Perigo’s Perspectives on Reality Check Radio

It has been an absolute delight to hear Lindsay Perigo back on radio again via Reality Check Radio with Paul Brennan on Thursday mornings.

For any poor bugger who has missed these glorious gems on our airwaves, I have rolled them all into one post with transcripts, and will keep adding as they occur. 

Just click the title of each and go straight to the show on RCR. 

Enjoy!

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1. Easter Homily

Easter is upon us ... and I'm glad.

I'm not a Christian; I'm an atheist. But I'm still glad Easter continues to be celebrated, given the palpable desire of sundry totalitarians to close Christianity down, and the palpable desire of its own clergy to alter it beyond recognition. Easter celebrations reassure us that totalitarians and revisionist clergy have not yet succeeded completely in implementing their diabolical agenda.
 
As an atheist. I believe fervently in the values touted on the masthead of this most excellent and sorely needed new platform: Reality Check Radio. Reason, reality, open debate, freedom of expression. 

As an atheist I find it unreasonable and unrealistic that one innocent man should be sacrificed for all the rest of humanity. I find guilt by genetics unreasonable and unrealistic: the idea that we involuntarily inherited the sin of Adam (of which sin I thoroughly approve, by the way. By choice, not inheritance). I find it unreasonable and unrealistic, not to mention cosmically monstrous, that trillions of people who don't accept this bizarre narrative will be condemned to hideous unending torture in an afterlife. It's utterly incomprehensible to me that a loving God, knowing that this would be the outcome, would proceed with the exercise in the first place.

Furthermore, as a gay atheist, I'm not enthusiastic about a religion--any religion—that says he who lies with a man as with a woman is an abomination who shall surely be put to death.

So, I don't believe the Easter story. But in the spirit of "I disagree with what you say but defend to the death your right to say it," I'm glad that those who do believe it are still free to say so. More than that, in awesome wonder I contemplate Christianity's magnificent cathedrals, its glorious music, its captivating liturgies, the Latin Mass (now all but forbidden), its super-human paintings and sculptures: illustrations of what man can achieve when driven by what atheist Ayn Rand called "the total passion for the total height." And I certainly would like to have taken Jesus out on a date!

The fact is, it's hard to argue that the new religion—the religion of Woke—that has both hijacked and corroded Christianity, is an improvement. Its adherents call anyone who dissents from their theology a "fascist"—without having a clue what the word means. Actually, they are the true fascists of our time, as the lynch-mob at Albert Park eloquently attested ... as the rioting, looting, burning and killing by Soros-funded, state-sanctioned Only Black Lives Matter and Antifa—make that Profa—equally attest. They are the Brownshirts, Blackshirts and Red Guards of our day, the crazed, mindless witch-burners and book-burners of 2023. Theirs is our contemporary Inquisition. Instead of burning heretics at the stake, though they would if they could, Woke-Fascists bay for their blood on social media, and dox, cancel and destroy them. 

Adults attuned to reality and reason might well laugh at the idea touted in Christianity and other religions that female virgins can have babies; it's an Article of Faith in the Religion of Woke that men can have babies—equally absurd! And woe betide if you dissent. It's got to the point where Supreme Court Justices and New Zealand Prime Ministers refuse to define "woman"!

Woke-Fascists fabricate scores of different genders, each with its own preposterous pronouns. Repair to reality, and its pesky chromosomes and body-parts with unassailably distinct structures and functions, and the Woke-Fascists will crucify you. They won't argue with you, since to argue is to debate, and to debate is a fascist, White Supremacist, misogynist, transphobic, homophobic micro-aggression, from which hysterical snowflakes require protection in "safe spaces." Little do they comprehend that in a free society of grown-ups, there is no such thing as a right not to be offended.

I'm old enough to remember when I and hundreds of thousands of other New Zealanders were in effect illegal on account of our sexuality, should we express it. When homosexuality became legal, some prescient wag joked that he was getting out before it was made compulsory. Was it really a joke? The libertarian precepts and concepts of "each to his own," "mind your own business," "live and let live," "consenting adults in private," "The state has no place in the bedrooms of our nation," “I don’t care what they do as long as they don’t frighten the horses,” are now honoured more in the breach than in the observance. LGBTQ might now easily stand for Loutish, Ghoulish, Bolshevik, Totalitarian Quislings: traitors to the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that the movement once tacitly invoked. The small minority of murderous thugs who have hijacked LGBTQ are intent on imposing their religion, their sexuality, their 57 genders, on everyone else. 

Fascism, for the benefit of the Woke-Fascists who don't know the meaning of the word, is the belief in the total supremacy of the state, in collusion with Big Business, over the individual, who must sacrifice himself to the state at the whim of the state. No dissent from state-approved dogma is allowed. Conformity is enforced by Thought Police: snitches, tenured professors, propagandists masquerading as journalists, inescapable surveillance (Big Sister Is Watching!), a pandemic of lying, mass hysteria ... and mob violence. It's Orwell's 1984 come to life. The disgusting coercive collusion among politicians, "journalists," Academia, Pfizer, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in the mandating of lockdowns, masks and the jabbing of citizens with a non-vaccine that is neither safe nor effective against the Wuhan Virus unleashed by the Chinese Communist Party ... this collusion, I say, is an egregious contemporary example of Fascism in action. 

"Safe and effective"? One of the biggest Big Lies ever, of which Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels would be proud. That's Fascism.

Don't talk to your neighbours; dob them in if they're outside when they shouldn't be? That's Fascism. 

"Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better." That's Fascism.

Fascism specialises in scapegoats. In Hitler's case, it was the Jews; in the case of current Woke-Fascist regimes all over the world, including New Zealand's uniparty state, it's the unvaccinated. Second-class citizens with no rights? "Yup, yup." That's Fascism.

The world's greatest tennis player, Novax Djokovic, still not allowed into Beijing Biden's America? That's Fascism.

If worshippers in the Church of Woke want to see real fascists, they need only look in the mirror ... and at the tyrants whose lickspittles they are.

Be thankful, then, this Easter, that some semblance of freedom of speech and worship still remains. If you believe in prayer, say a prayer for liberty. Withhold your support from any political party currently in Parliament. They're all in on it. They're all enemies of our Bill of Rights, which includes the right to speak and associate freely, the right to refuse medical treatment, the right not to be experimented upon. Remember how not one of them deigned to speak to the heroic Freedom Convoy in Parliament grounds? Remember how they turned on the hoses and turned up the headbanging? Banish these Mengelian Marxists! Actively and urgently construct an alternative. On such alternatives all over the Western world the very future of Western Civilisation depends.
In closing, I repair to an embodiment of the transcendent glories of Western music of the kind Woke-Fascists wish to shove down the Memory Hole: the Easter Hymn from Cavalleria Rusticana by Dead White Male Pietro Mascagni.

Happy Easter!

Oh, and memo to Chris Hipkins: this is a woman!
[cue the music]
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2. "Falsehood is a scorpion that will sting itself to death"

Percy Bysshe Shelley said, "Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay." 

A consummation devoutly to be wished, to invoke another great writer. Shelley, a fetching, uppity young tyke whom you would wish to take everywhere but couldn't take anywhere, also said: 

“Government has no rights; it is a delegation from several individuals for the purpose of securing their own. It is therefore just, only so far as it exists by their consent, useful only so far as it operates to their well-being. ... A man has a right to unrestricted liberty of discussion; falsehood is a scorpion that will sting itself to death. A delegation of individuals for the purpose of securing their rights, can have no undelegated power of restraining the expression of their opinion. ... If these individuals think that the form of government which they, or their forefathers constituted is ill adapted to produce their happiness, they have a right to change it."

New Zealanders served notice some months ago that they were of a mind to change it, in the wake of the oppressive nature of the Ardern regime. With her mandates and lockdowns, her hoses and headbanging, Jacinda Ardern had trampled on these articles in our Bill of Rights:

S10
Every person has the right not to be subjected to medical or scientific experimentation without that person’s consent.

S11
Everyone has the right to refuse to undergo any medical treatment.

S16
Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly.

S17
Everyone has the right to freedom of association.

S18
Everyone lawfully in New Zealand has the right to freedom of movement and residence in New Zealand.

Jacinda Jackboot had also made clear that she intended to trample on the right to free speech, by means of hate speech laws. Unable to define hate speech, she declared we would know it when we saw it. That is, she would know it when she saw it. That is, hate speech was speech she didn't agree with.

She hadn't been reading her Geoffrey Palmer. This former Labour Prime Minister is on record thus:

"In a free and democratic society, defaming the government is the right of every citizen. In times beset with threats of terrorism we should not close the open society. To do so would only encourage its enemies. In New Zealand, free speech and public debate must be 'uninhibited, robust and wide open,' and it may include 'vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials,' as Justice Brennan of the United States Supreme Court once put it."

Alarmed at Jacinda Jackboot's desire to criminalise political dissent, New Zealanders started to stir. Jackboot plummeted in the polls; her odious regime faced ignominious defeat.

So the regime turfed her out. Ding, dong, the witch was dead, we hoped.

Her successor, Hipkins, quickly transitioned from Woke to Bloke. He backed away from some of Jackboot's most extreme Woke-Fascism, and lulled us into imagining that common sense and reasonableness had re-entered public discourse. Men might not be able to have babies after all.

But then, the mask dropped. Faced with the question, what is a woman, Hipkins couldn't answer. Stuttering and stammering, he finally repaired to the Orwellian bromide that a woman is anyone who thinks he or she is. 2 + 2 = 5. Reality is malleable. Ignorance is knowledge, war is peace, freedom is slavery; 1984 was back.

Then, before you could say "broomstick," he resurrected the witch, for the specific purpose of enabling her to finish the job of killing free speech, not just here but everywhere.

Quote from someone or other in Pravda, New Zealand's lickspittle media:

"Former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern will take on a new role working alongside international governments and social media companies to target extremism and terrorist content online. Prime Minister Chris Hipkins announced on Tuesday evening that he had appointed Ardern as special envoy for the Christchurch Call, a newly created position."

Stand by for the criticism of any of the following to be criminalised: the religion of Islam; the Chinese Communist Party, its Wuhan Virus and its attempt to take over the world; Beijing Biden, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Cackling Kamala and Occasional Cortex, shills for the CCP; Dr Fauci; Pfizer; Planned Parenthood; George Soros, Klaus Schwab and all the other Devils of Davos and the actual terrorist, extremist groups they sponsor: Only Black Lives Matter and Profa.
 
Stand by for a sustained propaganda campaign in favour of the obliteration of borders and against national sovereignty; against fossil fuels; against prosperity.

Stand by for the further politicisation and Wokeification of the police and judiciary, and the collapse of law and order.

Stand by for the criminalisation of criticism of Comrade Chris and Jacinda Jackboot themselves. 

Etc., etc.. Criticise any part of the global elite's Woke-Fascist agenda or any of its corrupt promoters and you'll be arrested and jailed for a Thought Crime.

In spite of the Woke-Fascists, it's still the case that S13 of our Bill of Rights says:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief, including the right to adopt and to hold opinions without interference."

S14 goes on to stipulate:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form."

Our friend Percy Bysshe Shelley said, "Any disabilities for opinion imply by their existence barefaced tyranny on the side of government, ignorant slavishness on the side of the governed."

We are confronting barefaced tyranny. Let's show more than ignorant slavishness in return. Vote every last one of them out while we still can. Not just Labour but the entire Uniparty: Labour, National, the Greens and ACT. One of their number called those who exercised their rights under the Bill of Rights a "river of filth." They are a tsunami of evil. Let us drain the ocean!

I conclude again with a gem from the legacy of Western Music of the kind the Woke-Fascists want to shove down the Memory Hole. This is a classic anthem of liberation from the yoke of tyranny: the Chorus of Hebrew Slaves from Nabucco by Dead White Male Giuseppe Verdi.

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3. Freeing NaZiland from Woke-Fascism: Whom NOT to Trust!

I visit Faecesbook as seldom as possible. If ever one wants to know what John Keats meant by the "inhuman dearth of noble natures" one need only spend time on Faecesbook or Twit-Witter to be numbed by the inhuman surfeit of ignoble banality and asinine prattle that silly little Narcissists clutter up the platform with.

The other night someone sent me a link to a Faecesbook video by the ACT Party. Against my better judgement I clicked on it. It amused me. It purported to show that Winston Peters was not to be trusted. Well, that was news! Walls are perpendicular! Bears defecate in the woods! Specifically, the video claimed that Winston was in on Jacinda Jackboot's Brown Supremacy agenda right from the start, in contrast to his claim that she kept that whole agenda hidden from him. Now, I don't know what Winston knew and when he knew it; I did already know not to trust the man who enabled the worst government in our history to assume power without a mandate. Even though he's not now in Parliament, he's part of the UniParty in our One-Party State.

But it occurred to me that if there is now to be a battle between Seymour and Peters for the votes of those who are fed up to the back teeth with Woke-Fascist excrement, including Brown Supremacism, and these voters, who must surely be legion, fail to see they're both shysters, Winston might win. The same thought has obviously occurred to Seymour; hence the video. Winston is not afraid to go anti-Woke if he sees votes in it. He might even renounce the Global Migration Compact that he signed! He won't hesitate to switch place names back to English, strike down Five Waters, or however many it is now, restore one person one vote, abolish the Maori seats—at least, he won't hesitate to promise these things—but you can't count on him to mean any of them, and you certainly can't trust him to do any of them. 

Winston would no doubt join David Seymour in excoriating the deformity who wrote a "poem" glorifying the murder of Captain James Cook, but neither of them will stand up four-square for the great things about the ... gasp!!... colonisation that came in Cook's wake.

Cook is a litmus test. Woke-Fascists are now revillifying him just as the fanatically anti-British Rev Sheldon Dibble did in the mid-nineteenth century. They'll soon be demanding that his remaining statues be taken down, precisely because he was a genius and a hero, both for the ages and among his men at the time. David Samuel, surgeon's mate on the Resolution for Cook's final epic voyage, said, "In every situation he stood unrivalled and alone; on him all eyes were turned; he was our leading star, which, at its setting, left us involved in darkness and despair. ... He was beloved by his people, who looked up to him as a father and obeyed his commands with alacrity. The confidence we placed in him was unremitting, our admiration for his great talents unbounded, our esteem for his good qualities affectionate and sincere."

Winston would go through the motions of ridiculing the renaming of, say, Wellington's James Cook Hotel or the Arcade from Lambton Quay leading to its lifts, were such a Woke travesty to occur; Seymour has said he couldn't care less if the name of the whole country were changed to Aotearoa, as is happening anyway with not a peep out of him. He's a Globalist; not all that keen on pesky nation states.

So, patriots, trust not ACT, and trust not New Zealand First. We need a party that is NOT of the Uniparty. A party prepared to rework the Bill of Rights and make it our principal and defining constitutional document. Reworked so as to forbid its being over-ridden by any other legislation or at the whim of a tyrant working for Klaus Schwab, George Soros and Bill Gates. A party prepared to enshrine and make inviolate the "rights and privileges of British subjects" in return for which Maori ceded sovereignty to Queen Victoria in 1840. A party that rejects Ardern's Apartheid and Brown Supremacism and treats all people of all skin colours as equal under the law.

Hmmmm. Just to get right up the noses of the Woke-Fascists, perhaps it could be called the Colonial Party.

I say, by Jove, capital idea, what?!


4. Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered have I been this past week. Not to mention befuddled because it seemed as if we were having two Easter weeks in a row and this old chap didn't know whether he was Arthur or Martha. 

Bewitched by the reaffirmations of yesteryear and a pervasive decency that can still be manifest when the occasion demands.
 
Bewitched by the solemnising of Super Rugby and other sporting fixtures with Anzac observances; the spectacle of vast crowds, heads bowed in reverential silence as the heartbreaking strains of The Last Post rent the air, commemorating those who had fought and died for freedom. Bothered and bewildered because that very freedom is still being threatened from within as the likes of Comrade Chris and Kiri Allan try to succeed where Hitler failed in ending free speech. It needs to be emblazoned across the sky: there is no such thing as a right not to be offended! 

Not just bothered and bewildered but beyond appalled by the fact that Fox News has dumped Tucker Carlson, in recent years one of the brightest lights in the free speech firmament. I'll have more to say about this next week, when more will be known, but you can bet your boots this is part of Fox's efforts to appease the Swamp, the warmongers, the RINOs, the elites, and of course George Soros. In the process of this appeasement Fox will plummet to CNN-level ratings from its current position right at the top. Woke-Fascism over-rides everything, it seems ... even including the bottom line.

Back to more edifying themes: Bewitched by the emerging talents of tennis, resplendent in Barcelona, especially the tournament winner, the poised and passionate Carlos Alcaraz. Bothered by the thought that we haven't produced another Chris Lewis in 40 years! 

Bewitched by memories of Barry Humphries, whose death reminded us of a time when drag was funny and humour was allowed; drag didn't mean a murderous mob in Albert Park, nor was it the purview of pronoun pillocks. 

Bewitched by memories of the great broadcaster through whom I met Edna Everage, Jessica Weddell. Immaculately elocuted through her training with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Jessica did a Lady Bracknell would have done Dame Edith Evans proud. "A handbag?!" on its own would have been worth the price of admission, let alone, "I have always been of the view that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing. Which do you know?" "I know nothing, Lady Bracknell." "I'm pleased to hear it. I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate, exotic fruit. Touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square."

Jessica was an excellent interviewer with numberless, memorable encounters to her credit, including, of course, Barry Humphries and Danny la Rue. When I first met her as a cadet placed under her wing I asked if she were related to the W. Weddell of Pinehaven who wrote copious and (to me at the time) unintelligible letters to the editor of The Dominion about metaphysics and epistemology, She replied, "Yes, darling, he's my brother. And what's more, you're going to interview him!" I did. He won.

Jessica's voice was a much better proof of the existence of God than any of St Anselm's or Aquinas's. One of these days Paul and I will do a feature on great broadcasters of the past and you'll hear what I mean. What she would make of the contemporary squawking, screeching, quacking, upward inflecting and vocal fry which have replaced human speech I shudder to think.
 
Years ago, Dominion columnist Karl du Fresne wrote:
"I have heard it argued that none of this matters as long as we can understand what people are saying, to which my response is twofold. First, it's physically painful to listen to some of these awful voices torturing the language; and second, it's getting to the point where we can't understand them. It's only a matter of time before we'll need subtitles on the TV news bulletins to explain what some female journalists and newsreaders are saying."

That point is here. What a far cry from such glories as Jessica! Actually, Tucker Carlson squawked and quacked and gabbled and upward-inflected, but I could put up with it because he was trying so hard to stop the whole world being turned into Communist China, if not incinerated.

So, a week of being bewitched, bothered and bewildered. I can feel a song coming on. Jessica, who often said her men friends came in pairs, would love this one. This is Samuel Barnett in The History Boys.


5. The Cancelling of Carlson


Last week I said I'd have more to say this week about the abrupt firing of Tucker Carlson from Fox News. I thought we'd know more by now about the reason for it.

Actually, we're none the wiser about what specifically triggered the termination, but what Tucker subsequently said on Twitter reminded us that we had to know it was going to happen well before it did.

Here's what he said: 

One of the first things you realize when you step outside the noise for a few days is how many genuinely nice people there are in this country. Kind and decent people, people who really care about what’s true. And a bunch of hilarious people also, a lot of those. It’s got to be the majority of the population, even now, so that’s heartening.

This is what we have to count on now, there and here. We saw thousands of genuinely nice, kind, decent and hilarious people protesting against medical fascism in the grounds of Parliament last year. Quite different from the indecent and unhilarious entities inside Parliament who wouldn't come out to debate, but rather tried to drown, deafen and jail the protesters. We have to hope that the decent so outnumber the indecent that we can contrive to banish every last one of these unhilarious items from the building and our lives.

Tucker went on:

The other thing you notice when you take a little time off is how unbelievably stupid most of the debates you see on television are. They’re completely irrelevant. They mean nothing. In five years, we won’t even remember that we had them. Trust me, as someone who’s participated. And yet at the same time, and this is the amazing thing, the undeniably big topics, the ones that will define our future, get virtually no discussion at all: war, civil liberties, emerging science, demographic change, corporate power, natural resources. When was the last time you heard a legitimate debate about any of those issues? It’s been a long time. Debates like that are not permitted in American media. Both political parties and their donors have reached consensus on what benefits them, and they actively collude to shut down any conversation about it. Suddenly, the United States looks very much like a one-party state. That’s a depressing realization, but it’s not permanent. Our current orthodoxies won’t last. They’re brain-dead. [Ahahahahaha! Where have I heard that before?!] Nobody actually believes them. Hardly anyone’s life is improved by them. This moment is too inherently ridiculous to continue, and so it won’t. The people in charge know this, that’s why they’re hysterical and aggressive. They’re afraid. They’ve given up persuasion. They’re resorting to force.

Tucker was tackling the taboo subjects, saying the words one is not allowed to say. Here in my own words is a random sample:
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*Reality is what it is. We can ascertain it. To deny either is catastrophic.
*Facts trump feelings, snowflakes notwithstanding.
*The Bidens are a crime family, in thrall to the Chinese Communist Party, selling America out by the day. They were doing it when he was Vice-Pesident and are doing it still.
*The FBI suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop and is still doing so. 
*The Wuhan virus came from the lab. The so-called vaccines were neither safe nor effective. Mandating them was evil and illegal. Masks were rubbish.
*The DOJ has removed the blindfold from Lady Justice. January 6 was nothing like an insurrection, but they're still rounding people up for it while dropping charges against real criminals en masse. They'd already ignored the lootings, burnings and killings by Only Black Lives Matter and PROFA during the "summer of love."
*Zelenskyy is a crook and a tyrant who is taking us for a ride. 
*There is no climate emergency, just more pretexts for lockdowns and tyranny. 
*Occasional Cortex is a moron.
*The Green New Deal's purpose is to make everyone except the Globalists poor, cold and hungry.
*Woke-Fascists are programming AI bots to be Woke-Fascists. 
*Eliminating the southern border and allowing millions of invaders to go anywhere they like (except Martha's Vineyard) spells the end of America as a constitutional republic. 
*There aren't 57 genders; there are two.
*Lia Thomas is not a woman. 
*America's military has gone Woke. Mark Milley is a milksop.

And much much more. Haven't we known forever that one is simply not allowed to say such things? The miracle is that Tucker was able to say them for so long!

Tucker concluded:

But it won’t work. When honest people say what’s true, calmly and without embarrassment, they become powerful. At the same time, the liars who’ve been trying to silence them shrink and they become weaker. That’s the iron law of the universe. True things prevail. Where can you still find Americans saying true things? There aren’t many places left, but there are some, and that’s enough. As long as you can hear the words, there is hope. See you soon.

Now, I don't know what he's cooking up when he says "see you soon." Trump's running mate would be good. But he's right that as long as you can hear the words there is hope.
 
We're in the same boat, in New Zealand. We're a one-party state whose media are the dumb, dishonest propaganda arm of the government that bought them off. Notwithstanding, there are pockets of truth they can't yet reach or stop. You can still "hear the words," including right here on Reality Check Radio. There is hope. Faced with lies, the truth has a pesky habit of marching right on. Right, Tucker? Right, Elvis?

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