
And a core component of people believing that, and then a large number of people still do, is as a result of the DSMA committee Influencing not just how journalists report, but historians as well.
As we would like to look at ourselves, we'd like to think that because we've got a free and open media, which is which is able to talk, pour sunlight into the dark recesses of everything, and therefore we know what's going on, so people behave well.
And we're a kind of model.
Isn't that a model democracy?
And the other countries of the world look to us for it for their moral example.
I thought that's how it went.
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 Chinese climate change scam got caught red-handed tinkering with the data, torturing till it screened in a scandal that I helped christen Climate Gate.
So I give you the background to the skullduggery 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 out.
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 that.
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 Guy.
No, we don't.
It's a scam.
Isn't that a model democracy?
And the other countries of the world look to us for it for their moral example.
I thought that's how it went.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, yeah, of course.
You know, and it's hilarious as well because, I mean, I reported elsewhere on how under the guise of under the auspices of increasing media freedom and freedom of information, British intelligence runs like a large number of operations overseas, including in Europe, it must be stated.
Not just in the former empire or the global south.
They run a number of operations to effectively infiltrate the newsrooms of foreign media outlets.
And they often use BBC staff to do it.
So, I mean, yeah, they're very, very keen.
They're very, very keen on hammering enemy regimes for their Censorship or for their disinformation or for state capture of media, but not so hot on looking in the mirror and seeing how all of their criticisms apply to them.
Yes.
So, what did you mean by BBC staff?
What are they used to do?
Oh, sure.
So, basically, there's a charitable wing of the BBC called BBC Media Action.
Now, they compete for foreign office contracts and also contracts with other Western government agencies and Western foundations.
And this is something else I've reported on for the grey zone: is that they explicitly in leaked files refer to how they engage in quote-unquote behaviour change communications and they seek to influence the perceptions and actions of people abroad.
A cited example of their success in this regard was they ran a long-running radio drama in Nigeria, which had an audience of nearly 30 million people.
And their surveys indicated that about 40% of its listeners were persuaded to vote differently in the country's elections as a result.
Now, I mean, we can argue about whether you know the legitimacy of that.
I would say that Britain doesn't have any business doing it whatsoever.
But I mean, the fact of the matter is, is A, we would not accept this being done to us by a foreign power, you know, and quite rightly.
But B, these projects frequently involve BBC staff, whether people who work in the drama department or the new or you know, or for BBC News, etc.
So bearing in mind that these people are involved in effectively safe state operations with highly politicized objectives, which are funded by the Foreign Office or the Ministry of Defence or other UK government departments.
When they return to their day jobs, do we really believe that they stop being state agents and they go back to being neutral reporters or simply creative types and they don't apply these psychological warfare strategies to the creation of drama series for British consumption?
It seems rather implausible.
Yes.
I think when one watches TV with open eyes, it's very hard to look at a drama series without recognising the narratives that are being fed to, regardless of what the ostensible plot is.
The underlying narrative is always pushing agendas that the state wants to push.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, we see this in every conceivable regard, where it's like, I mean, just to loop this back to our dear friends in MI5, hi, if you're listening.
You know, the very first TV programme that was allowed to film inside MI5 headquarters was Blue Peter.
And there was an entire programme about effectively trying to market MI5 to kids.
And some children got to meet the then MI5 director general, who I think might have been at the agency's helm when it was involved in the CIA's torture program.
And it's just like, I mean, it's just really quite extraordinary that this stuff kind of flies under the radar and is normalized.
But I mean, GCHQ, likewise, they attempt to infiltrate schools and kind of talent spot young co-dragers, potentially, or people who have dedicated programs in schools that parents often don't even know about.
Of course, there's going to be a lot of TV shows kind of glamorizing and dramatizing this work.
I mean, there was that long-running BBC show Spooks, which was like, you know, that ran for like a year.
Was he in it?
Yeah, yeah.
And it was like, I mean, it was actually broadcast overseas just as just named MI5.
And it had direct involvement in, MI5 was directly involved in its production.
And there are all sorts of episodes that, I mean, almost seem like predictive programming, like lots of, there were several episodes of Spooks that basically almost perfectly predicted the 7-7 bombings.
and this is a TV show that is being in part written by the security services and it's just like yeah and I I don't know.
Unless they plan the 7-7 themselves.
Yeah, I mean, again, perish the thought.
James, I really, I mean, as I say, I think it's important to keep an eye on this stuff and really, you know, in as limited a way as we might be able to, you know, like actually really hammer these organizations and yes, and try and expose this to as broad an audience as possible.
Because, I mean, again, like I say, the government is already planning to employ the same tactics and strategies that were deployed to some pretty drastic effect during COVID.
And they want to apply exactly the same strategies and techniques for climate change or whatever the next big scary thing is.
For whatever issue can be weaponized or concocted for the purposes of population control.
And they're not actually very subtle about it.
I mean, a lot of the things that I report on might be hidden, but in other cases, they are very open about what they're intending to do.
In 2010, the Ministry of Defense issued this document, which was talking about the importance of psychological warfare and how, well, Britain is declining economically in terms of its international clout, in terms of its military might, etc.
And the way to counteract that is to win the battle of narratives.
And therefore, psychological warfare is the most important form of warfare because it means that battles can be won even if the physical contest can't.
I mean, which in war terms is a great strategy until you get news.
But there are an enormous number of people who are, yes, I think very successfully manipulated and propagandized into Believing that Britain is a lot freer, a lot richer, and a lot more powerful than it actually is.
And they're happy to walk around in that delusion, but there can be real world consequences for this.
And we've seen this kind of merry-go-rounds since the start of this year with Keir Starmer and Austin Macron talking about deploying forces to France.
And even generals in both countries have said, we can't do this.
It's an insane idea.
And then it gets dropped and then it gets picked up again a few months later and etc.
And it's like this could well spill into something very real, which could go sour very quickly.
So yeah, it might be nicer to live in a world of illusions, but they do need puncturing.
As you were talking that story about how when the only war you've got left to win is the information war, it reminded me of where do you live, by the way?
Not in the United States.
Well, no, I'm not based in the UK.
No, I mean, I consider myself a resident of the former Yugoslavia.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah, I was in Russia recently, and I said to this meeting with this Russian minister, and there were one or two of us of my persuasion, you know, sort of people, well, I suppose batshit, crazy conspiracy theorists, basically, who just don't buy the official narratives.
And we were saying to this Russian guy, why is your so not on top of the information war that you're you're completely being destroyed?
Because all these, all these stories are being told about you in the West.
And a lot of them don't stand up.
Why are you not making a great effort to counter these things?
We said, look, it's not a question of you don't need to chuck money at the problem.
All you need to do is do things like, I mean, if you've got a bunch of bloggers paid for their flights and their visas to Russia and just had a conference or something, let them hang out, that would do far more good than trying to influence the BBC or whatever, which you're never going to do.
And he was completely uninterested in any suggestion of how Russia might improve its, well, I suppose, propaganda in a way.
Well, soft power.
I call it soft power.
Yeah.
I mean, we weren't.
The Chinese are shit at it as well.
I mean, they really don't know what they're doing.
It must be said.
So we weren't saying to this guy, look, we weren't asking to lie about anything.
We were just asking him, we were just suggesting, why don't you get the points that are in your favor?
The things that are true, because there are true things in your favor.
Why are you so shit at getting them out?
And it was quite interesting, his reply.
And he did what Russians quite often do in this situation.
He told a Russian joke, which wasn't particularly funny.
But the joke he told was this.
He said, Two Russian tank commanders are driving into Kiev at the head of an armoured division.
One says to another, What a shame we lost the information war.
It's quite funny.
No, I'm actually very fond of that.
didn't realize it was a dedicated uh uh russian saying but i know i'm very i'm very fond of that because actually like this stuff is it it's it does have an in it does have an impact but it is ultimately meaningless um and that's why as i say you know illusions need puncturing and it's like the the um uh the the academic matt alford um uh who i would recommend chatting to um uh if uh he he's done enormous amount of work uh Matt Alford,
he's done an enormous amount of work into the influence of the Pentagon and the CIA on Hollywood.
And it's, I mean, it's completely ludicrous.
I mean, again, we're talking about like the CIA writing or rewriting scripts for popular movies.
And I mean, I think in 2011, Argo and Zero Dark 30 were duking it out for various film industry awards, and they were both written by the CIA.
And it's just like, but they also, yeah, they also have an influence on, you know, like, you know, programming for children and whatnot.
Like, that's a devastatingly effective soft power tool.
Do they own?
Yeah, yeah, no.
So, I mean, Sesame Street was set up by a bunch of US intelligence psychological warfare specialists, including people who worked on MKUltra, which was the CIA's mind.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Like, the mind control program.
And it was explicitly, if you look at the, there was the woman who came up with Sesame Street was called Joan Gans Cooney.
If you look at the her kind of proposal for the show, she specifically talks about wanting to reduce quote-unquote aggression in children.
And that's code for creating basically passive, unquestioning zombies who are deferent to deferent authority.
But the, but the, um, I need to write something about this because whenever I tell people, they don't believe me.
But the, um, it's, it's all, again, this is all out in the open, just people just don't put the pieces together.
That would probably get more, I mean, what you're talking about, what we've been talking about earlier, is very, very interesting, but it's quite dry.
I mean, it's very important.
A lot of people, you'll probably get more traction when you say Sesame Street was run by the people who designed MK Ultra.
It's quite a good story.
Yeah, and I mean, I mean, MK Ultra also included, and I've written about this, and you can find it on our website.
It also included experiments on children and was the documents related to it refer to wanting to make test subjects more childlike, which is quite interesting.
But the point is, is that this soft power stuff, I mean, it does have a massive influence on perceptions.
And I think that I remember a few years back, the second Top Gun was released.
I think it was 2022.
And it was effectively written by the US Navy and Air Force in order to boost recruitment to the US Air Force due to bad PR around Obama's drone wars.
And a friend of mine, his son went to see Top Gun 2 and then wouldn't shut up for the next six months about how he wanted to be a pilot.
So, I mean, this stuff does have an effect in the real world.
But I mean, yeah, I think in military terms, which is increasingly the thrust of propaganda.
And I gather that there are, I've been told by my friends in the UK that there is a lot of fiction shows on the BBC about Russia and the threat that it poses and Russian agents running wild and it's everywhere.
Yeah, so just going that point we always get told in the rep the West about Muskirovka and about the genius of the Russians and their propaganda.
But actually, they're kind of a bit shit, aren't they?
And the Chinese.
And actually, the truth is that we are, we, Americans and the British, are way, way better at propaganda and always have been.
And it's everywhere.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
Well, it's like, I mean, yeah, it's remarkable that, yes, that we hear so much about Russian disinformation primacy.
They're actually, yeah, they're really, really not very good at it.
And not only that, they're unconcerned about it.
I think they're much more focused on real world results than trying to manipulate people.
And I think I'm reminded of this actually ties in with MKUltra.
At the end of the Cold War, the CIA, because of course the CIA had justified MK Ultra on the basis that they thought that the communists were conducting mind control experiments.
So the CIA asked the KGB towards the end of the Soviet Union, well, did you ever conduct mind control experiments?
And they said, no, we just read Dostoevsky to understand how human minds work.
But the efficacy of this stuff in some ways is quite devastating and is certainly worthy of examination and deep concern.
I know that for a very long time, the Archers, which is that kind of very middle-class radio, is it Radio 4 series?
Yeah, my parents are big fans, but I mean, that was for a very long time used to siege government messaging on all sorts of stuff.
I mean, I'm old enough to remember when there were lots of episodes during the foot and mouth outbreak in the early 2000s.
Alleged outbreak.
Yeah, alleged outbreak.
I remember a lot of programming about a lot of Archers' episodes covered that topic.
And you go ask yourself, well, why was that?
Yes, indeed.
But it's the same with all soaps, isn't it?
I mean, EastEnders, it had the first gay kiss on TV.
They're always pushing agendas.
Yeah.
No, indeed, indeed.
And I also think as well that the, you know, all of the preponderant focus of this stuff, I mean, there is a massive international component to this.
And I think that, you know, a lot of a lot of people overseas are sold on this very idyllic and romantic vision of Britain based on Downton Abbey and Harry Potter.
Yeah, oh, yeah, and midsummer murders, of course.
But the but I mean, the primary, the primary audience for this stuff is domestic.
They're overwhelmingly, the British and American governments are overwhelmingly concerned with propagandizing their own populations.
I mean, on the plus side, if you look at polls, it's clear that an increasing number of people don't trust the BBC or established media outlets.
But then the suppression aspect of independent or quote-unquote extreme outlets means that they often don't know where to get alternative sources of information.
But I mean, call it bloody-minded optimism, but I do think that we're, I think COVID was a major kind of awakening moment for a lot of people.
And, you know, despite the frenzy of Ukraine is totally winning and is going to defeat Russia, I think that that narrative has reached more than reached its end point and people can see very clearly that they were being lied to for, well, the first 18 months of this nightmare, which hopefully will be over sooner rather than later.
It's amazing how people that, by the way, is the perfect example of that phenomenon you were talking about, whereby the last refuge is to fight the information war, because the actual physical war, you lost a long time ago.
And I mean, the number of pieces I've read, funny enough, I said this in the podcast just before that recording yesterday with Alex Creel.
And the number of columns I've written, I've read rather, in the Daily Telegraph, telling me just one more push.
Britain is being overwhelmed.
The Russians are being outwitted.
I remember early on in the war, or rather the special military operations, I prefer to call it, to annoy the blue and yellow flag people.
You had people like Andrew Neal tweeting out stuff that he'd heard on the rumor mill.
The rumor mill was that I didn't know that it was something about the Russian tanks couldn't operate because the wheels in their tanks were wrong side.
It was something that had so obviously come from the intelligence services and then been transmitted.
Thank you.
Just been transmitted as kind of, ooh, insider gossip.
And I just thought, anyway, yeah, you're right, that military reality has come and smacked the information war in its face.
Yeah, absolutely.
And there's another aspect to this as well, which I think is another real cause for concern is that spooks end up manipulating themselves.
I mean, I have reported on having quiet wanks in front of no.
I mean, I think that they end up, it's kind of garbage in, garbage out.
And I saw this like this, I've reported on the lead emails of Richard Dearlove, and it's quite clear that he and other people within his milieu, they believed all the crap about Russian soldiers never having seen a toilet before or Russians fighting with shovels that we were told.
And it's just like, well, yeah, you see the media with such steaming bullshit, but then they themselves end up feeding off it and believing it.
And that's dangerous.
There are other examples of that.
That's fascinating.
Well, yeah, I mean, there was a, I mean, something that jumped out to me, I think it was last year, that the MI6 Was complaining publicly that they were struggling to get accurate information out of China due to a lack of Chinese language skills and also a lack of cultural sensitivity of China.
So, I mean, you know, their vision of what China is like is being heavily informed by crap that they themselves flood the media with.
You know, it's, yeah, I mean, another example, again, relevant to the war in Ukraine.
In the lead-up to the much hyped 2023 counter-offensive, which turned out to be like a total disaster, the Telegraph particularly was big on this, but Ukrainian officials as well.
They were saying that, oh, well, the Russians are scared of leopard tanks and they're scared of British Challenger 2 tanks and they're going to run away.
And then in a Washington Post post-mortem of the complete disaster that was the 2023 counter-offensive, it was acknowledged that a significant proportion of the planning for this operation was the assumption that the Russians would run away and that they would that there would be that therefore Ukraine could establish logistics lines without any without harassment.
And then in the end, they just got they thought that Ukrainian quote-unquote courage and resourcefulness would win the day.
Of course, the Ukrainians have demonstrated an enormous amount of courage and resourcefulness, but I mean, you know, it's no match for a tank or landmines or drones.
I spoke to a Russian guy who, quite early on in the war, a young guy had gone out and served with a drone unit.
And he told me, he was a completely regular guy and he was very open about stuff.
He wasn't looking over his shoulder to see whether he could say this stuff.
A lot of them, they don't give a shit.
I'm going to tell you anyway, because it was my experience.
It's what happened to me.
It's what I think.
And he said that tanks have been rendered obsolete.
I mean, I don't think I'm breaking any news here, but he said as soon as a tank comes into an area, all the drone teams are going, yeah, I'm going to get a medal for this.
It's such an obvious target.
And they will all move in.
And their primary mission will be to take out the tank.
And the only way tanks can advance now is under with heavy drone coverage to heavy drone barrows to protect them.
Otherwise, they're going to get taken out.
So all those tanks that Britain and Germany have been sending out, all those leopards and challengers and things, they've just been, they've gone.
That's it.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Well, I mean, there was a, it might have been the Financial Times had this report recently where there were Ukrainians saying the era of the tank is over because if any armoured vehicle operates within 30 kilometers of the supposed front line, it's just going to get absolutely bombarded with drones.
And again, we see that lessons are not being learned here.
Recently, I think it was the Pentagon's official X account tweeted out a video of a drone dropping an explosive.
And it said in shouty caps, have you ever seen something like this before?
And it's like, well, yeah, every day since February 24th, 2022.
You know, I mean, this is the future of warfare, and Britain and America are nowhere on this.
And actually, amusingly, I'm not sure if you kept up with this, James, but recently there was talk of this British kind of semi-it's a semi-tank called Ajax.
And it was many, many years in the making.
It was delivered very, yeah, it was delivered very late and it was massively over budget.
And during tests, it deafened soldiers who were testing it and they were like vomiting and suffered severe health issues.
And the tank can't move and shoot at the same time.
It can't reverse on surface.
This is a more than 12 centimeter incline.
It's just completely useless tat.
And it was meant to form the quote-unquote backbone of British defense until 2050.
And it's already completely irrelevant and deadly to use.
It's really, again, this is the worry that there does appear to be in certain elements of the British and American corridors of power, this notion that, oh, well, if we went to war with the Russians, we could win it.
And yet, none of the lessons of the proxy war, which is that electronic warfare and drones are the future and armoured vehicles are basically redundant at this stage, it's not being learned at all.
And if we were to end up in a direct conflict with Russia, it would probably be over very, very quickly and very brutally with us on the losing side.
I think so.
Well, I mean, definitely, it would be like when the Americans entered the desert war and got trashed at the Kasserine Pass, all the sort of accumulated skill that the Germans had.
And it would be the same, certainly, for, I'd say, probably a couple of years before we.
It's so depressing to think that we're even thinking.
I mean, I feel sorry, probably like you.
I feel sorry for both sides.
I don't think that Ukrainian boys should die.
I don't think Russian boys should die.
This is completely, this is a proxy war organized by people who aren't even organized above a sort of national level.
This is orchestrated by shadowy elites.
I was going to ask you: the intelligence services, they obviously don't work for us.
They obviously don't work for the people of Britain or America or whatever.
They don't really work for the governments because the governments are, the government is a fiction anyway.
Who do you think they take their orders from?
Who runs them?
Who are they working for?
Well, I mean, it's difficult to say.
I mean, I always see them as kind of, you know, like kind of shadow governments unto themselves.
And it's quite, I mean, in the American context, you have like, you know, the CIA was basically founded by Wall Street bankers in order to further America's economic interests and Wall Streets.
Well, yeah, sorry.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
To further the interest of big business.
Sorry, yeah.
Absolutely not, you know, the average people.
I do think that the, I mean, in my, you know, my personal dealings with, you know, I do, I do have some sources in these agencies.
I do think they genuinely believe that they're on some kind of god-sent mission to prevent Western civilization from the barbarians of the gate.
I think the goodies.
Yeah, I think they genuinely seem to believe that.
And they think that, well, if we don't engage in all this meddling overseas and assassinations and two's, et cetera, then the mad mullahs of Iran and the Russian orcs and the hordes of the hordes of the Yellow Peril are going to be cascading through Dover.
It's a total delusion.
And I think frightening.
Yeah.
And I think there's also an aspect of it as well that such is the way these people are groomed.
They usually go to elite private schools and then they go to elite universities.
And they have that notion that Britain is this global power drilled into their hands, yes, and is on the side of goodness and light, like kind of drilled into them.
I mean, I think in the 1960s, Dean Acheson angered the, he was the Secretary of State under Kennedy.
He angered the British by saying that Britain is a country that's lost an empire and has yet to find a new role in the world.
I mean, I think a more accurate portrayal would be Britain is a former empire that hasn't really got the grips of the fact it's not an empire anymore.
And we see this in all, I mean, again, on the subject of useless military tat, Britain has two aircraft carriers, which cost many billions and were like 20 years in development.
Frequently, they travel around the world with no jets on them because Britain can't source the requisite planes to equip them.
But to even move them around requires pretty much the entire Royal Navy to escort them.
And they were so obsessed with acquiring the status symbol of an aircraft carrier because that would place them on a global power footing with the US in their minds that they didn't really stop and think, is this actually worthwhile and will it achieve anything?
And do we actually need this?
I mean, it's the same with Trident, which is in no way an independent nuclear deterrent.
It is completely dependent on the US leasing it to Britain at great expense.
And there have been reports that faulty Trident submarines get fixed with super glue.
But do you not think that possibly Trident is a SARP and nuclear weapons are a SARP anyway?
Or a PSYOP anyway?
They're just a well, I mean, quite possibly.
I mean, I think that I think that they're basically unusable anyway.
And I think it's interesting that the Chinese are actually, as a percentage of their GDP, are spending less and less in terms of their national budget on defense.
And their focus certainly isn't nuclear weapons.
Their research and development is in stuff that would actually work on a battlefield.
So yeah, I think that they're much hyped.
And again, in the spirit of popular culture enforcing this mythos, a couple of years ago, there was that film Oppenheimer that was about nuclear.
I thought that was an adverb for nukes.
I was very careful to avoid that film, Kit, probably for the reasons that you'd spotted.
It seemed to me that the purpose of the film was to reify in the imagination of a new generation the significance of nuclear weapons and the terrible change apparently wrought in the world when Oppenheimer allegedly brought forth this monster.
I'm become death, destroyer of worlds.
Which I'm convinced was a quote that he selected in order, again, to give sort of cultural and religious heft to something that wasn't actually even real.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's, I mean, of course, like, you know, the purported bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they inflicted less casualties than the fire bombing of Tokyo.
So they might not actually be the, you know, invincible, redoubtable, redoubtable weapons that we're told they are.
They were basically napalm, that they were mass, it was just another mass bombardment, that there were no nukes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I mean, I think the only question is whether there have been any since.
Yeah.
I suppose it's the job of the intelligence services and the military to keep us in the dark.
Well, yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
I mean, and yeah, I mean, there aren't any, interestingly, there aren't any listed DSMA advice requests related to Trident, even though it's frequently been in the news.
So, I mean, make of that what you will.
But, yeah, I mean, I think that, I mean, ultimately, they are, much like aircraft carriers, this kind of white elephant, which allows countries to claim that they're impervious to invasion or they're impervious to attack.
I mean, if they are as devastatingly effective, both in kind of kinetic terms, but also as the deterrent, the Iranians were not deterred from striking Israel quite comprehensively during the 12-day war, and Israel didn't even mention the threat of using them during that conflict, which they came out of it pretty badly.
So, again, maybe they are just a bunch of hype and mythos.
I was thinking I've been working on this substack, looking back at my time in journalism and asking the question: if I was working at the heart of a lie machine for these shadowy elites, why didn't I notice?
If all newspapers do really is churn out propaganda, which I can now see so clearly, why didn't I notice at the time?
But in a way, what you've told me about this committee that issues D notices offers quite a good explanation about why the media is so corrupt and compromised.
It's that it's done in such a kind of civilized way.
It's not that Journalists are editors are deliberately and wantonly withholding information which would educate their readers and actually would open their eyes to some really bad stuff that's going on.
It's that they've been they are given permission to cover up these stories by the existence of this very polite committee.
And there's a sort of gentleman's agreement about it all.
Of course we'd love to tell the readers this stuff, but the D Notice Committee has there's lovely lovely people who give us these nice trips to see MI5 and MI6 to their headquarters.
It's a sort of cozy gentleman's agreement to keep the really interesting stuff out of the public domain.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I mean, I think as well, I mean, in a kind of interesting and very interesting example that ties in with a lot of what we've been discussing, is, I mean, there was the American journalist Gary Webb,
he exposed the Iran-Contra cocaine scandal, where, you know, whereby the CIA was funneling weapons and money to the contras in Nicaragua and the contras were smuggling cocaine into the US on CIA planes and flooding the country with hard drugs.
And Gary Webb, formerly an award-winning mainstream journalist, he had his career and life ruined.
And we know from declassified files that this was a direct result of the CIA activating its, you know, speaking to its friends in the mainstream media and saying, go after this guy.
And he got fired from his position at a newspaper and was kind of farmed out some backwater publication in the middle of nowhere where he was in no position to report on anything dynamite.
And he later lamented, well, in all of my years in journalism, I was winning awards.
I thought I was doing serious muckraking and uncovering inconvenient truths and doing proper journalism.
But I realize now, in the wake of having my life ruined as a result of this story, that I just hadn't written anything worth suppressing.
And yeah, I think that kind of gentleman's agreement, that dark handshake, it means that journalists internally, if you can call them that, they internalize, well, will the DSMA committee or will this powerful agency or will this government official be okay with what I'm writing?
And if the answer is no, and you learn this stuff pretty quickly or you don't last very long in the profession, you just drop it and carry on as if nothing had happened.
I mean, I mentioned that BBC story about their fascist asset who was committing very serious crimes and being allowed to get away with it.
That basically completely sank without trace.
No other publication reported on it really.
And it's just been forgotten.
And that's the kind of thing you would think would be like a major scandal of historic proportions.
But no, it's, I think, was it Winston Churchill who said, occasionally statesmen stumble on the truth, but then they pick themselves up and carry on.
Oh, yeah, sorry.
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
I think that's a rather pervasive perspective.
Yes.
Yes.
Oh, now I'm getting feedback.
Hello?
Can you hear me?
Yeah.
Okay.
Is there any feedback?
No.
Okay, good.
Seems not to be.
So, yeah, I was just going to round up.
Round off?
Yeah.
Sure.
Round off by asking you.
So The Guardian ran the Snowden revelations and what was the other thing you did?
Snowden and WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks, yeah.
So I think all the papers are in on it, including the Scott Trust.
They're just different ends of the same turd.
So what do you think The Guardian isn't a bastion of free speech or anything else?
How come they did they did they release this stuff to sort of sort of as a sort of limited hangout or in order to sort of flood the zone?
Or what's quite, I mean, what's quite interesting about the um, the the uh.
Funnily enough, this was the very first um article that the classified UK ever uh ever published um, was that the um that they actually reported um uh on the uh uh.
They reported on the Snowden um uh leaks and then immediately the DSMA committee started getting its hooks into them and it started, you know, inviting them to their meetings and and engaging with them and they boast in their, in their public minutes, of how the Guardian was engaging with them constructively.
And I do think that there was, you know, there was a.
There's certainly an aspect of of wanting to up their kind of dissident credentials because I mean the, at that time they still had a kind of thimbleful of of independent credibility and they employed, you know, veteran muckrakers like Ian Cobain and you know, and a few others.
But you know, as Alan Rushbridge admitted to a parliamentary committee, you know we reported on one percent of the material that Snowden leaked and they were effectively gatekeepers of what did and didn't get reported on.
And I mean there was a.
You know there were several documents that were that were disclosed many years after the fact on British and American involvement in Syria from you know, even before the, the proxy war there started, which you know might have been helpful to release in 2013, When intervention was being openly mulled,
rather than kicking the can down the road and publishing long after it would have had any impact on public perceptions.
But I would urge people to check out this, it's called How the UK Security Services Neutralized the Country's Leading Liberal Newspaper.
It was written in September 2019 by Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis.
And they make the point that after that symbolic, completely symbolic laptop destruction where GCHQ officials oversaw the Guardian's hard drives being destroyed with angle grinders, that subsequent to this, their coverage became rather tame.
And ever since Catherine Viner became editor in 2015, they have run relentless puff pieces on the security and intelligence services, like exclusive sit-down interviews with the heads of, I think it was, yes, in November 2016, Andrew Parker, the head of MI5,
and I believe the official who met the Blue Peter children, he gave his very first newspaper interview, the first newspaper interview given by an MI5 chief in its 107-year history to The Guardian.
And ever since then, it's just been kind of pat ball puff pieces for the security services.
And I mean, The Guardian as well, it must be stressed, like during the throughout the pandemic, they were relentlessly hammering this notion that anyone and everyone who questioned the government stance on or government policy on COVID was some far-right lunatic QAnon, blah, blah.
And then at the start of 2022, they published this rather amusing article based on research conducted by some firm, which found that actually genuine quote-unquote anti-vaxxers, like people who were opposed to vaccination under any circumstances, represented absolutely less than 1% of the population.
And the Guardian said, well, this is a surprising result.
And it's probably surprising because of the undue attention that anti-vaxxers have received in the media.
And it's like, well, I mean, who is responsible for that preponderant focus and this false framing of people who opposed vaccine mandates or opposed digital passports as it deranged extremists?
Oh, it's you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're right.
It was a funny thing.
During COVID, or rather, the fake pandemic.
The scandemic.
The scandemic.
I had.
There was a part of me that was thinking, well, at least the Guardian's going to kind of call this one out, isn't it?
But that was the Guardian from a long time ago that I was imagining.
Pre.
Well, I mean, it's a funny thing indeed that you've got to bear in mind that during the 1980s, up to the 1980s, staff at the BBC were vetted by MI5.
And this went beyond security vetting into, oh, well, this person took a trip to Prague as a student, therefore they're potentially a communist subversive.
Or this person made a documentary critical of the Vietnam War, never feature them again.
The BBC itself was more critical of British foreign policy and the national security state then than it is now.
You know, I think that every the I mean, you know, the Telegraph, you know, which is, you know, basically a propaganda megaphone for the British military at this stage, you know, they did some serious, you know, muckraking, published, you know, dissident voices like Peter O'Bourne and yourself, James, of course, you know, for a number of years.
You know, that's all gone now.
Yes.
And I don't think that that's necessarily a natural evolution.
Kit, it's been great talking to you.
Where can people read you?
Well, you can find me at kitclarenberg.com.
As I say, my imaginatively titled website.
You can find me on Twitter, again, under my name.
And I most frequently publish with The Grey Zone.
And I head their UK desk as much as it exists.
So maybe see you there.
Thanks so much for having me on.
It's a privilege, James.
Yeah, is the Grey Zone doing okay?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, we're going from strength to strength, I think.
And this is perhaps the cause of my bloody-minded optimism about the future is that we've never been more read and we're reaching more audiences all the time.
And we have reported on leaks that show that from the earlier stages of the Ukraine proxy war that we were a subject of interest to the British state and they wanted to censor and deplatform us because they knew that we were going to report on this critically and we did.
And yeah, we've been saying from the very start of this that it's the British leading it and now the mainstream media admits that.
So yeah, I think we're doing pretty well.
Although the threat of a knock on the door is ever present.
And I certainly couldn't and wouldn't be doing what I'm doing if I was based in the UK.
May you and your family be safe, James.
Don't say things like that, Ken.
It's always nice.
Anyway, thank you for a very interesting chat.
And yeah, check out Kit's work.
Check out the Grey Zone.
And if you like my stuff and if you want to help support me against the evil intelligence services and all the other people that want to kill me, while I'm still alive, you can support me at Substack, among other places.
Please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
If you want to just carry on just watching free stuff, fine.
Buy me a coffee, maybe.
I've got to eat, ultimately.
We've got to eat.
We've got to eat.
Yeah, exactly.
I think you're all secretly hoping that I'm going to get arrested soon and put away.
You won't need to pay for me anymore.
While I'm still going.
Yeah, well, no, long may that continue, James.
God bless you.
And thanks so much for having me on.
Well, thank you, Kit.
It's been great.
And thank you for the work you do.
So yeah, support my sponsors.
Buy me a coffee.
Yeah, buy me a coffee if you just show stick two fingers up at the powers that you've got.