Michael Brendan Dougherty, a senior writer at the National Review Online, has written an incredibly intelligent and perspicacious piece about London Calling – by which I mean, of course, that he’s quite nice about it (and the Daily Sceptic). Here’s an extract:
I’ve followed London Calling on and off for years, because British politics since Brexit have been a fascinating roller-coaster ride: The shock of the result. The brinksmanship of Remainers. The hapless Theresa May. The triumph of Boris Johnson’s majority. Lockdown. Johnson’s feud with former adviser Dominic Cummings. The Liz Truss dalliance.
Young gives the impression of a trouble-making Fleet Streeter who married too well and thus had to become more energetic, and more entrepreneurial and health-conscious, than every one of his peers. He was a lad-mag-era journalistic legend. He did a disastrous stint at Vanity Fair, which he chronicled in the memoir How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, later turned into a feature film starring Simon Pegg. He’s taken plenty of knocks in his career. And yet he keeps getting up off the canvas and doing one enterprising thing after another. He founded the Free Speech Union to defend people from cancellation. He became a successful education activist in England. And his commitment to contrarianism led him to found the anti-lockdown site the Daily Sceptic, which is now a clearinghouse for anti-Establishment muckraking.
Unlike Young, Delingpole gives the impression of someone who may have come from some money. But like Young, he’s a born skeptic; he made his name, in part, by flaying climate doomers. In recent years, he’s been slowed down. He contracted Lyme disease — a mysterious illness that is barely known at all outside of the wooded areas of the northeast United States — and suffered from the exact same battery of symptoms that also plagued my friend Ross Douthat. He still writes a column about new television series for the Spectator, but since the Covid era really got under way, his view of politics has changed. And this change makes the Young–Delingpole repartee perhaps the most relevant ongoing conversation on planet Earth.
Whereas once he and Young were both basically libertarian-oriented Tories, now Delingpole has stopped caring about conventional politics. He sometimes has trouble working up any interest at all in the latest too-ing and fro-ing at Westminster. And this change has strained the relationship at the heart of the podcast, occasionally making me wonder if I was listening to the final episode.
For Delingpole, the sinister aims of our ruling class keep advancing whatever party is in power. Trump meant nothing. Brexit meant nothing. BoJo was, if anything, just another tool of the establishment. The implementation of the World Economic Forum agenda — you’ll own nothing and love it — continues apace. Depopulation is the long-term goal. Soon we’ll have a full-blown social-credit system backed by central-bank digital currencies. In his remaining time before the onset of inescapable tyranny, Delingpole is experimenting with religion and psychedelics, and forswearing “the death jab” — Covid vaccination. This is the worldview of #TeamJames on the podcast.
On the other side of the ledger is #TeamToby, whose view is that our politics are for the most part genuine rather than fake, our leaders deluded and bumbling rather than as supremely capable as they would have to be to keep conspiracies of the sort Delingpole believes in going.
What makes London Calling riveting is that I know so many friendships, marriages, and enterprises in which something like the same division has arisen over the past three years. I know so many people who go through life with worldviews equivalent to those of #TeamToby and #TeamJames as the respective angel and devil on their shoulders. And there is something inherently fascinating about watching people struggle through it.
Every establishment organ talks about the “crisis of democracy”, by which they mean the rise of populist parties that are challenging the rather narrow confines of post–Cold War political orthodoxy. But I think Delingpole’s worldview change is closer to the real crisis: the spreading belief that self-government is a sham exercise, that political action is pointless, and that our civilisation is doomed because our institutions can’t be reformed.
There are moments when Young has had to almost shrug at the surprising plausibility of Delingpole’s worldview; after all, it did kind of look like the Bank of England and a handful of bond-market players decapitated the Truss government. There are also times when Delingpole seems to come close to admitting that his worldview has cracks in it; shouldn’t “the death jab” have killed more of its recipients if it’s as deadly as Delingpole claims? Truss’s budget was no threat to the remora-like ruling class, so why did it get her thrown out of office? Beneath the surface, one wonders if the #TeamJames mindset is born of a certain despair — if its adherents are still mourning what was lost between 2020 and 2022.
The fact that London Calling hasn’t broken up over its hosts’ sharply diverging views is — dare I say it — inspiring. In a way, both men’s liberality is what sustains it: They always find a way to talk through or around their disagreements, and their friendship allows each of them to practice viewing the world through the other’s warped lens.
Worth reading in full!
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Very good!!
For my part I’m probably 10% #TeamJames of the centre. Ok maybe 20%..
So much respect for both these guys. Both products of an English culture that’s in danger of extinction (note to Toby ref Nick podcast). Mostly with James, occasionally with Toby, often somewhere in the middle.
THIS!’
The fact that London Calling hasn’t broken up over its hosts’ sharply diverging views is — dare I say it — inspiring. In a way, both men’s liberality is what sustains it: They always find a way to talk through or around their disagreements, and their friendship allows each of them to practice viewing the world through the other’s warped lens.’
Exactly – we all view the world through a warped lens – who can be sure that they know the truth?
Love ‘London Calling’ – since it started, it’s the only podcast that I’ve never missed.
(Despite references to huntin’/shooting’, both of which I abhor, which I accept because it’s so much ‘bigger’ than that!)
I would be truly bereft if it ever stopped.
Bromance.
More a Pole guy.
Uniparty, WEF is real. Politics is theatre not real. Don’t follow the orders, you get Trussed up and Sunacked. Or Gus Grissomed.
Rona was a planned fascism. The Stabs kill and injure on purpose and the future effects will be severe including infertility.
Brexit meant nothing – the elites will hand over NI, eventually toss Scotland to the Reich and have quintupled immigration and we are still tied to UN-EU HR and agreements. What Brexit? Could the Labourtards be any worse? No. Did we pay the marriage-break up fee of a few tens of billions? Or is that covered by the invasion costs from Frankrijk?
Perspicacious? Not a word we hear much of these days since the 70s when Leonard Sachs trotted it out regularly in his role as the sesquipedalian chairman in TV show ‘The Good Old Days’. And my father trotted it out also because he too was sesquipedalian and loved words, especially long ones. I must confess to leaning more towards #TeamJames, where the observable facts seems to fit the prevailing narrative more closely. As for “shouldn’t “the death jab” have killed more of its recipients if it’s as deadly as Delingpole claims?” Well, it’s not over yet, they are still injecting, and people are still dying. But I am grateful to Toby for providing a platform both here and at the FSU where these issues can be discussed openly.
People are dying and fertility rates have dropped. Perhaps a ‘death/sterilisation jab’?
Uptick in cancer and yes fertility is the big one.
Always a great listen, you’ve got to love it when James gets frustrated with Toby. I tend to be on team James as it’s the only way any of this makes sense, you can sense Toby almost makes the breakthrough and then backs off. I always wonder how given the stories on this site and the posts and links you lot provide Toby isn’t more down the rabbit hole. It must take a will of steal not to make that step or he’s clinging on to credibility while James doesn’t give a shit.
Thanks Toby anyway, this site and you lot have kept me sane over the last 3 years and I’m so glad I avoided the death jab. Preparing for the fight.
I guess when you’re on the dissenting side you’re held to different standards.
Hate to bring Trump into this but the whole mainstream press went down the proverbial rabbit hole on him. No repercussions for them spewing mostly nonsense with Russiagate repeated at nauseum, but makes clear they’re held to a different standard. If Toby gets one thing patently wrong, the orthodoxy will no doubt try use it for some kind of character assassination.
Can’t speak for Toby of course but perhaps he’s keeping some opinions close to his chest. Given what the government did during the pandemic / scamdemic, their bribing with considerable funding to the failing mainstream press to propagate their fear campaign. What else in the 4th ind. rev. / ‘big change’ agenda are they involved in the mainstream now? We presume it’s stopped directly but who knows how these exclusive contracts come about to keep the Nudging process continuing on to lead the people (under the guise of public health of course).
Especially when you are.. team ‘free speech’ too, the government is going to oppose any scrutiny and are making it very clear – free speech is not absolute (in a democracy). Shocking, especially with our constant signalling of how amazing our democracy is and should be exported via… regime change? Not sure how that dovetails with the system they’re really wanting to usher in, a China-style social credit score system and a big government boot!
Good point about Toby. I don’t think that he wants to believe the cynicism that prevails in James’s arguments.
Years ago, I was impressed by James’s book “Water Melons” which was spot on about the debacle of the Net Zero debacle well before it was fashionable to be so. His philosophy then – 10 years ago – was definitely propogated by a conspiracy theory underpinning his argument which he has since magnified much further.
Both men are excellent value but I err towards Toby as he is more optimistic and dare I suggest – hopeful.
I like Toby because he’s optimistic, but one giant cock up this ain’t. Politicians are just useful idiots and easy to exploit because of their narcissism.
But that’s how debate should be/was. Opposing views slugging it out verbally, in good spirit and good nature. The whole point of debate is not to agree, otherwise where would be the debate? And from that comes new thoughts, new questions raised.
That’s what has been mostly shut down by self-appointed ‘fact-checkers’ and sanitisers of public debate to agree only with the official orthodoxy.
‘Misinformation’ = exposure of Government lies.
I love London Calling! James, when particularly gloomy, reminds me a bit of H P Lovecraft, and Toby is a bit Woosterish in his eternal optimism. This is not to diminish the huge contributions of both men to freedom, debate and thought.
I don’t think it’s exactly a conspiracy. When I was at university in the early seventies, it was clear even then that the left had absolute control over political debate and thought at the time. Any member of the academic staff who dared to examine right wing topics in a neutral rather than ideologically critical way was, in todays parlance, cancelled. There was also an overwhelming sense of ‘we know best’ because we were at university and an appalling implicit disregard for the real, rather than imagined, views of working people.
This was also the time of studies on post-industrial society and the publication of ‘The Limits to Growth’ by the Club of Rome. In my field at the time – economics – there was a sustained attempt to empty the discipline of any values, such as the importance of growth and lessons from that, and to focus on a highly technical approach involving (early) computerisation.
In short, this was a step along the way to what we now see the WEF and the UN’s agendas telling us. The resulting globalist ideology is global because it is the ONLY ideology with any credibility for political and bureaucratic ‘professionals’ – it is just the way politics is done these days. It therefore becomes the default agenda for governments who have to fight hard to do anything differently.
This looks like it might be a conspiracy, but it isn’t any more. The real conspiracy happened in the fifties and sixties with figures like Maurice Strong, Brzezinsky, Kissinger, et Al and their attempts both to define a new world order and create the institutions to deliver it.
At least the agenda of debate is now shifting, helped by James and Toby and others, and I find people are now apt to respond in genuine horror at the more extreme actions of government institutions and global corporates. The Daily Sceptic does a great job of highlighting such actions and is having real impact, as is the Free Speech Union.
The real strength we have is that these elites have not factored in the real views of people – any more than the left has come to terms with the views of those they claim to represent. We can but hope, and keep speaking out.
I agree with many of the comments that London Calling is excellent.
I hesitate to criticise – so let’s call it an observation – but, while I believe James says exactly what he thinks throughout, I feel that Toby may on occasion be holding back from a free expression of what he is thinking, and is self-censoring to some extent.
Why might this be? It might simply be that the podcast has found a winning formula, and he feels somewhat bound to maintain a Team Toby stance. Or it might be that, as Associate Editor at The Spectator, he feels constrained by the editorial position of that magazine (on the safety and efficacy of vaccines, for example). Or he might think it commercially prudent not to put himself “off-side” (topical metaphor) with the mainstream press.
While Toby’s position on freedom of speech is unassailable, self-censorship, for whatever reason, is not inconsistent with it, I don’t think?
I want to be with Team Toby and just believe it’s incompetence. I find myself in Team James because of the open skullduggery we’re seeing around us.
My view is that we have a bit of both: we have incompetent, corrupt politicians, while the corporate, banking and lobbying world is rife with conspiracies run by clever people. The conspiracies work, in part, because clueless, corrupt politicians are easily manipulated.
However, the conspirators will be hopeless at ruling if they succeed with their Nineteen Eighty-Four bull****. Imagine Noah Yuval Harari standing up on a public platform on victory day and telling people he’s going to run a policy of hacking their brains so they no longer have free will!
I half wonder if the best way to end this nightmare would be to let the bad guys win. As soon as they win, their inability to run the world will make everything crumble. Trouble is, what terrible loss of life and livelihood would be incurred in even the small amount of time they’ll rule?
In another age, we’d all be climbing on wooden ships and setting out to find new lands to live in!
That is indeed an excellent review, and a good summary of the dynamic between the two teams.
I’m mostly on #TeamToby, but if James is right about the death jab being a deliberate de-population ploy, it won’t because it is killing people (though it is, but “not enough”), it will be because it is stopping people being born. As detailed on this site, the birth rate post-jab is going through the floor.
Oh no, not another podcast I’m going to have to find time to listen to. 🙁
With all the slogan t-shirts why are there no Team-Jame’s Team-Toby??
Thank god (who I don’t believe in) for the Toby Youngs of this world. ….not so sure about the Delingpole though!!