James Delingpole
Politics • Culture • Writing
Erudite but accessible; warm and witty; definitely not woke
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Not All Conspiracies Are True. Apparently

Whenever I do a podcast which strays too far into the realms of ‘conspiracy theory’, the purple pilled come crawling out of the woodwork.

Purple pilled is what I call red pilled people who want to keep one foot in the mainstream. So, for old times’ sake, they keep taking the occasional blue pill.

This is a tendency I can well understand. Going down the rabbit hole is a terrifying and lonely experience. You miss the company and validation of all your old Normie friends. They think - if you dare raise the subject - that you have gone mad. So (albeit subconsciously) you’ll do almost anything to reassure them, and yourself, that you still have your critical faculties intact and that you’re still firmly grounded in reality.

One way of doing this is to focus on a ‘conspiracy theory’ that you personally find beyond the pale. “Sure I get that They are trying to poison us with unnecessary pharmaceutical interventions for rebranded flu. Sure I get that the presidential election was stolen, that Kennedy wasn’t assassinated by a lone gunman and that 9/11 wasn’t plotted by a man in an Afghan cave. But c’mon, people! The idea that the moon landings were faked is something only the tin-foil hat crazies would be believe…”

Which brings us to my latest podcast with Bart Sibrel, who since the 90s has made it his life’s work to demonstrate that the moon landings never happened. At his website, which he doesn’t like to mention - it’s bartsibrel.com - he has amassed lots of documentary evidence detailing the main points of contention.

These include the unnaturalness of the shadows in the moon landing photographs (which look as if they have been illuminated by more than one light source, such as might happen in a studio but not on the moon); the flimsy nature of the craft which we are asked to believe were capable of making this epic journey when computer technology was a fraction of what is available today, even on your iPhone); the Van Allen Belt of radiation which a human could only survive if encased in thick layers of lead; claims of death bed confessions from the head of security on the set where the fake moon landings were allegedly filmed; and so on.

But this is a message which makes lots of people very uncomfortable. The moon landings are part of the fabric of our life and comprise some of our earliest memories. For example, when I was about four I won a fancy dress competition on a cruise ship. Obviously I had no choice in the outfit - you don’t at that age - nor did I recognise the name of the character I was dressed as. But clearly the judges did: it was Buzz Aldrin!

A bit later, I used to insist that my Dad got his petrol from the local Shell garage in order that I might collect the ‘free’ commemorative coins issued to celebrate the latest Apollo mission. And I definitely remember watching at least one of the launches live on TV.

Later in life, after some very rigorous vetting to check I wasn’t one of the pesky moon deniers, I even got sent on a journalistic assignment to NASA in Houston to hear for myself about some of the marvellous missions the space agency was planning next…

It’s understandable, then, that when you try to debunk the moon landings some people take It personally. Not only are you tacitly accusing them of having fallen for maybe the biggest con trick in history but you are also treading on their dreams. The moon landings have long been sold to us as mankind’s greatest achievement. We did it! We got there! We got so good at it we even sent a moon buggy and hit golf shots there! No kid likes being told that Father Christmas doesn’t exist. Few grown ups can deal with its equivalent - the notion that the most amazing thing man ever did was just a cheap (or rather, very expensive) trick.

This is what I detect when I read some of the disbelieving comments on podcasts like my one with Bart Sibrel. I see the various stages of anger, grief and denial, couched as rational and reasonable scepticism.

Here are some of the classic responses:

“Not everything is a conspiracy, you know” they’ll declare sagely. Or they’ll ignore the most compelling evidence presented and instead focus on the weakest point mentioned in order to reject the entire argument. Or they’ll express doubts about the credibility of the witness, usually by picking holes in his character or delivery. Or they’ll declare that this is a silly subject to be focusing on when there are so many more important battles to be fought. Or they’ll say that we shouldn’t be talking about this stuff at all because it just gives us a bad name.

Some of these are perfectly valid complaints. I can see, for example, why some people might find Sibrel’s rapidfire delivery offputting, even redolent of someone trying to pull the wool over his audience’s eyes. Also, I agree that some of his more extravagant assertions - such as the one that the original Apollo crew, led by Gus Grissom were murdered b the CIA- depend too much on hearsay and are probably unprovable.

But a few cherry picked flaws do not a convincing rebuttal make. This is where I DO take issue with the fake moon landing deniers. If you’re going to find the odd hole in the argument or presentation, fine. Just don’t try to extrapolate from your quibbles a logical leap far bigger than anything Neil Armstrong ever took - that you have thereby debunked the debunkers.

You just haven’t.

How can I be so sure of my ground? Well up to a point, I can’t. All ‘conspiracy theories’ are, by definition, counter-narrative and subject to well-funded, well-embedded official cover up. So inevitably, the evidence in their favour is going to be more sketchy and heavily contested than a printed statement signed in triplicate from a ‘trusted’ official source saying: “This is what really happened…”

But I still think it’s more than possible in almost all these cases to discern - a la Occam’s Razor - where the truth lies.

One way is simply by sifting the accumulated evidence. Fake moon landing theory wouldn’t be half so credible if it depended merely on the researches of Bart Sibrel. But it doesn’t. If you don’t find Sibrel’s style to your tastes then just ignore him and watch the host of other compelling material out there. American Moon, for example, which presents the case in painstaking detail.

American Moon is particularly good at debunking the debunkers. Which is an important thing to bear in mind before you come back at me with your killer points you’ve found on the internet about how “No actually, the astronauts took a clever route which SKIRTED the Van Allen Belt” or “Duh! The astronauts left actual REFLECTIVE DEVICES on the moon’s surface, which you can still see using a laser.” Do you think if they were going to go to the trouble of faking the moon landings they wouldn’t also have a budget - or, if you prefer, a coterie of useful idiots - ready to shoot down any pesky sceptics?

As I often say, different people have different routes into conspiracy theories according to temperament. That is, one person’s killer fact is another person’s ‘meh’. So it was for me in the case of the moon landings. What swung it for me initially was none of the points that Bart makes on his website (perhaps because they didn’t appeal to my non-technical mind). Rather, what first persuaded me that ‘it was faked’ was listening to a specialist in court witness testimony analysing recordings of the astronauts describing their lunar experiences. His conclusion: these were most definitely not the personal testimonies of people who had been anywhere near the moon.

I agree it can be hard in this crazy world of ours trying to penetrate the hall of mirrors and to work out what is and isn’t a true reflection of reality.

But what you can do is make intelligent, informed inferences based on what you definitely DO know.

Before I went down the rabbit hole, in what you might call my Normie days, I used to tell myself that possibly one of the myriad conspiracy theories out there was true and that the rest were probably rubbish. All I had to do at some stage, if and when I could be bothered to engage in such a pointless activity, would be to pinpoint the real one and then discard all the imposters.

Once you start burrowing, though, you realise it doesn’t work like that. Sure you’d like lots of the ‘conspiracy theories’ not to be true because then you could publicly distance yourself from them and maintain your status as a sensible, rational person. But instead what you find as you hop from one topic to another - from JFK to 9/11 to the Beatles, say - is that they all have similar hallmarks, like a poker player’s ‘tell’ or a serial killer’s signature.

After a time, the techniques - all essentially based on mass deception - become so wearisomely familiar that you scarcely need to look into the details of conspiracies you haven’t yet investigated properly. Your default assumption becomes: Yup, there’s another one.

This might sound reductive, cynical, even paranoid but it’s none of those things. Rather it represents a mature, informed acceptance of the way things are.

The greatest bar to believing in any conspiracy theory is our natural (or, you might argue, thoroughly programmed and imprinted) unwillingness to believe that there are people out there capable of doing such a horrible thing.

We have been brought up to be trusting, both of essential human goodness and of authority. This is quite a mental hurdle to get over - and some of us never do, preferring to go on living in the illusory world of the blue pilled than the harsher reality of the red pilled. But once you have leapt that hurdle, you are - or ought to be - changed forever because it is impossible to unknow what you know, to unaccept the terrifying truth that you have with great reluctance come to accept.

The default position of the blue-pilled is: But why would they do this?
The default position of the red-pilled is: But why wouldn’t they do this?

Both make logical sense in their way. But the purple-pilled position just doesn’t. It requires believing in two things simultaneously - a) that there are forces out there of unimaginable power and wealth, capable of the most monstrous evil, which they frequently engage in in order to deceive and thereby exploit and control mankind but b) that when it comes to certain things - WWII, say, or the Moon Landings or the Death of Diana - they decide “Nah! Not for us. We’re keeping out of this one. We’re keeping it perfectly legit and we’re going to allow events just to take their natural course.”

“Not all conspiracies are true,” you say?

If you believe that, I’ve got a nice chunk of moon rock I’d like to sell you. 100 percent guaranteed genuine.

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James and Dick’s CHRISTMAS Special 2025

Featuring Dick. And James. And Unregistered Chicken. And possibly some other special guests.

Not included in ticket price but available so you don’t starve/die of thirst: nice pizzas out of wood-fired ovens; street food.

VIP Tickets - £120 including bell-ringing lesson, walk with James, front row seats, church tour

Location is: My neck of the woods. Northants. Nearest stations, Banbury/Long Buckby. Junction 11 of M40.

Friday, 28th November 2025. Starts at 5pm

https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/?section=events#events

00:02:47
Big Birthday Bash

James Delingpole’s Big Birthday Bash August 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

00:04:15
Nick Kraljevic

If you had to escape to another country which would it be? James runs through some of the options with Aussie cybersecurity guy and entrepreneur Nick Kraljevic. Nick - a Delingpod addict since Australia’s crazy lockdowns - talks about how to claim dual citizenship (handy if your family originates from somewhere like Croatia, as Nick’s does) and which countries are currently the most welcoming. His two top choices may come as a surprise. Nick is the founder of Societates Civis - www.soc-civ.com - which can help you make the move.

↓ ↓

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, JD 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 ...

01:24:01

Posted by Tom Woods this morning. I concur! Breakfast is for farmers.

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James's Big Birthday Bash - August 1st. Be There!

Because I love you all and want you to be happy, I’d like few things more than if you were ALL able to join me at my James Delingpole Birthday Bash on August 1st.

Unfortunately, numbers are strictly limited. So please don’t be one of those people - I’m the procrastinating type myself, so I know whereof I speak - who sends me a pleading message a few days before the event saying: “Can you squeeze me in?” Because tragically I might not be able to help.

Here’s why I think you’ll enjoy it. The main event is me doing a live Delingpod with Bob Moran and the conversation is going to be great. You know it is. Apart from my brother Dick - who’ll also be appearing, obvs. - there’s probably no one with whom I have a greater rapport than Bob. And, gosh, do we have a lot to talk about: chemtrails, death jabs, dinosaurs, Satanists, the New World Order etc. All the stuff, basically, that you can’t discuss with your Normie friends, but which here we’ll cover freely and frankly because, hey, you’ll be ...

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Christianity 1 New Age 0

If you haven’t already - I’m a bit behind the curve here - I urge you to watch this car crash encounter between Christian apologist and scholar Wes Huff and ‘ancient civilisation’ researcher Billy Carson.

It’s an excruciating experience - probably best to watch it on double speed - for a couple of reasons. First, the hapless podcast host/debate moderator Mark Minard is somewhat out of his depth and is also clearly embarrassed at having one of his guests (Carson, sitting right next to him) eviscerated in front of him by his other guest. This causes him to interrupt the debate at intervals and expound well-meaningly but not very interestingly on his own half-baked views on the mysteries of the universe. You feel a bit sorry for him but you do rather wish he’d shut up.

Second, and mainly, it’s painful to watch Carson being outclassed and outgunned by someone who knows and understands his purported field of expertise so much better than he does. Carson was reportedly so upset by the encounter that he ...

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I Wish I Weren't a Christian

No, not really, obviously. I’m just venting my frustration on how incredibly hard it is sometimes.

For example, if you read your scripture regularly you will notice that time and again Jesus enjoins us to forgive our enemies. This is emphasised in Matthew where He tells us that there’s only one prayer we really need and that’s the Lord’s Prayer.

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus leaves us in no doubt that for followers of the way forgiveness is not an optional extra.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.

There’s an implicit contract here. If you want to be worthy of God’s forgiveness then you must do likewise.

I say the Lord’s Prayer every day, from the moment I wake till the moment I’m about to go to sleep - and lots of times in between.

The first parts are easy. What’s not to like about hallowing the Lord’s name and celebrating his eternal kingdom and being assured of all that daily bread He provides?

But the forgiving trespasses part can be a bit of a stumbling block because it seems so onerous - and unfair.

Surely if someone wrongs you, especially when unprovoked, the proper and proportionate response ought to be to smite them sevenfold? At the very least.

How can it not be right to retaliate when you’ve got right on your side?

How can it especially not be right when you happen to have been blessed by God with a mind that can produce the kind of next-level invective, weapons-grade cattiness and implacable, Daisy-cutter bomb logic that utterly obliterates anyone foolish enough to cross you?

Not only would the revenge be just - but fun too!

I’ve tried these arguments, over the years, on my morning walk with the dog, which is one of the occasions where I go through the Psalms and commune with God. But I can never quite get my point past the goalkeeper.

I’ll say stuff like: “C’mon, God. Give me a break. I’m not St Francis of Assisi. Can’t you just give me a bit of leeway, just this once, to satisfy my baser urges? I’ll be good afterwards, promise.”

Or: “But taking out wrong ‘uns in an amusing way is my brand. It’s how I make my living. You surely don’t want me to starve, do you?”

Resisting the temptation to deploy my powers is tough. It’s like being blessed with a huge penis only to discover “No sorry. The Lord has decided that your path is to become a monk. So I’m afraid that magnificent appendage is for peeing, only.

Why, God? Why?

The problem is that the Bible doesn’t really offer many get-out clauses. It’s not just the Lord’s Prayer that enjoins forgiveness. There’s that possibly even more annoying bit where Jesus tells us - say what? Really?? - that we should ‘Turn the other cheek.’

And then there are all the Psalms - which Jesus quoted more than almost any other book, so they must be on point - urging us to be patient and to let God take care of all the smiting.

https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Podcasts/Archive/show.php?slug=2025-08-13-psalm-37-pooyan-mehrshahi

For example, there’s Psalm 37:

Leave off from wrath; and let go displeasure. Fret not thyself else thou shalt be moved to do evil.

Time and again you find the psalmist - usually David - asking, in so many words, “How much longer am I going to put up with this injustice? It’s so unfair!”

And God’s reply is always: “Fret not. I’ve got this!”

In Psalm 73, another of my favourites, the psalmist gets so frustrated he wonders why there’s any point being good when behaving badly seems so much more profitable.

Yea, and I had almost said even as they. [ie the Ungodly] But lo, then I should have condemned the generation of thy children.

But then he goes into the sanctuary of God and learns the fate of the ungodly.

Namely how thou dost set them in the slippery places and castest them down and destroyest them.

O how suddenly do they consume, perish and come to a fearful end.

Yea, even like as a dream when one awaketh, so shalt thou make their image to vanish out of the city.

https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Podcasts/Archive/show.php?slug=2025-12-09-james-is-joined-by-preacher-stephen-white-to-unpack-the-beauty-and-depth-of-psalm-73

The language and imagery of the Psalms is so magnificent that I could spend all day reciting them. But if you’re reciting them merely for the great poetry then you’re surely guilty of the kind of vainglorious burbling Jesus warned us against in Matthew 6. You need to imbibe the meaning also - and accept that if Jesus took this stuff seriously then you probably should too.

Not, by the way, that I am remotely wasting any time fantasising about my enemies consuming, perishing and coming to a fearful end. On the contrary, I feel sorry for them because choosing the wrong path, away from God, is punishment in itself.

I prefer to take my example from one of the extraordinary monks featured in Archimandrite Tikhon’s Everyday Saints. [Unfortunately I can’t look up his name because I gave my copy to ortho bro Dick].

This monk was sent to the Gulag by the Soviets - but not before being cruelly tortured by a sadistic NKVD man who broke all his fingers. Many years later, the monk was reunited with his torturer, now so thoroughly ashamed he became an ardent Christian.

Please don’t think for a moment that I am comparing my feeble attempts at forbearance to that of this saintly monk. I’m sure I will fail to meet the exacting standards of saintliness on many, many occasions in the future, which will be my loss and your gain. After all, I’m sure my articles are SO much more fun when I’m putting the boot in rather than when I’m turning that other cheek.

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James and Dick's Christmas Special - Don't Miss Out!

I was about to start writing Part Two of my piece Most Journalists Don’t Realise They Are Working For Satan, when a thought occurred: “Hang on, James. Shouldn’t you be plugging your show?”

It’s this Saturday, on the off chance you are interested. I quite understand if you’re not: you’re probably busy, this miserable weather doesn’t make you feel like venturing away from home, and anyway, it’ll just be me and Dick on a stage talking rubbish as usual.

You’re right. Dick and I sitting on a stage talking rubbish is indeed what you’re going to get this Saturday evening. As usual we won’t be at all prepared. Well, Dick might but I won’t because I’m lazyI like to keep it real.

The only thing I will have to do in advance is wrap Dick’s present which I got him from Russia. He’s going to really love it because it is about as Dick a present as you could possibly imagine and I want to watch his little eyes light up as he tears off the wrapping.

But to be fair, I do have roughly in my mind some of the few things I want to talk about. One of them is ‘Who Really Runs The World?’, which obviously for us batshit-crazy tinfoil hat loons is one of those ongoing conversations which keeps changing the more we learn. Another is ‘Was Churchill more evil than Hitler?’ We’ve talked about this stuff before but my take on these issues in 2025 is going to be subtly different from the ones you heard in 2024 or 2023, let alone in say 2019 when I was about 90 per cent Normie. (I’m allowing myself 10 per cent off because I did at least know back then that climate change was bollocks).

Will we play the “Yes/No” game? I doubt it because the answer always “No” these days. But you never know. Perhaps Dick might surprise me. Or perhaps he might introduce a wild card game he has invented for the occasion.

There will be no Christmas decorations. Sorry but it’s too early.

Nor, likely, will I wear my Christmas jumper. Too hot.

But we will do the Lords Prayer at the beginning - inter alia, to ward off any demons and because it makes everyone feel amazingly uplifted - and Jerusalem at the end.

Also, you get to see Unregistered Chickens, who just get better and better. Or so I’m told by one of the band members. Dick and Andy the lead singer keep making bitchy remarks about the fact that even when they’re playing at my events I never come to see them. Or only for a few minutes. I try to explain, honestly, that this isn’t because I’m too grand or because I think they’re crap but because before you do a show the very last thing you want to be doing is hanging out with the audience because it drains all the energy you need for the show.

Still I think the thing you’ll enjoy most about the event is hanging out with like minded folk. You’ll be able to put faces to the names of some of the fellow Awake people you know from online. And you’ll be able to talk about all the things - Michelle Obama’s big swinging lunchpack; hybrid creatures bioengineered in the same Antartica DUMB where they breed the children for adrenochrome, were the Thunderbirds puppets actually devised as a result of remote viewing technology which enabled Gerry Anderson to see into the future from the 1960s and watch Konstantin Kisin and the other one presenting Triggerpod? etc - that you will probably avoid bringing up with family round the Christmas dinner table.

It’ll be fun. You’ll really, really enjoy it.

It will be no skin off my nose if you don’t. But I just think if you don’t come you’ll be missing out.

https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/Events/james-and-dick-s-christmas-special-2025

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All They Want Is Your Soul

One of my unlikely podcast guests this week is Nick Griffin.

I say ‘unlikely’ because I’m always slightly wary of people who have been involved in mainstream politics - even if, like Griffin, it was only at the margins.

https://locals.com/jamesdelingpole/feed?post=7481845

Griffin - or Nick, as I suppose I should call him, now he’s my new mate - used to be the leader of the notorious British National Party (BNP). Like the party from which it splintered, the National Front, the BNP was and is one of those outfits which the mainstream media likes to brand as ‘fascist’ and ‘far right’ and ‘basically a bunch of Nazis.’

This would be why, in my days as an MSM journalist, Nick never crossed my radar. He wasn’t the sort of character of whom you could say to your editor “How about we hear what that Nick Griffin has to say for himself?” It would be tantamount to career suicide because, imagine, what if you quite liked him or he said something people agreed with? Far better not to take the risk - and to ignore him - as all self-respecting media folk did.

Anyway, now that very belatedly I’ve had chat with him I’ve discovered that, yes, I do quite like him. And also that he says lots of things I agree with. Many of the people who’ve listened to the podcast share my pleasant surprise. Here’s a typical comment:

“I was brought up believing the BBC hype - NickG is equivalent to Satan […] Please do bring Nick back on. Even some of my ‘awake-ish’ friends still recoil in horror at the mention of his name. This exposure can right this wrong.”

My main reservation about inviting Nick onto the Delingpod wasn’t that he’d be too controversial but that he might be a bit too conventional in his outlook, a bit Normie.

But on this, too, I was pleasantly surprised. As an example of how interesting his conversation is - and perhaps as an incentive to encourage those of you who aren’t already paid subscribers to sign up for an early listen before the podcast goes out free - I want to share with you one of his best anecdotes.

It was prompted when I asked him about whether any attempts had ever been made by shadowy forces to buy him off.

Yes, Nick said. Attempts had been made on a couple of occasions, one of them when he was a member of the National Front.

Representatives of an ultra-orthodox Jew in New York called Rabbi Schiller offered the National Front a large sum of money, on one somewhat surprising condition, which I shall reveal in a moment.

In Italy, meanwhile, on another occasion, some of Nick’s ‘far-right’ fellow travellers were made a similarly generous offer by a wealthy Jewish outfit. Again, the money was dependent on the fulfilment of one surprising term.

Then, Griffin went on, there was the example of his friend in Northern Ireland, a social marketing genius who was offered a blank cheque by Jewish interests, but only on one condition.

Here’s the interesting part. Perhaps you thought - as I certainly did - that in all three instances the Jewish donors would have made the same request: talking more about the Holocaust, maybe; toning down the anti-Semitism; avoiding criticism of Israel; something like that.

But no. The things that were requested were all very different - and also quite unexpected.

In the case of the National Front, the request was that they should stop griping about the perils and iniquities of the banking system.

With the Italians, the request was that they cease to sing the praises of Corneliu Codreanu, a Romanian fascist leader - founder of the Iron Guard - assassinated in the 1930s.

And in the case of the Northern Irish marketing guru, it was that he should stop talking about the evils of abortion.

The three very different provisos only had one thing in common: each was very dear to the heart of the people to whom the money offer had been made. To the National Front, banking was the key plank of their economic argument. To the Italians, Codreanu was a beloved romantic hero and role model. To the Northern Irishman, crusading against abortion was a moral imperative.

“They offer you everything you need,” explained Griffin. “But in every case they are only prepared to give it to you on condition that you sacrifice the thing closest to your heart.”

Perhaps experts in the Kabbala, or the Babylonian Mystery Religions, or the occult generally can explain to me what is going on here. But clearly these offers have great ritual significance - and also go some way towards explaining the nature of a world whose temporary god, according to the scriptures, is Satan.

Yes, you will be granted whatever you want. But not until you’ve first sold your soul.

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