Hi. I'm Ron Coleman, a partner in the
Dillon Law Group, social media legend, and free
speech enthusiast.
When I started the Coleman Nation podcast in
the spring of 2021,
its focus was on free expression and censorship
on the Internet.
But as important as that subject is to
me, which is very important,
I felt hemmed in in the podcast.
I wanted to spend more time talking to
the interesting people I've met in my legal
and free speech work
without feeling a need to have them all
make the same point.
So I culminated the first series of the
podcast and have started the second series.
I hope you'll enjoy these conversations
as much as I have recording them. I,
culminators,
we're going to a far distant land today,
A land that has become a lot more
distant than I ever think I thought it
would become in certain respects
besides being
at the antipode
and the opposite end of the world from
where we are now. That's Australia, and we're
gonna talk to Helen Dale.
The very interesting,
very eclectic,
and not entirely uncontroversial
writer
who you can find at Helen Dale. I
I just love her subtitle,
not on your team, but always fair.
I wish I'd thought of that.
That's also the name of my substack as
well. I well, I didn't put but always
fair in it because it would have made
the string
too long to type into the search bar.
You you mean on you you mean on
the on on the, substack?
But the substack is just www.notonyourteam.co.uk.
Do be aware that whilst my initial claim
to fame was in Australia as a novelist,
I don't live there anymore and haven't done
so since,
2,000 the end of 2016.
I I I live in the UK now,
so it's white's daylight. So you It's white's
daylight here. Yes. And and you've and you've
also
so you you left Australia just about the
time it became
began becoming benighted a little bit before.
Maybe we'll you may have Well, I've I've
come back and forth.
I but my last visit to Australia
was in 2018,
and it was actually for the the second
Kingdom of the Wicked novel, which is my
3rd novel overall.
And it was the book the author tour
for that to Australia,
in
2018 because of COVID
and also decisions of mine. I I can't
just blame COVID, decisions of mine. I'd not
gone back,
and I'm going back this year in for
the whole of October for a number of
conferences and events with Australian think tanks and
organizations.
So, Helen,
you start out as a writer. Correct? That
Yes.
And you broke onto the scene with this
Ukrainian
novel
that
perhaps there were mixed signals?
That was the one that was the enormous
bestseller.
The enormous bestseller? Australia. Which And it won
the Miles and it won the Miles Franklin,
which is the Australian equivalent of the Pulitzer.
And you got into a little bit of
controversy there over whether it was
true fiction I had a
well, I had a run-in, and we can
talk about this if you like because it's
now become a global phenomenon. I think we
should. I had a run Yeah. I had
a run-in with the Jewish lobby, and
they used to fight their battles
in a more peaceful
way. They were never violent,
but in every other respect,
the way the Workies do.
So it would be letters to Oh, a
lot of them are the same people.
And that's what? Letters to your employer. It
would be Really?
Letters to your university.
Very unpleasant letters to to me. And this
was over over the content of the novel?
Yes. It was. It was basically, it's a
a it works like a diptych.
So it this is historical fiction, not science
fiction, by the way. There is no science
fiction in this first book actually to assure
people of that. Please please don't get It's
complicated enough.
Yeah. It's a diptych where basically half of
the book is set in the Holodomor, and
half of it is set in the holocaust.
And I use the attitudes of the
period.
So there are a significant number of Ukrainian
collaborators in it and
with the Nazis,
and
they their motivations
for doing what they are doing took bad
things to Jews, but not only to Jews
at polls and stuff as well.
In all the bases not to the Jews
who caused the who are who had any
who any involvement in causing the halodomor.
I mean Well, Stalin was very good at
spiriting people away, and it is I found
when I researched the novel that there was
still bitterness in Ukraine that Stalin had succeeded
in getting rid of
spiriting Lazar Koganovich
out of
Kyiv,
because
he was the sort of focal point of
the hatred.
He was an an incredible mass murderer. People
you know, if it weren't for Stalin In
Ukraine. Yeah. People don't appreciate I mean, he's
he's such a minor character in people's
understanding,
like, impressionistic understanding
of the Bolsheviks. You think, okay. Stalin,
Trotsky, Bukharin.
You know, used Lenin, Beria. He's the names
that if you pay attention to that stuff.
Where already people start getting more sophisticated.
No one gets to Kaganovich,
who was amazingly
one of the few Jews to outlive
Stalin in in the top communist leadership, but
he was an absolute
butcher, an absolute son of a bitch, and
unapologetic
to his last moments on Earth.
Well, this is the thing. I was actually
in Ukraine
when he died. Oh, man.
Okay. And this is how I got this
palpable
sense of
from people that he was never brought to
justice and the equivalent in including in terms
of the numbers of dead.
The the other thing was, of course, is
to to Ukrainians, he's like Ackerman
is to Israelis.
There there is a very, very similar
sort of view in the history Well, not
just Israeli. Say. Jews and I mean, that
that's one of the examples where you you
should say Jews and not Israelis.
The Israelis were the ones who took care
of him, but he wasn't killing Israelis. He
was killing Jews.
But the I mean, in terms of this
is something that just
crystallized a huge moment in an entire country's
history. And you but this is after your
book had been written?
Pekanovich died actually in the nineties. So Right.
Oh, no. Right. Okay. Of course. Mhmm. So
this is I was doing the research for
it. So this is why this point constantly
Wasn't you the one who who who croaked
right? What just, like
Yes. Like, his last words were When the
news first came out, I thought he had
been killed when I first heard news, you
know, from Ukrainians
gabbling to each other, and I was learning
the language. You and I are understanding each
other. Don't listen to me. Gosh.
Building the fall of the Soviet Union.
I thought this is going to turn into
Romania. This is not going to be nice
and peaceful like Poland or East Germany. This
is going to there's going to be violence,
and it wasn't. But that's what I thought.
Which many which many say now was
not that there should have been violence or,
you know,
uncontrolled,
retribution, but that the lack there were there's
never was really
any sort of coming to terms,
you know, with a reckoning for people who
had been involved in
inhuman
crimes against humanity that the Soviet Union Communism
wasn't and Marxism has never been held to
account. There was no judgment at Nuremberg. There
was no icon trial. I mean, there were
a few little attempts in in what had
been East Germany to get some Stasi people.
There were a few attempts in Ukraine,
few attempts in the Baltic countries, but it
all fizzled, and you you had very, very
old people. And this is when
in germ West Germany, when they were because
they were so old, when they were trying
some of the old Nazis, they were all
getting suspended sentences because they were all ancient,
and you had some starce
commando who was the same thing. They were
getting suspended sentences because it's very difficult to
send.
As soon as you start having
in the United States. Oh, they're gonna try
had said Trump to jail.
I'm sorry. I won't say anything other than
that
little about Yeah. No. Well, I I I'm
not American. But I'm not sure. So I'm
sorry that's all the interruptions. You back to
the dip ditch. So you so you're so
you were doing so I imagine
right off the bat,
the these
professional
holocaust
people who have made the Holocaust I I
was not allowed to compare. That was the
first thing. Thou shall not compare.
That, the next thing was, you're blaming us,
which came from two directions, but only the
Jewish one was public because Ukrainians were just
less prominent in in the arts and culture,
but I heard about this privately,
was the mutual blame game. Oh, we collaborated
with Hitler because you lot were all commies,
and we were all commies because you lot
had pogroms on us.
Alright. I mean, you know for continuously.
It's very, very unpleasant to be in the
middle of. And both premised on this savage
concept of group guilt.
Yes. Oh, and and you must understand this
in every possible sense of,
the this idea of of group blame, group
guilt,
group responsibility.
And
also,
this is something that is we need to
be aware of that's
become a big part of culture, but it
was pervasive
amongst these two groups when I was writing
the book and it became really, really clear
to me.
Is holding someone account, an individual account,
to account, often in a pretty destructive way,
like confiscating their property and so on and
so forth,
or worse. But we'll start with confiscating the
property because they both started like this and
then it became worse.
Holding someone to account for something that their
ancestors did.
Which underlies the Palestine Israel
Yes. Business. And the thing is with the
ancestors,
you would get I mean, sometimes a rich
twisted about things that went back
back to the
Polish Lithuanian Commonwealths, to the Khmelitsky Mazikos. Oh,
sure. Earlier than that. Yep. You know? There
were people who had this rich and detailed
tapestry of knowledge about some extraordinary incident that
was probably true or at least partly true
500 years earlier,
That kind of thing. And I just thought,
this is the kind of thing that has
to go in the ground. You know, it's
like your debts.
And smart.
If they can't be satisfied from your estate,
then that's too bad. Yeah. You don't go
after the kids. In other words, not
this this whole concept of,
reparations.
Yes. You just can't have it. There's no
end. You will turn your country into you
will turn your country into the Balkans.
Or Ukraine. And and, also, I mean, there
it is it just it's so irrational and
illogical.
Let's go to Europe. Which
are we gonna
go to Rome and seek reparations on behalf
of the Visigoths
or the Visigoths on behalf of reparations on
behalf of the Sack of Rome. Like,
this is his human history. Okay. This is
far be I I you and I.
Solzhenitsyn also got I mean, so that was
that was my first introduction
to all of this kind of thing.
And it was very controversial, but in those
days, when people attempted to cancel you, it
was much, much harder.
When did you get
get you
16? No. No. This is 1995 was when
I won the last 95. That's fine. Okay.
Okay. For for the hand that signed the
paper for this one that I've which is
the Holodomor holocaust setting one that I'm talking
about. So but and and your your task
there was to
was
to
really contextualize.
You were not denying the holocaust. You were
Oh, god. In the holocaust. Oh, no. It
was absolutely essential to the story. I mean,
this this kind of thing. But it was
to do with people wanting to control
how they are portrayed
and which is the and the problem for
me was not started by me or even
any of my critics.
We had
lowered the drawbridge to this idea that you
can punish an artist for the way people
respond to their art form,
and that had happened with Rushdie.
And I my my very good friend, professor
Katie Barnett, at the University of Melbourne has
maintained consistently, and I don't mind quoting her
that this all started with Salman Rushdie.
And because the world did not have his
back then,
it has made it progressively
more difficult
to defend
free speech
and and just
expressive rights
in the arts more widely. You think the
reaction
to the Salman Rushdie Fatwa was
overall a failure
of the on the West's part? In what
sense?
On the West's part, yes. Because we didn't
defend the principle. We did. I mean, a
lot of people didn't like Rushdie. They thought
he was a this, that, and the other,
and that's why you hear sort of you
read if you read Joseph Anton, and I
realized that a big memoir about his time
in hiding while he's being protected by special
branch,
He's going to be
quite bitter about people who who didn't have
his back, but some of the stuff in
there from people who really should know better,
who were scions of
of the literary establishment in the UK and
the US, oh, yeah. Well, maybe it would
be good if Salman Rushdie learned better manners
and stopped biting the hand that feeds him
and this kind of thing.
Do you think that that the this failure
on the Rushdie
thing was specific to the personalities and the,
you know, the the the this beginning of
Western liberal or left wing, let's say,
comfort
with
the Islamic revolution or
what do you think that was about?
No. I don't think that was the case
then. And,
I mean, I do you do see these
stupid left alliances
because they think it's all in the name
of liberation. Right. It's all like a revolution.
And they're completely unaware of the Iranian history
where the Islamists turned on all the secularists
and the Islam and the mark Marxists and
just killed them all, imprisoned them all, vast
slaughter. They're completely unaware of that history and
that it would happen again in an example.
You know, so you get this weird alliance
between queers for Palestine and Hamas
and where queers for Palestine actually in Gaza,
they would be the same as the secularists
in Iran in 1979. They would all have
their throats cut.
So you do see these very weird left
alliances, but I don't think that was happening
in
1989
with the satanic verses. So
I think what was happening there was we
had already lost our nerve in terms of
protecting a writer's
expression rights and the quality of his and
also the the text, the quality of the
work that he'd produced. We'd already lost our
nerve
because already there had been a number of
years
in the universities,
where the old thing that,
if someone or a writer said something nasty
about you or your group,
you just have to get over it because
it was just words.
There'd been a reversal of that probably because
some of the things that were actually said
about minority groups and women in the past
were very, very nasty.
But the point is we lost that distinction
between words and deeds. But in the US,
around the same time,
there had in the eighties, there had been
these multiple instances of
scandalous
artistic expressions. I mean, they're not really art,
but
what had become to be accepted
as sort of our famously, the piss Christ
installation.
In other words, attacks on Christianity
and on or or the or the attacks
on on Jerry Falwell by,
Hustler Magazine.
Those Oh, yes. The So in those cases,
the and, you know,
and the
the fraternity of writers and free free speech,
you know, fetishists,
like, you know, such as myself.
I mean, I was I was in college
then.
But but there,
the traditional
response
was in place.
But here And from to be fair with
Penn, with Rushdie,
it was in place It was. Yeah. There
to Penn were good. Penn was good. And
this,
this very much started.
First, it was just beginning to leak out
of the universities, this idea that if you
portrayed someone negatively
and it hurt their feelings,
then that was,
your fault as the writer if you'd done
that. You needed to mind your p's and
q's.
And, of course, it it was based, the
logic of it, was based on this idea
that, you know, what's offensive
is very subjective,
and what's people consider nasty is very subjective.
So you get this what's happened in Britain
with this perception based policing. It's literally
offensiveness or victimization
or racism in the eyes of the beholder.
Yes. Yes.
Yeah. So it's just in the terms of
their perception. But the problem with it
is
if you say it hurts me, you destroy
the harm principle, which in Britain is the
core of our free speech history because we
don't have a a written
constitutional rule. There's just lots of collections of
post it notes.
It's not actually I'm gonna remember that. Single
digits. How I'm gonna explain it.
It's a good way. It's just many, many
thousands of post it notes developed over
thousands of years, so that kind of makes
sense.
But you destroy the harm principle because if
you say this hurts me
and
psychological harms are as real as physical harms,
then the old harm principle, which works on
the idea
that as long you do whatever you like,
as long as you don't harm others,
as soon as you make the
broaden
the the concept of harm, you engage in
concept creep, then it becomes impossible to defend
speech
using John Stuart Mills harm principle and the
sort of various intellectual traditions that emerged in
the UK going back to the civil war
and parliamentarianism
and the levellers and so on and so
forth.
So in contradistinction
to the famous
Skokie Nazis
decision where the Supreme Court said, yeah. Though
they're gonna hurt a lot of people very
profoundly because Skokie is full
of older Jews. This is in the, you
know, early eighties,
who are survivors or the children of survivors
of concentration camps.
So for Neo Nazis to to to there's
gonna be harm.
We're talking about emotional harm,
but that that's very real. It doesn't matter
because the first amendment
that was the high point.
Not from the Supreme Court, which has been
consistent since then, but in that was the
high that was pretty much the end of
the line for the ACLU and the so
called civil libertarians in the US
to
take
a neutral stance on free expression regardless of
whose free expression that I mean, it became
a scene in the Blues Brothers.
I hate I Illinois Nazis.
And it I'm sorry. This is the way
it it's come down to people outside the
US. It's become a scene in the Blues
Brothers.
Another third rail that you stepped on,
was interviewing
David Irving.
Oh, yes. I did that. And, weirdly, I
did it for fashion magazine
that I don't think exists anymore, probably because
it just it paid its writers obscenely well.
It was very it was mainly photographers' very
fancy,
photo photo shoot.
Well, and I can explain And was this
before after his his his conviction?
Before well, no. He wasn't convicted. It was
civil it was a civil it was a
it was It was a civil def it
was a unlawful offense. Some time in in
in in prison for,
holocaust in Austria for holocaust denial. Right. Right.
Right. In Austria for holocaust for denial and
because that is criminal speech in a lot
of European countries,
Austria, Germany, and I suspect
quite a few of the others as well.
That's very, very common to have whole speech
rights mobilized on the continent. When you spoke
to him, it was it was about it
was when everyone pretty much began
by the eighties, people were kind of on
to him.
But he was Well, the the this,
his
oh, goodness. When did this happen?
He very foolishly
and I remember writing this at the time
because I wrote articles about it in the
Australian press. He got this idea in his
head
that he wasn't a holocaust denier, despite saying
obvious holocaust denial things.
So therefore,
he sued
Deborah Lipstadt and I think a couple of
other people, but mainly Deborah Lipstadt Right. For
calling him Holocaust denial. And the thing is,
it was just the stupidest.
I sat there and covered great chunks of
this trial and then interviewed the guy. And
I said, but you said all these things
that is obvious holocaust
denial.
And so what he it became clear during
the course of the trial that what he
wanted to do was get the other side
to drag out their evidence so he could
just sit there and poke holes in it.
You know, the whole thing was just performative.
Do you remember And the thing is that's
all very entertaining to do something performative like
that. But and here's the thing that Yeah.
You will get this as a lawyer. The
lawyer will notice this.
He hadn't made any attempt
to make himself
rip proof.
He owned, free and clear, a property in
Grosvenor Square. Rent proof. So in the US,
we would call it judgment proof. Yeah.
Judgment proof. Yes. Okay. Basically,
so all of this money,
and because he'd been very economically successful when
he was younger, best selling books and all
of this kind of thing, and carefully invested,
so not a fool. And it was all
still in his name. And, of course, he
lost completely
comprehensively
Wow. And was bankrupted
Wow. Because libel is is a rich man's
tort. Yeah. And all of that property was
sold out from underneath him.
They're bought and which which I imagine subsequently
I'm not a psychologist, but like everyone else,
everyone likes
to dabble, made him
all the more resentful.
And look, this is what they've done to
me. I'm only asking questions.
And I'm sure it did, but I interviewed
him when he was still I visited his
house in Grover Square, the very fancy one.
Yeah. Grosvenor Square. Lady and gentleman, that that's
like living on the Gold Coast in Chicago
or, you know, or Yes. Avenue in, you
know, in New York.
So I I interviewed him there, and the
photographer from the fashion magazine is doing all
these fancy photographs and so on and so
forth.
And it just became clear to me,
he's extremely clever. Oh, yeah. And he's just
got this thing in his.
He's got a brain worm, basically, an obsessive
brain worm. And I honestly thought
with, after interviewing him and and covering the
the trial, I honestly thought I will never
meet another person like that. I'm sure. I
will never meet someone
so obsessed with one thing
with Jew and it was with Jews, not
with just the Holocaust with Jews, full stop.
I will never meet someone
so obsessed about one
issue group of people ever again,
and I was proven wrong.
Because I have since now met several,
not huge numbers, but then these aren't the
circles I won't move in,
of people on the political left who have
the same kind of obsession that David Irving
had about Jews, but they have it about
Israel.
But they have it about Obsessed.
They have it about Israel. They are obsessed.
Like, this is this is the the sociopolitical
equivalent
of someone
who lines up all their Lego on the
wind in height order on on the windowsill
or, you know, or has all star has
all the Star Wars figurines, the original ones
from the seventies eighties on a on a
little cloth face that rotates.
So this is what it was a wonderful
thing to do as a child and so
on and so forth, but you need to
stop it.
You really did that. Weird. Wow.
But yes. So I don't know how common
that is
because I'm not an academic. I don't
know large numbers of university student
children, teenagers,
but I know a few people through politics
because I have been in that sort of
Westminster
bubble village. I covered Brexit for the Australian,
that kind of thing.
I I have been in
encountered a few of them.
And it's like
other conflicts don't even exist. So you can't
even trip them up with, well, what about
Sudan?
Terrible conflict going on there at the moment.
Or what about Burma? Conflict going on there.
The In other words, if you're so concerned
about genocide, why is it only
Yes. Yeah. Why you you can't be in
the way because you just get this Yeah.
You just get this blank.
And I've had 3 or 4 conversations like
that. And and and the facial expression I'm
getting is the same expression I got from
David Irving when he would go
when I would say, but look at what
you said. You made that chappaquiddick joke. And
he goes, oh, it's only a joke. And
I'm going,
it's it's only funny if you accept your
premise.
That can't and I got the same
response.
Let's fast forward along with where the to
to this time where we are in which
we are now. You've put
most of this behind you and become a
a a regular writer.
No? Not so much?
I mean Well, yeah. I mean, I just
I I've become much more of a commentator.
I did not expect that. That was unexpected.
I always thought How? I mean, I used
to. Before 2 before Brexit, before 2016,
actually, if I was in the pages of
a national newspaper in either the UK
or Australia, it was because I was writing
a book review.
Mhmm. I wrote reviews of other people's books.
How usually fits. So so how did going
to law school and becoming a
lawyer fit into this career path? Because now
Alright. Okay. I should explain the way the
Aussie system works.
There's only one Australian university, and it did
this relatively recently, the University of Melbourne, that
has the US style structure
of a law degree.
That is where you do something else as
an undergraduate,
then go to law school and tend to
be quite a lot older, like,
mid late twenties, early thirties. They they often
are before they start practicing law.
The Australian system is not like that.
And
no no law school in Australia was when
I started
as an undergraduate in 1990.
You do a qualification that's known as
arts with a slash and law, or science
with a slash and law, commerce with a
slash and law.
Nearly always people do arts with a forward
slash and law. People who do accountancy
or economics,
have
particularly the accountants
and or have given themselves a very hard
job because it's another whole professional qualification.
And you study them at the same time,
and you start
at 17 or 18. Australian
universities, you start quite young. I was 17
when I started university.
And you're admitted to the university. You have
to meet
the cutoff,
the academic cutoff for both
law and arts,
even though you'll be taught in the same
university,
the sharp distinction between different universities that you
see in the United States or the UK
with the Russell Group and the Ivies or
particularly Oxford and Cambridge.
In Australia, there's a bit of that. There's
the group of 8. There's the Sandstone Universities
that were founded in the late 19th century,
and the oldest, they're over a 100 years
old. There's a bit of that, but within
those universities,
much more intense competition
based on the course you study.
So you need
many more points
to get into medicine, law, engineering,
pharmacy.
Those are the prestige qualifications than you do
for arts.
So you go in to do arts
and law,
and the whole point of the arts qualification
was so you're not a dreadful bull. Highly
educated person who is also
not pig ignorant and actually knows who Charles
Dickens is. That was the original logic behind
it. Sure.
What I did
was I started an arts law qualification.
And I then my first novel actually came
out while I was still an undergraduate. I
hadn't even finished the arts qualification,
let alone do very many law subjects. So
I actually dropped my law
course in the nineties. I thought I was
going to be a full time writer.
That didn't happen,
even though I did do quite a bit
of writing and so on and so forth,
I worked some very odd jobs. I worked
as an archaeologist for a while. I was
an interpreter for a while in the home
office. I did all sorts of unusual non
legally related jobs. What languages?
Italian.
Uh-huh.
Yeah. I've lived in Italy. So, and it
was because it was during the the the
Balkan crisis, and nobody spoke Albanian. Like, I
I think they worked out in the whole
of Britain. There were about 3 people who
spoke Albanian,
but nearly all the refugees spoke Italian. So
they were just desperately hunting for people Albanians
are pat pat themselves off as Italians all
the time.
And it's because of Rai. It's,
Rai Raiuna, Raiju, and Rai Trai, the Italian,
television.
All comes over the Adriatic, and they all
watch it. And they all and you can
actually learn Italian off Italian
pre
Berlusconi
Italian television. You could certainly learn
Italian off of it. Interesting.
Yeah. It was just the nature of the
way Rai has worked historically in Italy.
And so I did all sorts of odd
jobs like that, but then I realized, well,
I hadn't had another idea for a book.
I started to write one, and it was
a disastrous
crap piece of crap. I finished up throwing
it all away. It was just awful. I
knew when I was writing bad stuff.
And so I thought, well, look. I need
to get a useful job of work
and that pays decently and that I suspect
I'll be good at because I put words
together well. So I went back and finished
the law degree that I hadn't finished,
and that's what I did. I then just
worked as a lawyer in either in Australia
or over here. And it did what it
says on the 10th. It it,
allowed me to pursue different things and so
on and so forth. And it also meant
that can it and this is
to go back to the first book. It
also meant, from my point of view, the
can the whole cancellation thing just seemed to
have disappeared.
You know, I was just working ordinary, normal
jobs as a lawyer in various countries.
I got a scholarship to go to Oxford
to do graduate
qualifications at the the famous Oxford BCL.
There were no issues with that.
And I thought, right, this is my future.
I wrote one book, and I don't have
any more good ideas.
I'll just be an attorney for the rest
of my life, solicitor,
barrister in in the UK.
I then, however, took a job up in
Scotland, and Scottish law is different from English
law, really quite dramatically different. It's got a
lot more Roman law. It's a different legal
system. It's procedurally quite similar, but the substantive
law is quite different. Really? And I couldn't
do Scottish work for the very simple and
basic reason that I did not know how
to do it. So I had to do
in subjects. Well, this is how we know
you're not an American lawyer because
people are doing all kinds of people do
things they don't know how to do all
the time. That's what helped me entirely of
Twitter's people practicing law or having no idea
what they're talking about.
Practicing a law law without a license or
however you put it in America.
Yes. Without practicing certificate over here. Unauthorized practice
of law.
Yeah. And it's, So So you're in Scotland?
And so I So what was the so
what were you doing there? Why did you
go with the first one? There was just
a very, very good job that I thought
I would be very good at after I
finished at Oxford, so I applied for it.
I got it. And that
law firms like like people who went to
Oxford Law School and got good marks there,
they think they might be pretty clever, and
so they hire them.
And, but there were certain things I had
to do at the University of Edinburgh, certain
subjects that were where Scottish law, like property
law and family law, it's more like Roman
law, so it's very different. Different.
And I had to do a year long
subject,
in civil law, which is the traditional not
only the law of the Roman Empire, but
the history of Roman law and how it
became so important both in Scotland and on
the
the history of Roman law and how it
became so important both in Scotland and on
the continent.
And that all seemed, by the by, it
was very
enjoyable, and I thought that was good and
so on and so forth.
And you're you're broadening your your ability to
practice law, so you're gonna be Right. So
in all that, it's a different more of
a lawyer. Mhmm.
I then had to, though, be formally admitted
in Scotland because it's a different jurisdiction.
I had to go to an admissions process
where you lodge your papers with your academic
transcript and show that you haven't paid a
1,000,000 speeding fines recently and all of the
all of the things that they do
for
lawyers. And I didn't have very much in
Scotland. I sent them England and Wales as
well because I'd been down
in a university and living in Oxford and
all of that kind of thing.
And I had formal objections made to my
admission in Scotland
from the people who'd had a problem with
my book in 1995.
They had made no attempt to cause me
grief in England and Wales some years earlier
or to stop me going to Oxford or
so on and so forth. This was in
2012.
At the time,
because I had to get legal advice to
get this sorted. At the time, I thought,
oh my god, it's the Jewish lobby back
for another bite.
And technically,
that was true,
but only technically.
Because by 2012,
everybody had started to decide
that a completely
appropriate way to respond to
someone who said things that they didn't like,
either in a book or on the telly
or whatever,
was to try to get them sacked,
to get them disbarred,
to get them struck off. Whatever the expression
is used in your jurisdiction
for lawyers and for doctors, I know it
varies.
Counsel. And so it
it it it it it went into abeyance.
There was a sincere attempt on me in
1995
that didn't work. My book was never out
of print. It continued to sell. It's provided
me with a very good income, including in
lean periods
over the years, so I can't complain.
That was another thing. It was quite difficult
to cancel people in the nineties because particularly
just with words. You could cancel them if
you physically threatened them like Salman Rushdie. But
if you just did it with words, you
tended to just make the person's book into
or filled whatever it was. And there was
no social meaning? Created this yeah. You created
a Streisand effect, basically.
Whereas now,
everybody has decided
that it's completely fine to cancel people, and
we use this word cancel, which didn't used
to exist. I first wrote about this phenomenon
in 2015,
and I did not use the word canceled
because no one had used it, I don't
think, at that point.
And it has become completely standard.
Everybody is doing it. It is very, very
hard in the United States now, and I
will say this with complete honesty,
to tell
Jewish people and conservatives
who finally
finally got a lever that they can pull
on these appalling
universities and and the nonsense that they've produced
and and so on and so forth and
and the the bigotry and the sectarianism
and so on and so forth.
They're now pulling the same leader because they
found that it works. And I wrote
a piece for my Substack, which was featured
on the front page of Substack's website, mutually
assured cancellation.
But it's very, very hard to tell people
who've been on the receiving end of it
for a very long time to not do
it.
And this is where Well, in other words,
to not do it. You are the you
are the country with a culture of free
speech. To not do it back. To not
do it back. In other words, when given
the opportunity
to do it to those who have done
it to them,
It's hard to tell people,
wait. Stop. Stand on principle.
Yes. It's very hard to get people to
be principled.
It's very hard,
you know,
like
Okay. So what happened in the Scottish
situation? You were not able Well, no. I
was I was admitted to practice and so
on and so forth, but I had to
engage legal representation.
I had to put together, you know, formal
submissions,
you know, that I wasn't an anti semite,
that I wasn't a this, I wasn't a
that, and so on and so forth. I
had to go through all of the process.
It was very unpleasant.
And it was only resolved fully the day
before I had to front up
in the court of session to have my
admission moved
by the firm that I was working for.
So, yes, it was very, very stressful,
and un unpleasant. You know, I was sitting
there thinking that it was finally resolved the
day before, and I was just
and I I can't even remember if I
slept properly that night or or that kind
of thing, but it was just this is
2012. My book won the Miles Franklin award
that you were annoyed about in 1995.
It's time
to to put it aside.
But the point is, by 2012,
we're into that period that Jonathan Haidt
is talking about where
the world is get is getting into this
madness, where everybody decides that this is an
entirely appropriate way to behave towards someone who
you disagree with.
I guess,
you know, now that I think about it,
in a world where everybody
can
everybody has access to a
a box in Hyde Park.
We can't rely on gatekeepers anymore to to
shut people out.
So we have to
crowdsource
shutting people out. And that's what that's really
what they're doing.
And it's producing a system of shunning.
That's all I can
it's a type of shunning, almost. 100%.
And where they can't shun,
where it doesn't the shunning doesn't work,
and I'm an example of someone where the
shunning didn't work. What happens is you're just
siloed.
And I wrote about this, and Andrew Doyle
has used my my argument in in one
of his books.
And what that means is you finish up
being in a press environment that might be
quite lively and and expansive, and many people
read your stuff, but they're all people who
either agree with you or they're adjacent to
you politically. Yep. A 100%. And so You
in 2015,
I was safely able to write a piece
for The Guardian, because that's where it appeared
on what became cancel culture.
It was for The Guardian, me, in 2015.
Impossible.
Whereas now, the idea of me
appearing in The Guardian is just completely fanciful.
And they'll be very honest with you if
you write to to them. You know, this
used to be a newspaper that was quite
good at grabbing people from the other side
of the aisle, and I was one of
many, many writers that it did this to.
You write to them now and you go,
I would like to pitch you a piece
on x and some are a standard bright
freelance writer's pitch.
Those are they'll quite often just write back
and say, oh, no. We don't publish conservatives.
Yeah. A 100%. And the thing is, it's
starting to now happen on the other side,
and that's called the silo effect. Absolutely. That's
what I coined.
Imagine 2 grain silos looking at each other
across the street and in in the middle
of one of the Do you seriously states.
Are you taking is it your testimony
sitting here today?
I hate that. I I hate sitting here.
Yeah.
Is it Yeah. That you coined the term
the silo effect?
Is that is that is that what you're
saying, Helen? I'm not I'm not sure. I've
I've certainly described that. I don't know if
I I I'd love to know that. But
I described it That's what it is.
Andrew Doyle then used it, the silo effect.
And it's a specific thing whereby,
you start writing for the Daily Mail and
you stop writing for the Guardian. And as
far as the readers of the Guardian are
concerned, you have simply disappeared. This is what
happened to Suzanne Moore.
And who's with Suzanne Moore?
A very, very fine left leaning feminist writer
for The Guardian. Very funny, mainly for many,
many years,
and, happens to be gender critical on team
JK Rowling. And so that was the end
of her, and they shoved her out of
the newspaper.
She had a petition around the office that
basically every other journalist signed except for her
in the newsroom. Well, you know, you know,
speaking of speaking speaking of, you know, Bolsheviks.
Right? It's exact here's another angle on it.
I can't tell you how many, and the
reason is I haven't counted. It's not a
gazillion. But there are numerous people who are
either apolitical or people of the left
who I have asked
to come on this show, and I'm
I'm not I'm not a big, big platform.
I mean, it's a niche. It's a niche.
Yeah.
And they won't do it because
you're political and you're conservative, and I it's
there's no upside for me. There might be
an upside for you, Ron. Yeah. I think
there would be because I think my audience
would like to meet you and like to
hear you and like to hear you. I
cannot get
a discussion going
with anyone who isn't already in my silo
with me. So I can find interesting people
like you who've had interesting experiences
and, you know, who who see things
in a unique way, but you can't have
a conversation, you know, and the therefore, he
became a science fiction writer.
Well, what I did was I finally got
a good idea.
A book. And so I did the thing.
And that's why as I as I admit,
it took 13 years to write
these
2 books. That's book 1 and book 2.
Yes. And as you can see, they're quite
tasty and Yeah. Meaty. Funky. Yeah. Meaty. And
you and they were mentioned. I didn't I
thought of you as a lawyer and commentator.
And then I'm listening as one does to,
the little platoon who I've had on the
show.
And it was worth having on your show
just for that voice.
He he's great. Lovely speaking. But but also
really, really well informed and well educated, sophisticated
thinker.
And he mentions your he mentions your books.
And I said, Helen Dale. I mean, not
the not the most obscure name in the
world,
but is that my friend from Twitter, Helen
Dale? Darn if it isn't you. So tell
us a little bit about those and and
and how that sort of fits, which I
think it does with the the rest of
this conversation.
Well, basically,
I I knew all this stuff about legal
systems, and I practiced in different legal systems.
And it's always been a personal
bugbear of mine. When you read works of
science fiction by pretty good writers who are
very good at conceiving technology and so society
and so on. But they'll have incredibly primitive
legal systems, so you'll still have trial by
battle or something like that in there. And
I just thought, right, I'd like to do
science fiction with, like, science fiction lawyers. And
so that means and because I'm a lawyer
and I've practiced in all these odd places
and done all these odd sort of law,
it will be good law. It will be
a real legal system, but it won't
be identifiably
1 or
that exists anywhere in the world. I will
make it up.
And so that was the starting point. Oh,
that's that's interesting. So in other words Yes.
That was but so that isn't necessarily
oh, but but but it's science fiction because
you're positing a,
a world that's not that's not our world.
What I will do is I will I
don't write these. I am terrible at writing
blurbs,
and so I have never written one,
either for myself or any other writer. However,
my editor,
publisher is still good. So I
I will read Matthew's blurb, and it will
put your readers in the picture. Okay.
784,
AB Erbe Condita,
31 AD.
Jerusalem sits uneasily in a Roman Empire that
has seen an industrial revolution and A
charismatic
A charismatic
young leader is arrested after a riot at
the temple.
He seems to be a man of peace,
but among his followers, the Zealots and daggermen
swarm to drive the Romans from the Holy
Land.
As the city spirals into violence, the stage
is set for a legal case that will
shape the future,
the trial of Yeshua Ben Youssef.
Intricately
imagined and ferociously
executed,
Kingdom of the Wicked is a stunning alternative
history and a story for our time.
So what I've done
is a version of
Philip k Dick
speculative fiction, alternative
Sure. History, alternate history, they sometimes insist on
it, where you go down a different timeline.
But this time,
with what I the innovative thing, the conceit
that I use, the high concept that my
agent calls these this kind of thinking high
concept. Thank you, Matthew Hamilton. I didn't know
this, but that's high concept apparently
when he was selling these. So
I've learned this.
And the conceit is that I don't change
the actual timeline
of what actually happened.
You know,
Tiberius is still the emperor. Pontius Pilate is
still the the the prefect. You just changed
up you changed the details.
What I've done is I have changed the
arc of historical progress or or historical narrative
based on
a point of departure
where
Archimedes is not killed at the battle of
Syracuse,
and he becomes the Romans DARPA guy.
And so I set this all up with
a fair degree of
intricacy to to make, and then I just
let it run.
And so it's kind of like letting an
experiment run and just seeing what happens.
And I worked out then
what I once I had the legal background,
I thought, what made these two cultures so
different?
Why didn't they get on? And they didn't
get on in ways that are very familiar
to modern people, but were very unusual to
people in the ancient world.
So that kind of thing. So I had
to present all of that sort of conflict
with Islamism, for example, as something new.
Right.
And, yeah, people had not seen it yet.
Pagans in Europe, and that word we use
is not the word they use to describe
themselves. They follow the right of this or
the right of that or whatever. Themselves
humanity.
I mean, the the the knock on Christianity
was that they were haters of humanity.
Yes. Here we are being regular. Here we
are just being people. And I've got a
problem. I've got a problem with crops, so
I'm gonna go to the crop god. That's
why wouldn't I do that?
Why wouldn't I sacrifice
to to the to the to the god
of healing when my when my child is
sick? Like, why do you hate why do
you hate me for that? One god, one
god.
So what? And you get and the thing
is you get
Romans responding like that. And you do also
get Romans and Jews
trying to talk to each other, trying to
bridge this huge
because
it's not just an intellectual theological divide. It's
also a moral divide. You finish up with
very, very different approaches to human,
morality.
And in in the modern world, you would
say until relatively recently, the Jews won some
of those arguments, but the Romans won others.
You know, the the Romans were the ones
that made everybody that they conquered monogamous. No.
You're not gonna have more than one wife.
You know, that that kind and, of course,
what did that do? It passed into Christianity,
and you think, Roman monogamy. Didn't they bang
like a Donnie Dora in a gale? You
know, this kind of thing. But, of course,
it was serial
monogamy.
They were all busily getting divorced all the
time.
And so I just had these good
ideas for books, and I was writing them
at home in the evening doing the doing
the thing. And that's why I've only written
3 novels because I worked a normal job
for years years
that that has long hours.
And they came out in book 1 came
out in 2,017,
and then book 2 in 2018.
I my publisher didn't think for a while
of of putting them in just in one,
but, no, it's better. When you got,
books that are, oh goodness,
nearly 500 pages long,
it needs to be Yeah. A separate book
for each. But I wanted to give, I
give people Roman morality, and, you know, they're
not just
like us,
and we're not like them. And it's not
just the the odd end the the cruel
entertainment and stuff that everybody knows about from
watching Gladiator. It's just
they didn't think people were equal.
That's probably the first
big thing.
So
I had to introduce lawyers
who are talking about things that all made
sense to other lawyers in the first 20
pages, but they're also talking about, oh, you're
a citizen. So you're a citizen, so you
get a jury. No. You're a non citizen.
You don't get a jury as of right.
You have to pay for the the jurors
to sit, which was a distinction that the
Robins had.
That that kind of thing, which just makes
modern people go
but the by the same token, they're talking
about legal concepts that will make sense to
any lawyer
because the Romans were the other great lawgiver
civilization.
So they've got all the they've got tort,
which they call the elect and, you know,
they've they've got libel, which they call in
urea. They've got, you know, all of the
things that you know, they've got the system
of contracts that would make perfect sense to
modern people. They've even got the concept of
higher purchase. It works exactly the same way
that higher purchase does,
in our society, bailment, all of these things
that are
completely the a lawyer's bread and butter, how
to draft a will.
You know, you see them applied in slightly
different areas like marriage was a contract to
the Romans, so you draft up a you
have a you have your notary draft up
a contract.
That
that kind of thing. So These have obviously
done pretty well because you've been able to
They Yeah. Yeah. They've done really well. Although
it did help, I have to say. I
was worried they would only sell, like, maybe
5,000 copies each or something, and that would
just be it.
But then they got a very positive review
in one of British papers, the Financial Times.
And, the same person who wrote that review
is an economist called Mark Oyama,
and he actually wrote a long version of
the review that had all this incredibly detailed
economic analysis in it that was amazingly good
Oh. On his private
medium blog.
And anyway,
first of all, the short version from the
newspaper,
Tim Harford, the economist in the UK tweeted
it,
with his share token, and his tweet went
viral.
Thousands of retweets.
And people were interested. The the review was
very positive and charming, and lots of people
bought the book on the basis of that.
Then the long form of the review by
this economist, this professor Mark Koyama at, used
to be at Oxford. He's at George Mason
University now.
It was featured,
probably because it was so detailed, on Tyler
Cowen's Marginal Revolution.
And Tyler Cowen said, oh, I've started reading
this book. It's really excellent.
And it just proceeded to to just fly
off the shelves.
Terrific.
So I was very, very lucky. And and
did the cancellation
crowd not even
bother? No. No. I I
I didn't have I I had one unpleasant
incident
in 2018 at, the classics department. Obviously, classics,
ancient world. Yeah. So I got I went
to go and give a talk to people
in the classics department,
and they were given weird threats
about protesters and would turn up and I
would be picketed. And this was in 2018.
And,
anyway, the university to its credit in 2018,
the universities hadn't gone under, just said, oh,
we'll just, we will have,
we will
be in contact with Victoria Police. There will
be a police officer on the door, and
there was a police officer on the door.
And it was all very fun. And you
know how many protesters turned up? And she
was a very sad protester who was very
polite.
1
protester.
And here's me getting up there talking about
classics and answering questions on, you know, the
social policies of the the emperor Augustus who
was trying to reduce the divorce rates, for
example, in the Roman world, and he tried
to pass laws to stop that and or
reduce it. And it was interesting because he
didn't have a problem with the idea of
divorce. So the approach is very different from
the modern one. You know, it's So that
kind of thing. So I'd be I'd be
talking to about stuff like that. So you're
blue past it. You you you seem to
you you Yeah. I just although I do
wonder there are a number of things that
have
I blew past the cancellation.
1, I I be I it became clear
to me with with the controversy over the
first book, because I was still in a
university at the time, and I did have
contact with a lot more people on the
political left.
It became clear to me that the Jews
were rapidly running out of friends on the
left.
And they thought that these various left wing
organizations
or lefty people and I'm not talking about
Palestine here. Palestine, not a word. No one's
talking about Palestine. This is a nonissue.
And and in any case, it was nothing
to do with my controversy. Never came up
at all.
But it was pretty clear. I was just
So here when you say the Jews, you
mean the Jew the people who purport to
speak in the name of the Jews?
In other words Yeah. I would have said
I would have said
activists at this point, but the problem is
it extended very quickly over the next 10
or 15 years
beyond activists to just anybody who is Jewish,
this collapsing of Zionism and Israeli into Jew,
and it all just becomes this general, a
blob. Yeah. That thing that's happened in the
last probably 2 2 years, but certainly since
October
7th, it's definitely happened.
So what I was sort of thinking was
I I saw
I thought,
you kind of don't have friends here. You
think these people are your friends,
but they're not really your friends. But you
don't like me. This is not you speaking
to anything. You speaking to the Jews.
Or about people I noticed who who were
Jewish, who I were very strongly on the
political left. Right. You know? So very, very
strongly
pro multicultural
policy,
very, very pro high rates of immigration, including
from parts of the Islamic world that,
it's
very few have actually been able to get
into Australia because of the way the country's
immigration system works, but a few did. Yeah.
So very, very woke, what we would call
woke now. Right. And the thing is
I got the
very strong impression, and this isn't
an Australian thing that I've written about. The
first group I noticed who
started to generalize in a pretty unpleasant way
about Jewish people
and in a way that modern people now
would recognize
because they were running the decolonization
line,
and they would do it about Australia, settler
colonial state, and they would do it about
Israel, settler colonial state.
And they tended to be the very, very
small number of Australian Aborigines who were starting
to get into universities
in that period.
And I I've written about this for
for law and liberty, you know, this rhetoric,
And I noticed that the decolonization
rhetoric, another friend of mine,
she said I I she she was involved
in land rights activism. And the thing is,
her case is unusual because she has both
Aboriginal and Jewish ancestry. So she was seeing
it from Australia is full of people like
this. It's just
an it is the most ethnically diverse country
on earth, you know, per head of population.
So it's full of people like Katie.
And so she was
she was seeing this from both sides,
and it was no. This is really nasty.
And
the same rhetoric about Australia Day as invasion
day,
and it's not legitimate
and covering statues of captain Cook with red
paint or
Arthur Phillip, who was the first fleet.
Captain Arthur Phillip who led the first fleet,
all of this kind of thing.
And the same language was used. And I
remember the first time I encountered
Jewish people, and this is this the problem
with thou shalt not compare thinking.
They were very shocked by this kind of
rhetoric,
and they would go, oh, you're you're they're
the same that Israel shouldn't exist.
And I'm going, have you not noticed what
Aborigines say every single Australia Day on social
media and elsewhere?
They say that Australia shouldn't exist,
and they say it in exactly the same
way. And this they have been saying it
for 20 years.
And maybe that should bother you too.
Maybe that should bother me. The because you
live in Australia. No. You live in Australia,
in fact. You don't live in Israel. Oh,
no. And I started to and it wasn't
just me. A lot of people started to
say, well, hang on. You might want to
look at the people who look at the
world
in this
way and see every single country,
that's got white people in it that had
an indigenous population there beforehand as
oppressive and colonized
and so on and so forth.
And
and and it's such a level of blindness
that you can't even raise historic empires. You
can't talk about the Mughals. You can't talk
about the Ottomans.
You can't talk about the Zulu. You can't
talk about, you know, all these major, major
civilizations
that were also
empires that were not black people.
And you the blindness is just total.
Helen,
thank you for shining some light into the
dark.
We Read my book several fondly. Yeah. I
think we're gonna have to do that. And,
I'm
I'm so glad that
Benjamin brought us together, in this way because
I should it's really long overdue for us
to hang out.
And I hope that we can do it
again in some form or even in this
form again.
Great conversation.
And everyone Good luck with all, with all
your things that just yeah.
Even if there's only lawyers watching it.
No. No. It's lawyers don't if they if
lawyers are watching it, they're not admitting it.
Actually,
lot of Jews watch it. And I and
it's important for I mean and I think
the people who anyone who watches culmination or
listens to culmination knows
criticizing
Jews
or even criticizing
the Jews
doesn't make you an anti Semite.
If it did,
I'd be the biggest anti Semite you ever
heard of. Oh, well, no. It's gotten to
Moses. And I I I did I did
see this directed at Jewish people. I have
seen this and it's a horrible thing. They
call themselves hating Jews.
And the thing is I'm
I don't know where that came from for
you for Jewish people, but I know where
it came. I'm gay.
And one of the things that gets directed
at homosexuals
who are right leaning
and has been for years, as in I
can remember it being said to me in
the nineties when when I was actually outed
as part of the controversy over my first
book,
I was a self hating lesbian or a
self hating homosexual.
I heard that in the nineties, and it
is just the most awful thing to say.
Right. So the whole thing with the self
hating Jew. Well, I get that all the
time because I'm I'm a capo. See? I
I'm a because I'm a because I'm I'm
a I'm a conservative
and I support Donald Trump.
And, like, I
as opposed to what?
Like you said, take a take a look
at the left. These people are
literally genocidally inclined,
but we anticipate.
Are you I mean, I realize the history
of the Jews of Jewish people in America
is very different from the UK because Jews
in the UK are nearly all Tory. Like,
something the figures in the last 2019
was 9 like, 92%,
and it'll probably be more now since Interesting.
Even though Oh. Yeah. So
the UK, really different. Australia,
more like the US. There are quite a
significant number of Jews who are really quite
left,
and they're having that same horrible post October
7th wake up call, including some who have
worked with Aboriginal organizations and have suddenly discovered
that they're on the outer around the water
cooler and, like, oh, yeah. There's been some
awful stuff.
But but the UK is quite different.
Helen Helen, your your polymath is the word.
Great talking to you. Let's stay in touch.
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