Covid Mission-Creep - Laura Dodsworth on Canadian Authoritarianism, Central Bank Digital Currencies, Mass Formation, Conscientious Objection and More

Church of England vicars Thomas Pelham and Jamie Franklin get together to offer a spiritual perspective on current events being joined by special guest Laura Dodsworth.
This week: How to apply the teachings of Christ on non-judgmentalism to unjust political situations and commentary on the ending of Covid restrictions and the Bishop of London's response to the situation.
With Laura we discuss the ongoing totalitarianism of Justin Trudeau and the Canadian Federal Government with respect to the Truckers' Freedom Convoy including the seizing of citizens' bank accounts and the violent militarised police action taken to break up the protest in Ottawa. We talk about the way that Covid-19 restrictions are resulting in mission-creep particularly with respect to central bank digital currencies. We also ask how the Canadian government's response can square with notions of liberal democracy and respect for free speech and political expression. Is the term "liberalism" meaningful or should we be speaking more in terms of the individual and the collective? Laura also wants to know why the figureheads of the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches seem to have very little conception of the notion of conscience with respect to certain medical treatments beginning with the letter "v".
And, after a notorious billboard advocating the removal of JK Rowling from considerations of her own Harry Potter world, Laura goes full-on Old Testament prophetic. Not to be missed.
Laura Dodsworth: https://lauradodsworth.substack.com/
Timings:
00:05:08 Luke 6:37-42, Applying Jesus' Teaching to Unjust Political Situations
00:18:55 Email of the Week - Loss of Conviction in the Church of England
00:23:58 The Bishop of London Responds to the End of Covid Restrictions
00:30:20 Conversation with Laura Dodsworth
Notices:
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Chapters

• 5:08 Luke 6:37-42, Applying Jesus' Teaching to Unjust Political Situations
• 18:55 Email of the Week - Loss of Conviction in the Church of England
• 23:58 The Bishop of London Responds to the End of Covid Restrictions
• 30:20 Conversation with Laura Dodsworth

Transcript

Transcript of Conversation with Laura Dodsworth

Jamie Franklin (JF): Laura.

Laura Dodsworth (LD): Hello. Oh, hang on. There we go.

JF: Hello, how are you doing?

LD: I am really good. It's lovely to be with you again.

JF: Yeah, it's great to be with you. So, just so you know, we are, this is all going on the podcast Laura, so, you know. 

Thomas Pelham (TP): We’re live.

LD: Ok, I’ll get myself together. 

JF: Yeah. I mean we like unguarded comments, and you know, fashion and things like that. But just so you know. So, Laura, great to see you, great to have you on. How have you been doing since we last had you on? In the summer last year, didn’t we, I think? 

LD: Hmm. I don’t know about you, but I'm genuinely quite confused about time now. I tried really hard to keep it together for months, but eventually certain things start influencing you, you know, lockdowns, not living your normal life. Having the Euro 2020s in 2021. Was it in the last summer or the summer before that we spoke? I don't even know! Last summer?

TP: It was about May, wasn't it? May of last summer. So, it was just after your book had been released. 

LD: Fine.

TP: I think. When was your book released? March? April? 

LD: May 21.

TP: It was May so it’s around then so it’s 8 months ago. 

JF: Yeah, I know what you mean though. I can barely remember, but it was definitely a while ago. You'll have noticed that we've massively upped our game here on the podcast, you know, the conversational style is hugely developed and various other things. I'm sure you'll notice as we go along. But Laura, I've been seeing stuff on your Substack, so you've been doing that. Presumably you’ve been promoting the book. I've seen your media appearances and stuff. So, is that mainly what you’ve been doing? Have you got other stuff brewing? Or how have you been spending your time? 

LD: Hmm. You’ve just created a slight feeling of shame in me. I don't feel like I've been generative enough. I think that the book had quite a long tail, more than I was expecting, but that's because I often don't let myself think about how much work will be involved in something. I actually don't really like book launches very much at all. I don't enjoy them. I really don't enjoy it, all the scrutiny and the media interviews, yourselves excepted – you’re lovely. In a way, I just want to get it out there. A bit of praise would be nice and then move straight onto the next thing, but that's not how it works. So, I actually have started writing another book. But otherwise, you’re right. I've written quite a lot of articles on the themes are in the book and been doing interviews about the book. And I started a Substack. That was partly just so that I could just write whatever I want every week without having to get an article commissioned. That's been occupying me. But yeah, mainly I'm trying to get into a new book. As the restrictions have eased actually, and we are hopefully on a path back to some form of normality. We should talk more about that: what normal, old normal, true normal, real normal means. 

JF: Yeah.

LD: I feel myself needing to create and to generate again. It doesn't suit me personally to be following agenda and being on a hamster wheel of news, because that's just not how I’m built. I need to create and be original. So, I feel myself kind of losing interest and detaching from some things. I don't look at any Covid data anymore. I’m not interested. 

JF: Yeah.

LD: I just, I need to move on and do something new. So that's why I'm writing a new book. But I can't tell you about it or I'd have to kill you and all your listeners! 

JF: Well, that would be horrendous. I mean, that would be absolutely awful. I know what you mean. I feel a very similar way, actually, about the Covid stuff. Like, as the restrictions end, I mean, maybe this is a kind of selfish thing, but as it becomes less kind of pressing on me personally, I do find it less interesting. I think one of the things I wrestle with a bit, and I do feel a certain sense of obligation to the people who listen to this podcast and people who are connected with us, as there are still lots of people who are who are very, very worried about it. And they really feel like this is just a lull, you know? It's all gonna come back, you know? This is all part of the plan, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm not saying I'm completely dismissive of that stuff, you know, totally. But I do find it harder to engage as it becomes less and less a part of normal life. I don't know if that makes sense.

LD: Yeah, I mean that’s an interesting point. Are we losing interest because we're personally less impacted? I mean, it would be natural for that to be part of the case at least. But I don't think it is that. I think it's because we're in tune with the fact that, you know, every story has an arc, and we're on the downward part of this arc. It's okay to be detaching from it. But it's also about how you can best be of service? If I think about, write about, and talk about the same thing forever, who am I serving? I'm not serving anybody, least of all myself. You have to be true to who you are. I find myself more emotionally engaged maybe with what's going in other countries, where they're still mired in much stricter responses to the pandemic, but it depends. So, while the Coronavirus Act in this country will go, and restrictions are being eased, I am preoccupied with what we're left with, and we're not left with lock down and we're not left with vaccine passports. But what are we left with? Who are we at the end of this? We've, changed. Or, perhaps we understood more what the illusory quality of life was before. And I'm worried about muscle memory. I'm worried about how much more manipulable people are than I thought. I'm worried about how our governments respond to things. I'm worried about our relationship with governments. And I think about things that are coming in the future, but they're not necessarily about Covid. They’re more about how the terrain was so fertile for the authoritarian response we had to Covid. 

TP: I think that's really a good way of looking at it. I was reminded of the lock downs, of the language actually, when we got the warnings from the Met Office about the storms last weekend. 

JF: Oh yeah. 

TP: And the way they couched their advice as quite firm requests almost. And I was thinking, well, who are they to do anything other than tell us how fast the winds are, you know? Tell us the risk level and then we can make our minds up. But there were things like the press report, things like “The Met Office have advised people only to make essential journeys”, and that sort of language got me a little bit - I don't really like the term – but it triggered me in a sense because it felt quite lock downy. I got very grumpy for a bit. 

JF: You were triggered!

TP: I was triggered. I got very grumpy, stormed around the house, and then had a cup of tea. I think there's a sense in which that that even if the government have taken a step back, have our institutions learned far too much about enjoying the power of the bureaucrats? Of the arcane workings of the civil service? I think we probably need to have a conversation as a nation at some point about that. But the problem on the other hand, is that as people naturally step back from it, they get less interested in it, you know? And I very much doubt you'd find 100 MPs to get grumpy about it anymore, because it's not in the papers anymore. 

LD: Yeah, that’s a good point. And I also felt a little triggered. I could feel my blood pressure rising when I saw one of those illuminated roadside signs. Now around here, for ages they said the same thing. They started off alarming and then they became wallpaper, didn't they? You know, stay home, protect the NHS, save lives, blah de blah, stay safe, or whatever they were. I don't remember now because they became very irritating wallpaper on road journeys. And one of them, on that day of the storm, changed to “Necessary travel only”. I thought, hang on, buster, I'll be the judge of whether my journey is necessary or not.  You tell me about the wind speed, and I’ll decide where I'm going and if it's necessary. And if roads need to close or train lines need to shut because trees fall, well, so be it. I don't know if you saw, but there was a radio phone in - I think it was on LBC - and they managed to find some listeners who were saying there should be mandatory stay at home orders during storms. So yeah, there is a bit of a feeling of ‘oh my goodness, what if we become the safetyism culture gone nuts?’ But I think it's really important to not let go of concerns about what's happening to our culture and how we move forward, even when it doesn't feel like it's a pressing need anymore, because personally our circumstances are better. I’ll be giving evidence at an APPG next week about behavioural science. And I've followed up with letters and doing what I can. The kinds of themes in my book, where I can I've pushed in different directions, to know that I've done my duty in areas where I’ve gained some knowledge and expertise and have an interest. But you have to carry other people with you. They have to have the same interest. 

TP: It's gonna be much harder. Obviously, we've got a cohort of people who are with us. But it's always that 40% in the middle, isn't it? I say it as a number plucked out of nowhere. But, you know, if you think it's sort of 30% who are rabidly in favour of government authority and totalitarian responses to even the smallest things, and you've got, maybe, a 30% who are always going to be inclined against that. It’s the people in the middle that that were swayed one way and now seem to have come the other. But they're not going to be stuck with that if it's not directly affecting them. To be honest, it will continue, obviously, to directly affect them, as inflation continues, as the government continues to mismanage gas prices, you know, tries to declare war on Russia in order to stop people getting upset about parties. There needs to be a narrative of smaller state, dismantling of the institutions, reversing of political correctness and safetyism. If we don't get that momentum behind it, then we will end up here again, won’t we? There's no doubt about it. It’s the only trajectory that we’ll see.

JF: Go on, Laura. People want to hear you, not me. 

LD: Well, some of the topics you suggested to talk about today are very much along those lines. So, you suggested we should talk about the truckers in Canada, the freedom protests, which I found that very inspiring. 

JF: Yeah.

LD: Of course, not everyone feels the same. I think if you lived in, you know, in downtown and your listening to horns honking, it would be really flipping annoying. And if they are blocking up trade roads, arterial roads, of course it’s inconvenient, it’s damaging to the economy. But what I really took objection to with this protest was freezing bank accounts. And not just the bank accounts of truckers, but the bank accounts of people who donated to support the truckers. And I think that's a really concerning trend and that's one that could migrate. It could migrate beyond the borders of Canada and go to other countries. I don't want to see that in any country. I don't want to see it in China. I don't want to see it in Canada, and I definitely don't want to see it here. Canada was a country I always used to want to go on holiday to. And weirdly I have no interest in going to Canada now, and I think of them as, it's true, the last couple years has changed where I want to go in the world. I think at least a percentage of the population is quite barking mad. I don't like the look of the government and the police. I think that they treat freedom as casually as we've seen in certain Middle Eastern countries, so it's a lot less appealing to me as a country. But it's a very sinister move, to cut off somebody's access to their own money, to basically freeze their property. And, you know, here in the UK, the Treasury and the Bank of England have a task force looking at Central Bank Digital Currencies. So that's a kind of digital money. And one consideration is, should it be identity based? And that would open up the sort of action we've seen in Canada very easily here. You know, your money can be related to your identity, and it could open up a form of social credit system like China. That's the kind of thing I look at when I see the response in Canada, and it’s what worries me.

JF: So, I mean, there's a direct link there isn't there, between the Covid thing and this issue of Central Bank Digital Currencies, because in some ways in Canada, this is all being justified in the name of this ostensible ongoing pandemic, right. So, there's this ongoing pandemic, we've got all these mandates, and then the truckers go against the mandates. But because these are extenuating circumstances, Trudeau is able to invoke these emergency powers, which putatively justify his freezing peoples’ bank accounts. So, it's directly related to the situation with Covid, but, as you say, it is quite worrying because it sets a precedent whereby it becomes an acceptable thing, in a supposedly western liberal democracy, to steal peoples’ money out of their bank account if you’re the government.

LD: Hmm. 

JF: I think, one of the things people don’t think about a lot of the time, is like, should a government be doing that, you know? Should they have access to your money? Why would that even be something that is the case? Sorry Laura, go ahead. 

LD: Well, I don't know what their legal options were for dealing with protests. Most countries have laws already to deal with protests like that, just like here in the UK. There are there are laws to deal with difficult protests. Why not use them? Why bring in new emergency powers that lead them to freeze bank accounts? You know, it is honestly a genuinely totalitarian move. Seizing property normally happens a bit later on in totalitarianism, so this is quite an early show of the hand, I think. So, if you had a digital currency, it could be more fine-tuned than that. Instead of freezing all their money, it could be that your money only allows you to travel so far, because you can only fill up your vehicle with so much fuel. In the future Internet of Things maybe your car will talk to the petrol pump. It could be that you have different rates of tax and interest applied to different people. It could be that you can buy some products and not others. The options are quite limitless really if you have an identity based Central Bank Digital Currency. I had huge reservations before, but now I've got even more concerns because our government hasn't condemned the actions of Trudeau's party at all. And they haven't said anything about freezing bank accounts of protesters and the people who donated to the protesters. They're basically redefining what they consider terrorism to be in order to do this. And it's just self-evident where the problems could be because it could be applied to any form of protest or dissent in the future. It’s a really slippery slope. 

TP: I mean, the obvious thing is that there's a similar kind of - thinking of terror laws - way that the councils in the UK use, I believe, powers given to observe people, to follow people, to trace people, that were supposed to be used for terrorists in action, terrorists, and other major crime, but actually ended up being used for things like bin collection. Minor faults. It's obvious that once an organisation gives itself power, it's always gonna use it as much as possible. It becomes convenient, it’s much quicker to bypass the rule of law. 

JF: Laura, something I'm really interested in, in this article that you’ve written about this on Substack, is when you talk about liberal values. You write, for example, ‘I will no longer engage to fight against a virus, but a fight for liberal values and against despotism’. And on one level that's very straightforward, but then the thing that complicates it slightly, well I suppose it’s epitomised in Trudeau himself, is he's not, some kind of jackboot wearing Adolf Hitler look alike. He's a man with long, floppy hair who talks about including everyone in society, who talks about the need to not be prejudicial towards minority groups. And he espouses, at least ostensibly, socially progressive political views more generally. What's going on here? How have we got a situation where we've got a man who is basically a sort of totalitarian, but at the same time he's espousing these, ostensibly socially progressive viewpoints. Do you have any thoughts about that? 

LD: I think it's a massive disappointment on a really shallow level. When he first came to office I thought, ‘Cor, he's dishy’. Lots of women did. Lots of women thought Justin Trudeau's dishy. Do you remember the picture of…? 

JF: He looks like a schoolboy to me. He looks like, you know, really skinny and small to me. But what is it? Is it the face? The hair?  

LD: If you say so. If you say so, no, I mean, yeah. He couches it in that language, but now I don't trust him at all, and I don't think those values are progressive at all. It's couched in the language of inclusion, but, you know, he just gave a speech now that the protests are dispersing, and he said things like ‘You can't attack journalists.’

JF: Who can’t? 

LD: One can’t, but he's referring I suppose to the truckers. Maybe the truckers were verbally abusive to some journalists? I'm not sure what he was basing it on, except I'd already seen a clip, on Twitter, of a Rebel News journalist being beaten with batons and shot at close range by a tear gas canister. 

JF: Yeah, I know this. 

LD: So, you can't attack journalists, except the Police policing the protest can. And he talks about it being a time for healing and recovery. But the reason that they’re there protesting is because they're bodily autonomy and their rights are threatened by the vaccine mandates. Whether they individually want to be vaccinated or not, the protest started because they didn't agree with the mandates for crossing the border. So, how are they supposed to heal and recover? They’re not being given the opportunity to protest and have their views respected. Yeah, I think he's a deeply nasty, illiberal, despotic person, and he just tries to use the right language in order to subvert supposedly liberal ideas to bring people with him. You know, he's constantly talking about keeping Canada safe. Well, this is the language of tyrants, because it's alarmed people who follow a strong leader to safety. He also has described the truckers with every name under the sun. He’s called them misogynist, Nazi, anti-vax, racist. 

JF: Islamophobic.

LD: Yeah, but the cats out of the bag, we've all seen footage of them. We've seen lots of different ethnic minorities. We've seen filming of them dancing and singing in the streets and laying flowers down before police officers. This isn't some ragtag bunch of renegade supremacists. So, he's using language that should bring liberals along with him – ‘oh we don't like those people so that's why we're coming down hard on them, because we don't like that sort of person.’ But it's a subversion of the liberal ideals, cause that's not who they are and in fact, they're just exercising their liberal right to protest. 

TP: But there's two definitions of liberal going on here, aren’t there? I mean, there's liberal in the way that I consider myself to be a liberal, a sort of classical liberal, I guess, which is all about personal autonomy within a society of tolerance, I guess. And there's Liberalism as this political force that sort of mutated in places into things like BLM. Into things like the Trans wars that seem to be going on, about the rights of people to hold views about sex that the mainstream disagrees with. It's not liberal in the old-fashioned sense, but it is Liberalism. But I think Trudeau isn't liberal. He is certainly part of that Liberalism. There are others. Macron in France would be another one. It’s a sort of Globalist Liberalism, I guess, that doesn't seem to have roots in the 19th century, but comes out to the early 20th century Communist and Marxist kind of political politics, doesn't it? Is it a re branding of that, do we think? I mean, I wonder whether he's just making evident the authoritarianism that is a core of the liberalist agenda. 

LD: I mean, I think so. I’m not really very well versed in Marxist and post-modern literature, to be honest. But I don't think there's anything inclusive or genuinely liberal about him. It's telling you what to think, and I as someone who considers myself to be a classic liberal at heart think that's really offensive, telling me what to think about these issues. We should come onto the Transgender stuff, but it's very post-truth, and it forces you to lie in order to not be socially excluded or derided, and that's not right. I think that in the last couple of years I've had a political and ideological midlife crisis. I don't know what my politics are anymore. I don't see right and left as meaningful in anyway at all. I think that we really need to go back to basics on our values. What are our values? What do we want the role of the state to be? I feel like I want the role of the state to be much, much, much smaller. 

TP: Yeah.

LD: I don't want it to be interested in whether I'm happy or frightened or telling me what essential travel means. I would like it to keep the borders free from missiles and clear potholes in the road. Not really much else. I'm having kind of a backlash to it. I don't throw the baby out with the bath water but my views on the role of the state of changed completely, perhaps I’m a libertarian anarchist now, I'm not sure.

JF: I was going to say, I think the key, I mean, I don't think you’re necessarily an anarchist because you're talking about a role for government, which wouldn't be anarchy. That would just be a limited state. But I think the key political distinction which is meaningful is between individualism, or some kind of form of individualism let's say, and collectivism. So, the word liberal, I agree with you Tom, is too fuzzy to really have any proper meaning. I think that's the thing that connects the Covid thing and, for example, the Transgenderism thing, because they're about some form or other of collectivism. So, with the Transgender thing, or with any other type of identity politics, it's about placing the individual’s identity within the context of a group primarily. So that's the way you see yourself, like, I am a gay person, or I am a Trans person, or even, I would say, I am a woman primarily, rather than ‘you are an individual who is also a woman’. And that's a very significant difference to, I would say, the kind of emphasis on the individual that, broadly speaking, has come to us. I would say it finds its historical origins in Christianity. But it finds a political articulation in the political liberalism that Tom was talking about. I think that's really the key distinction, that we're moving towards a much more tribal sense of identity.

TP: How does that play with you though, Jamie, just to push back slightly. How does that play with you in our call as Christians to find our identity in Christ? Is that not just another facet? I mean, shouldn’t people be allowed to find their own identity? 

JF: Your identity isn’t subsumed into Christ. You're still an individual before God. In Christianity there's a very strong emphasis upon the responsibility of the individual for his or her own actions. In that tribal identity, it's not that you can do whatever you want, but it's that your actions are seen in the context of the group that you belong to. And this does actually come back to this thing about identity politics or Transgenderism because it seems to me now, that we're moving away from a vision of, say, equality before the law or equal treatment, let's say, more generally and more towards this view that whether or not you are guilty or in the wrong is based at least partially on your identity. So, the truckers, for example, they are terrorists because they are white working-class men. Now the BLM protesters, they were freedom fighters because they were, at least ostensibly, minorities. 

TP: Yeah, most of them were white, middle class. 

JF: Yeah, that's as maybe, but they were seen to be there. So, I think that's a really serious problem that we're facing. 

LD: Yeah. People have taken a really partisan approach to these protests. A few people criticised my Substack article and said ‘Well, you wouldn't stand up for Extinction Rebellion, or Insulate Britain, or BLM, if their bank accounts were frozen’. Like, hang on, I absolutely would. I don't agree with anybody's bank account being frozen because of protest. Nobody. And, in fact, people called for Insulate Britain’s bank accounts to be frozen. There’s an interview with Mike Graham on Talk Radio. I love Mike Graham. And he said their bank accounts should be frozen. I said no, they should not. You should never freeze someone's bank account for being at a protest. It's very dangerous. 

TP: Certainly, it's not the sort of thing, it's, you know, normal crime should be, even if they are causing a breach of law, then they should be dealt with in the normal way, shouldn't it? There should be no special bank account freezings. You wouldn't take a robber and freeze their bank account, whilst they are on bail. 

LD: A fine perhaps, you know, assuming that it’s appropriately set according to their income, but of course we’ve gone crazy with fines in the last two years. 

TP: £10,000.

LD: £10,000, which can break somebody, it can absolutely break them. And that is the point. It’s supposed to strike fear through your heart because it will break your household. But we have never set fines like that. They've always been based on a certain percentage of a reasonable income. 

TP: I believe that you're quite right, that that's why they were there. I believe that not one of those fines was kept at that level once it went before a Magistrate, so if you appealed it and didn't pay it, then every single time it was dropped to an income one because Magistrate’s can’t set fines of just randomly £10,000. It was a weird collision between two different things. Fixed penalty notices were supposed to be small fines that were given out quickly without the accompanying mechanisms of state having to be involved for small things. If you make those enormous, you get in the weird situation where you get a smaller fine by going to the Magistrate.  

LD: But that’s a risk. Not everybody wants to take that risk, of standing in front of a Magistrate, because you have to get that far before you get your fine reduced. Most people will just want to pay the fine so that they don't have to go through that incredible stress and anxiety of going to court. Can I say quote from something you were talking about before, about the individual and the collective? I think it’s really interesting. I set myself a challenge of writing about this for my Substack, and it's taking me ages to write it because I've read several books, and have been thinking about it a lot, about the collective versus the individual. And I'm sure you’ll have heard Professor Mattias Desmet’s theory of mass formation. So, he is somebody who's basically arguing that we're in a time of mass hysteria, which, I would contend seems true, intuitively. I'm not a psychologist, though. However, you can't really evidence mass hysteria. Nobody can say definitively it’s happened, or it has not happened. Now, mass formation actually comes from Jung, who talked about mass hysteria and psychic epidemics. He’s the one, the first person who coined the term ‘mass formation’ and he would say that in order to avoid mass hysteria you must self-individuate. The individual has to find meaning. That could be through your relationship with the divine. It could be through social connections. It could be through work. But it's about being strong and self-reliant as an individual. And it seems to me that during lockdown, which itself atomised us, we were also asked to negate the self, because it's selfish to put yourself before the collective, because an infection spreads through a group, but in a way that was sort of a dangerous premise. And I think it's made us more open to mass hysteria. More prey to dangerous ideas which have spread like an infection. And this also ties in with something I wanted to talk to you about, about the church. Because I've been quite startled by all faith leaders being so strong on the vaccine. So, I think the Pope said it's an act of love to be vaccinated and it's immoral not to be vaccinated. And the Archbishop of Canterbury also said it's immoral not to be vaccinated. And I thought, where is the room in there for individual conscience? Because the vaccines are quite controversially developed by researching on replicated cell lines from aborted foetuses. So, these are foetuses which were aborted decades ago. And they’re replicated cells. We’re not talking about a fresh foetus and it's not in the injection, but for some people that would be a matter of conscience. Now I'm not a Catholic. Myself, I don't have any kind of reason to have a religious exemption on that, but I thought it was really strange. This is the first time when people were asked so strongly to lay aside their individual conscience, you know, in war you can be a conscientious objector, but it didn't seem that religion made space for conscientious objectors with the vaccine. And I wondered what you think about that?

JF: Well, I mean, it's obviously a huge shame that we've got this situation where we’ve got Pope Francis and Archbishop Justin who are the ones who are pronouncing on this, because there would be people in the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and there are people, probably fewer people I would say, in the Church of England, who would have a sophisticated enough grasp of the issues to be able to talk about this in a sufficiently copious way. 

TP: Actually, there are materials from the Catholic Church that do talk about it in a sophisticated way. So, the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith did a big thing in 2017, I think, a big paper on the use of [aborted foetal cells]. And they present a nuanced moral case. And they come down on the side, in the case of most vaccines, of people being ethically allowed to use them if you are Catholics. However, they make provision in it, throughout the argument, for conscience, you're quite right. So, the materials are there for the Pope to draw on. That's his own Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. They work for him. Published documents. The Church of England don’t really bother with such nuanced thinking, but they have linked to that same document and effectively endorsed it at least once, I've seen somewhere. But again, Archbishop Welby, when boiling down the issues, fails to make those nuanced arguments. And there is a nuanced argument. The argument essentially goes a little bit like, you know, we are third hand from the original crime and sin of the abortion at this point, and so, therefore, the culpability is lowered. And if the risk is high enough, and the culpability is low enough, a balanced argument can be made ethically for taking it. However, the conscience argument is always there. Now, I've said this before, and I’ll say it again, the biggest issue with the vaccination drive, the coercion, has been the lack of conscience. You don't even have to have a religious one. If you don't fancy it, that should be enough of a reason not to have it, because we have bodily autonomy. But, in the end, conscience needs to be followed. The Bible is God’s way of talking to us directly. 

LD: Yeah.

JF: Yeah. So, to answer your question about the Church of England, Laura, I think that we do have people who are capable of, like Tom just did, articulating something like that. Why do our spokespeople sound like everybody else in the top of our institution? 

LD: State mouthpieces? Maybe.

JF: It’s because the Church of England, at least at that level, the Episcopal level, is another example of institutional capture, where certain people are promoted if they say the right things. And what you have to do is, you have to just keep saying the right things over and over again, and eventually you'll be put in a position by somebody, by the people who have their hands on the levers of power, eventually they will put you in that position, and then you can carry on saying that stuff. 

TP: Turns out, unfortunately, the right things are not ‘Repent’, and ‘Turn away from the Kingdom of God’. 

JF: Well, that would be the ideal situation. But, in order to - and I don't want to go about it, it's just a good example - the Bishop of London, she was the Head Nurse, so she had a very, very senior position in the NHS. Now she's the Bishop of London, which is the third most senior position in the whole of the Church of England. Now, what she says as the Bishop of London is not very different, I would imagine, to what she would be saying if she was still the Chief Nurse. There isn't very much theology in it. There's not very much which is specifically Christian, and I think that's a good example of what you need to do if you want to ascend the ranks in any of these organisations, be it the NHS, be it the Church, or be it any other kind of institution, the Police, for example, is you just have to say this stuff. Just keep saying it and then eventually someone will put you in a position where you become a mouthpiece. And it's very sad. But I think that's basically what's going on at their level in the Church of England. 

LD: It's interesting, because, you see, Jung talks about how religion can help people evade mass hysteria because you have this other moral guidance to follow and your relationship with the divine is one of those meaningful connections that can help yourself individuate and stop you from succumbing to a psychic epidemic. The problem is, where religion is so close to the state, that the leaders are the state mouthpieces. I find the idea of taking my moral guidance from Archbishop Justin really objectionable. I'll probably upset people here now, but I think of him is an empty vessel. 

TP: You won’t upset us. Don't worry. 

LD: But it's embarrassing, the idea of taking moral direction from him, and it’s a huge turn off. I feel like I've had - I might be oversharing - but as well as a political, ideological midlife crisis, I've been going through something of a spiritual crash in the last couple of years as well, because it's made me think so much about what it means to be a human? what is human nature? That everything that you think you hold dear and take for granted just turns on a dime so easily, so quickly. And I'm not saying that a pandemic doesn't warrant big social changes. But it just felt like more than that. It feels like we've lived through a Milgram experiment in obedience, or an Ash experiment in conformance. I mean, we've seen how people respond in authority, and to authority, in a way that I found quite disturbing, 

TP: I think the key really is that in the past, when we've had pandemics, that the natural human reaction has been adequate and hasn’t even really needed to be engaged. We know what to do in a pandemic. If you don’t want to get sick, because you’re already sick, you stay out of the way. And if you've already had it, you can act as though you’ve moved on and you can move into the next stage and help those who are having to isolate. You know, that sort of stuff happens naturally. What happened is the governments entirely lost faith in human nature and in the natural collectivism which would have been enough. We know it would have been enough because it was enough in Sweden, and it was enough in Florida. It was enough even in our first wave because it had peaked already before the restrictions came in. So, I think government has lost trust in us. Why should we now trust it? There’s a catastrophic breakdown in that. And I think that comes across in the Church of England as well. They don't trust us. Why should we trust them? They don't seem to trust Christ, certainly. 

LD: Well, if your religious leaders don’t talk about God, and the divine, and afterlife, and how you truly take substance from each other, if instead they shut the doors and tell you what you must do to your own body in order to be moral. The Church has done that before. You know what I mean, though. Then I just don't see the Church as a source of morality now. One of the most striking images from the last two years was seeing ‘Vaccines Save’ emblazoned on Christ the Redeemer in Rio. I just can't get over it. It used to be that faith saved. And I think that the Church’s days are numbered because, you know, if you if you tell the congregation that they don't need to come for a couple of years and do normal services, then they're not really going to see that need to come back. 

JF: A lot depends on, I don't want to be flippant, but a lot depends on God, and whether or not He exists and all that kind of stuff. But what you're saying is absolutely right from a straightforward point of view. It's not the best marketing strategy to say that the thing you want people to do, the product you've got, as it were, is actually not worth engaging with. I absolutely agree with that. I think that the audience that we have on this podcast is at least some evidence that there are people out there who were looking for serious theological, or religious, or spiritual conversation about how to respond to what's been going on, and that in the absence of that coming from more established - I don't really know how to describe it - respectable sources, they've looked to us instead, and to others like us. So that's definitely there. I would say that I think because of Christianity's emphasis on individual responsibility, and the importance of conscience, and the primacy of conscience, the fact that we've been told by these people that this is a moral obligation, I actually think that's abusive. I think that's an abusive spiritual responsibility and a fundamental misunderstanding of who we are as human beings before God. If we have a fundamental objection to something, say for this reason, which I do. It’s not the only concern I have, but I certainly have a concern about this, then it would be absolutely immoral and wrong for you to do anything else but to reject the vaccine and not have it. And I think the reason that that hasn't been said is because there's been this overwhelming desire to be seen to be good in the eyes of the world. And I think it's a very dangerous path for the Church, because…

TP: It never goes well for a church. I do think, on the other hand, that you’re right Laura in that it's been quite easy to lead churches out of restrictions. In churches there is a rich seam of people have seen this for what it is, a sort of madness. Unfortunately, not very many Ministers seem to be in that. But then it's a complicated matter of responsibility to law and Canon et cetera, et cetera. It’s not always easy but I do honestly think that there has been a push back from the pews and that it's quite easy to lead people back out of it. Easier maybe than in other parts of the world. The other place, of course, which have been relatively normal, have been the pubs. Which is great. Ever since you could, they’ve all been completely normal and I wonder whether, something of Phil Sacre’s - a priest that we spoke to a few months before we spoke to you – mantra, was that the working class are going to lead us out of this. They've been immune to this panic of the middle-aged Boomers. 

LD: Well, I don't think you should homogenise them all as feeling the same. I don't think that's true. But, you know, that also makes me feel sad because the truckers of course in Canada are working class, by definition they are working class, and look, they’re having their bank accounts frozen. 

JF: Yeah.

TP: By middle-aged Boomers, yeah. 

LD: It’s pretty sad. Yeah. Anyway, I feel really bad guys. That's two podcasts now I’ve given you a hard time for the performance of the Church in the pandemic, for which you’re not responsible. 

JF: No, no, no, it’s absolutely right. I mean, we do the same thing. It is absolutely right, and you don’t need to feel bad. But Laura, I do want to ask you about this issue specifically around, well, before you were a leading light in the anti-lockdown world you, well I suppose you still are a photographer, but you wrote books and produced books about photography. 

LD: Anti-coffee table books. 

JF: Anti-coffee table books, very good. And you’ve got one on femininity and one on masculinity.

LD: I do.

JF: They’re there. 

LD: Am I allowed to show a nipple on your podcast? 

JF: We’re all very relaxed.

LD: That’s the first one about breasts. And then there’s Manhood about penises, and Womanhood about Vulvas.  

JF: Right. There we go. Well, that's the first time that word has been said on this podcast, which is, you know, first time for everything. 

LD: Which one? I can bring you lots of new words. I do that. Nipple, penis, and vulva. 

JF: Yeah, exactly. In fact, probably we’ve never said any of those three words. 

LD: Now, when I did English Language A Level, I remember a specific class where somebody made the point that there were far many more rude words for a lady’s bits than for a man’s and that this was an example of sexism in language. So, you know, I don't know whether you think that's true?

LD: I don't think it is true. I haven't counted. I haven't done a quantitative assessment. Of course, the words for a vulva or a vagina are much more despicable if you think about the worst word in the English language. I will not grace your podcast with this word. I've said it on Radio 4, but I'm not sure you want it on Irreverend. 

JF: Everyone knows. We know which word it is.

LD: You know, it's the worst pejorative in the English language. And yes, of course it's an altar to pleasure, and it's where life comes from, and it's just part of a woman's body. And if you think about the worst words for a man's penis, none of them come close in terms of hatred or disgust. I think they might mean you're a bit silly, but they don't mean you’re a despicable person. 

JF: Yeah, they tend to be funnier words. 

LD: But the point I think we’re missing now, is that these are all physical realities, aren't they? And we sort of talked a little bit about Transgenderism, and is that where we were going with this Jamie? 

JF: Yeah, it was. I was going to raise this issue of this advertising campaign. Who is it? What is it in, the New York Times? 

LD: The New York Times. 

JF: I'm not entirely sure what it means, but this is advertising hoarding which has a picture of a, I think it's a black lady, and it says on the front of it, on the foreground sorry, ‘Liana is imagining Harry Potter without its creator’. And, of course, this speaks to the kind of outrage over JK Rowling's pronouncements about womanhood, which, to be fair, in some ways they are quite nuanced because she's not coming out and saying the kind of things you would hear, I don't know, somebody like Douglas Murray saying. She's trying to make a subtler point, I suppose, about the difference between sexual identity and gender identity. 

LD: She's been very gentle compared to Douglas Murray, but the criticism reserved for either is entirely different. 

JF: Yeah.

LD: I'm sorry, I’ve interrupted you. 

JF: No, no. Go ahead. I want to hear what you’ve got to say, go on. 

LD: Well, I have to collect myself because actually this ad made me really angry on a few levels. 

JF: Do you like Harry Potter? Are you a Harry Potter fan?

LD: No, I didn't enjoy the books or the films. 

JF: Oh, that’s a shame. I loved them. 

LD: Sorry I didn't. They’re too long for me, but I respect them as magnificent feats of creativity that have given a huge proportion of the world genuine pleasure. My boys liked the films when they were younger. It’s just not really my thing. I'm more Star Wars. 

JF: Okay, great. I like that as well. 

LD: If that positions me, okay. 

JF: Yeah, that’s fine. 

LD: Okay, so, first of all, when I use the word Liana, I want to make clear that I'm considering her to be an avatar for the New York Times, because Liana is a character in an ad. I'm not talking about that woman who's been photographed and being mean to her in the things I'm going to say. Now I'm going to unleash on Liana. Liana needs to get a life and get a brain. I mean, how dare she imagine the creation without the creator? 

JF: Yeah.

LD: JK Rowling is a woman, and she's a creator. I'm going to call her a Creatrix. She's a phenomenal woman. She's come from being a very poor, single parent. She has written about her own experiences of domestic abuse, okay. She knows all about being a woman. She's pushed a baby out through her part that we can't say, okay?

JF: That which must not be named. A Harry Potter reference. 

LD: Exactly. Or I could just say her vagina. That's another word for your podcast. That one’s okay.

JF: That’s fine. 

LD: So, she deserves nothing but respect for having created this amazing world that's given pleasure to millions and an enormously successful self-made woman. But Liana doesn't like her, presumably because JK Rowling believes that biological sex is real. Liana doesn't explain. She's just imagining a world where JK Rowling doesn't exist. It annoys me as a woman, it annoys me as a feminist and it annoys me as a fellow creative, because there is far too little respect paid to creatives. I mean, I myself have been plagiarised a number of times. It's really painful, it's like, go on, if you're so good at ideas, go and have your own. 

JF: Yeah.

LD: You can't imagine Harry Potter without the person who created Harry Potter. So, it's incredibly annoying. And it’s spiteful. It’s a really spiteful add. It's a spiteful and deliberate blow at a female creator. So, presumably, Liana is all about busting the binary. If you've watched the full video, there's something about binary, gender, blah blah blah. I don’t remember the exact lines. So, she's this really, she's really woke. Yeah, she's really woke, but she's in this ad which is deeply sexist! 

JF: Yes. 

LD: It's hypocritical and, I mean, how dare the New York Times try to erase a woman out of existence because they don't like her views? So, you have to be quite dim to pretend that the creation exists without the creator. So, the New York Times is setting its stall. It wants dim-witted readers who basically enjoy a spiteful blow that is being deliberately struck at a woman who, very vulnerably, shared her story of domestic abuse when explaining part of her background for believing in biological sex. I can't believe we need to defend believing in biological sex, but here we are. And there is nothing progressive about following the fashionable herd, and that's what the New York Times is doing. So, the end of that ad says its independent journalism. It's not independent to follow the herd like this. There's nothing independent about it. They're welcome to their dim-witted readers. 

JF: Yes.

LD: I don't have a subscription, but if I did, I'd cancel it. 

JF: Well, there's certainly no beating about the bush there with that answer, Laura, so thank you. Tom, you need to head off. 

TP: I need to head off, yes. Apologies. Well, thank you, Laura. It's been a delight again. Thank you for joining us with all your words. Daniel had to get a list out because I’m certain as an ex Roman Catholic he’s probably not heard of them, you know, so, yeah. Thank you and I'll leave you to continue this discussion with Jamie. It's something that we spoke about a little bit about last week actually, and some of the issues around the Church’s consultation on Conversion Therapy about coercion, but also about biological realities, which I think the Church is getting really tied up about, because the Church really likes to be liked. And this is something which it’s impossible to be liked by everyone about. I'm not quite certain how it’s going to help the Evangelical drive, because the people who like to deny the biological realities of male and female are not the people who are going to pop into church next week if we pander to them enough. But it's a real live issue within the Church, as well as within society, that I think is deeply worrying, because in the end we’re called to truth. And we’re not called to allow fiction. And when you end up with a sort of, binary, being busted by, so how many genders does Facebook offer now? A multitude of fictional potentialities that say nothing about who someone actually is. I think it's a very dangerous path that society is taking. 

JF: Mmm. 

LD: Well, you know this, playing devil's advocate here, the thing is, I agree with what you're saying, but some people say the Church doesn't have any hold on truth because if you don't share the same faith, some of what you believe in isn't truth. It can look like fiction, like sky fairies. You know, transubstantiation, is that truth? Or life after death, is that truth, you know, people don't necessarily hold onto those truths. They hold onto their truths of gender, but biological sex is true. If you take the example of Lia Thomas recently, who's won the…

TP: The swimming, yes. The 22-year-old. 

LD:  Yeah, used to be on the men's team. Now when Lia won one of the races by something like half a length, and frankly I thought it was embarrassing. I mean, for me, if that was me, let's say I identified as a child and I was competing against children and I won by half a length, I’d think standing on the gold medal podium and taking my award would be embarrassing, because I’d have cheated. So, I don't actually know how that individual can take the reward. It is embarrassing. But you know what? While the women are competing with Lia, then they’re just gonna have to accept their silver and their bronze. And actually, people need to refuse to play. And that's where we're at with that. Lia can say they are a woman, but I think everybody watching that is going to disagree that it's a fair competition, because, if you've been born a man and you have a man’s body, 

TP: You’re different. 

LD: You are at an unfair advantage compared to the women, for whom the women's category was created, to enable them to compete and be in sport fairly.

TP: Absolutely. And I think that it goes without saying that if those records are allowed to stand, then no woman will ever be able to hold the record for swimming.

LD: Goodbye Women’s’ sport. 

TP: Well exactly. Goodbye everything. You may as well just say, okay, we’re just gonna open everything to everyone, not have different sexes in sport. 

LD: I think women will still keep some gymnastics categories, but not many. You know, it's goodbye, Women’s sport. And don't forget as well that in the US this matters more that scholarships are given for sport as well. So that's goodbye your scholarship places. 

TP: I think I should just add, just before I go, as a last word, that I don't deny that people feel the way they feel. We can't stop that. I cannot deny that someone feels that they’re a woman, even though they're born in a male body. And you can have sympathy on that, and I think everyone should. And I think you can be respectful, and I think everyone should, but you cannot extend that fiction to everything. They shouldn't be allowed into woman's rape centres because those are particular places for traumatised women. They shouldn't be allowed to compete in women's sport because that is a category that is for women who are born as women. They shouldn't be allowed to claim to be mothers, because that's a category that's only achieved through the most privileged and most ultimate expression of womanhood. The power of creation and nurture that cannot be seized by someone who's biologically male and shouldn't be allowed to be. So, treat them by all means with compassion. Call them what they want, I mean, in a sense, you know. But pretending that they are women when they were born a man, or that they can truly inhabit femininity, despite the fact that they are male physically, is a fiction which is not helpful for them, I think, and it’s not helpful for society. 

LD: Well, I think they can inhabit femininity because femininity is just an idea, a construct. 

TP: Ok, so, womaness, I mean, they can’t just…

LD: Womaness!

TP: I was looking for the word, but they cannot, I’m a man, I could never be a mother. I could never put myself in that position. I cannot experience it, therefore, I cannot, you know, even if I thought I was a woman, I couldn't ever actually be a woman. Because I'm not. You know, that's what I'm trying to say. You’re right, femininity is a construct. 

JF: Tom, there’s an issue there with language as well. Sorry, I know you need to go. 

TP: I must, I've got to pick up my son from the childminders, so I’ve actually got to go.

JF: We’ll finish up here. 

TP: Bless everyone. Nice to see you.

JF: Ok. Thanks, Tom. 

LD: Bye bye.

JF: I was just gonna say Laura, about the issue with language, I mean, I don't really want to go down that rabbit hole, really. Because it's something that people have talked about a lot. I think one of the things I wanted to ask you about, we’ll finish in a second but, as somebody who's spent time paying attention to women's bodies, this whole thing, I mean, say you would take it all on board and say, well, biological sex is not a reality, or at least it's not some kind of tangible reality of any importance, and really what's important is somebody's gender identity, and that's essentially what they are. For me, it raised the question of where does that leave the human body? And all of this stuff that you mentioned, sports, for example, or being a mother, these are all things which are to do with the physical reality. So, my question for that sort of ideology is, for that viewpoint is, where does that leave your body? Does that mean your body is just, well, it doesn't mean it's not important, does it? Because people change their body to, kind of, match their gender identity. I don't know if you’ve got any thoughts about that?

LD: I think that, well, my thoughts underwent a 180-degree change while I created the books; Bare Reality, Manhood and Womanhood. I included people with different gender identities in the books. First of all, I don't discriminate against people. I’m interested, I’m curious and it was supposed to be a collection, a compendium of totally different types of bodies and feelings about them. I wanted to collect and curate lots of stories so I wouldn't excluded people. I mean, that said, each time one of the books come out in the series, I would get complaints. Mainly a lot of love, but there would be Trans people who would be angry about the way they'd been included. And I had, from a couple of gender critical feminists, somebody said you can't call it Bare Reality: 100 women. Their breasts, their stories. It's Bare Reality: 99 women and one man. Their breasts, their stories. Actually, it was two men, if you look at it like that, they miscounted. And I saw where they were coming from, but it’s not a neat title anyway, is it? You’ve got to have a bit of artistic licence for titles and the headlines. But while I started the projects really open-minded, thinking, what's this going on then? Because I started those photographs and interviews in 2013, before this really became as big as it is now. But by the time I’d finished, I thought, well, much as I've got compassion and respect for everybody who was Trans or Non-Binary in the project, I came to believe more in the truth of biological sex. I think that how people feel, and their identity, should be respected. But you can't change the truth of the body. So, I think people have got a bit mixed up in the language while trying to fight for rights, and ultimately, that's harmful to their case because it's just not truth. I don't think it's gonna end up washing. Let me think, what's a better way of putting it? You see, what is gender? When you ask people what gender is, it's quite hard to explain. What do you mean by gender identity? It’s just about how you feel. Well, how we feel changes all the time. Do I feel feminine? No. Well, sometimes I am, you know, I paint my nails and wear makeup, but do I identify as a woman? I don't even know what that would mean. I just am a woman. I have a woman's body and I've got my personality inside it. 

JF: Yeah, absolutely. And you've got boys and at least a girl, haven't you? Is that right? 

LD: I've got two boys.  

JF: Okay, so you’ve got two boys. Well, I've got two boys and a baby girl, and, well, I suppose she's not really a baby anymore. She's 18 months old. But, you know, it seems to me that when you're a parent of young children, the reality of biological sex is just so clear. You can't ignore it. It's not just about the way they physically are, it's about the way they behave as well. It's about gestures and things like that, which are just completely different. And there is a sense in which I can see Mary, my daughter, as having, I don't even know how really to describe it, but sort of feminine gestures, and things which just flow naturally from her being a girl. Now, again, I wouldn't want to say that no male would ever have similar types of gestures, but it's just such a stark difference between her and my boys. I don't know if that makes sense.

LD: Yeah. I mean it can do. It's hard to deconstruct what part of that is acquired from having watched and learned from people, how much might be genetic, traits that she was just naturally going to exhibit because she's your daughter, or your partner's daughter, or because she's female. But I know that I, as a female, have attracted attention and experiences in my life that I would not if I were male.

JF: Yeah.

LD: That can't be rewritten. And I've menstruated and had gynaecological problems, I’ve given birth, and I have only done that as a female and that has brought joy and it's brought difficulties. And those are female experiences, and you can't overwrite being male or female. So sometimes people like to bring up intersex people, or more accurately, known as having disorders of sexual development - DSDs. But having people who do not fit absolutely neatly into a category doesn't mean the categories aren't real. Whereas gender is something, you can have multiple genders, an infinite number of genders, because it's just about how you feel, their feelings. It's not actually biological reality. 

JF: Yeah. Okay. No, I mean that makes sense. Laura, I'm aware of the fact that I've kept you longer than I said I would. So, I think it would be good to wrap things up there. But it's been so good having you on. I mean, there’s so much to talk about. But it's always fascinating to hear what you have to say. So, you've got your Substack, which is lauradodsworth.substack.com Does it have a name, your Substack? 

LD: No. 

JF: It's just Laura Dodsworth. So, you said people can find you there. And obviously we've got State of Fear. Is there anything else you'd like to call people's attention to? 

LD: Anything to flog at the end? No, not really. When you invite me on your podcast, I just feel like I'm chatting to some really interesting guys in your living rooms.

JF: Well, that's very kind.

LD: I just wanna turn it round, actually, and ask you questions about religion and God. So, no, nothing to sell at the end. It’s just been a pleasure to talk to you as, always. 

JF: Okay, you know what I'd like to do at some point, and I don't want any put pressure on you. But you've come on twice now. So, I'm assuming that this isn't the worst thing in the world for you. But we should at some point do an explicit conversation about spiritual stuff, about God, about Christianity, whatever. Whatever you want to talk about. How does that sound, do you wanna do that at some point? 

LD: Oh what, where I ask you about things?

JF: Yeah, whatever. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, great. 

LD: Interview you? Yeah, great. And something we talked about, in the last podcast actually, was the role that the Church could have in reconciling people and offering healing. And I'm sure that something is being planned from the top down from Archbishop Justin. So that's going to be dreadful. And I'd love to see what you can do, grassroots coming up, because there's got to be a place, surely, for churches in the recovery stage of the pandemic.

JF: Yes, yes. I think you're right about that. I mean, we did talk about that didn’t we? To be honest it hasn't become anything more than thoughts in my mind, but I think you’re certainly right. Speaking of the Archbishop, have you come across his series of interviews yet, on Radio 4?

LD: I am meaning to listen to them. I saw the one advertised for Tony Blair. 

JF: Yes, yes. Well, that's next week. So that's the one we're all waiting with bated breath to hear it. 

LD: It just sets my teeth on edge even thinking about it. So, I have to listen to at least one and I'll save myself for that one. 

JF: Yeah, yeah. 

LD: What do you think about it? 

JF: I've only listened to half of one, which is this Middle Eastern novelist lady. Yeah, I mean, look, Laura, you know, I have to be reasonably careful as to what I say, but it was pretty much exactly what I expected it to be. I don't know if that says enough. 

LD: Fine. That says enough for me. I think we all know what you mean. 

JF: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But I'd love to have this conversation about God, etc, at some point. That would be really, really good. And, you know, give you free reign to say whatever it is that you want to say. And if you want to ask me questions, if you're interested, I'm very, very willing to answer them. So, let's do it.

LD: Alright. We’ll turn the tables. Because that's my natural habitat, being on the other side. 

JF: That would be fantastic. I’d love. To do that. 

LD: Brilliant.

JF: Let's arrange it. Great. Okay. Well, Laura, seriously, thank you so much for coming on and to everyone else, thank you very much for listening. And we look forward to being with you next week. Until then, have a great time and God bless.