Bothelford's Gone w/ Edward McLaren: The J. Burden Show Ep. 444

Easter hyphen Hub. Easter Sunday is April fifth, So stuck up on Cadbury Easter eggs and let the hunt begin.

It's worth your time. But just before we went live, you you were talking about exactly that dynamic, you know, the sort of pleasure enjoyment of reading a novel, and you know, before we get into kind of the very grim subject matter. I'd be curious to get your thoughts on that. Well.

for a number of reasons. Whilst disliking him, namely him getting so royally pissed off about Edward Norton wanting to change the ending of his film. He thought that if you're taking a serious subject and trying to make a film out of it, there's no reason you have to go all Bellatar and slow everything down and make the experience of consuming this product deeply, deeply awful as awful

as the subject matter. He thought, No, I'm going to edit this kind of like I do my advertisements for TV, and I'm going to make sure that there is esthetic pleasure to keep the person going in right the novel, which maybe you can tell I did very very quickly. I thought this is a subject that no one, especially in the bourgeoisie, who are partly responsible through their ignorance of allowing the grooming gangs to proliferate. These people should be able to read this thing and kind of get

something out of it. Otherwise they're just not going to process the data. They're not going to sit down and read, say Professor Allison Shaw's book what was it called again, Kinship and Continuity, which looks at the deep history of Pakistani communities in Oxford and by extension, Britain as a whole. They're not going to go over the Casey Report. They're

not going to look at crime statistics. They're not even going to look, for instance, at the route at Low Rape Gang Inquiry, although I do like through but gang Rape Gang Inquiry because they create all of these little graphics that reveal something horrifying from the victim's testimony. Unfortunately,

we live in the twenty first century. We are all consumers the instincts have been stimulated irrevocably, and in order for something to linger and last within the human memory, it has to take the form of a product that someone can process and enjoy. And whilst that might seem a little bit vulgar for a subject such as this, it is completely necessary, at least to my mind, that something like that takes place.

Now that is separate from quality, of course, And I'm glad you brought up the you know, example of American history XC and that sort of that sort of I guess you could say strategy, because I have certainly had the experience of reading something which is so awful, even if it is you know, accurately rendering that it sort of becomes numbing, right, It sort of it overloads your ability to to sort of absorb what is going on.

I mean, honestly, this is a critique often made of soldier needs it right where it's like, okay, like I understand this is awful, but after page six hundred, my capacity to absorb it has been reached. And I, like many people, did not finish The Jeatson for exactly that reason.

And I think that you know, the the esthetic sensibilities that you have keeps it keeps you away from that trap, and particularly the the opening to the book, which is sort of an artistic understanding of the history of this town or this village, and it's incredibly moving. And as someone who has not spent much time you know, in your in your home country, it's it. It's something I particularly enjoy from from novels, which is having works that

have a very strong sense of place. This is why I love you know that the Southern Gothics, This is why I you know, even you know other places I've never been. I think of, Oh, never mind, it was a French author whose name I can't remember, but you know, a very similar thing. And so the pros in it is moving, you know, it pulls you into the the

narrative at just a side there. So I'm curious to what degree is your knowledge of this subject matter and of this area autobiographical and personal, not that you are the main character by any means, but are you pulling from personal experience?

at all. So, for example, there's one moment where the main character is I think in the early years of his secondary school, and he gets into a fight with a boy aptly named Muhammad and is then sent to this therapist who is called Miir, who was obsessed with bell hooks, and and you're not allowed to spell this woman's name without a capitual letter, and of course I instinctively actually spell her name with capital letters in the book, just to sort of, you know, rub it in that woman.

go no matter what. The other thing that has come up recently is that via just directly researching the grooming gang phenomenon in more detail in places that surround me, I won't go into detail in case I get a nail bomb. One always discovers that there's more of it than you expected. There are some extremely posh towns in the British South, in the Home Counties that we used

as trafficking spots. I mentioned Oxford before we started having this conversation, but there is this place in Oxford which is called the Nanford Guesthouse, or at least it was, and it was one of the major trafficking sites, and it's one of the only trafficking sites that was released to the public and it was disclosed because of the borderline private investigations of one Simon Morton. I went there

and it is now called the Rassa Syang House. And Russa Siong is a Malay phrase which means sensation of love and it's related to this song Rasasion that they sing in Malaysia and Indonesia about getting all the girls, getting all the lovely young girls. Given that six out of eight of the Oxford Guomingang ringleaders have now been released from prison because they have completed half of their sentence, and that is supposedly how the British prison system works.

What are the odds that they are not there?

or zone that you go to. An enemy of mine who I will not name, described the opening of the novel as quasish Bengalarian, and I regard that as a very high compliment. The other thing that I would mention is I think there is, leaving aside the Southern Gothic genre, which I also enjoy, something peculiarly British and or European about the novel, in that if you look at Shirley Jackson's Hill House, the line the opening line is something

like hill House had stood for eighty two years. Meanwhile, I am living currently in a building that is called hill House. And this place has been here since the Georgian period at least, so it is significantly older than what we would now call the United States by and large. And there is a pub further down my lane that is from the fourteenth or thirteenth century, further than this.

Whereas in the American Psyche, and this is something that I'm trying to get into in the sequel, to a certain extent, there is this sense that you're on someone else's ancestral land, and there are all of these Native American burial grounds filled with ghosts and revenants and angry specters, like in Stephen King's The Shining, They're going to come

out and get you. In Britain, the ghosts are your own ancestors, and they have been here since the beginning, which is why there's this dynamic, not to spoil too much, that I'm now focusing on, where you have a Muslim family who are written somewhat sympathetically and living in the middle of London, who developed this idea after one of the girls in the household plays this game until Dawn, which is about Wendigo, that all of the English people

living in the countryside are these the monic Wendigo that are sort of surging up and eventually they'll be driven away. And the ghosts in the house because there is a vague supernatural element, the ghosts in their house are wondering why the hell they're there? Why are these Why are these Iranians that I've seen on postcards that my husband has sent me from the New World in I don't know, sixteen ninety or something like that, now dwelling in my abode?

What is going on? Yes, So that sprawl should answer two of the angles that you were trying to address, and then throw a little bit more in for good.

psychotherapy is weaponized against young men in your country. And you know, sure I've spoken about a similar, albeit slightly less aggressive version of that system that exists in my nation, perhaps less politically focused, but particularly I found the series of instances where you know, our main character is in therapy, whether kind of before or after shall we say, the dramatic moment, but also the presence of medication in this book right as a literal controlling mechanism is something that

you know, thankboy, I have not experienced, but I have seen many of my peers, and I was wondering if you could speak about that element in the book.

They've realized they fucked up with the phones and the computers and children having these devices that they can use to collect data on them like cattle for their whole lives, and that this has destroyed people's attention spans. And so now you find incidentally, these mass diagnosis can pains for antidepressants and especially ADHD medication, which are seemingly designed just to make them function without doing away with the iPhone or the computer or anything like that, or imposing more

strict regulations on those things. They are intentionally drugging the population, at least to my mind, although I'm going out on the limb when I'm saying this, to make sure that

they keep working. As for the schooling system, by and large, a point that you made last time that I don't think I dealt with enough is what you regarded as the endemic nature of feminism within British society versus American society, where there's a component of it, but there's also this broader idea of the Democrat coalition, and I thought that you were right on the money with that, and I

had to go away and think about it. And much in the same way that you could say that progressivism going to South Korea was an awful cocktail, because it combined a society that was already exceedingly maternalistic and nannying with an ideology that gave a sort of blank check for nannying disciplining behavior. You could say the same thing

is true about Britain. It could be argued that the reason why we didn't have much of the trans thing versus the United States is because we already had this turf class empowered in our society, and they didn't want to be playing second fiddle next to men dressing up as women, or auto gynophiles or poor deranged autistic kits of one sort or another. And so rather than that being a victory for democracy and free speech or our people, it was just them stolidly trying to remain in power.

And these are all of the people who are in the medical professions. These are all of the people who are nurses, These are all of the people, especially who are guidance counselors at schools. These are all of the people who are matrons. We mentioned our mutual friend Ed Dutton a while back. He is right to point out that these people are disproportionately high in narcissism and are using children, especially boys, as conduits for their own vengefulness

towards the world in one way or another. And I think, again not to give too much away, this really comes out in the character Fauna, or as he was originally called, Frederick. I'll get into it a bit more. I know you were on the verge of saying something, but Fauna is this true male to female transgender autistic who's very analytic in his theory of mind and really really likes Plato and physics and sort of synthesizes these two components. He's one of the very few characters who was smarter than

the main character, and significantly so. And yet he has ultimately bought hook Line and Sinker into the system. And he does this by allowing the system to change him and allowing himself to be convinced that there's no way out. He's never going to be loved, he's never going to be successful, and both because of his own degree of

internal narcissism as well as his autism. He thinks, great, I'll just adopt all of these you know names that the system wants me to use in order to succeed, and I'll permit them to perform surgery on me so that I can exist and my existence can be tolerated. And I knew when I was at university these four computer programmers who were associated with this one girl that nobody really liked, especially me, and all of them within

the space of about five months, transitioned. And they did it because they were not especially attractive, not charismatic, but very very smart, autistically minded men who felt themselves separated from their own being and felt that they could moderate this through some logical system of one sort or another. That the number of men, especially in Britain and in Scotland in particular, who have been permanently damaged by this sort of stuff is simply unreal. And to a certain extent,

I think the Turfs. The Turfs are opposed to them and opposed to their mania and wanting to enter women's spaces, because they also regard them as a threat on their own, even if they hadn't transitioned as autistic men who can organize and who can innovate, and do not like living in a sort of nanny Mucci savella, which is what modern Britain has become.

to the nanny McPhee flavella. Do you oppose it, bring that what it may or do you say, well, I'll double down, you know, I will do exactly what I need to. And it's interesting you bring that up because the first transgender person I ever met was my freshman year at college. I didn't last long at this college for reasons that you could you can no doubt survise.

But and it was the one Scott on campus, right And okay, sure that's a literal sample size of one, but it very much seemed to be a similar situation where and to be fully honest, I did not know this person was transgender. I thought they were just a computer programmer and kind of weird. I assumed it was just an odd guy until he went into the the women's storm, and I said, oh wait a minute, now, he's not just Scottish. Turns out as another level there.

But the point is, I think that that's a very fascinating element in this book, particularly because we see after sort of and we'll we'll speak about this obviously, this book is about, you know, the grooming game scandal. We see Fauna return in sort of the last third as a unlikely ally, which again I think in a cheaper version of this story, that character would be you know, we were deemed and beli eevil and I think that that was a very elegant way to bring that character back.

And so I'm curious, what were you what were you attempting to do with that?

If you just assume that you're analysis of the world that is sincere and direct and empirical is true, then you also know that the men who transition or decide to buy into the overcoding that the system wants to impose on them have some of the same data that you have, and in fact, in a different world, would

have potentially been your friend or ally. An aspect of the Fauner character that I find upsetting even when I go over it is the fact that he so obviously could have been the friend that the main character so dearly needed as he was going through all of this stuff, because he's a fellow sufferer, he has been through it himself, and yet because of the nature of his own identity and the faustian bargain not in the stranglarian sense that he has made, he cannot acknowledge any of this solidarity,

and it becomes completely wasted. And another aspect of this is the fact that the girl character Agatha, who is the sort of sacrificial victim in the whole thing, was formally helped by Fauna before act. Fawner knew about him, and sorry knew about her, seemingly whilst he was still using his own name. And so because of the failure of that initiatic ritual of masculinity, please help me, please, save me, he inverts his own identity in order to

continue to live comfortably and personally. When people have come to me and confronted me with something terrible that's happened to them, I do feel I must say this kind of chivalrous urge to assist, and if I didn't do that, I would be totally renouncing an aspect of my own identity.

I think my editor, I won't say her name, but she put this to me quite well by suggesting that underneath the sort of horrible, shredded postmodernity that one sees in the book, there is this kind of fantasy world, and not in the sense of it being unreal, but this world of knights and shield maidens and miss cole

beasts that can be assailed and confronted. But because all of the particles in the universe at a micro level have gone wrong or been reorganized to benefit particular people in power and their selfishness, that can't be The main character cannot marry the girl because she has been destroyed, and the best thing that they can have together is a kind of fraternal bond, and the same thing obviously goes with Fauna's distorted fate by the end of the text.

It wouldn't be particularly difficult to find. But that was what I think was so affecting about the novel. Our main characters are fundamentally changed, or the worse, they do not get out of this scott free. It does not return to that kind of fantasy world of knights and shield maidens. I mean, you know, one great example is that Jack is maimed in a very dramatic way and physically damaged for the rest of his life. You know,

he does not get out scott free. And similarly, you know, well we're being light on details, but there is something to be said for the fact that Agatha has been so deeply damaged, that this will not be a sort of ride into the sunset moment. You know, there is an escape, there is, you know, a cessation to this abuse, but it's not cheapened by you know, simply discarding it at the end to have the kind of Hollywood ending.

And so I would commend you on that. And then, you know, if I could turn it into a question, I'd be curious to get your response.

them are doing the six seventh thing. And one could very easily imagine these kids, any of them that survive as dementia patients when they're seventy or eighty, just going.

of our population is going. It's like chapter two hundred of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, But rather than miscegenation leading either to you know, Frederick the second of Hohenstealfen or a sort of perfect human slave, it's the psychological distortion between the child that sees the god in the machine and is teaching himself, you know, how to program supercomputers on the one hand, and then the real entity, the entity that is created out of reels and is

not human in the same way at all anymore, probably coincident with IQ distributions, but also just not also coincident with parental neglect, and ever increasingly, I'm thinking that's the future that we're headed toward. It is going to be this actual management of the population that the philosopher you've all, Noah Harari referred to as useless eaters using porn in video games and KFC. That's where we're headed, and there's no averting that in any way at all. Things are

not going to get better. And in fact, this is one of the reasons that I think, because you mentioned pathways earlier, the Amelia figure is so interesting, the Amelia figure, who is this this sort of BPD art ho to use a categorization rather than an insult with purple hair, with a nose rearing, with a wart on her face. And this main character who is just a sort of ordinary middle class boy who gets involved in right wing politics. Why is this Amelia character the natural matchup now for

this regular boy? Why isn't the tradwife his matchup?

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go in for that sort of thing. But everyone knows the story and everyone knows the examples associated with this kind of thing. So the best case scenario, which is developing at least by the end of the novel between Jack and Agatha, is that, as I was saying, you have this fraternal relationship where, you know, maybe it's not exclusive, maybe you're not married, maybe you don't promise to stick with one another forever, but you're in this bizarrely plastic

but also partly solidifying situationship. And given the fact that not only in Europe, but especially in my country, there's just no real reason to get married anymore because we have our own version of no fault divorce laws and church attendants is so low, and our new archbishop is an activist who spits in the face of everything that

is part of our Anglican tradition. What are we meant to do apart from either give up romantic hopes, try and recreate the situation of patrician marriage where the Roman patriarch has total rights over the wife and child, or this sort of on again and off again situation that only generates bastards, or simply give up entirely. There is no grand restoration from that sort of thing, or environmental

degradation or having plastic in our blood. And I can give you one example that just hammers home how bad the trajectory for this sort of thing really is, which is I went into a church in this town that I went to school in and it's actually Bottleford in the novel is kind of based on this town to a certain extent. And I went to this church that I hadn't been to before, and I opened the door.

It's a beautiful Catholic church with these great, big stained glass windows in it, and suddenly I see hair dryers and I see sort of clear flat landing. It's been very polished, and there are no pews. And a woman comes up and says, can I help you? And I work out that the thing has been hollowed out and cannibalized and turned into a hairdressers. It's been turned it's been turned into a hairdressers with all of these big windows on. So even if remigration of an immense sort occurs,

that problem is still occurring. The IQ decline problem is still occurring. Dont't thinks it's going to be sort of eighty five IQ average within a century. There is no slowing that entropy without a sort of miracle coming. To use a phrase from Martin Heidegger in the last essay that he published in Despiegel, only I got can say this now, although there is a god character in the text that we might want to get into to a certain extent.

You know, this is the origin of the the you know, the crunchy girlfriend, racist boyfriend style meme, which you know, in my case worked out and I've seen it work you know elsewhere. Just an aside. But I think that when when I hear you talking about, you know, the these churches that have sort of been turned into a best civic architecture and at worst commercial space. I mean,

it reminds me of the American Northeast. You know that the land of the Puritans, formerly the most religious place in the nation, now the sort of high seat of you know, American imperial liberalism. But it's the same story. You know, you have a few particularly historically notable churches that are museums with a vestigial congregation of fifteen octagenarians at best. But you know, you go through places like you know, Martha's Vineyard, a very famous destination for the rich,

but there are no churches left. I mean, they're buildings there, but it is a library, you know, it is an airbnb or a short term rental, and it's one of those things where it's like that to me, that culture seems dead. You know, that there's nothing there other than just sort of a you know, feeling that this is a building that should be kept around and even then, you know, we see how long it lasts. But I wanted to return to what you were saying about the

sort of the god character. And then I want to put a pin in a discussion of the parental figures in this novel because it's sort of an interesting I should not be showing that pen to the camera and it has a highly specific information on it. But sorry, but I think that there's an interesting discussion there. But we'll come back to that after the question of the godlike character.

lives alongside and within Saint Michael's church. And it's worth saying, as a friend of mine brought up, who's very knowledgeable after reading the book, that churches in England, but I think also just Anglo countries by and large that are called Saint Michael's are built in areas with a martial basis. So that church, I think it's the Carfax Tower in Oxford. It was erected in I think the ninth century, and

it was erected on the site of a battle. And so you invoke Saint Michael as this protective archon or military spirit that enables you to succeed against all lads, I imagine, pushing back the vikings or something like that.

I'll have to look more into that. The thing with her is okay, she's partly assimilated to the church, but she's also older, and she lives as an imminent extension of Anglo Saxon consciousness, meaning that all of these old people who are lying around and dying in chapter one faintly recall her, and even more faintly recall her elf

like emissary, but eventually she's completely forgotten. And since we're talking about the vanishing and the emptying of churches, it's worth suggesting that churches really represent a transcendent form of ethics and religion. They represent one's potential unification with this broader metaphysical system. But if you get rid of that, what seems to happen, at least to my mind. Isn't

that spirituality disappears. What happens is spirituality is imminentized. You can see this with the sort of political theology of therapy that most young women operate on nowadays, where you know, a friend of mine was accused of being of being what was it called a psychopathic narcissist by his ex girlfriend last night, and all of these vocabularies and little quacks and priests that you can go to so that you can repair past trauma and the breakdown of the

mind and the internalization of these outward specters, as if you know, people had always felt this kind of way instead of just going to a congregation. And a side effect of this imminentization seems to be an authentic revival of paganism in so far as you think there is an ancestral spirit that is directly tied to me and that cares about me and has a personal investment with me that I can contact and I can interact with,

and is doing things around the town. And on the night I'm regurgitating the line roughly of one of the first sexual results in the town. Call by this mass influx of predominantly cash Mimurpury immigrants. Marine memory is seen by the last two people in the town who believe her at the church with this enormous, famous red halo behind her head, and they can see traces of blood

dripping down the thing. It's as if she is an imminent racial consciousness that has been sleeping for ages, almost beneath the security of the transcendent morality projected by the church. But now the church is empty, the church is gone. People don't really believe in Christ that much anymore. These

genius Loki, these location bound spirits are coming back. And I obviously won't spoil the ending, but the fact of one character's being tormented and exploited means, as Robert Bly would say in his Eye in John, that the wound becomes a gateway to deny. The wound itself operates as a kind of summoning room for a form of God or Goddess that did not previously exist and was not required,

but it's going to be activated. And to just sort of throw in some genetic evidence on top of this, someone like Richard Lynne would say that religion, even if it's a very new, potent religion that is constructed out of weird tiktoks like the Agatha thing. For example, there are many British universities that now have at Garth and societies. Stress increases religiosity inherently in order to meet the values

of the day. And so I don't necessarily know if we get out of this with a Christian revival, and if it's a form of Christianity or be a bizarre and mutilated form of Christianity with big swords with crosses on them.

I say, yeah, honestly, and when you return out of out of prison after being beaten by an Albanian man, I'm sure you would, you know, enjoy the proceeds of the real.

There's a particularly poignant moment where she goes to the local convenience store to try and buy mace, finds out that it is not available. But you know, nonetheless, she is sort of fed a drip fed, you know, information through television. And actually the role of television and the screen in this novel is sort of particularly interesting, So

I'd be curious to get your thoughts on that. And then also, you know, while we're talking about other parents, you have you know, Jack's father, who is you know, this sort of sad alcoholic. But nonetheless, you know, we see a very interesting dynamic where his his ex wife has been hiding the fact that their son is being drugged from him, and of course is to kind of finish out the the kind of sorry as you can tell,

then it's it's been a rough gold days. But you have you know, Agatha's mother, you kind of the who is it? A very different archetype to put it mildly. So first of all, I'd like to get your opinion on the screen. You know, Jack has a series of very dramatic visions where we see this as sort of a chimera. To get your thoughts on that, and then also his relationship with his own mother.

with Chernobyl. It's a phrase that people utter when they're trying to arrive at a direct description of the political scenarios before them and the demographic scenarios in particular. But then this internal censorship mechanism takes over. Someone will say, oh, the West End's gone, Birmingham's gone, that my whole street in Manchester it's gone now. And then you'll say what does that mean? And they will not have the language to get back to you on that. They will just

short circuit. And this is why, really the main villain in the thing is not a human being. It is this creature that I refer to as the Khmeira, and it's this entity that I've based off of this very interesting Etruscan sculpture that I encountered on the Internet once, and also kind of on the character of the entertainment

in David foster w us infinite jest. There's a difference between the screen of the computer or the screen of the phone or the screen as you're you know, looking at Thomas seven seven seven's posts on nineties usenet and the television. The television in particular is demonic because it is an information pipe that generations who are used to the idea that it is completely you know, it's completely beyond criticism, are just taken by they're completely absorbed by

it and they cannot be broken out of it. Whereas you could see the smartphone, social media and so on, especially post Jack Dorsey as the television being broken up into all of these different competitive screens, which means there is far more narrative creative destruction. There is far more individuality and the ability to get a sort of general

idea of what's actually happening before you. So it is because of the power projection of the television and broadly the bourgeois class that controls it, to the upper elite bourgeois class that is used like an alien tractor beam to make things invisible in the town. Oh well, I don't want to point that out. That would make me

like Enoch Powell. That's a sentiment that Jack's mother has, and it's a sentiment that I've encountered, I don't know, pretty much every other day of my life with people who are above a certain age, usually older than millennials, and they are permanently fucked by this thing. They are never going to be fixed in these terms, and it

is it is something that makes people evil. William Darrylnple, when he was talking about some aspects of the Soviet Union, mentioned that mentioned that they almost want you to buy into the ideology as such so that the excesses are things that you'll tolerate. Or maybe your village tax man has been gotten rid of and you're very happy because you no longer have to sacrifice fifty percent of your

vegetable patch in order to appease him. The same thing is true with all of the endless hypnotic entertainments of the screen, or the kimera who has kind of a mind of its own. I used the phrase genius loci earlier to describe a spirit that is a real spirit that lives within the English and is waiting to be summoned up marine emory. You could describe, using sort of

modern esoteric terminology, the Khmera as an eggregore. It is a being that wouldn't exist on its own, but it's sort of technologically superimposed over whole hills and vales of the country, and done so on an international basis. There was a conversation tangentially related to this that I had with someone who was literally called tag Beer meaning I think holy war, and he was surprised how much I

knew about your party in Palestine and so on. But his entire legal PhD is on getting reparations from the Europeans, and the way that he described it was he wanted to take the de Narti vacation program that was imposed by the American Empire and the Soviets in the aftermath of the Second World War in order to just break the people by showing them this footage, this edited footage, again and again and again and drilling down into them

like that. And he called this mind rape. He said he wanted to do that to the British and there was evidence that it worked, and if you had to get rid of social media and get rid of computer screens in order to do that, that would be great. And I asked him if he had any sort of particular hang ups with the British people, and he said, no, I just want to do what's right. That is what

the Khmera is. The camera is, in effect, the technological mind fuckery that occurs before you know, your average sort of Kistani gruma named Mohammad Kara or something, it's a real name, gains this invisibility cloak over him and then goes and perpetuates some of the worst crimes we've seen in this country since before the medieval period. As for the parents, I think I'll get started on Agatha's mother, because she's the one that I think has haunted me

the most since I produced her. I don't really consider this spoiler. She's an only fans for she does these only fans videos, and this has a connection with the gang, and she's leaning into this sort of thing because she's grieving the fact that her husband was murdered by this

Albanian and her father's a former policeman. Now, not only if one consults one's working class friends who live in similar situations to these, and there are hundreds of thousands who do, but if you look at the Small Catechism of Martin Luther and you look at how important the figure of the patriarch in the family is treated at He's treated as the priest of the family who's responsible for all of these individuals, and also the history of Lutheranism within

particular zones of Germany. What you work out is, in functioning working class families and kinship networks, there is almost always one big man who is the lynchpin of the whole operation, and as soon as he's gone, as was the case in my friend Tom's situation, everything collapses. Everything becomes immediate gratification, how do I fulfill my passions? How

do I get stimulus checks from the government. And that's precisely what happens with Agatha and her grieving mother, who already mean that they're not upper middle class girls, either her or her mother. They already have these tendencies toward self destruction since their class was basically cut up during the Thatcher era and a bit before. So what they're doing is like a more extreme, multiculturalized version of the tendencies they were having before, losing the father in the family,

losing the household. And I regard this to a certain extent sympathetically, and to a certain extent not. There is this very interesting sketch by Hogarth which is called a whores Progress, which Jane Austen actually references in a few of her letters, and it shows this great, big woman who is giving this poor girl all this beer in order to get addicted to alcohol and then she can

prostitute this poor girl. App there are these women who were involved in Rotherhain, and they were white English women who looked exactly like the woman giving the beer, the big old woman doing that, and they loved the feeling of power of having these young girls and their sexuality under their command, and they were expected, one of them said before she was arrested, to earn their keep. So it's not just that the grim In gangs are awful

in their own right. They play on the worst aspects of the British population that are latently narcissistic and psychopathic anyway, and that's exactly what happens with missus Alice Darger, who is lost in her own world, and hence the evocation of Lewis Carroll. As for Jack's father and mother, the mother's a sort of posh Tory type who wants to do the good thing, even though she has the right instincts.

You mentioned Mace. Mace's is banned in this country now, at least, so unable to defend herself, horrified by what's happening. The father is this very pretentious liberal type who likes reading Philip Larkin, and I think that's basically then.

go about their business. This devolves into, you know, sort of a shoving match, and eventually, you know, the men

are scared off. And as the solution or as the the situation subsides, he sees this older man sort of peering out around a corner and he says, oh, I would have had your back, and he reaches into his coat and he grabs a pressurized can of spray paint, you know, to mark the offender so that when you know, had things gone differently, if Johan was beheaded, at least the police would have been able to identify the man

because he had yellow spray paint on his jacket. And this is something that you know, who less sympathetic Americans will use as in jokes, right, They'll they'll make fun of you know, you Brits and you know, for a certain level you can sort of understand why, but very fundamentally, like this is an egregious wrong done to you and your people. The idea that even the most passive form of self defense like an irritant, you know, which I mean,

at someone who's been exposed to it. It's certainly not pleasant, but it is entirely survivable. We make every soldier in this country experience it and they don't all die. You know, it's not blasting them with a blunderbuss or something taken off the table. I mean, it's completely totally absurd. Obviously

it's not your fault. Clearly, you know, your politicians don't listen to you know, what what you people want, but it does sort of you know, that was a very poignant example both from you know, Johan's experience and also in the novel because additionally, and I don't remember the you know, the ethnicity of the the shopkeeper, but that is another dynamic throughout the book where we see Jack continually going to stores, you know, going to the kind

of third places, you know, where you would get you know, a bottle of water, where you would buy pepper spray, in another country, and they're always staffed by hostile and resentful ethnic minorities. There's a scene where h Jack has been been drinking and he goes in for a bottle, gets overcharged, pays the white tax, goes in again, buys

another one at a discounted rate. And that's a very minor moment, you know, it's on a pivotal turning point, but it does show I think something, you know, very dramatic that even those obviously that direct way to protect yourself is off the board, but also these very minor interactions you know, shop as you know, buying a bottle of water when you're hungover, or you know, going to you know, provide groceries have been turned into effectively hostile ethnic shakedowns.

we had guns until the dun Blaine massacre. And then because we have a sovereign parliament, which is generally a good thing in terms of you know, trying to recover the country and so far as it can be recovered, they just decided to get rid of all the guns, and that that was universally accepted at the time because of how bad this guy going in and killing all of these children in I think a preschool happened to be in a nursery. Beyond that, self defense is directly

discouraged from the top down via the education system. I used to get in lots of fights at school, and every time that I fought back, because I was not regarded as an endemically messed up problem child, I got worse punishments than the kids. For instance, there was one who was sent to our school from another school because I went to a sort of poor grammar school, and we were meant to reform him. He brought knives to his other schools frequently, and then he would fall asleep

at the front of our history classes. And yet we got it when we got in a scuffle. I was meant to take the blame for all of these things. You are not allowed to defend yourself whatsoever. And there is legal case after legal case of people entering British people's property and then British people trying to defend themselves. For instance, there's one guy in the woods who was a bit of a crazy bloke who had all these bear traps and so on guys broke in there, he

shot them and then he was thrown in prison. That's the basis for the attitude that you see disseminated among the British by and you know inclusively the English, the Scottish, the Wealth and the Northern Irish. Unless you're someone who has already been to prison and is consequently not afraid of this sort of thing, because you've already been humiliated, you've been sort of painted badly with the brush of being on the wrong side of the law, you are

going to be terrified about this kind of thing. And given how sensitive the middle class or bourgeoisie in our country is to being associated with the likes of Tommy Robinson or anyone like that, you know, people that they're trying to escape because they're actually biologically connected to those individuals,

nothing is going to happen. The other part of this that is historically worth addressing is the National Front, mainly in the seventies and eighties, became such a big four in British politics, or at least a big enough force that the McPherson report, I believe it was decided that they had to be quashed and ruined. This is a party that was established by GK. Chesterton's cousin called AK Chesterton. A wonderful nickname to him would be Ak forty seven

Chesterton that I don't think he heard it. What the crushing of these movements and the implementation of Frank Soscus's free speech laws materially did in the country is they broke up the system of antibodies that existed within the working class. They just humiliated those people. They trod all over them. They prevented them from organizing under ethnic banners,

having uniforms, or anything along those lines. And because of on the one hand, that and the fact of our self defense laws, and also the class dynamics that are so present here that aren't present in the United States. When you see someone of a different ethnicity, who is who has protected characteristics, as they say, attack someone indigenous, there is a very high chance the average individual is just going to walk away, walk away or ask if

everyone's okay, rather than getting involved. I mean, it angers me every time I see something like this, because I know I'm going to see it more.

That is the trait being selected for. And you see this in you know, the academic world, right that you were effectively best served by going with the program as much as you possibly can. You know, if you can publish a good bit that's helpful, but don't say anything controversial in the slightest and to your sort of returning to you know, the kind of pairing of Fauna and Jack. It is sort of this interesting choice that must be

made effectively. Will you accept the programming or will you accept that you are resigning from polite society, that you will no longer receive the benefit of being aligned with the system. And I think that this was a more prominent conversation in the US during COVID A word I probably shouldn't have said on YouTube, but go with it anyway. For instance, I have a very distinct memory of helping one of my friends move and my roommate at the time,

long term friend. We were helping him, you know, up on the roof, patching something, both of us at you know, good universities, pursuing our degrees. And it was right when you know the message that Biden said you weren't allowed to get a job at a company of above a certain size without a medical treatment, and had a very frank conversation that like are we roofers now? Like is

this our life? Because you know that seemingly was the position, and as that has retreated from memory, I think many people have forgotten that effectively, there is no third option. You cannot both receive praise from the machine and work to oppose it. It's pretty basic. And obviously, as you said, class dynamics are different between my country and uh they're much more implicit here, They're much less kind of It's messier for any number of reasons. Demographic reasons is a

large part of that too. But when I interact with middle class British people, by and large, I see people who are completely and totally controlled by social status, and particularly controlled by social status as regards the gamut right, the evil racist rule, or the evil racist working class, the Chuds, as we would say, here are the rednecks. And it's a it's very strikingly expressed in your book, Edward.

the reality of Bez the Gammon shook them. It completely traumatized them, and it made them want to have a global proletariat as opposed to a local proletariat. They could still fulfill their dreams of, you know, post Christian humanism in the tradition of William Wilberforce, as I mentioned before, or you have to you don't actually have to fix your soul. What you have to do is do political things. Now that is a bit unfair on Wilberforce, but there

are certain of his fans that took that message from him. Yeah, they feel that they have this no bless so believe they have this role that is necessary to make them navigate society in the right direction. And yet as soon as they see the elements that they're expected to handle directly, they do what Yavin would call the Missus Jellybee thing and they start giving more money to people in the East Indies than the starving children that directly surround them

in their own streets. In terms of how this can be counteracted, I don't think it's something that the English can do on their own. And I think it is very notable that a lot of the people that I know in Restore Britain are either Catholic converts or they're partly Scottish or something, And there are lots of these figures within British sort of fringe politics who are not completely British. Nima Pavini is a good one. I mentioned

him earlier. Half Iranian. There is a radicalism that insists upon itself within the British context that is not purely English. Much in the same way that if you look at the example of Finland, you know, highest average IQ in Europe. I think it's one hundred and seven. Yet all of their elites, or most of their elites, they're disproportionately Swedish.

They're Swedish fins. And this is because despite the IQ thing, Finn sorry of Swedes, tend to have a higher general factor of personality, so they're going to be more charming, They're going to be more charismatic in one way or another. So I don't really think these dynamics play out with the English helping and fixing themselves. I think there are some additional things. Obviously, I'm half Scottish, so I'm also you know, tooting my own horn very quietly as I

do this. But to this end, I think it's fascinating that Blair's cabinet when it came in and was so revolutionary, it was disproportionately Scottish. It was not English. And there is a radicalism in the Scottish character that needs to be adhered to and respected to a certain extent, meaning that even if you know you're in a very nice area of Edinburgh and Scotland is so nice in comparison

with England, especially Edinburgh, you will find crazies. You will find organic gin who is this nutty homeless man who is a former heir of this fortune, asking you if you want to see his organic moves before doing some of the most explicive dancing you'll ever perceive. And another one called the Edinburgh Barbarian, who is this jacked ruder, also from a wealthy family, who just records himself on a shitty little TikTok iPhone whilst posing and frightening girls

to talk about the power of humanity. All of these forces can be wielded in a positive direction. But I don't think the middle class English are going to be able to help themselves. They are going to vote Libden with their Davy and maybe they're dissatisfied. Transgendered children will sidle in with the Greens. And Zack Polanski who has a skull that looks like it could consume infants like Harribo.

better than casinos and pharmaceuticals. In addition, you can check out our sponsor, Pox and Soun's Coffee. They sent me a bunch of coffee it's pretty good. Check it out. If you use my name, Jay Burden, you get I believe, fifteen percent off just not half bad, ed. I appreciate it. Man and everyone at home, keep your head up. I can't last forever.