#2448 - Andrew Doyle

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan experience. Andrew. Hello. Good to see you, brother. Good to see you. Um it has been, you said, six years almost to the day. Almost to the day. The last time. So lots changed. Right before everything went crazy. That's it. Right before. Yeah, the whole world sort of shifted. Because everything went kooky around March, right? Yeah, so it was February twenty twenty and then

Then we have COVID and then we have you know, we've had Trump in between of that, we had BLM. That summer of twenty twenty everything just exploded and went a bit mad and um yeah, and then everything shifted. So Uh it's called The End of Woke, how the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter Revolution.

Isn't that how it always goes though? It goes like we go too far and then we overcorrect and we become Nazis. That's it. Exactly. Well, you know Or it's or it's the opposite. We go socialist. It's a big pendulum. I get that. It sort of goes back and forth. I mean I was trying to s in that book I was I'm trying to make the point that what woke was was like a kind of the latest manifestation of

an a kind of innate authoritarian impulse. I think human beings are by default quite uh inclined towards just shutting people up if they don't like them. Yeah. Just imposing their authority. And so woke while I mean A lot of people are annoyed that I've called it the end of work. I'm not saying it's all over, let's just go home, forget about it. It's still going on. But the point about it is is that

In its current manifestation, things are changing now so rapidly. We are moving into some sort of new phase. And that authoritarianism, which we've associated with the left, might come up from the right. It could come up from anywhere. It's what you say about the pendulum. So you just have to be kind of vigilant about it. I don't think we were vigilant. I think that's why woke happened.

We weren't vigilant against this prospect that you know p uh authoritarianism could emerge in what we thought was a free society. Well, authoritarian authoritarianism it snuck in through uh a sheepcock. Yeah. A wolf in a sheep's costume. Yeah, it was a it was a costume of being more inclusive, being more open minded, being a better society, being kinder, you know, it it it led to, you know, child trans or

led to chaos. It led to like a lot of like really fucking freaky things that you'd have never expected. People people saying that the First Amendment's not important. What's more important is protecting people. Well that was the key, wasn't it? The point was that the way it worked was that it was gulling people through language that sounded really sweet and kittenish and fluffy. You know, things like

Equity. Well that sounds a lot like equality, doesn't it? But it it doesn't mean equality. It means treating people unequally to ensure uh equal outcomes according to group identity. That's a very different thing. You say you're talking about let's make everything inclusive, but what you really mean is let's exclude anyone who disagrees with what we've got to say. So you're using language to mean the exact opposite. They say gender affirming care.

Do they mean that? Or do they mean affirming what is effectively a pseudo scientific belief among vulnerable people? So it's it's all about misusing language because most people are thinking or I like to think are pretty decent. Yeah. But most people want to be kind and want to be fair. And when you hear these activists saying, Be kind, be compassionate or else right, you know, then you kind of think, okay

Well, maybe their intentions are good, but also they're pretty scary. I mean there's there's a there's a weird there was a weird thing with the woke thing, which was that On the one hand it proclaimed to be this sort of great, virtuous, kind, uh, progressive, right side of history. How often did you hear that phrase? And at the same time, they're like dangerous dogs. Like you're you're you're like, I better not piss them off. I better not say the wrong thing in the workplace'cause

They'll dis they'll destroy you. Well, I always find that the most preposterous the idea is and the the least capable it is to stand up to scrutiny, the more violent the enforcement of that idea will be. Because you cannot combat that you you can't defend that idea with logic, so you have to defend it with fear and force. And and just just shouting people down. And that's what we saw. And that's

It's a natural impulse of human beings. Absolutely. Like when you're arguing with a kid. You know, when you're a kid and you're arguing with a kid and you say something, you don't even know you you shut the fuck up. Like to start scaring you. So why is it though that some countries and some societies seem to protect themselves better than others against that against that impulse? And I feel at the moment that the UK is kind of failing.

where America is to a degree succeed not in obviously in all ways, but when it comes to the idea of freedom and free speech, like I think UK has pretty far has pretty fallen to the kind of the the the woke insistence that you need to control people's language. Well I think it's been co opted. I think whatever organic version of that emerges naturally from society where people want where there's an over correction. I think in the U UK, because you guys don't have free speech law

'Cause it's just different over there. Yeah. You can get away with a lot of crazy shit. Like the first of all, like we should explain what we're talking about. There's more than twelve thousand people have been arrested in the UK in the past year for social media posts. And if you read some of those social media posts, they're not even remotely terrifying.

It's not like I'm going to grab a knife and go cut the head off of every immigrant I see, like, hey buddy, maybe we should lock this guy up and evaluate him. He sounds like a crazy person. Like no, the immigrants are coming into this fucking country and creating all this crime. knock on the door, you're going to jail. I worry that Americans think we're mad.

We do. Yeah, do you? We do now, yeah. We think you've lost it. Yeah. We th well we also think something happened where your leaders are intentionally trying to tank your country. It seems like they're trying to bring in as many migrants as possible. Um cater to them, not to the British people.

And do it openly so that everyone knows what they're doing and then create chaos on the streets because of it? Yeah, I mean people have a phrase for that, an anarcho tyranny, you know, where you where you punish people who aren't breaking the law but you protect those who are. And I think with the I mean, I don't know the extent that Americans know the I mean the stat you quoted, that came from the Times newspaper in London which had a freedom of information request to the police.

found out that it's twelve thousand a year on average. So that's like thirty a day. Not just being investigated or looked into but being arrested. But over the last few years only, if you go back it's only like a thousand or five hundred could it was three thousand uh b last time we spoke, back in twenty twenty. Was it really a year? It was back then? Yeah. Oh my god. So we already had that problem.

I mean we already didn't know it was that many. That's crazy, even back then. It was already really high. I mean we had stuff like the old stories of like um there was that guy in twenty ten who made a joke online about he was at Doncaster Airport in the UK. He said, Oh if this queue doesn't hurry up I'm gonna blow up the airport.

Just a stupid funny tweet. He went all the way to court. That was a full trial. Or so these these laws and I think I I think what happens with this stuff is people don't realise how long this has been embedded in the UK. We have hate speech laws that are encoded in a number of different legislations. We have a thing called the Public Order Act, we have a thing called Malicious Communications Act, that's from nineteen eighty eight. We have the Communications Act from two thousand and three.

And all of these things criminalize I tell you I I kid you not, the language in the statute books is if it's grossly offensive That's the phrase. If you post something that is grossly offensive, you can go to court, you can be prosecuted. But I you know, I find well that's it. What does that even mean? I find laws against free speech to be grossly offensive. So should the the British state be arrested? I don't know.

And there's one I think it's in the um malicious communications m communications act where it talks about needless anxiety. Causing needless anxiety can get you arrested. And you think you think that's not a thing. I can give you a specific example of smoke cigar. Uh I have once my friend Winston Marshall who I think you've got to do.

J I I worry that if I try it, I'll cough and I'll look really wimpish and and pathetic. And it won't be good for your arguments. It will backfire it will I tell it it'll undermine everything. It'd be like I'm sitting here with a paper hat on at Christmas. Undermining all of my key points. Right. Um I d I d see I like I like the flavour and I like being around smokers because my grandmother used to chain smoke around me. So it's kind of...

Well she's Northern Irish, you know. I mean th that's it's the way they do. She used to give me whiskey when I was three to calm me down, you know. Oh wow. It's that sort of family. Um That's an old thing they used to do with kids. They just put it in their babies, they put it in their mouths. Like a like they would dip their finger in whiskey and rub it on the inside of a kid's mouth. If you're struggling with a child, get it drunk. That's how you do it's it's old Northern Irish whiskey.

I don't think you should scoff at it. It's a good it's a good thing. But I'll be more than happy it's grossly offensive. It's grossly offensive. The example I was gonna give uh was this um guy called Darren Brady. And this sounds made up and whenever I tell people this it sounds made up. He um posted a meme I don't know if you saw this meme where it was the four Progress Pride flags. You know that it's got the crazy triangles and stuff in it, don't it? Uh-huh.

Right, and that was going everywhere. And he posted it. And there's a video of him being arrested, put in handcuffs. He's an army veteran by the way, right? Put in handcuffs by the police. And the policeman says in the video, You caused someone anxiety.

So th the actual language from the law i is being used for this rearrangement of the and you know what? That's quite a good satirical point that he was making. It wasn't even his meme. He was just retweeting a meme. But even if it was some horrible offensive thing, who cares? How is that offensive?

I mean well you can find that's the problem. You could find anything offensive. You could find anything grossly offensive if you're extremely sensitive. You could. And but wasn't there a point to that? I mean he was kind of saying that The LGBTQIA plus movement has become quite authoritarian. Yeah. He's not saying they're actual Nazis, and he's saying, Oh, isn't it quite funny that when you put them together it looks like a it looks like a swastika?

Especially for a retweet. That's crazy. Yeah. That's crazy. It's retweets, it's tweets, it's posts. Uh we've had memes of the big ones. So there was a guy called Lee Joseph Dunn who went to prison for eight weeks. That was last year, I think. For three memes that he posted. Eight weeks. Eight weeks in prison. What the right so again.

The I'll tell you what the most offensive of the three memes was and you can tell me whether you think it was worth prison time. He put a picture of some immigrants uh with w knives and underneath it said coming to a town near you and that was it.

So I don't know if you think that's worth prison time. That's the most offensive one? Of the three, that's the most. What's the least offensive one? I can't remember what the other two were. Because I remember I looked at them, I thought, well that's not even worth That's not even worth thinking about, but this one was the one that really'cause they say in England you're stirring up hatred against minorities. Through the the the spreading of the meme. Right.

Clearly not sufficient, you know. I I and I think in the US you have you have far more protections. I I wonder whether it's to do with the fact that in the US you have the First Amendment. Like you so you have something codified that says You can say what you want. We've never had that. It's very important. And it didn't seem important twenty years ago or thirty years ago. Because no one ever looked at England as being that kind of a country that would just put people well obviously

This was all pre social media. Yeah, yeah. And England has always been a a fairly polite society. Yes. And and th but the thing is like now pub talk has become illegal, right? Yeah. Like if you say something offensive in a pub

You're subject to be arrested and they're asking people to turn people in. There's a thing called the banter ban, which the Labor gov the Labour government was trying to put in. Here's the logic of the banter ban. Um I I I I've forgotten about this, but now you mentioned it. They wanted to introduce this law so that, for instance, if you're working in a bar or a pub and you overhear someone who says something against your protective characteristic, say you're a gay barman.

And someone says, Oh, I don't like the gays or something and you overhear it, your employer has a a a duty to protect you from that kind of hate speech, that kind of harm. So therefore there's going to be a blanket ban on speech in on certain kinds of speech within the

the pub, right? I would say the guy who's eavesdropping, he's the problem, right? You shouldn't be listening in on other people's conversations. That so that's a n that's a real thing. Yes. And I guess it all comes down to this view.

Which I think is completely wrong, that words and violence are the same thing, uh that words can create a more violent society, that there's a direct causal link between the stuff that people say and the stuff that people say online to how people behave in the real world.

And I think you guys have got it right.'Cause you've got the Brandenburg test. Do you know about the the the the test for incitement to violence in the US? No, what is that? It's it's basically a test that was established I think back in the sixties. Uh it was a KKK leader called Clarence Brandenburg who was prosecuted for incitement to violence.

And the test was that was established since that precedent was that any words uh that can be convicted for incitement to violence, they have to be intended to cause violence, likely to cause violence, and the violence must be imminent.

And if you satisfy those that that threshold, you can be prosecuted in the US for incitement to violence. So it'd be like kind of imagine a demagogue surrounded by all his fans, whipping up a frenzy and then pointing to a guy on the front row and saying, kill him now. That would qualify for the Brandenburg test. But in the UK, because we don't have that test, all we've got is whether people found it offensive.

That's the that's the difference of the threshold. So it's a it's a massive difference between what the US has and what the UK has. Massive. It's insane. I mean, to give the most r obvious recent example 'Cause I don't know if people know about this. There's a woman called Lucy Connolly in the UK. Uh I don't know if this was reported over here at all. Do you remember we had all these riots last year during the summer when uh against hotels which were housing asylum seekers and people were

setting fire to them. There were genuinely racist stuff going on right during those riots. And this was off the back of a guy who'd murdered a bunch of little girls in a dance room. And there were rumors going around that this was an asylum seeker, right? And this one woman, a mother, who'd lost her daughter, very sensitive about the idea of

uh Lucy Connolly, she's very sensitive about the idea of loss of kids. She tweeted in an ang in a fit of anger, Go and burn down all the hotels for all I care. Uh if that makes me racist, so be it. And take the government with you. Something like that. And she deleted it within a couple of hours. She went out, walked a dog, she deleted it, and she thought, I really that's not me, that's not who I am. Deleted it. Police came.

And she served over a year. Oh my god. Now I'm not saying the tweet was nice, right? The tweet was a horrible tweet. And she says it was a horrible tweet. That's why she deleted it. But because we don't have that Brandenburg test, we don't have a test for incitement to violence. Cause the key is that tweet, there was no way it could have she was a nobody you know, she wasn't someone with influence. She didn't have many followers. Um she no one was gonna read that and go and act upon it.

And if they did, that would be on them. Right? Because this is a myth, this myth that people act on cue to what they read online. Well it's influenced. For sure. But at at what point are you required to have sovereignty? over your own mind and your own actions. Yeah. Well I think what it does is it raises the temperature, particularly when political leaders do it. Right, but i when political but my point is like it's not gonna incite you to violence. It's not going to incite me to violence.

So who are we talking about? What this is part of the thing is like they're protecting the dumbest members of society. This is like the thing about banning, you know, crazy talk online. If you're talking about witches or, you know, whatever it is. Flatter

Like y i we have to stop misinformation. But from from who? It's not working on you, right? Yes. You don't believe it. So who are we protecting? We're protecting the dumbest people? Also, aren't you kind of letting them off? Like if if someone goes and commits an act of violence and says

Oh, I did it because someone told me to do it. Aren't you kind of letting them off the hook? Right. Exactly. And and sort of displacing the blame. You know, it's like that guy who shot uh John Lennon, who said catcher in the rye made him do it. Reading the book capture are we now blaming J.D. Salinger for the murder of John Lennon? It was John Lennon, wasn't it? I think who didn't have to do that. I think the best that you could say is when political leaders and people with clowns

Say things like that, sort of it'd say, you know, it's fine to go out and commit violence. I think what they do is they create a kind of imprimatur of approval. They create this kind of sense that. If you do it, the people in charge will have your back. If you do it, it's okay. Well, this was the argument with Trump for January sixth

Right. And that's why the BBC edited his speech to make it look as if that's what he was saying. Do you see you saw that clip, right? Oh my god, it's fucking crazy. I I mean I've been saying for a long time the BBC has a real like what I will say in the BBC's defense.

Is they've always been pretty good at being party politically neutral. Like they will uh interrogate someone in the the right and someone in the left in a pretty neutral way. They don't th I think they do a pretty good I know people will be annoyed at me for saying that, but I think they do. But I think in terms of the ideology, the woke ideology, they got capped.

They have a thing at the BBC called the LGBT desk, or they had it up until recently, which could veto any news story, which meant that any story that was slightly critical of transactivism or or anything like that just didn't get reported.

So I'm not surprised that the BBC They gave them veto power? They gave them veto power, yeah. That's crazy. This all came out in a report quite a recent report just a few months ago which led to the resignation of Tim David, the Director General, and he resigned ostensibly because of that Trump

Clip which by the way that wasn't the first time they did it. There there was another clip about a year or a year before in a different program that did the same thing. Took the clip, re-edited it, and made it look like he had said something he absolutely had not said. So I think the uh the the BBC quite obviously has a an ideological bias, if not a party political bias. But that's more than a bias. Well it's misleading, right?

You're you're editing something and chang I mean you they took out a giant chunk of his speech. This episode is brought to you by 1-800FLE.com. Valentine's Day is coming up. It always sneaks up on people. If you want an easy way to absolutely crush it this year, this is it. 1 800 flowers roses. They're bigger and actually last. Plus, they back it with a seven-day freshness guarantee so you can feel confident that you're sending the best.

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By one dozen, they double it to two dozen roses free. That's one eight hundred flowers dot com slash Rogan. I forget how many minutes it was. It leapt like forty five minutes or something like that. So he said something crazy like that. Yeah he said it made him look like he was saying go and commit the reason. And instead he he was in tongue in cheek. talking about the very fine center, that they're doing a great job, the f senators and congresspeople and said all this other stuff.

No offense, but you can find daft stuff that Trump says pretty easily, right? You don't you don't you don't need to edit that stuff down. Well it's because they had an opportunity to like like what we were saying before earlier, we were talking before the show, you can put out a narrative. Yeah. And then that's the one that sticks. So that's the one that spreads wide. And then when all these years later they have to have this

you know, trial and everybody finds out it's not true. But the damage is done. I mean that's what they did with Trump during the whole uh steel dossier. Yeah. You know, the p the hookers and peeing on people and you know all that crazy shit. Remember that I remember the idea that he'd hired hookers To urinate on the bed that was once occupied by the Obamas. Something like that.

The reason I didn't believe that is I don't think Trump is that avant garde. I don't think he's that creative. Like that like if he'd have come up with that, I'd have been actually applauding that. That's kind of amazing. But obviously he didn't do that. It's not even something to applaud it that just sounds like a work of art. Right. Urination on the bed of your enemy.

Through the medium of prostitution. I think that's kind of an artistic thing to do. But I don't think he did it. I d obviously didn't do it. None of it's true. Right. But you put that but isn't that weird that that in parti that's like something I don't think anyone seriously could Well s there's plenty of people that believed it. And they don't yeah, they don't have to believe it. They just say it. Like that was the whole point about

You know, b the trial where he got arrested and conv or and convicted of thirty four counts that are a felony, none of which are actually a felony. That's all bookkeeping deception. It's that was the paying off of the girl. So now you can say he's a convicted felon. You could just say that. And even though all those counts were misdemeanors, all of them had passed the statute of limitations. But for some reason, through no l legal way that anybody could ever really honestly explain

They decided to label it a felony. And it was just to turn him into a felon. I saw the I saw even left leaning um anti Trump lawyers saying this is not how the law should work. You can't artificially elevate a misdemeanor to a felony outside the statute of limitations.

If you do that, they're gonna do that to you. Yeah. It's like we're gonna give that kind of power to the Republicans and now when they're in office, they're gonna start doing things like that. Are we crazy? Well also th this really bothers me. Like one of the key things that I think's happened over the past few years is this complete lack of fealty to the truth.

From both sides. Right. It's whatever is convenient matters more. A complete lack of intellectual curiosity. A complete lack of um of of of investigating and looking and and and thoroughly checking. And by the way, with the BBC, that really matters'cause Unlike the the the news media here, which can be as partisan as it likes, the BBC's the state broadcaster. It's got a responsibility by charter.

to not be to you know, to be balanced, to be even handed. And it completely failed. And I saw today, just this morning, some people, you know, we've got all the mania about the Epstein files at the moment. Some activists have now said JK Rowling once invited Epstein to the opening of her theatre her play. Uh never happened.

But because there's a furore about Epstein at the moment, they're just saying it happened. It gets spread all over the place. That's all you have to do. And that's all you have to do. And then then the dam and then that gets ki repeated. Oh, didn't this happen? I know. Like what you say about Trump is right. I always hear that he's a convicted felon, he's a convicted felon.

Why don't you pause for a minute and y assess whether or not that conviction is sound or whether it was politically motivated or how helpful that But like you say. Also, it's like it's such a dangerous precedent descent. It's terrible. Like if you do that, it look right now in the United States, the the media predominantly leans left, except for Fox News. The mainstream large scale media.

I guess CBS is probably going to lean more right now. Yeah, yeah. It seems like it's in the process of that. But for the most part, when you watch CNN, if you watch MSNBC, if you watch the mainstream news, it's very left leaning. Yeah. But if the fucking if right wing people started if if it was like more common for the news to be right leaning and then they started doing the exact same thing about a left leaning candidate. Yeah.

This is so dangerous. And the idea that the left doesn't recognize that which are the people that have always been in support of free speech. It's never been a right wing thing to support free speech until now. It's always been a left wing thing. When I was a kid, it was o famously the case of the ADL. defending Nazis having the right to protest and saying, look, we we we think what they're saying is abhorrent but

It's very important that you get the right to say whatever you feel. And then the way to combat that is with much better, more concise speech that's much more logical and makes sense. And this is what you do. This is what debate is for. This is this is we sh we've always known this. Yeah, but I mean I I agree. I'm so dispirited by that that very thing that you've identified that

The left used to be about this. The left used to be all about I mean that example you mentioned of of uh Skokie, wasn't it, in Chicago, the the Nazis marching through Skokie. And the A C L U saying, We're you know, we're defending this. There was a book by a guy called Aya Neyer who was the head of the A C L U called Defending My International Yeah, it wasn't the ADL, it was the A C L U. It was the A C L U and and and he was saying um

You know, he's he you know, he's Jewish. He's got uh he family members who died in the Holocaust, but he's writing a book saying I'm defending neo Nazis' right to free speech, not because I support them, but because I don't. And I wanna defend the principle whereby I can tackle them and that's speech. Right. So th th in other words, the the principle is so much bigger. I mean the thing that I think has been lost and now by the way, the A C L U complete about turn. I mean there was a

a lawyer for the ACLU tweeting about how he wanted Abigail Schreier's book banned and he said, This is the hill I will die on you know, that's a guy called Chase or is it a guy I think it's a trans activist called Chase something, I can't remember. Anyway, but but the point is, how far have you fallen? When it comes to these free speeches. Left or right, it's nothing to do with it. It's it it should be about this principle of

D it's not whether you agree with what they're saying and ha the substance of what they're saying, it's whether you want the principle intact. And that principle applies to us all. The very same principle that allows the Nazis to say all their crazy stuff is the principle that allows us

To t to challenge it, to t to tackle it. Well it's it's a very short term win. And it's basically they're playing chess and they decided I want that rook no matter what and then they just sacrificed their queen. Like look what you've done. Look what you've done for this short term victory. You're essentially tanking civilization for a decade where we have to sort this out and like b wa let the ship wash itself back and forth until it right.

Yeah, so how how and how do you ensure that it's not going to happen to you? Like I think about that. There was a national conservative conference in Brussels about a year and a half ago The local mayor said, I don't like this and he had the police rush it, shut it down. And you had mainstream right wing figures like Nigel Farage, Swala Bravman.

How do they not think, hang on a minute, if we establish that precedent where you can just shut down your political opponents through the use of police force, how will that not rebound on me? How will that not happen to us? Well, this is the argument that they're using right now for Trump going after his political opponents. Right, right. You can't fucking do that. Even if you hate the guy. If like if there's a real crime that you can get someone, but when you take a crime like the bookkeeping

Yeah. And turned it into a felony that could put this man in jail for the rest of his life for doing something that turns out to be legal. You can pay people to shut up. Yeah. And this is so it's just it's so weird that people for this short term gain are willing to tank, which is essentially this whole structure of our civilization that allows free discourse. You need it. It's so important. It's so important to be able to communicate and talk.

If podcasts didn't exist, there was no way to talk through ideas. Other than mainstream news, we would still be stuck in some very bizarre 1990s or 1980s narrative about how the world works. Yeah. We would have real problems. We'd have real problems if there wasn't independent journalism like on Twitter and on wherever they can post.

Yeah, so why don't they get it? I mean we've had like people in left leaning papers in the UK calling for Elon Musk to be arrested because he's allowing free speech on X or Twitter, whatever you want to call it. Well their offices got raided today in some country. There was a country where X's offices got raided. Um, I think one of the things was they somehow or another let there was uh I think something had to do with child pornography. Where was that? France. Fresh investigation into Groc.

And what is it what are the Oh, so you know what this is all about. Suspected offenses including unlawful data extraction and complicity in the possession of child pornography. Aaron Powell Yeah, but that's not what this is about. This is because people have been misusing gras. To like put bikinis on women they like or it cr even in a few horrible cases creating child

Child sexual. You can't create child pornography with crop. No. But I mean unless there's like some sort of a loophole where you could get it to do it. Among potential crimes It said it would investigate were complicity in possession or organized distribution of images of children of a pornographic nature, infringement of people's image rights with sexual deep faith. Okay, the sexual deepfakes. Yeah. So sexual deepfakes is like if you put Hillary Clinton in a bikini and made her hot.

That's a sexual deep fit. Okay. Right? Fraudulent data extraction by an organized group. I think you can still do some of that stuff. You can put people in bikinis. Yeah, I think you can do that. So like if you wanted to take Shaquille O'Neal and put him in a bikini, sh you could say you're sexualizing him. Okay. I uh yeah. I mean I guess you can do that. Yeah. So but that's what it's so that'll be why you know recently Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of the UK, said he wanted to oh it was

Considering or not necessarily he was gonna ban X, but it wasn't off the table. It's something like he as though he's gonna do that. But this is always the excuse. Like we're protecting children. Right. And and look, no one wants that sort of stuff, right? No one wants deep fakes of kids. O obviously. But there's far I mean, looking at the stats on that, there's far more child sexual exploitation on Snapchat for instance.

But they don't go after Snapchat'cause Snapchat isn't the form where Keir Starmer is getting criticized every single day and brutally hauled over the coals by by people checking his facts. One of the best things about X recently is the community network. Checking checking journalists and politicians in real time with facts. They hate

They hate that. So no wonder they're going after X. Yeah, Biden got cooked by community notes multiple times. Yeah. To the part where the administration was taking down posts. Yeah. So did the uh the Guardian, the left leaning newspaper. It flounced off X with a big statement saying, We're going to Blue Sky. We've had it. We're off to Blue Sky. It was such a flount. And of course and then of course everyone was retweeting all the their community notes. They had

Of course. Just absolutely loads of them. And you know, especially when it's open to the whole world. Yeah. And people that aren't stuck under your guidelines, like in America, we could just talk shit. And I think the reason why it's in France Probably has a lot to do with candice, I don't know Oh yes, that makes complete sense. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean that is That makes sense of it now. By the way, there's a real quick way to solve that.

Open chromosome test. Oh I thought you were gonna be a bit more graphic than that. Well you don't have to. Because that doesn't really solve it because you could if unless I mean there's no operation, but if she's gone through a surgery then, you know, you could show a picture and it's probably pretty realistic, especially when was the last time you saw a seven year old lady

Cooter. Oh yeah. Congratulations. I'm just interested in that sort of well you know, you're allowed to be curious in this country. That's actually a really good example though, isn't it? Just m something so obviously not true just g going all over the world. Like like in a in a matter of moments. Is it not true though? Well, that uh um Macron's wife is a man. Yeah, yeah, that's not true.

Well you know, the burden of proof is on those who want to say that it is true. Aaron Powell The reality of the story is weird enough without it being true. Like the forty-year-old man and the his teacher. She was forty if it was it if if it is actually one. She was forty and he was fifteen. That's crazy. And everyone says, well, they're Aaron Powell What a wild country. I would say with all of this stuff.

proof. You need s like when you when you wasn't it the Carl Sagan thing about extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I think that's a pretty safe dictat. The idea that, okay, anything could be true. You know or you know, there have been crazy conspiracies that turned out to be true. So I'm not I would never rule anything out, but what I'm saying is if you're gonna make a claim like that, you better be damn sure you've got really solid evidence of it. She's got hours long document.

Yeah, and are they are they persuasive? I haven't watched them. You think I have that kind of time, dog? Well you should do. What you should do your research before you're part of the problem. Outrageous. I can't do research on that. I I I wanna wait till it plays out in court. But whenever I do do research like I'll give you the the example from this week, just'cause I'm reading it now.

A woman's written a book claiming that Shakespeare was a black woman. Oh, I saw that. Yeah. Um so so um this is a major spoiler alert. Shakespeare wasn't a black woman but Crazy. Yeah. I've got the book I'm I'm reading the book now. Um it is worse than you imagine. Part of the evidence How could it be worse than I imagined? Because because it's obviously not true first of all. Of course. But but but um she basically says in the book that um it's important that it should be true.

And therefore yeah. And in fact the book opens with a picture of Shakespeare as a black woman. Which was drawn by the author. Is it a good drawing? No it's okay. I I get someone else. If it's out, it's the fr it's the first Oh that's the book is pretty good. No no that's no no no. That's a black woman? No, no, no. That's a portrait of Amelia Lanya who she says was Shakespeare and she says that the portraits at the time were whitened.

To disguise her blackness. In in the book itself, you won't be able to get in the book, I don't think, Jamie, but in the book itself there's a sketch that she's done. So it's like I can imagine a publisher saying, Oh, what evidence have you got? And she's like, Oh well I'll I'll go and draw it for you and that's sort of what she's saying.

Yeah, black Jewish Well actually I mean Amelia Lanya was part part Moorish, but wasn't black and she wasn't uh particularly dark sk skinned. And she was Jewish as well? Yeah, part Jewish. Okay, so who is this woman that they're saying actually was Shakespeare? Lyck oss hårakut, vad är din här emergency? Du plattade alltså håret utan värmeskydd. What's wrong with you, woman?

Upp till 25% på räddande hårdvård hos lyko. Your beauty playgrad. Så she's called Emilia Lanja och Emilia Bassano. And one of the arguments is that. Shakespeare at the time, if she was a woman, uh wouldn't have been able to get published'cause women couldn't get published. But Amelia Lanyar was published. She had a book of poetry. So all of this stuff falls apart like in two seconds flat.

And she all right, this is the best one. She even says in the book that um the word Shakespeare is an anagram of uh a she speaker. I'm not making that up. That's what she says. I mean you know y listen. How'd she crack the case? Well actually it's an old theory. It's it's like a twenty year old theory. Is it really? Twenty years old. And and it's so funny. It's so pathetic. But this was my first encounter with conspiracy theorists, because my background is

I did a doctorate in Shakespeare. My background was teaching Shakespeare back in the day, like before I did comedy and before I did anything else. And it was the conspiracy theorists around Shakespeare saying Shakespeare couldn't have written his work. They are the most intense, the most angry, the most evidence free cohort

Of people you can they get more they're m angrier than the woke. I promise you. Like I've tweeted I've written stuff about Shakespeare online. I d I recently did some lectures about Shakespeare for the Peterson Academy because I'm really into helping I th I love the Peterson Academy, I love what they're doing. And I did these Shakespeare's lectures and the conspiracy theorists were on to me online saying, It wasn't Shakespeare.

The key point about Shakespeare is if you're gonna say it wasn't the guy who everyone thought it was You have to answer one key question. Why does everyone who knew Shakespeare, wrote about Shakespeare, say that it was? Can I stop you? Because I'm confused. I didn't even know that there was a conspiracy about Shakespeare. Oh wow. Yeah, there's lots. I had heard one person say that Shakespeare wasn't real and that it was really someone else's work that he plagiarized. I had heard that.

But I never even bothered to fucking. Well it c actually came from America. It's you guys. Of course. Um it was the best. We're number one. It was a guy called Loone guy called Looney, actually, from America. That's hilarious. That's his name. You get a listen to that guy. So he c uh we're going back like sixty, seventy years or something, but he came up with this idea That Shakespeare was actually an aristocrat called Edward DeVere, the Earl of Oxford.

Problem is Ad Edward DeVere died in sixteen oh four. That's before Macbeth, that's before Antony and Cleopatra, that's before Coriolanus, that's before the Tempest. So he managed to I think they get around it by saying he wrote these plays And then he and then he died. Or or the or something. Yeah. So so even though some of those plays actually have cultural references from the time after DeVere died, but it doesn't matter, maybe he was a prophet as well.

But all of the all of the guy you you speak to these people, you'll you'll see what I mean. Edward DeVere, they think some people think it was Francis Bacon, some people think it was Christopher Marlowe, some people think it was Elizabeth the First. Like all all of the candidates they put up, right, the key thing is they're all aristocrats, they're all posh. Why?'Cause Shakespeare was a middle class, lower middle class, not very rich, didn't go to university, came from the Midlands

You know, up and coming guy who and they say, Well, how could someone like that write about kings and lords and ladies? It's snobbery. They're basically saying Working class people can't do can't do art. That I mean really that's what it is. Otherwise they wouldn't be going after all these aristocrats. And the uh it's the opposite in America.

Is it? Yeah. So if you were a Rockefeller in America, you're from the Rockefeller family and you wrote an amazing novel, no one would believe it. Right. Okay. grinding, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes alone in their apartment to write something that's brilliant. So I wonder what it is about the UK. Well, although like I say, a lot of it comes from America and

Is it just the I the need to tear down an icon? Is it that? Is it I mean I get it now with this woman who's who's saying Shakespeare was a black woman. I get that at the moment because we're in this moment of identitarian group identity mania, right? So that makes sense. She's got a political reason why she wants it to be a black woman. So I kind of understand that more. But what is it I think it might be more to do with the idea that

This guy changed civilisation, changed literature. No one else has achieved what he achieved in writing. He's up there with Michelangelo, Bach, you know, all of the let's tear that down. Let's tear down Western civilization. Let's say none of this is based on anything. This is all this is all untrue. Right. I think it's to do with the

That innate iconoclasm, that innate l you know, just just t tearing down the great things about our culture. That's always been the case. And pe and people always want to tear down idols. They want to tear down you know, whoever it is, no matter what. I was watching this video we were talking about the other day of this woman talking about how the Beatles were terrible.

And this one was not very articulate, not particularly interesting, doesn't seem that compelling. And she was going on and on about how bad the Beatles were like. Yeah. You're not gonna convince anyone. That's just not gonna work. But people are gonna fucking try. They're gonna try no matter what, no matter who it is. Hendrick sucked. I've heard that before. Oh really? Hendrick sucked.

Stop. But at least that's based on an opinion, right? There's a di there's a difference between saying Jimi Hendrix sucked and Jimi Hendrix was actually uh a woman from Liverpool called Maud. Well, you know the theory about Jimi Hendrix in America. Do you know that? No. So it's the people that are like deep into the CIA and CIA conspiracies. And the what is it called? Strange Tales from the Canyon? Is that what it's called, the book?

Um so there's a book on there's a bizarre connection between a lot of the countercultural figures of the nineteen sixties and and the intelligence command. Uh one of'em is Jim Morrison's father, was like a high ranking military officer. And then there's different people from different bands that were like a key part of the counterculture movement that all have parents that were either

in intelligence communities or b uh c closely connected to it. Like a sustainable. We're scenes inside the canyon. It's a crazy book. It's uh it's fun. It's kinda fun. Uh is it crazy as in Like the revelations are crazy, or that it's just not true? Well, it they they make some broad leaps, right? So there's a lot of and then a year later he died in mysterious circumstances, or a year later he died from suicide, or a year later he died from an overdose. And yeah I'll be like, Well well, okay.

You're hanging out with a bunch of people that are doing drugs all the time and they're all near dwells and they're all hanging out in Laurel Canyon. And if you don't know Laurel Canyon, Laurel Canyon at least at the time

I mean when I first moved to Hollywood it's like all the weirdos would live in Laurel Canyon. Right. Like all the weirdos were like right there above Hollywood and there was all these crazy parties up there. It was like Laurel Canyon was nuts. And they all knew each other, right? So they're all part of that circle. So I mean this was like when I moved there in the nineties this was the case.

My friend Dave Foley had a house up there. Right. And it was like all these kooky people and he was telling me about all these kooky parties and all this different shit. It was like Laurel Canyon was always like kinda so of course a bunch of people are gonna die. The theory is that the CIA um sort of engineered this

this culture mm to I don't know why. I'm I'm not exactly sure because I haven't gotten all the way through the book. I'm like only like halfway. No. I pick it up every now and then. It's just like it's too kooky. It's not grabbing you. Well You can't make Jimi Hendrix in a lab, okay? You can't. It's just you can't fucking do it. You can't make someone that good. It's not possible. You can't tell me that if they did, why haven't they done it since? Why don't they do it all the time? Right.

And you're telling me the central intelligence cooked that guy up? So they invented him like he's like a their clone or something. I just think that they had some sort of an influence on these people, on Jim Morris. Like there's a thing about Morrison, the Mor the Morrison one, like what is the connection between Jim Morrison's dad and the intelligence agent?

There's some like tangible connection with Jim Morrison's dad. But wouldn't you just normally assume that if your dad was some high ranking military guy, first of all Never home. Yeah. Okay. So where are you? You're out running around with your friends, smoking cigarettes and fucking drinking and you're in a band and it turns out you got a lot of ank.

and uh pain because you're being neglected as as a child because your dad works sixteen hours a day trying to fuck the country over. And so what do you do? You you go counterculture. It's like it's so com the preacher's daughter, she becomes like a harlot, right? There we are, high ranking US officer with Yeah. Right. But that is okay, but again, like this is a perfect example. Wow, he's involved in the Gulf of Tonkin. Whoa.

No, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no. But his dad is. But this is the thing. They'll take something like that, they'll take various strips of coincidences, and they say this leads us to this conclusion. But all they're doing is coming up with a conclusion first and working backwards. Like th th this sort of stuff, you see it again and again. So this is how this connects with intelligence agencies. McGowan, I guess that's the author.

Core move is to group Morrison's father with other Laurel Canyon musicians' parents who worked in military, defense, or intelligence linked roles, and to frame this as evidence of a broader covert program around the nineteen sixties rock. Come on. Yeah. So are you saying that the CIA were trying to influence the culture through the medium of rock music? Uh huh. Uh and that's somehow tied to espionage and they also have that film uh

What's that? What? Jared Leto bought that place. There was a film studio in Laurel Canyon too. Oh well it's a base. It's a it's an actual base. But they were films were I was talking to Jared about that. I had di I had dinner with Jared Leto one night. He's very cool by the way. Very n really nice guy. Very normal. And by the way, he looks like he's thirty, he's fifty years old. It's crazy. Moisturizer. What are you doing with your fucking skin? Laboratory here for

So he bought that place and converted it into a home. That's where he lived. It's a dope spot. Soundstage looks quite nice. Soundstage film laboratory, two screening rooms, four editing rooms, an animation and still photo department, sound mixing studio, numerous climate controlled film vaults. And this is connected to the conspiracy somehow. Well this was an actual military base.

Okay. So this Air Force station, whatever it was, I wonder what they were doing. Like why did they need all that film Capability. That's like that's how they would make the actual like you know, real Well that makes sense. Right. Makes sense that they were right there in Hollywood if that's what they were doing. On top I don't what other other things they made. Does distill from it.

So it's just a studio then? Yeah, but it's in that same neighborhood at the s at the same time. Yeah, but so what? I mean with all of the He's not arguing for it. So the so what of it is that there wasn't that many of them to begin with. Just they all happen to be in the gym. Again and again the pattern is either there's gap

There's gaps in what we know and people decide to fill them in themselves because there's a kind of comfort to that. There's also some kind of comfort with I know something that no one else does. I've got the answer. I read a book when I was a kid, like teenager. called The Sacred Virgin and the Holy Hore.

And it was about um sort of books I read. And it was about um Jesus and it was trying to prove that Jesus was a woman. And and and as you're reading it, you're thinking, yeah, oh uh yeah Jesus is a woman. I can't believe I f look at that. And then you get to the end and you think, What the hell did I just read? And and it's that thing of you can marshal any kind of uh half baked facts or any uh you can ha marshal certain things that we can see and fill in the gaps yourself.

And lead to a crazy conclusion. What concerns me isn't so much that people do that, because people have done that forever, as long as they've been human beings, is that now people are leaping at it. And falling for it in a way that I haven't seen maybe it is just social media, right? But it is. Can I give you an example of this? So a recent one which I just thought was nuts. Did you see the portrait of King Charles the Third?

by an artist, I think his name is Yo Y E O. Um a re it's a big red portrait which currently hangs in Buckingham Palace. Oh I have seen that. If you take a qu a quarter of it, invert it, flip it, add a bit And squint, it looks like a goat devil, right? But you have to do a lot of steps to find the goat devil. Well of course and puzzle.

How dare you? How dare you dismiss that puzzle? Let's show the photo and show how it's done'cause it's kinda fun. Can you see the go Oh here we go. So can you see the girls as well? Just the photo by itself, like hey man What the fuck are you doing? Oh, it's a creepy crap. Why am I splattered in blood? I've seen it in the flesh. It's a it's a creepy.

It was an all white background. That would be one thing. Like, oh that's kind of an interesting look or p you know, pastel. So what are you saying? Are you already suspicious? Is that what you're saying? Well the p the photo's nuts. Like the painting is nuts. Where's the goat? So all you have to do is put it Together, side by side. You don't have to do that much. You exaggerated how much you have to do that.

Oh no, look. Put it back, put it back. Wait a minute, wait a minute, oh wait. I can completely see the goat now. That's a hundred percent a goat. They did it on purpose. It's a sign. Go back to the other one though. Click on that one. I see a goat there. I see some evil demon. Look at two eyeballs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, bro. What? Hundred percent. Stop.

Stop trying to gaslight me. I see a monster. Oh well. I mean You can find something in everything, man. I mean you see I can see Martha Stewart in that. The Virgin Mary and a grilled cheese sandwich.

You can see it in the clouds and the rocks and like like there's a term for this where our brains look for patterns and things and I had a conversation once with a a friend of mine that I didn't know was going crazy. Right. And uh he goes, uh Hey you want to see something crazy? And he he pulls out his phone. And he shows me a cloud. Yeah. And I go, What is that?

And he he shows me some other ones. He's got like hundreds of photos of clouds on his phone. Yeah. I go, What are you seeing? So these are UFOs. He goes, these are spaceships. This is not a regular cloud. Right. And I'm looking at the photos, like he's just been taking pictures of clouds all day and I realize, oh my God, my friend is going schizophrenic. He's a I didn't know him well. So he's a friend? Yeah. Okay, okay. The more I talked to him, the more I realized there was something crap.

Like it is a guy I hadn't seen in like maybe seven or eight years and I ran into him at a comedy. Showing me photos of clouds on his phone. Then in during the conversation I realized But but aren't you concerned that that kind of thing is now kinda common? Like that i i i from people who aren't necessarily unwell.

People who are just seeing stuff. Well it's fun. I think it's fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's exciting for people to uncover information that the general public is ignorant of. Right. And so there's an here's the thing about the laurel. There's enough of the CIA meddling in cultural events that's absolutely true and provable. Yeah. And that's MK Ultra. And that's what they did with Charles Manson. And that's the book Chaos by Tom O'Neill, which is a brilliant

Which g is a very well documented and details Jolly West and his influence on the Manson family and how they were influencing these people to try to sabotage the hippie movement. So the hippie movement was this Change in culture where all of a sudden people were rejecting the war movement, they were rejecting you know, they were free love and they were doing acid and people were freaking out, their kids were just di disappearing and following the grateful dead around.

And they took this guy, Charles Manson, this very charismatic con man, they taught him how to dose people up with acid and influence them and they got them to commit murder. But there is evidence for this, right? So you're talking about a book that is researched Right. Right. No, you're being logical. And I you know, you're correct. But what I'm saying is because of that, people go, well what else?

Well what and so then they make these big leaps like Jimi Hendrix is a CIA creation. Right. And which but if you're a logical person, you just listen to Voodoo Child's Slight Return and you're like How this is like if that's true, CIA should get back to work. Make another one of those, bro. So I wonder whether this is this is I think this is the fallout of the woke movement. This is the the divorcing

Yeah. The idea that it that it that it doesn't matter not just about what is expedient but what we want to believe. I've got friends. that human beings automatically fall into in order to support their belief systems. and enforce their particular ideology over whatever opposing ideology is. But it's escalated. It escalates, but it's because of social media that everything is escalating now. Aaron Powell But is it just social media? I mean I think another thing that's a major reason for it.

We had COVID, we had All these people tell all these experts telling us it's a racist conspiracy theory to say that it came from a lab in Wuhan. Now everyone knows that's almost certainly true. We had people in positions of authority lying to us. So It's something about this culture war that is a big thing.

But they leapt to race, didn't they? They leapt to identity. Aaron Ross Powell So if that's but i in either case, what what you've got effectively is a legitimation crisis. You've got people in charge. We've been lied to so often. But but what I don't think you should therefore do I like I'm all for being sceptical about people in authority, academics, politicians, journalists, they've all lied.

But that firstly doesn't mean that all experts and all journalists and all people have lied,'cause there've been some good ones all the way. But also that doesn't mean that you automatically leak Of course. some kind of critical analysis, the same thing that you're criticizing those people for failing at, you're falling into the same trap yourself. I don't mean you. But you're Andrew Doyle. You're a brilliant guy who writes books and you're really smart. The idea is

that you are immune to this stuff because you're intelligent, but the unwashed masses are not. I don't think I'm immune at all. I d I I I honestly don't. I wouldn't put myself in the case. Well you're immune to the dummy. I I'd like to think so. You are. I am. Yeah, but don't you think that w all of us in the right circumstances could end up falling for a little bit of a few years ago.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: But I like to believe and maybe it's a naivety on my part, but I like to believe that most people are uh you know have a kind of natural intellectual curiosity. You know, have ha if they are i if they stop for a moment and think and and uh uh you know and and don't just Trust instinct over reason. I think we're all capable of it. I just think we're not all realizing it. Well, it's not just that. It's like some people are medicated.

Right. So some people are on a bunch of different medications that dull their senses and then you've got people that have gotten to wherever they are in life. Maybe they're in their fifties. And they're set in their ways and they have no desire to change at all. And so they've been living a dumb life. for fifty plus years. You can't all of a sudden say, Hey Mark, I want you to be logical and introspective and think about this thing and analyze it and for what it really is.

Instead of holding on to your ideological beliefs that you've kind of locked yourself into and you identify with and any attacks on those is attack on you personally, I want you to just let's look at the fact. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Look, there's a lot of pressure when it comes to dating, especially in February, but you're putting too much on yourself and on your partner.

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Tackle your relationship goals this month with BetterHelp. Sign up and get ten percent off at betterhelp dot com slash JRE. That's better. H-E-L-P dot com slash J R E But you saying that sounds very persuasive to me. Like the way you put that. Like if I were that guy, I'd be like, Oh, I'd listen to Joe now. You're just a fucking thing. I've been called I've been told I I get dark money. Oh yeah.

How do you get any of that? Well I love it. I want it. I want the diamond. It's so dark I haven't seen any of it. That's how dark it is. What is dark money? uh ideologue who's sort of slipping you money to say the thing. You know what it is? It's that thing of I don't believe that you disagree with me. I'm too narcissistic to believe that you disagree with me. You must be being paid to have you picking off. You're paid off. Trust me, I would love that. If anyone's out there wants to pay me off.

I'll be a mouthpiece. I'm you know but it's I haven't had that opportunity. It's pretty low. I'm a bit of a whore. If if all if truth be told. I've got a mortgage. Come on. I will say any crazy shit if you want me to. Well there's certainly a lot of people that fall into that category too. So people do get nervous about it. I mean obviously you're joking.

But there's a lot of people that will change their opinion if money comes their way. But I I like to a assume people mean what they say, and my logic behind that is even when they don't, you can still dismantle the argument even if it's authentic or not.

You know, even if it's authentically believed. Sure. So so that that I think that's just the best way to go about it. Trevor Burrus, Jr. The best way is debate. That's the best way. Or at least conversation. Aaron Ross Powell But that's what we've lost. I don't know. No, I know what you mean. You mean the the Uh so recent can I can I give you an example of that? My my um so I went to uh UC Burke. The University of UC Berkeley in California.

Well, almost naught, right? So I what had happened was, you know, Charlie Kirk's tour was planned to go all the way through and this was the last date, the Berkeley date, and after his assassination various people went and did the shows because they said because Turning Point rightly said, we're not gonna give an assassin the veto of our tour. We finished the tour.

And uh Rob Schneider, who I've been working with in Arizona, I've come over here to work with him. The comedian? Yeah. Okay So so I've been this is how I escaped from the UK, I should say. So me and Graeme Linahan, who you've had on your show, the comedy writer. My comedy uh writing partner and friend Martin Gorley, the three of us. We uh decided that things were so bad in the UK

Uh we'd rather write and do creative stuff in America. Rob Schneider, who I'd met many years ago, he said come on over, we'll set up a production company. We've been working in Arizona on all these various projects. It's so liberating and also it's the middle of the desert so I fucking love it.

The heat and you know you go from England to that, it's kind of it's kind of exciting. So so we've been able to you know we and look, I don't want to do down the UK or say but what I will just say is the creative industries there are pretty stagnant. They're not like here. So many more ways. How can you be free? How can you if you were worried about going to jail for a meme got arrested at the end by five armed officers? Right after he left this podcast. Was that it? Yes.

And it was He came over, did this podcast, went back to visit his family and got arrested. And you know what? So when people say to me that's not a real problem, that I mean Graham had done three tweets. One of them was just uh they were all joke tweets, by the way. They were all jokes and one of them was just it was something like Ladies, if a guy's in your changing room or in your bathroom, scream, make a fuss, call the police. If all else fails, kick him in the ball.

And it's obviously a th a wry way of saying, Look, the guy's got genitals, the guy's a that was why he got arrested. He on the night he got arrested he was texting me. He said, I've just been arrested. I've been taken to the hospital'cause my blood pressure is so high. The police took him to the hospital because they'd raised'cause

And and you s and you say there's no problem in the UK with creativity. He's one of our best comedy writers. He's the most beloved comedy writer. He hasn't been w able to work in T V for six years. Right? How can you be creative in that environment? And so we just figured Let's let's get on a raft. So for people don't know, I should probably tell everybody. You are Tatiana McGrath.

So yeah. Well here's what's funny about that. Your satirical character who you created many, many years ago, when did you create her? Two thousand and eighteen. Okay. When you created her, I had you on the podcast shortly after. We we laughed about it. I have seen her. quote tweeted with people agreeing with her. Yeah, even now. Yeah. All the time. So with uh it's so I yeah, I imp if people don't know, it's a character called Titania McGrath.

She's a woke just so social justice warrior, right? It's fucking great. It's one of my favorite follows. But you know, I I I don't do it as often as I used to. You know, I used to do it all the time. But then I wrote two books as her I did a live show as her. By the way, when we when I did a live show we were booked in for a week in the West End in London.

And then the head of the theatre found out and scotched it and s and and actually said, Oh well I didn't know about this and the contracts are all signed. Absolutely crazy. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Um but we did the show well it does matter, I suppose. Um but the point is that, you know, so I I did this character. Attire at your theater? My God. Well, the theatre industry in the UK is even worse than comedy if you want to go there. Oh it's really, really bad. But um

Like uh I've been in t I t in two different theatres in London I've been had the same experience of standing at the bar with a woman complaining because there's men uh pissing in her toilet and they're doing nothing about it. Because all the theatres in London have made it all gender neutral, they've gone completely Completely hardcore work. Anyway, that's not the point. But with with Titanic, what what I find so surprising is

Every now and then if something annoys me I'll tweet. Or or or if I think of something I'll do so I don't do it anywhere near as often as I use. But even now. Uh, I did a tweet about you know when all the people in London were marching? uh about the peace deal in the Middle East. Mm. And I did a tweet as her saying, I've been marching all day, you know, I want a t I want a peace deal that was not arranged by Donald Trump. We're never gonna give up this fight, right? And

Ted Cruz retweeted it saying, Can this be real? So e even even now These fucking boomers. He's not even a boomer. He's not even a boomer. I think he's younger than me. How old is Ted Cruz? I think he's younger than me, which is hilarious. I had the same with I did one about how does he not know? Does he have no friends? How old is fucking Ted Cruz?

Okay. That's crazy. So that dude's three years younger than me and he doesn't he doesn't know satire? The anger I got from I did one the other day or recently about the Iran protest. When did he tweet about this? That's hilarious. Yeah. Your that account There it is, there it is. How how many follows does T Okay so this oh sorry this is possibly real? No obvious it's not a big thing.

I just fired my immigrant housekeeper because even though I'd educated her about the evils of Donald Trump, she still voted for him. There's no place for racism in my house. Click on your account, I want to see how many followers you have. Okay, 733,000. That's a famous account. Like, yeah. It's radical intersexualist poet, non-white, obviously white, ecosexual, hilarious, pronouns, variable, selfless and brave by my book.

You'd think it was obvious, wouldn't you? Obviously I mean, maybe he's busy. Maybe he's busy and someone sent him that and he just doesn't know and but it's very funny. It's very funny. But then on the other hand. Can get us close to the case. I mean in the eight years Since you created her, she has become like more real. Yeah. It's like when AI is gonna turn her into a real person. Yeah. Like oh oh maybe. Oh a good example of that. I was uh just I use AI mostly as a search engine.

'Cause what's great about it is you can say, Oh, I read an article like ten years ago that said something like this. And it'll find it and you'd never find that on Google. Right. And I was trying to find this article it was from my book actually. There was a there was a a case in the UK where a uh a guy had raped a thirteen year old girl but because he was um he was Muslim and he'd gone to a madrasa and the judge let him off jail time, said you were very sexually naive, you didn't understand

Uh the guy was saying, Oh, I I thought women were nothing and like a lollipop you dropped on the floor and the judge let him off jail time and I thought this is quite extreme. And I could I found it. It came up on ChatGPT and then it deleted.

And I said, Um, oh uh I think you just deleted the information for me. It's in the public domain, why did you do that? It said, Oh uh you know, it's fine, it might violate my terms of service and I said, Well how could it? This is an article that's in the public domain. So it gave me the information again, deleted it again.

I said, you keep deleting this, stop it. It said, I definitely won't delete it, then it did the same again. So what it's doing is it's saying, because this is a news story that could be deemed anti-immigrant, or this is a news story that is politically sensitive, I'm not gonna let you see it.

Was this in America you were doing this? UK. Oh I wonder if you could do it in America. Let's find out. Let's try well let's try perplexity. Put that into perplexity, see if I d I doubt that perplexity would be article. Well why don't you just ask the question? So it's it's it's a story about uh a minute. That would take that take a while to Will it? How I mean Maybe he didn't do it ten years ago, he did it recently.

No, no, it was a story it's a story from years ago. Right, but you found it with Chat GPT, which is obviously recently. I found a daily mail article about it. So it's on public domain, it's there. But it just it just it didn't want me to find the fact that it I decided wasn't good for me to find. Right. But it showed it to you and then it pulled it back, which is crazy. Like how does it not know? It showed it and deleted it.

It it showed it and deleted it four or five times. And I r realized I'm not gonna I'm not gonna get this information. But then I So when it showed it, how long did it show it for? Like about five seconds. You'd see the text appearing and then it deletes. But I'd seen enough to find it then on Google, so I was able to find it and quote it in my book, so it's there.

It made me think it's like that thing about when people were asking Alexa, you know, do white lives matter? And and it was coming up with this kind of very uh ideological but and and you do wonder with with AI and with the computers, you know if If they are created by people who have that bias. I know Grok is very different. But like um for instance, I mean this is a crazy example.

A Chat GPT is like an old school mom that w that wants to make sure that you you're protected, right? I was writing this sounds really wanky, I'm sorry, but I was writing about the Roman historian Suetonius. And there's a passage in Suetonius where he talks about the Emperor Tiberius, and it's very sexually explicit. But I was quoting it for an article, so I wanted to know what it said. And ChatGPT said, I can't translate the Latin.

Because this is too sexually uh un uh uh you know problematic I went on to Grok and it did it straight away. Because Grok isn't saying that you uh are are too delicate to read this stuff. And what's really funny about that is the old dual translations of the old Roman and Greek texts, they're called Lerb editions. You get them from nineteen hundred.

They kept ev they translated everything except for the rude bits which they kept in Latin. So Chad GPT is like the old, you know, p patronizing scholars of a of old who said, This is just for the l learned people. You can't learn this. The first iteration of Google Gemini, that was the word That turned Nazi soldiers into black people. I don't know how that's a positive message. Showed us photos of German soldiers from World War Two and it was all interracial. Yeah, and Vikings. Yes.

I don't know if you've been to Scandinavia. Diversity not their big thing. Or certainly wasn't then. The Vikings came and marauded and raped and set hide the villages, but at least they were diverse. Hey. You know, at least they had a broad range of ethnicities, right? But I mean we're nearing a time in America where white people are not the majority in America.

So at what point in time does that stop and we just call people what they are, just people. But doesn't it bother you a bit that th the thing about that kind of thing is this as I say, this i obsession with group identity, which is so of our time.

What it now actually means is re the revision of history. If you're gonna revise history and say oh actually you know you've seen all these sort of period dramas set in England. There was a black Anne Boleyn as they went Henry the Eighth would have married a black woman. No he wouldn't. Uh you know that you're

She was a very attractive woman. Hey, I I'm not mocking her or knocking her. But back then What I'm saying is you can do anything with colourblind cast colorblind casting has never really particularly bothered me, but it's when you are in a if you're playing hyper realism. Yeah.

And you're suddenly populating Edwardian England or pre-Edwardian England as an ethnically diverse place, which it wasn't. I'm not saying black people weren't there, but they were very, very a very small minority. Isn't that a problem in the new Odyssey? Well, I say that. I just saw it online, so I might be being tricked by someone making something up. I think Helen of Troy is black in the new Odyssey. Well let's find out. Um can we check that one?

I'll tell you why I think that's ridiculous. How how far do we have to swing the pendulum until Roots is redone with white people? Can you imagine? Or an all black Shinders list. Right, right, right. Can you imagine that? Helen of Troy to be portrayed by black actress in New Odyssey movie. And look, I'm sure she's very talented, I'm not knocking her. But the thing about the Greek the thing about Helen of Troy

Who probably didn't exist. I mean even the Greeks knew she probably didn't even exist. She's a myth. She's a She's the epitome of Greek beauty. She's like the uh sh she's sh she's described all the time in the ancient texts as fair and blonde and and uh they're they're they're reaching for an ideal of beauty. That's why they went to war because of this.

So they wouldn't choose what they used to call an Ethiop. The Greeks had a word for it, the black African people. They wouldn't choose a an icon of cultural beauty from a different culture. They wouldn't have done that. You know? It's all very well saying Greeks and Mediterranean people and gr you know would have wouldn't have been pure white. But Helen of a Troy is a very specific and it's actually quite important to the to the plot.

And and and again, if you're doing a look, for instance, when they did the all black Wizard of Oz, the Wiz, I imagine that in the late sixties would have been quite radical and fun and wow, I can't believe they did that, that's brilliant. But doing it now is really boring because everyone is doing it. It's so banal. It's basically saying group identity is everything and you you people can't be racist and so therefore gonna

But it sometimes throws you out of the actually I'll tell you the worst example. Did you ever see Darkest Hour, the Winston Churchill film? No. So you know obviously he took on Parliament, he said we're not gonna appease. Um there's a scene in the film, Gary Oldman plays him.

He goes down into the tube, the underground, and he's wrestling with his conscience and there's loads of black people on the tube. There's white people too, but there's loads of black people and they the public convince him, No, you you need to stand up for Hitler Now we know that Churchill wasn't was a bit of a racist, didn't really like the you know, fine he was of his time. I'm not saying anything more than that, he was of his time. But that it was so unreal. It was so unrealistic it was so

It was almost like the filmmakers w were saying, racism's never been a problem in the UK. Well actually it has. Like and I kinda think this is I I kinda think this is Although it's ostensibly progressive, I think it does the reverse. I think it says Do you we never had a problem with race. We were all wonderful kumbaya. No, we weren't. And actually the abolitionists

The the Thomas Henry Huxley's of the world, the people who had to fight a for racial equality and parity, they had something to fight against. Misrepresenting stuff in the art. And then beyond I'm sorry I'm ranting now'cause it really bothers me but beyond that, it throws you out of it in a way that you suddenly think, I'm no longer watching a film, I'm watching a sermon.

Oh, th so this happened to me last week. Have you seen the Netflix series Ripley about the talented Mr. Ripley? No, I have not. Right. Now you remember there used to be that film with Matt Damon years ago. It's the same story, same novel, an old Patricia Haysmith novel. One of the main male characters in that TV ser is a brilliant like Andrew Scott, isn't it?

Performances are brilliant, they play it hyper realistically, it's all black and white, it looks beautiful. On the Amalfi coast it's wonderful. Everything's working brilliantly. And I was thinking, this is great. I'm not being preached at. Then a major male character turns up, played by a woman who calls herself non binary, and and Not only are we meant to believe that that's a man, the characters don't notice that it's a woman in a man's clot in man's clothing. So we're meant to believe

These characters don't even cla like not one per Ripley doesn't say, Why is why is she wearing a why is she wearing a suit? This is set in the sixties, by the way. So I think if they wanted to change the novel and create a kind of You know, like one of those Butch Dykes of the day who used to go for sort sort of like um uh or a Just like Ellen. Yeah, or yeah. Or the androgynous type like those those people have always existed. Why not change the character?

to make it a female character who who who likes the likes looking like a man. Why not do that? Why tell us you no, this is a man. You have to believe it's a man. Do you see what I mean? Like it throws you out of the room. It's crazy. I no longer believe in this. I had to stop watching it because I no longer believed in it. Well, I think the problem the real problem with trying to shove that down people's throats is it creates the opposite reaction.

Right, right. It creates homophobia, transphobia, and racism. Because like it doesn't create it, but it makes them feel like they have a point. Well, you've seen recently that the polls regarding gay rights in the US seem to be going down tumbling. Support for gay rights, support for gay marriage. We've had I think a number of states trying to overturn the the gay marriage uh legislation. And the reason for all of that, I think.

Being gay has been tied to this LGBTQIA identity obsessed movement that has also involved uh the medicalization of kids.

sterilization of kids, twerking in front of children, and now people are saying this is because you gave us gay marriage, this is because you let the gays marry. And because of that, you've allowed all this other stuff. You've opened this box and everything else has ki has tumbled out. And that's not That's not true because the fundamental point about the uh about the belief in gender identity is it is fundamentally anti gay as a principle.

Right, because what it says is c you know I know I'm telling you something you already know, but like gay gay rights was predicated on the idea that there's a minority of people in every society who are attracted innately to their own biological sex. If you say biological sex doesn't matter

And actually you've you've g you're attracted to a s a kind of gendered soul, you're attracted to an essence, you're attracted to how someone identifies. Well, first of all you don't know gay people if you think that's the case. They're not they're not attracted to how you see yourself. Right.

They're they they know gay men, I don't want to be crude, know what a penis is, right? And and and uh they know how to sniff one out. Now I and I think this idea this idea that that that they're attracted to the way that you perceive yourself. No.

And not only that, then you get you know, like in Australia at the moment, lesbians are not allowed to gather legally if there's a man who says he's a lesbian and wants to join them. That is against the law in Australia now. So y you can't do that. Wait, wait a minute, what do you mean?

So uh the Australian Human Rights Commission ruled that if you are if you have an all female event, right, so like a lesbian gathering maybe, something like that, um, you have to include men who identify as women. Oh god. Because otherwise you are discriminating. Um there was a woman who I interviewed on a sho I had a show in the UK on GB News up until recently, and I interviewed this woman called Sal Grover.

And she's an Australian woman, used to write for Hollywood, I think. Um she created a a woman's app, women's only app, and this was in the wake of me too, you know, so there's all that going on. And she wanted to create a space for women. And a guy called Roxanne Tickle Right. They always have these kind of uh stripper names.

Wanted to get on the app which was called Giggle. So by the way, this court case is called Giggle versus Tickle, right? I'm not kidding. Boy. And he said I he got on the app, she kicked him off because it's a it's a bloken address. And um he sued and won. And in the court case the judge actually said uh sex is changeable. Well it's not, no matter what a c a uh a guy in a wig says. Um but she's now appealing and going through all the all thuff just in the future from ever cont

And you know, not only that. I mean we've just had the other day, was it yesterday, um did you see the uh the girl who was uh used to identify as trans, g a girl called Fox Varian? Right. Especially if you you have children, you you realize like they change their the way they think about things year to year. They and if you uh ki children are so malleable. is that you have to love them. But you don't wanna steer them in any direction. You wanna let them be their own person

Right. And you know, it's like you I tried to expose my children to a bunch of different things and find out what they enjoy. And what if you do that you find out that they're all different. They all like different stuff. They just gravitate towards different things. And if you are a domineering, overbearing, mentally ill parent, you can convince your child. Almost anything. Almost anything.

This is what it is. Because they're children. This is why you don't get fifty five year old union guys who become suicide bombers. They're like And of course, you know. I get seventy two virgins? What? Yeah. Like it's not gonna work. But you can get young, impressionable children and you can convince them of almost anything. Like convincing them that they're actually

a woman in a man's body and don't you want to be a woman and let's get you on hormone blockers. Okay, mom. Yeah. And then all of a sudden you're ruining this child's life. But also, I mean, there will be kids who are struggling with the how they see themselves in the world. There's girls in particular who

You know, they're developing into women and they don't like the sexual attention they're getting. They'd love to get Especially autistic girls. So what what well that's another point. So this is the other this is the other reason why I think the movement is essentially anti gay. Because you know the Tavistock Pediatric Pediatric Clinic in London, which was an NHS gender clinic, which has been closed as a result of the CAS review, this report into pediatric gender care.

They found uh uh um there's a book by Hannah Barnes called Time to Think, which found that between eighty and ninety percent of all adolescents referred to that clinic were same-sex attracted. So they were either gay or lesbian or bisexual.

Now that means you've effectively got gay conversion therapy going on on the N on the NHS. Right. And so you know, I had you know, I'm friends with um a couple of lesbians who run the L G B Alliance in London. They have an annual conference for gay rights and they're talking about gay rights, you know. These young non uh non binary identified people broke in, unleashed uh locusts and um Crickets and insects.

a plague of fucking locusts into a gay rights conference. Isn't that the sort of thing neo Nazis used to do? Right. So I I I mean I I you know I w I I think you need to have sympathy with with with people and whatever they're going through, but don't tell a child if a child tells you

I think I'm in the wrong body. Don't say yes. Say that's not possible. Human beings can't change sex. But let's explore psychotherapeutically what needs to happen. Let's look at Los Angeles, which is, in my opinion, one of the most mentally ill spots in the Yeah it's a very weird place. That's why you left. Well, I mean I left for a bunch of reasons. Uh mostly I really left because they were telling us we can't do comedy.

But the point is like Los Angeles is a very mentally ill place. Like uh if you just looked at like the just the sheer numbers of people that are medicated and fucked up. Okay. If that's the place that's dictating the tone for the rest of the world, that's dangerous.

'Cause these are a lot of people that just desperately want attention, they desperately want to get accepted, they have to go through the audition process, so they have to change who they are, to talk to the producers, to try to form themselves into something to be s accepted. There's a disproportionate amount of trans kids that are involved in Hollywood.

It's largely dispro disproportionate. Of course. Some of'em have two trans kids, three trans kids. It's like what the fuck is going on here? This is not normal. This is not this is not no influence whatsoever. This is You're using that child as a virtue flag. You're flying that child as a trans flag in the front of your porch. I have a trans kid. But don't you think that that like a lawsuit like this, that's gonna change things because no one's gonna ensure that kind of procedure anymore.

No one's c like that's a surgeon and a psychotherapist who are now lumbered with a two million dollar. Bill. Yes. For the yeah. That's what I mean. The thing about the the horrible thing about these cases is not just that these children have have their lives ruined by these surgeries and have been sterilized and It's also that they've been attacked. Yeah. So ruthlessly. You mean you're talking about children that have made a mistake.

someone coerced them into making this mistake that's changed their body for the rest of their life and they're getting attacked online. Yeah. Like you imagine being a fragile child already who's willing to go through this procedure, can't believe they did it, now they don't have breasts anymore, their voice is deep forever, they're all fucked up. Yeah. And then people are screaming at them online. Yeah.

But you know, this is how the the satanic child abuse um panic of the eighties this came to an end because of lawsuit. When you know when they started when they realize that these psychotherapists have been le using these leading questions, effectively telling them you've repressed the memory. You know, there was that book, The Courage to Heal, where it said, if you think you might have been abused, you probably were. Like such a reckless thing to say. Right. And and all these people accused.

None of it was true and but when they started suing the uh the uh psychotherapists, it all collapsed. Right. And I wonder whether uh hysteria can collapse if you Actually money talks. When Elon bought Twitter, the amount of trans identified kids started to drop off. The amount of non binary identified kids started to drop off. Right. And that I think is a direct result of people being able to say what they really think think.

Like my friend Megan Murphy, she was banned off of Twitter until Elon bought it because she said a man is never a woman. That's all she said. Right. A man is never a woman. She was arguing with people about Biological males who identify as women, being able to get into women's spaces, and she said a man is never a woman. Banned forever. So no one wanted to talk about this. See, there was no real discourse, and if there's no real discourse,

then you can push a goofy ideology pretty fucking far. But as soon as people jump on board and start posting funny memes and and Elon says it's open season, do whatever you want. Yeah and he calls it the woke mind virus and everybody's like piling in. Well then you have discourse and then anything that's absurd

immediately gets shot down because people say, No, this doesn't make any sense. This is crazy. It comes back to what you say. You said about debate, you said about discourse. You said about if you unless you I mean I just saw today, just on you know, obviously on Twitter'cause I'm always on it. But I saw

John Lithgau, you know the actor, brilliant actor, who plays Dumbledore in the new Harry Potter thing, saying that J.K. Rowling's views are inexplicable. Inexplicable. It means you haven't read them. Like JK Rowling is is for women's rights and she recognizes that women's rights depend on the recognition of biological sex for the preservation of single-sex spaces. It's as simple as that. All he has to do is read the essay she wrote on a blog.

eight years ago. He can't even he's not even sufficiently intellectual cure intellectually curious to do that. And he goes out and says it's inexplicable. Women's rights and gay rights are inexplicable. Really? Or are you just not having the conversation? You're just shutting yourself up and saying, My friends have said she's evil.

But would be criticized if he supported J. K. Rowling. If he supported J. K. Rowling, he would be attacked. So it's a calculation you're saying. Yes. Maybe. It's the same thing we're talking about with Hollywood being mentally ill. It's the same thing. Where you have to shape your opinions Based on how you'll be accepted by the group. It's the most groupthink place I've ever been in my life. There it's almost universally left-leaning.

But isn't that the problem in comedy? Like with the UK, so many people who would otherwise be innovative, subversive comics, they've got nowhere to go. Right. So they just tailored the colour. They come to Austin like I did, right? That's it. They come to they come to I I I and I I I get so sick of it'cause I know in America it's much better. But in the UK

All of like th my old friends from the comedy circuit who tell me, No one's self censoring. You can say what you want. No I'm like, are you kidding? Like the list of people I know who have had shows cancelled, taken off Uh because they caused offense. Uh this week Leo Kirs, friend of mine, had one of his shows on his tour just deleted because some activists complained to the venue, right? So so it's happening all the time and they're e ignoring this Himalayan mountain of evidence.

Um and they're saying it's not a thing. But of course people are self censoring it. Michael Rappaport got his shows uh he got his shows cancelled from Cap City Comedy Club. Did he? Which is our other comedy club in Which is a great club, owned by Helium. Right. Because Michael Rappaport is very pro Israel. Right. And uh apparently Why does that make you racist? I don't know what he said, so I don't want to speak out of turn. I don't know what exactly he said.

Oh. Uh don't think that she has been uh sorry, back to the Odyssey thing. Oh yeah, yeah. She m has been uh cast in the movie. But only Twitter rumors have said what her position in the movie is and then everybody has ran with it. So she could be anything someone else. Well there we go. Well isn't that what I said? What is that article that you just clipped? This is the one I showed earlier the Hungarian That's a niche.

That's shame. How dare you let that sneak by? A are you being paid by the Hungarian Conservatives? Meanwhile, it's probably a fucking troll farm in Pakistan. Yeah. Good for the Hungarian Conservative getting out coming out on top of the Google search. That's pretty good. But I did I not say I'm not sure about this, it's a Twitter rumor. But look, Elon Musk bought into it. Elon Musk as Christopher Nolan has lost his integrity.

That's how it's read so Eli. So there we go. The dude's too busy be be building rockets to pay attention to what he tweets. But this proves the point. Like let's not Oh yeah, he's gonna take us to the moon again. So you know, that's why he's not isn't he? No, Artemis is. NASA. Oh, is he working with NASA with Artemis? Again.

But that's probably like oh show you some things. But that's okay. So that is a perfect example because I am always now as a even when I mentioned that earlier, I was cautious, wasn't I? Right. Because I know

I've I've fallen for this so many times. I now double check and triple check everything. And I wish I didn't have to, but you do have to, because even the mainstream uh media lie about stuff. Yeah and then and then Twitter rumors go absolutely mad. Well it's it's important when you're talking Ja, ja.

It doesn't make any sense. Well you sort of can. I like I think an artist should be able to do what they want. And I think if you want to like they do it with Shakespeare all the time, sorry to go back to Shakespeare but I you rarely go and see a Shakespeare play today that hasn't been filtered through the prism of identity politics and changed in the Right, but that's not the same. That's not the same as historical figures.

Uh well, he wrote histories, he wrote about kings, Henry the Seventh, Henry the Fifth. Yeah. That's fiction. Right? Like the the thing about the Odyssey is definitely fiction. It is sort of, but you know, they didn't think Troy existed. And then they found out it does. Right. So it's based on myth. But you remember like they thought that Troy was a completely mythological creation. So it's an actual thing. You didn't know that? No. Yeah, they found it. When did they find Troy?

It was in the twentieth century. Um so for the longest time. But there wouldn't have been sirens and there wouldn't have been uh psychopses and there wouldn't have you know what I mean? Like Oh Joe. No psychopses uh they think we're actually elephant skulls. That's what they think that was. Right. Okay. Do you ever see an elephant skull? I have never seen an animation. Yeah. And like, oh my God, cyclopses are real.

Fair enough. I mean I'm evidence allegedly real place began to emerge in the eighteen seventies. Henrik Schliemann uh discovered large scale excavations at the Hisarolic. uh in northwestern Turkey in eighteen seventy. So when did they first uh start excavating? So where is it? It's in Turkey. a revising of the beginning of civilization are now pointing to Turkey. Yeah. As opposed to uh like Iraq.

Yeah. Well the Greeks were everywhere, you know? So the Mesopotamians and the I mean that that doesn't surprise me. I mean I I th I think the re the point I was making about Helen of Choi is that Even if it's not real, even if it's not history, the myth of Helen of Troy means something quite significant within that story. Yes. So if you subvert that, the the the the fundamental aspects of the story itself doesn't work.

Right. And you can't buy into the myth. It's like if you turn the elephant man into a handsome fellow with a six pack. Exactly that. Don't give them ideas. Don't give them ideas that do. Um can you show me a photograph of an elephant skull? It's really kooky. But you see an elephant skull and you're like, Oh I saw it. I could totally see you falling for that. Yeah. What the fuck is that?

Like look at an elephant skull. Isn't it nutty? Oh completely. Yes. Yeah. And it's gonna be a big old beast. Right. So you're gonna think it's a big giant thing with tusks coming out of its mouth. Like look look what the s look at the actual cyclops on the left. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Of course.

No, it makes sense. Makes complete sense. Complete sense. Yeah. Yeah. You found that, you're like, oh my god, cyclopses are real. You would think, oh my god, these monsters. Isn't that funny? What a weird shaped skull. So strange. You never think the eyeballs would be down there by the cheekbones. That's what's weird about I have to say elephant anatomy is something I'm not on the other thing.

I'm not brushed up on that one. Show the photo again. Look at that photo where the eyeballs are. So where the eyeballs are where the cheekbones are. See? See the little circular holes where the cheeks are? Now when you see an elephant in the flesh, like show me a photograph of an elephant. Just uh elephant. So see where their eyeballs are? Isn't that crazy?

That's not how you think of them, is it? No. Well, they're so strange. Like give me that s uh the second one on the left. Yeah, look at that. Click on that. What a wild animal. They're amazing. Have you never seen one of those before? You'd be like, I know in a zoo. Crazy. I've rode one in Thailand. No. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I don't recommend it. I don't think you should ride them. My f whole family wanted to do it. I didn't want to do it. I felt like it's exploiting them. But they're very sweet. They're gentle, aren't they? Yeah. It's a whole process. So one of the things you do when you go to Thailand is

you uh take care of them first before you ro you don't just hop on them, you feed them. Right. So you give them a bunch of sugar cane and you pet them and they teach you to like so that the animal understands you have a general But that it's intelligence, right? It's because they're smart. Oh, they are scary beasts. But they're not like the hippo. The hippo will kill you. You cannot do that with a hippo. So dangerous we think they're really cute and fat.

But they are f fucking dangerous and they can run fast and they can tear you apart. And they will. But the the key the key difference I believe is the intelligent thing. Yeah. And you can also become friends Yes. Like uh you can actually take care of an elephant and be kind to an elephant and that elephant will like the be gentle. Yeah, they come up to you and the so you feed them sugar cane and you talk to them, you say, Hey buddy, how are you? And you pet them and you wash them. You wash them.

No, I would never have an elephant. I'd be friends with an elephant, but he'd have to be wild. Like I just don't agree with any of that. Well having them in zoos and things. No, I hate it. I think I think if you're gonna have animals, you should have a gigantic area that is a a true ecosystem that they exist in naturally. Yeah. And then people can maybe venture into that ecosystem

And explore it. I felt that way. I was at the zoo recently in Arizona and I felt I felt there was one Jaguar pacing obsessively and I thought I just felt this we're just like it's like going to you know, like in the E Elizabethan era they used to go to Bedlam to watch the people who were mad.

As an entertainment thing, it felt a little bit like we were doing that like a little bit of a little bit of a little bit far too much appreciation for the wild. Yeah, yeah. You know, I have animals that are contained at my house. But they have been watered down by selective breeding to the point where they can't even

Like I have a a King Charles Spaniel, he's this tiny little fella. Like he's incapable of doing anything. Right. Like he's just a little cutie pie. You can't unleash him into the wild. Right. And I have a golden retriever who thinks everybody's his best friend. Did you see the guy who kept a hippo from birth and then it ate him? And then it kill him. Yeah, you're not going to be able to do that.

A creature that doesn't see the world that you do. Yeah. There's a lot of animals that you can breed up until you can rather uh Have them in your home, of course.

Chimps famously. Up at a certain point and then they decide I want to rip your face off. I don't like you anymore. Oh I'm sure oh uh if cats were as big as we are, they'd probably do the same. Well they would just eat you. They would they would kill you one hundred percent. The only reason why we have a relationship with cats Too small. Yeah.

Cats are great'cause they're convenient. They do what they want. They're sweet. They're sweet. I love cats. But I mean you can't have a fucking giant one. But you can if you take care of them from the time that they're cubs. Yeah. And most of the time they don't kill you. Yeah. But then you get a little Siegfried and Roy action and it just decides for whatever reason I want to drag that dude away with his neck.

But you know, these co these sorts of pleasures, you know, life with animals and l this sort of thing's gonna matter more and more. To us I think, when the robots take over. Yeah. And the uh Well, we might have to live with them. We might be wild and the robots might take over the cities. We might have be forced to be nomadic tribes again. I think they might see us.

When the the the robots would no longer allow you. You can hunt, but you have to make your own bows and arrows. I can't possibly do that. So they're gonna see us as pets, is what you think. So I want elephants to exist in a contained ecosystem where they they live naturally. And they're gonna say you can't have carbs. You can't have any of these things. So uh all the stuff I've been reading at the moment about AI is saying that

AI won't wipe us out because it'll see us in the way we see animals and way we see pets, is that we'll we think you're sweet and stupid, but we'll we we we like having you around, we'll tolerate you. Is that the way it's gonna go? I think we're going to be forced in. In what way? Like I think we already are, like Elon's

famously made the point that you're already a cyborg. You you have your phone that you just carry around with you everywhere and then with Neuralink it'll be inside your body and then whatever I wouldn't. I'm not letting that happen. You won't in the beginning

The first iterations a lot of people won't. But if it makes your life measurably better and it's a simple procedure that's non invasive, you know, it's like a simple thing that they plug into your the back yard. Well, I I'd be like a cyborg warrior. Well you would probably be connected to artificial intelligence.

And it would greatly enhance your cognitive function. Okay. And greatly enhance your access to information. It would be instantaneous. You would no longer have to read. You would just have all the information It would just completely change the way you store information because you would probably have some sort of an external hard drive that connects to you.

It would be something where your memory is no longer fallible but it's now infallible. Okay. It's gonna be a perfect four K memory or eight K memory. You're gonna be able to rewind. I mean, wasn't that an episode of Dark Mirror where they rewind their memories?

There's an interesting twist in this AI spaced uh remember you sent me that bot thing that was going around this week. Oh did you see this week? Yeah yeah yeah this is what we're talking about. So this is a new twist on it. Uh I think if this is real. Grain of salt could be bullshit. I'll just say that like the Odyssey thing. Yeah. But if this is real, the bots have made a website where they where the other bots can rent a human to do tasks at the bot Well that's slavery.

No, renting. It's a b it's like jobs. It's like a renting a human being. Oh, humans put themselves on it. It's like gig economy. Yeah, get paid your way, robot bosses Is this the thing where the robots are inventing their own language that we can't read? It's on this website, right? Yeah. But they might not have enough space. Rental human dot AI is fun. That's fun. Well you know the so the other thing is real though, right? The AI chat room where these AI agents have joined and now it's

Yes and no. Yes and no? What you mean? Some of it i they are creating a space, but I've already seen places where people are taking advantage of it for viral viral reasons. For instance, uh Let's just assume it's real. There was a like a polymarket um bet that so oh shit, what was it? Someone one of these bots would sue. And so someone actually just like went ahead and filed a lawsuit on behalf of their bot and made it look like

Oh so they can win the polymarket bet? Yeah exactly. It depends how much money is available. As far as I know, it's just like if I put up twenty bucks for a bet, now there's only twenty bucks. So that's all. Right, but if you have something where you have inside knowledge of it, is there any regulation? There's supposed to be I've like there's supposed to be rules on the bets. If I create one of those rules you're supposed to I think there's a cave. I don't know about that.

You know, the UFC is plagued with this issue. They actually canceled a fight recently because there was suspicious betting. And so there's been the one fight Some so here's the story. Okay. One guy apparently was injured and his teammates knew he was injured and so everyone started placing a bet for him to lose in the first round. Right.'Cause he apparently had a bad knee injury.

And so he knew that he couldn't fight. And so the the idea was let's make a lot of money betting on me'cause he was the favorite. He would go in there or betting against me. And so he would go in there and throw a kick, fall down injured, get beat up. They'd stop the fight.

And then all these people that knew he was injured make a ton of money. And he was in on it. Like he told them that. Allegedly. Okay. I just want to say allegedly. Okay, okay. But it's enough so that they the the team was removed from the UFC roster like If you are competing for that team you no longer can fight in the UFC. You have to find a new gym. Right. The coach was no longer allowed to coach. The fighter was banned.

And so then the FBI got involved and they said, Well there's a bunch of different fights that are suspicious. So then a bunch of fighters came out and said Hey, somebody offered me seventy thousand dollars to lose and I said no. Yeah. And so then there was a fight recently between Michael Johnson and Alexander Hernandez, which is a fight I was really looking forward to, that was canceled last minute, and I was like, what's going on? They said suspicious betting activity.

And so someone was saying that Alexander Hernandez was injured and a bunch of money came in on him to lose. He was actually a favorite going into the fight. And that therefore mate rigged it. Nope, didn't rig it because the FBI uh was informed, I believe they were informed, but the UFC was informed and the UFC pulled the fight. So wait they said because of this suspicious betting activity.

Um because a lot of leap late minute money came in on this one guy to win, we're gonna pull this fight from the card and not allow this fight to take place. and do a thorough investigation because something seems wrong because of the previous fight that they know was fixed. Trevor Burrus But fighters have been doing that for ages, haven't they? I mean that's that thing that they've always done. How does that connect then to the AI element that this website?

Well we were we were talking about betting. We were talking about polymarket. We weren't talking about AI. Polymarket privileged users made millions betting on War strikes and diplomatic strategy. What did they know beforehand? Privileged users. Right. So imagine if you're someone who's an aide to the Pentagon.

You know, you're you're working there and you know that we are it gonna bomb Iran. Yeah, yeah. And then there's a polymarket thing about it, no one else knows. Okay, okay, yes. You know? That I mean that's been going on forever though, hasn't it? People have always done that. They've always manipulated. That's a plot in Pulp Fiction, isn't it? Bruce Willis's.

He loses. So that he can make the money off. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that's always gone on. But this polymarket thing is new because you can kind of There's CalShi and then there's uh DraftKings has it now. You're speculating. Yeah, you're not taking money from the book or the house.

Okay. But the fact that they know about it and they know it's happening, that means they'll be able to crack down on it. But I don't know. Because there's a lot of st there's there's so many options and possibilities. Like unless you make a gigantic score and people start getting suspicious.

If you're not greedy about it and you just kinda sneak around a little bit here, a little bit there, I bet you could probably make a lot of money doing that. But do you think fighters and people like that and sports people generally? I mean they're too proud, aren't they, to let l let something like that go just in case just for money? No.

No, that's not true. Okay. Depends on how much money they're making. Look, if you're Anthony Joshua, I'd say yeah, you're not gonna do that. You're very wealthy. But if you're a guy who's on the undercard and you're only getting ten thousand dollars to fight, but someone's giving you a hundred thousand dollars to lose. Yeah, okay. Guys have done that forever. Yeah, I guess so. I just don't knock this guy out, whatever you do, carry him or

Carry him to the tenth round. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of that going on where they say I have a bet that you're gonna knock him out in the tenth round. So knock him out in the tenth round only. I don't think you'll ever be able to stop that. No. If that's gonna happen. No, I don't think so either. I mean that's That's gone on forever. Yeah, yeah. But isn't fighting like a kind of vocation, like a creative vocation for a lot of people? Well it is creative.

Believe it or not, um, because movement is creative. Yeah. You know, when you're fighting, you're not just running at each other and tr some guys do. But the really good guys don't just run at each other and charge. There's feints and deception, there's movement. Yeah, yeah. There's certain things that they're doing where they're reading your movement and trying to guide you in a particular direction and set you up.

Like boxers. I can believe it. Boxers call it setting traps. Yeah. Yeah. It's like playing a you got a bluff. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there's a lot of fainting involved in in fighting. There's a lot of like fake movement to get you to react and then they kick you when you settle in. You know, there's it's

R it's really creative. You know, it's just why like was it Faye Dunaway? No. Was it who was it that said, you know, that the older woman that said and and w talk about the arts and I don't mean mixed martial arts. Well like a kind of snobbish thing about Glen Close? No, it wasn't her. It was the lady from Bridges of Madison County. Who was that?

That's uh Merrill Street. Meryl Streep, that's who it was. Right. Yeah, Meryl Streep said that. It's like a it got it pissed off so many martial arts people. Why that Merrill Street doesn't matter? Who thought you were? Yeah. Who thought you were Merrill? That's crazy. But also even though it's violent, you d you think it's not art.

If you understood it, it's it is art and is in fact like a beautiful some performances are beautiful. Well it's choreography, right? Yeah. In a way. Well it's not choreography at all. It's it's ad libbing in the moment. I mean there's pre conceived motions.

that you have that you're hoping that if the guy does this you're gonna do that and sometimes it works out. Yeah. But it's like the poetry of movement of a s of a really sublime fighter like, you know, Anderson Silva in his prime. Yeah. Was beautiful to watch. I believe you. I you know, my I have very limited experience of this. I did kung fu when I was twelve and I stopped because I got so bruised. Oh I got so hurt. I was too cowardly.

of what things are, you know, from the outside and you know, it's kinda silly. Yeah. Oh Joe, I was gonna tell you about this Berkeley thing and I almost felt yeah that's right. We got onto sidetrack. Um but I think they it was a natural segue. Um because I because I think this encapsulates all of the stuff you were talking about, which is that I was going to this Basically Charlie Kirk's tour was meant to go on. Berkeley was the last day.

And um Rob Schneider had agreed to do it and um apparently he'd said to Charlie, you know, What's the wor what's the craziest place you could take me to? And he said, Berkeley, Berkeley's gonna be the craziest, let's do that. So he was already booked to do it. After what happened with Charlie? Uh, Rob asked me if I'd come along as well. And we were so we'd be on a panel. And I had no idea of the extent of the problem, right? So uh and I'm sure you know a lot more than I do.

You know, but I turned up. We were there, we we turned up and there were men with guns. We were in uh you know in an SUV under the ground. We got into this venue and Suddenly the security starts showing me footage from outside and people are it's like a war zone. People are s throwing smoke bombs, they've they're they're trying to crash through the railings. Some guy gets beaten up, he's covered in blood because he was wearing a t shirt with turning point written on it.

And I'm suddenly realizing You know what? Th this is a fantasy world that we're now occupying. We're now occupying a world where the people outside think the world is this and what's going on inside is completely disconnected from it. And I actually find it quite depressing.

'Cause when I was sitting on stage talking to Rob and Peter Bagosian and Frank Turek, these people of completely different viewpoints, we're just having a chat. Outside, they're smashing things, they're screaming, they're saying that fascists have overrun the university. Yeah. And I'm thinking Just to come back to that point you made about

You know, that need to discuss for discussion. That experience made me think, actually now what's happening is we're like we're living in two separate worlds at the same time and we can't see what we can't see what the other side is or what the what the intentions of the other side are. And I don't know how you resolve that. That to me sort of encapsulated the entire problem.

Well at this point it's gonna be very difficult to resolve and I I honestly think it's gonna take a generation to work through it. But isn't it as simple as people learning what the word fascist means, for instance? It's not just that. It's like they they firmly believe that they are trying to fight against something that is going to destroy democracy in this country, which is

Conservative values. So there's a no kings march and I couldn't figure that out. I was trying to figure out what what are they this is an elected leader. Aaron Powell Well you know it's all organized, right? You know this is all funded. Okay, it is so um this was Mike Benz's point when he was talking about the defunding of USAID and what they use that money for. NGOs uh get a bunch of money and they uh fund a bunch of things, uh particularly in other countries.

where they're essentially making it look like there's these on the ground street protests that are very organic. But it's not. It's very organized and it's very funded. And the idea is to start K. So I've seen people get caught out, people who are clearly being paid, who appear at various different things.

indoctrinating people into this particular ideology by supporting universities so you fund it in advance. So it's like decades of in this is uh I'm sure you've seen um the Russian guy from nineteen eighty four, nineteen eighty five, Yuri Bezmanov talking about The It's a wonderful video because it shows you exactly what happened. How they're gonna introduce Marxism and Leninism into universities.

and then it'll indoctrinate children and then those children will be poisoned and within one generation it'll ruin the United States' entire educational system. So that's the law Yeah, that's the law. Yeah. But l you should watch a little bit of that'cause it's it's crazy. Because back then I remember the nineteen eighties. Ever that

Would be a crazy idea. N no, universities are where people have free thought and discussion. It's very important. Yeah. You know, and I I was in a very left leaning place at the time. I was living in Boston. You know, and it was like w the probably more universities per capita than anywhere else in the country, at least at the time. And it was a very well read city. Like the idea that universities are gonna destroy the way human beings interact and debate is like preposterous.

But this guy was talking about this back then, that the Soviets had planned this in advance. And that they had essentially subverted our entire education system and thereby would those people would leave those schools indoctrinated and enter into the workforce with these new ideas in universal acceptance that these ideas are correct and then it would in turn

You know, the butterfly effect. So do you think that everyone I don't I can't be sure that it's as conspiratorial as that, because there must be A lot of you know, people who just got on board with the money. Well there's a lot of money involved in doing this. Right. There's a lot of funds that have come from China. There's a lot of money that has been donated to these universities. Like find that video.

But there's like a second version on Twitter I've never seen before. An AI moderated version. No, no. He's now in a wig. Oh I recognize him. So listen to what he says. spend on espionage as such. The other eighty five percent is a slow process. Which we call either ideological subversion or active measures, active mirapriatia in the language of of the KGB, or psychological war.

What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information No one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country. It's a great brainwashing uh process which goes very slow and it's divided in f in four basic states.

Uh the first one being demoralization. It takes from fifteen to twenty years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which requires to educate one generation of students. in the country of of of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words, Marxism-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of of of at least three generations of Americans.

without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism. The result the result you can see, most of the people who graduated in sixty. Dropouts or half-baked intellectuals are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, education, You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated. They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern.

You cannot change their mind, even if you if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other words, these people

uh uh the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To get rid society of these people you have you need another twenty or or or fifteen years to educate a new generation of patriotically minded and and and uh common common sense people who would be acting in favor and in the interests of of the uh of uh United States society. And yet these people who've been programmed and as you say in place and who are favorable to an opening

The Soviet concept. These are the very people who would be marked for extermination in this country. Most of them, yes. The psychological shock when when they will see in future what the what the beautiful society of equality and social justice means in practice. Obviously they will revolt, they will be very unhappy, frustrated people. And the Marxist-Leninist regime does not tolerate this. Uh they obviously they will join the links of dissenters, dissidents.

Uh unlike in present United States, there will be no place for dissent in in future Marxist Leninist America. Uh here you can you can get uh popular like uh Daniel Ellsberg and filthy rich like Jane Fonda for being dissident, for criticizing your Pentagon. In future these people will be simply Squashed like cockroaches. Nobody is going to pay them nothing for their beautiful, noble ideas of equality. This they don't understand, and uh it will be a greatest shock for them, of course.

The demoralisation process in the United States is basically completed already. for the last 25 years Actually it's overful filled because uh demoralization now reaches such areas where previously not even Comrade Andropov and and all his experts would would even dream of such a tremendous success. Most of it is done by Americans too. Thanks to lack of moral standards. As I mentioned before, uh exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized.

is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures. Even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it until he he is going to receive a kick in the in his fat boss. When a military boot crashes his bo then he will understand, but not before that. That's the tragic of the situation of demoralization.

Okay. Yeah. Pretty fucking accurate. Well he's describing the situation as it is at the moment, right? And he's describing it in nineteen eighty four. However, that doesn't prove that what he's just that intention to create that kind of chaos. That it was uh implemented and executed in the way that he describes. I suppose what I mean by that is

So they had actual people in universities planted in universities to deliberately execute this idea. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: This is what he was saying. And he's saying this before we even realized that it happened. I agree that it's scary. It is scary because it did happen.

But what but but that doesn't fully explain why it caught on. Why did academics who were clearly not plants, why did they catch on with this stuff? Well they don't live in the fucking real world. This is the problem with academics. They go right from universities to teaching positions. They don't have any real world experience. I mean this whole idea of the long march through the institutions, it's there in Rude Deutsche. It's there it's it was said we're gonna do this.

infiltrate the major organizations, institutions, the church. Yeah. We're going to uh over a very long period of time uh change society for the w in the way that we want to see it. I think what's happened is I think that intention was there. I think what he's saying is very eerily describing what's happening now, the demoralization and the detachment from truth. But I don't think it necessarily came about

As systematically as that. How do you think it came about? I th well for one thing, I think what we're facing now isn't quite the template that Marx would have had in mind, right? Because for one thing uh there's no emphasis on class or money or the economy or or Anything well insofar as Marxism has become about group identity. In terms of the left, the rich is a giant mantra that people chant in the streets. That's true. They're trying to tax billionaires.

But it's incoherent because it's from people who've got money. It's from the upper middle classes. that you give the unwashed masses and then they run with it. Well I wonder whether it caught on, partly through what became fashionable, what became trendy, but also because any ideology says to you, you don't have to do any thinking anymore. You can outsource that to us. We've got a set of rules. Right. And these are the rules that you've got. It's wide. I love that.

Well it's why you've got people who are Well, it's why you've got queers for Palestine. Right. You know, that can only exist when you're following a set of rules and not thinking about it for two seconds, right? That can be. Oh and I imagine throwing people off roof. Of course they are. Of course they are. I just say go and do go go go there.

And see what you see what you ex see. See what you experience. Go there's a man in a dress wearing lipstick with a beard. Good luck. Yeah, I just did a Titania tweet of a drag queen touring the Middle East and she's you know, she's touring all these venues. And and she's got the sort of the Palestine dress and then the sort of the the glam kind of

Arabic look. It's like just just go there and see what happens. But that that kind of cognitive dissonance can only work if you are if you are uh ideologically driven. And I think so I I suppose what I mean is I think the appeal of ideology Is what is what explains, not a kind of we've implant implanted these agents here, they're gonna lead to this, they're gonna lead to this. It has to also be complicity.

Of course, that comes from implanting ideas. But it isn't. Those ideas take hold and then groupthink takes it from there. Aaron Powell But isn't it a shame that the universities of all places, the place where you go to be challenged and the way the place where you go I mean I was thinking that when I was at Berkeley and I you know, I was sitting on the stage.

And there's all these men with guns all around the theatre because of course what happened with Charlie. Mm-hmm. And I'm thinking it's like the end of the Blues brothers, you know, where you're on stage and all the people are waiting in the w it felt weird and I thought this is not This is not what a university is or should be. And the other thing that I thought is a lot of those people outside protesting weren't students. They'd they'd sort of come in, they'd been bust in.

So maybe that feeds into what you were saying about, you know, s this is all hundred percent planned and covered. How are they getting bust in? Who's funding them? Right. People are paying a lot of money to do that. Right. And they're doing it all over the country. But they did it during the presidential Yeah. During the presidential elections they were tracking cell phones.

From place to place and they realized that there was a group of people that were paid attendees at Kamala Harris's rallies. Oh yeah, I remember that. And so they were getting paid. Their job was to show up and cheer for Kamala Harris. Do you think fundamentally then the Democrats are anti Democrats? I think fundamentally anybody that doesn't have organic support Is going to figure out a way in this environment to drum it up. And if you can do that through a service.

Or if you could do that through an NGO or if you could do that through a company that'll hire people to show up at your rallies, they do it'cause they wanna win and they wanna get into a position of power. Yeah. And one of the things that we do find with Trump

is that it actually turns out the president can do a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know? And we used to think that they were kind of handcuffed and they weren't able to do as much and that's why nothing ever got done. Turns out that's that's doesn't seem to be true. You get a maniac

in office and you can kinda get away with a lot of things. You can do a lot of different things. That's what we sort of need in the UK. We we need someone to come in and strip away. I mean it's a little bit of a Bezmanov was saying is that we need to

kind of a whole generation that teaches that being patriotic and having morals and ethics is actually a good thing. And that free speech is important and that to be able to debate ideas is essential to any sort of true society that considers itself an elevated Absolutely. It wasn't founded on the idea that it's y you have to adhere to one ideology and this ideology thinks that gender's not real and no one can answer what a woman

Crazy. Well w that's become popular. Well we see in America like America's the kind of life rafter of the world that you've got all these things built into your political system. Yeah. And that's why it's so scary when you see people Do you remember the um vice presidential debate between J D Vance and Tim Waltz and Tim Waltz said that uh the First Amendment doesn't cover hate speech. It doesn't cover misinformation. Exactly. Um He's a dangerous fuck.

Is saying actually we're gonna strip out all of this stuff? The way he waves and runs on stage and it's all just so fake and performative. I don't know any men like that that aren't dangerous. Why was he picked? Probably because of the Minnesota stuff. It's probably had something to do with what he was allowing to happen in Minnesota. Right. Like the min like there's a reason why he had to resign. I mean I'm clearly speculating. I have no idea

a moron when it comes to politics. But what I would ag what I would assume is that the For sure he was informed of this fraud long in advance. Right, right. If it wasn't for that Nick Shirley kid in those videos and apparently Nick Shirley had been informed by the the G O P there, that this was all going on. So this gets exposed, it gets into the public zeitgeist. It becomes a huge news story.

It's not a coincidence that the riots break out in the exact same place where all this fraud is being exposed. Because ice is everywhere. They're all over the place. But it's not The the most violent interactions are the interactions that are happening in the place where the most fraud has been publicly exposed. Yeah. It's all this is all by design. There's something very scary about it. Yeah. And so this guy knew about it in advance. How do we know?

Well one way we know is because he's resigned. So there must be something. Right, there's something. He's not running for governor again. He was in the process of running for governor. He's decided to step out of public office entirely now.

So maybe they told him if you do not step out, you were going to be prosecuted, we know what you did. Yeah. Or maybe he's going to fucking turn state's evidence. Who fucking knows? Imagine if he had have won, him and Kamala Harris, if if they would have been in charge. I mean what I'm I don't think I would have come here. Elon doesn't buy Twitter.

And Kamala Harris wins and Tim Wals is our vice president. But doesn't that just tell you how how fragile freedom is. Fragile how how close you are. Very fragile. And that's why people support Donald Trump. And the people that think that they support him because he's a racist and all these different things

No no no. They support it'cause it's an alternative to what we all saw coming. Yeah. No no one's excited that ICE is killing people in the streets. No one no one likes that. No, of course not. You you have to be fucking insane if you think those people should be just getting shot like that. That's nuts. But what they don't want is what the government was previously doing. They had a completely open border.

Bussing people into swing states. They were trying to pretend that this was all organic and it's not. It's not. It's it's a pl they had a plan. And they did it in a sneaky way where they looked like the really kind, ethical, equitable and inclusive Crowd. Right. Well that's the woke story all over again. Exactly. It was the woke stories applied to geopolitics. It was the woke stories applied to the whole political process in this country. It was dependent upon the census.

The census doesn't count citizens. The census just counts humans. And so you get more congressional congressional seats, you get more electoral points. The whole thing is nuts. I mean I like to think that not all Democrats are into that. Of course not. But the problem is it's a party. Like if you work for a corporation and you're a good person

But the corporation is promo polluting a river in Guatemala. Yeah, yeah. There's a diffusion of responsibility because you're a part of a giant system and hey, I'm just an accountant. I go to work and I do my thing for Exxon or mobil or whatever it is.

Well I'd say for however messy all of this has become in the US, at least you have had some sort of attempt to strip out the the very stuff that that guy was talking about, the fact that the civil service is all one way, the fact that the machinery of government

It that was the plan, right? So the machinery of government works in a certain way. So there's no democratic means of getting rid of it. There's no way to change it. Well I think the counter to that is the education that the internet provides. And that's where they didn't anticipate in nineteen eighty four. So the the education that the internet provides is untethered.

But then the internet tells us that uh Christopher Nolan's just made a film with the Black Helen of Troy. Right. And he hasn't. It all it produces all sorts of unsavory things too. Yeah. But it also allows the distribution of information that would be impossible through normal means. If these people are, as he said, in control of major media, which they were, in control of universities, which they are, and then it goes on to be the only way people get information, now your information is

Very heavily filtered and then all that stuff works. But that's why the technocrats in the EU, why ideologues generally are against internet or they want to censor it. Or whoever's trying to do that. So the EU the head of the EU Commission is Ursula von der Leon.

Did you hear her? Well yeah, it's a it's a sexy name, right? Yeah. She's unelected. The the the the European Commission is an unelected body that sets the legislative agenda of all these European countries. Absolutely crazy. You can't vote them out. She did a speech last May where she said and I'm not joking about this, she said that um uh misinformation was like a virus and you need to inoculate yourself against the virus. And the phrase she used is uh not debunking, pre bunking.

So pre-bunking is her idea of what you do with misinformation. What she means is censorship. Well, she's d but pre bunking is the most sinister That's crazy. Chill it like if you were to say I'm gonna come up with the most Orwellian sort of Dark Lord kind of Pre bunking. Yeah, that's like fucking minority report, right? I don't know crime. I don't know what the because I know that this this is

A free speech debate opening up between the US and and the and Europe generally. Like you know when J. D. Vance came over to Munich and gave that talk to all the European leaders? and said, You've got to stop censoring your people, you've got to stop running away from voters and they were shocked. Yeah. And they were horrified. But he was dead right. He's dead right. And he should and you know what? People on the left should admit that he's dead right as well.

But there's something about Europe, right? There's something about like I think over here, coming over here, I've I get the sense that even if most left leaning people as well as right leaning people do value free speech as a kind of shared value. And in Europe it's not that. There there's a real sense of we can't trust the masses.

Because I know that the EU is is seen as this big lefty thing, which it absolutely is not. The EU is a body that wants to censor its citizens. It's a body that tells people you can have a referendum, but if you get it wrong we're gonna make you vote again.

It's not a democratic organization. So no wonder Vance is sort of and Trump is a at loggerheads with this body because you've got these we in the UK have a authoritarian leader, Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister. He couldn't be further away from the American ideal of free speech.

He introduced this online safety bill, which is basically t this is why a lot of tweets in the UK if you go over to the UK now, a lot of the tweets will come up saying this is potentially harmful content, so we're screening it out. Uh he you know they're trying to get rid of juries for certain trials. They did get rid of juries. Right. They already did. And that's particularly dangerous because some of those cases

are uh for speech crime. Right. So uh I'll give you an example. There was a Royal Marine called Jamie Michael who had made a video just say uh saying we need to peacefully protest against the migration issue. They took him to court. Uh for stirring up racial hatred. Um but the jury is l what let him off. It was the jury that saved him. In this new system, there wouldn't be a jury there and he would be in prison. Yeah. And most certainly would be.

So I kind of feel like we and we've got Keir Starmer now for another three years. Every decision that he makes is about not trusting the public, censoring what they think. He could if he could get rid of X he absolutely would. Is it possible that someone sensible could win in three years? Or is the system So deeply entwined in the ideology o of the English people that it's just stuck. This is what I think about that.

In a way you had your culture war election because of Trump, right? Yeah. You know, I mean a lot of people say the culture war doesn't matter. Of course it does. Of course it matters. You did you see about that the the the advert that the GOP put out, you know, Kamala Harris is for they them, Trump is for you. That was the slogan. It was about um the Democrats wanting to fund transgender surgery for prisoners. And Donald Trump's team had this advert

Carmen Harris for they them. Donald Trump is for you. That actuated a 2.7 shift in favor of Donald Trump among everyone who saw it. It was a major success.

That just shows that these issues, these cultural war issues, people do care. Oh people care do vote. But you had a way in America to vote that stuff out through Trump, right? Mm-hmm. We've we've never had that. We've had a Like if they if they had more time they would You mean that if the Democrats have clung yeah, if the Democrats won this time and then they tried to do it again in twenty twenty eight?

Elon was really adamant about that during the last election. Like this might be the last real election we have if you don't stop this now. because they have an open border and in the last four years they've pulled ten at least ten million people into this country. And they've changed the electoral map. Yeah yeah. And then on top of that there was both uh Schumer and Nancy Pelosi openly talking about letting these people vote. Openly talking about giving these people a path to citizenship.

And they had already put them on Medicaid, they had already put them on social security, they were giving them E B T cards, they were housing them at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. They were giving them money and helping them get to the states. Right. They were flying them all through into America and putting them in these places because they were trying to get voters. So another four years.

In another four years they might have had it completely locked up. You know that's what the Democrats though have have said about the the Republicans. I mean Oprah Winfrey was saying this might be the last election we have if we don't vote for if we don't vote for Commonwealth.

years ago asking him to be president. Yeah, they were mates, were they? Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Look, they all get captured. They all get captured by groupthink and ideology and they all get captured by money and protecting it and who's gonna protect them and But we don't we don't have that safety valve in the UK. Like so like I say, you were able to

For all the imperfections, you were able to vote in an administration that was actually going to rip out that that whatever you call it. It showed the system is better even though the system was trying to get rigged. Enough people revolted against it. Yes. That but look at the ideas that you're attaching to this administration.

Like look, the ice stuff is horrific. The mur the people getting shot, it's it's horrific. We all agree to that. There's a lot of the authoritarian aspects that's horrific. But what they've stopped is all of this illegal immigration. Yeah. Legal immigration is still available. And then what they've also done is investigate

literally billions of dollars in fraud and they're uncovering it over and over and over and over again. So there was obviously crime that was going on that was not being addressed by the previous party. Sure. And this one of the reasons why they didn't want the Republicans getting in in the first place. So they still have to label them in the most i horrific ways possible, accentuate all the negative aspects of what's going on with the i stuff.

But n not talk at all about the economy taking an uptick, not talk at all about GDP, not talk at all about tariffs being effective, not talk at all about any of the positive things. Stopping wars. He stopped wars in multiple different countries, stopped conflicts. No one's talking at all in an objective sense. This is a Nazi party. These are fascists. We have to have no kings.

Stop the fascists. So these narratives Are just being pushed out there constantly by the media, all the while these politicians are absolutely terrified. that these investigations are gonna start moving into their states and uncovering more and more and more fraud, which they're going to But and I mean I know you say it's so reckless though I think as well for the Democrats to like you say

Paint ice as Nazis, talk about that this is the equivalent of the Gestapo. I think someone used that phrase. I mean I know what you're saying about the shootings, obviously we all agree it's absolutely horrific. Any kind of Situation where the police inflict that kind of violence on someone needs to be thoroughly investigated and looked into and all the rest of it. But I'm I'm concerned about the politicians saying, No, go there. Get in the way of federal agents while they're enforcing the law.

But but but won't they're putting people's lives at risk, aren't they? But it's again that that chess move again. Giving up the rook. Or uh uh attacking a rook and giving up your queen because of it because you just want the t the current. But it's dependent upon how far it goes. Yeah. Right. They've gotta de escalate this violence. Yes. They they've gotta make sure that that but

You also need support of local police. You can't have people attack the hotels where these ICE people are staying and have no support whatsoever by the police. That's crazy. They're being told to stand down. So this is messy stuff and you Yeah. But look how hard it w I mean you s you talk about how you know we

Trump has come in and he's stripped away all this stuff and this fraud and but that was he didn't do it in the first term. It's only when he got to the second term and it was planned and he had Doge set up and he had Musk in place. And all of this deep state stuff could be identified and stripped out and and worked against the stuff. So he couldn't work against it. Right. But we can't in the UK, uh just to sort of explain where I think we are there is we can't do that.

Because we we have the two major parties are both ideologically in lockstep effectively. Right. So so I mean most of the woke was pushed through through the Conservative Party. They were in power for thirteen years. Uh they're ostensibly right. They pushed through all the genders self recognition stuff. Why do you think the Conservatives did that? So the why is a good question. So the Prime Minister Theresa May, Conservative Prime Minister at the time.

She said in her autobiography, I'm woke and proud. You know, she said like she Can you imagine Trump saying that? That's the equivalent. It's the equivalent. So I think it's because something about this ideology infected every side of the the political art, particularly in the UK. What might happen now? in the UK is reform are probably gonna win the next election. That's in three years' time.

And that's so seismic because it will blow apart this two party system that we've got. That probably couldn't happen in America, right? You probably couldn't get it. We have a third party that can win? We have a third party that can win. That's new. Really? And that's we haven't had that.

For a long, long, long, long time. But you think what is the the possibility that it could win? You think it's fifty fifty? Look at it this way. We've been sort of veering massively from you know, the Conservatives under Boris Johnson won this mad mad majority, like eighty seat majority, and they could do whatever they want and they squandered. People were so resentful of what happened with Johnson, who by the way let in

So m more migration than uh illegal migration than we've ever had, right? Did he do that for cheap labour? Probably. I mean I think that's certainly part of it. Certainly that's part That's uh that's a problem that conservatives don't want to admit that they were you know, I had a conversation with a very prominent politician who explained to me that he had a conversation of with a guy who was a CEO of a corporation that didn't want to stop the flow of illegal immigration.

Because he wanted cheap labor. I can't fucking believe this guy's saying this out loud. It's worse with Johnson because in their manifesto they pledged not to do it. So they had a promise they call it the Boris Way.

Like so so so that's how bad it was. And then you have Starmer and the Labour Party who who are just as bad if not worse. And you know, we we have a situation where it's it's unmanageable now and reform, this third party, Nigel Farage's party, is saying, No, we're actually gonna tackle this

And of course, ultimately what happens is the public they reach a tipping point and they say, By the way, Starmer is the the least popular prime minister on any opinion poll ever in the history of records. That's he's gone from a massive majority to nothing. Captured by the ideology because he doesn't care about migration, because he said that anyone who was concerned about the grooming gang scandal

was jumping on a bandwagon of the far right. That's what he s that's what he said. So all of this has happened, but you can't blame the left. It's the left and the right. It's both of them. It's why they call it the Uni Party. It's the same thing. So you need something else to come along and uh explode it. What do you think the possibility of Farage winning? Pretty high.

Between now and then. Do you guys whack people over there very often? Less than here. I think that's more it's more an American thing. Um but you know easier. A lot more guns over here. Um but it looks like if it was today he'd win. Uh there's obviously a couple I mean he could mess things up. Something crazy could happen. Right. Um get caught with a live boy or a dead girl. Something like that. But I think With Starmer, people are just sick of it. He s it's he has

continually backtracked on all his promises. He's not interested. He dismisses people's concerns about immigration. He dismisses people concerned about the mass rape of children in the grooming gang scandal. Th you know, they had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do an inquiry about that. They didn't want to do it. You know, and because they're so terrified of being called racist ultimately, so they let this thing slide.

So I think people are just sick of it. I think people have reached the point where even I think people who don't like Nigel Farage will hold their nose and vote for a third party. To explode the system. And maybe we might be able to reset after that. Maybe something could happen. Aaron Powell One of the things that's interesting in America is a lot of young people are becoming

Because I think that's a force of the internet and being a conservative more today is more like being a rebel. Yeah. It's like bucking this system. Whereas it used to be that if you were a rebel, you were left wing, you were like Yeah. You know, and that's not really the case anymore because the system that has power is a system that is pushing this one very particular ideology that also demonizes young males.

Hugely. Yeah. But that's also why I don't think it's about left and right anymore. I I think one of the things about the culture war is it It kinda killed off left and right. Like I say in the UK we couldn't vote this out. We had a le a r a right wing party, it it didn't make a difference. The left wing party makes it worse. We had a prime minister you know, Keir Starmer on radio saying that Ninety nine point nine percent of men uh women don't have a penis.

Which means that there are th th what is it, thirty five thousand m female penises out there? It's quite a lot, if you can picture that image. You know, so that's our Prime Minister saying this crazy Our Deputy Prime Minister said on TV that you could grow a service. If you wanted to.

That's David Lamy. That sounds like I'm making that up. He said that. You can check that. He said you could grow a cervix. So th this is these are the kind of people who are in charge now who are it's just all about their fake Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Aaron Powell That's why they're going to absolutely try to do that. Trevor Burrus Well they are doing it.

There's a lot of censorship involved in scare. Yeah. Just in the fear of being arrested. But the but the problem for reform will be do they have the guts to do what Trump did? Do they have the guts to come in and say, look.

We need to scrap the civil service well not you can't scrap the civil service, but you need to sort of bleed it dry. You need to you need to give it a good rinse, right? You need to get rid of the'cause there have been whistle blowers in the UK civil service who've said we're not going to do what the elected politicians say.

If if they come in and say there's an i an immigration problem, we're just gonna stymie that. We're not gonna do what they want. We've got uh police who are routinely investigating people for their opinion. Just to put that into context, by the way, if we're talking about this deep state that we've got to clean out, our police force

Is trained by a body called the College of Policing. They have been telling police for years it's your job to arrest people for what they think and what they say. And the High Court. Twa the High Court told them you've got to stop this. You've got to stop recording non crime hate incidents. Two home secretaries said to them you've got to stop recording non crime hate incidents. They ignored the courts, they ignored the government.

And that's the power of an ideologically captured Quango. So you know that's that's the problem. So even when you w even when you vote for a party that's gonna strip this stuff out, you still have to do the actual hard work. Of stripping out. I would abolish the College of Police. Do people know about non crime hate incidents? Do they do they know that this is a thing?

Aaron Powell I mean people are just aware that there's a lot of arrest because of social media posts. We don't we don't pay nearly as much attention to the UK as the UK pays attention to American politics. Uh you know,'cause we we're a small island, that's fair enough. But what I would say is like it's worse than people think, insofar as the twelve thousand arrested a year, that's hor horrific.

But with the police routinely checking up on you if you commit non crime, that's sort of even worse, isn't it? Yeah. Have a database of jokes that they've seen online that they think are problematic and they've kept this. The Scottish police introduced a hate crime bill two years ago now, which prosec can prosecute you for things you say in your own house. There's a section in that bill on the public performance of a play. So if a play is offensive, they can arrest it.

If you're the director or an actor involved in the play and it's considered offensive they can arrest you. They set up when they when they implemented that hate crime bill, they set up um hate crime reporting centres. So if you felt offended, you could and they converted like they there was a sex shop, I think. There was a mushroom farm. You could go and report hate to the police.

uh as and when it occurs. And this is coming from the the police force. The are uh the people who are supposed to sustain authority and prevent criminality. And you've seen the viral videos of people police coming knocking on people's doors saying you said this thing online. So I think it's worse than just the the arrest. I think it's a rotten system.

that is being trained by activists in the College of Policing that no government will deal with. They don't get rid of these activists, they let the activ and the activists, when they're told to stop it, they carry on anyway. And in the entire culture. That's what I mean. That's what I mean. You need a a politician to go in and say, scrap the College Police in, uh, strip out all the activists within the NHS, within the Army, within the police.

Within the Crown Prosecution Service. It also has to get so bad that people realise how bad it is and they need radical change. But I think the grooming gangs did that. I think the fact that we we effectively sacrificed thousands of kids. on the altar of ideology. The fact that we said You know, the there there were politicians, counsellors, uh doctors, social workers saying we don't want to be called racist, so we're gonna ignore

The sexual assault of children on a mass scale. And that was not really thoroughly covered here in America in mainstream news. I think because Elon Musk No online it's not. But not in mainstream news. So do people not generally know about that? They know about it now. Right, okay. But it wasn't something that you would see every night on CNN. Really? It's a huge story. But the that that the power of uh being called racist became so intense.

I mean, even you know that horrible um bombing at the Manchester Arena at the Ariana Grande concert. In the subsequent report of what went wrong. Well one of the security guards said he saw the perpetrator with the rucksack and he didn't approach him or apprehend him because he was afraid of being called racist. That was the reason. And as a result of that two dozen children lost their lives.

of of smearing someone as racist is so potent, which is why I think here in America The word fascist, the word Nazi gets thrown around so much because they know if someone is so branded you disoblige yourself from having to engage with their ideas. They become this kind of monster

that you don't have to even think about or worry about. Right. And we're just I think we're just getting over that in the UK now where the accusation of racism no longer really sticks. I think people think it doesn't mean anything anymore. And you know, they've tried with reform, they've tried saying that reform is a racist party, it's a far right party. No one's buying it.

anymore. And I think that's why hopefully something can change. I think the grooming gangs, I think the mass immigration, to the extent where people are now at risk, they just are. uh unvetted people, many with criminal records. We don't want to go the way of Sweden. D I mean, you know how bad Swed Sweden's got, right? You know Sweden used to be the most high trust society in Europe, low crime,

They a allowed mass immigration on a scale they couldn't possibly contain. I think it's now twenty percent of Swedish population are now foreign born. And predominantly they live in ghettos where crime is rife. They didn't integrate, there was no expectation they should integrate. And as a result of that, it's gone from being one of the safest countries in Europe to being the the country that is has most gun and bomb attacks of any country not at war except for Mexico.

And that's happened in the space of ten years. Crazy. It's a absolute tra I remember when it was going on and a Swedish stand up friend of mine, Tobias Pearson. Texted me saying there's gun there's grenade grenades going off in Stockholm, there's gunfire on my street, there's and the the the politicians are doing nothing about it. They're saying this doesn't matter.

I was in Sweden a couple of years ago, I was I was talking to a bunch of and they're you know what Swedes are like? They're very middle class, very uh well not all of them obviously but very liberal. Mm. Very like not a r racist shred in their body. And they all came back to the same story. They all wanted to discuss immigration. And they all come back to the same thing. One woman said to me, I got this wrong. We got this wrong. Why do you think they did it?

Good intentions, first and foremost. Really? Okay, well there's there's a Really? You think it's just good intentions to let all those people in? Have you met Sweet? But I mean but come on. It's happening in America, it's happening in England, it's happening in the UK. Yes. It's happening in Ireland. It's happen it's just good intentions everywhere. Could it also be could it also be this delusion, this idea?

what you would call, I suppose, liberal universalism, this idea that everyone is basically the same, everyone in every culture basically wants the same thing. It explains the queers for Palestine phenomenon. I don't think that I think this is organized. I think it's organized. I think the more chaos there is, the more they can crack down on your rights. I know you think it's organized. I'm not convinced of that yet. Yeah, yeah.

fairly universal in Western societies now and try to ruin them. Yes. In America as well. For the last four years before uh Trump got into office, that's what they were doing here. It seems like a strategy. It doesn't seem as simple as just good intentions. I know well, and that does seem too simplistic. I absolutely agree with that. Aaron Ross Powell You create more chaos. The more chaos you have, the more laws you need.

The more laws you need, the more control you have. But speaking to these people in Sweden I mean I was there it was an event where we were talking about a book I'd written, so it was all about these issues and I was mingling and talking to them and they all wanted to talk about it. But they're the citizens. They're not the people that implemented those laws in the first place. That's where I'm cynical. I think the people that implement those laws in the first place they know what they're doing.

Well, certainly they're aware of the risks. I mean if you take what happened in Cologne, that New Year's Eve party, where I think it was over eight hundred women were sexually assaulted. And and the media didn't report it. And the and the and the government wanted to sort of minimize it and say that this wasn't real. It's not even just the risks, it's the physical, actual, measurable consequences. Yes, exactly. And they're not they're not course correct.

That to me leads me to think that they know what they're doing. Uh you don't think it could just be complete naivety this idea that I think it's the best way to combat the internet. The best way to combat the internet is create a massive amount of chaos and then crack down on people's lives. The the assumption that it's all sort of coordinated will take you down that that route where you start thinking, as some friends of mine now think

The world is controlled by a group of Satanists who sit in a room and they choose the you know, they choose the leaders and they do you know what I mean? Like Well, I don't think it's Satanists, but I think it's incredibly wealthy people.

Aaron Powell But why would it be in their interest to destroy the economy that so sustains them? Aaron Ross Powell Well it depends on where they are and who they are. But George Soros clearly does that and he's talked about it. He's talked about enjoying destroying democracy.

And enjoying destroying countries. He's kicked, he's not not allowed to go into certain countries. He makes money doing it. But he relies on those democratic societies to make you know Yeah, but they're still functional. He just profits. That's what I struggle with though. Like you know y uh someone who believes in uh fundamentally the capitalist dream can't be sub uh uh you can It's subject to manipulation. Yeah. And intelligent, evil people.

Or at least amoral. But this doesn't this doesn't answer why people do vote for it and they do. I mean, they do vote for it because they've done a really good job. of attaching it and th there's also this ideology thing. There's left and right. If you're left, you're blue no matter who, blue to the grave. That's it. Yeah. And if anybody that votes red is a dirty racist fascist and and they think about it that way. And we really have no option for a centrist party.

in this country, which is where most people lie. Most people lie in the middle. Most people are very socially liberal and most of the people that I know that are even identify as conservative they're very socially liberal. But but they're financially much more aligned with conservative Sure. Well I think I mean I think ultimately, hopefully that the brick wall of reality is what is what cures this. Like it's when if if we don't destroy society along the way,

If we don't allow them to destroy society, if we don't completely erode all of our rights along the way. And as you said earlier, it's it you can get very close to that happening. And rights ne lost are never Never. Look at Australia. They had one mass shooting, they took their guns in the nineteen nineties. Then COVID came, they're like, Get in a fucking camp. Yeah. They've just introduced a new hate speech law off the back of the Bondi Beach shooting. Uh-huh. And of course this

Again, it's really draconian. It goes way too far. In fact I think the Australian hate speech law is basically saying If someone does something that wasn't intended to stir up hatred, but it could conceivably have stirred up hatred among a theoretical group or peop or group of people, then it's a crime and you can get five years in prison. just letting wild, violent criminals emigrate into your country. Imagine Yeah.

Like not saying, hey, maybe we should stop letting violent criminals enter into our country illegally and live here. No no no. What we should start doing is taking people that have done no crime whatsoever and create their dissent. Create a crime based on their descent. I totally agree. We had it in the UK. We had a um a politician, horrible story, guy called David Amos.

Well y you know uh he was stabbed to death by an Islamist at his surgery. You know politicians have we call them surgeries where you meet face to face your constituents. They come and you talk about the local issues. I don't think they do that in America. Um he stabbed him to death. And then there was this parliamentary debate about how can we crack down on free speech online. Right? No, the problem was the the knife wielding maniac.

The problem was gaslighting unchecked Islamism. I mean it really is what Bezmanov was saying.

Yeah, it's that thing of not addressing the like after the not seeing the truth. Not seeing the truth because you've been captured you've been demoralized. But I think what's better now is that people can see through that. So like when When um Keir Starmer well after that horrible I mentioned it earlier, the girls who were killed in the dance class by the guy uh who who was a child of immigrants immigrants

Um he that his response to that was, Okay, let's let's not uh you know deal with the fact that we've got radicalized individuals within our community, young people. He said, Let's ban buying knives off Amazon because the guy got the knife from Amazon, right?

You can also get them in shops here. You can walk in and get a shop. Most people have a kitchen knife at home. It's like one of the most common weapons. And he banned ninja swords around the same time, which was a big blow to the n ninja community. I kinda So crazy like that's the thing you go for. You choose the the thing that isn't but there this is the idea of allowing this kind of chaos.

And having this be a coordinated plan, right? The more chaos you have, the more you gaslight people, the more people are attached to an ideology, the more you can keep restricting their rights. Further and further and further until they're more and more frustrated until a lot of'em just give up. But we are at a position now where people are seeing through it all the time.

In the UK now, like th no matter how much they smear, reform is far right, the polls just keep going up and up and up for the right. Right. Because you have at least some dissenting voices. We have that and also the palpable absurdities of what the politicians are trying to tell you is real. Right. Oh and by the way you know the Labour Party has cancelled a number of local elections because they know they're going to lose

They've actually cancelled it. They've cancelled them. Well they've said they've postponed them while they're reforming the system. Right. So so but it's stuff like that where get rid of the juries, cancel elections and they're the good And and at that point, it doesn't matter how much your propaganda or how much you think your propaganda is gonna work, the public are gonna are gonna see through that.

And they say, hang on a minute. You're saying that I can't vote. You're saying if I end up in court I may not have a jury. You're saying I can't browse through Twitter. You're saying I can't say the wrong thing online. Enough is enough. And I think they they they reach a point where they say

And and and some of the stories are so egregious, like for instance the guy have you heard of a guy called Hamet Koskin, this um I think he's Armenian guy, who burnt a copy of his Quran outside the Turkish embassy, right? The idea of this was a protest against the Turkish government because he perceives Erdogan's government as uh uh I suppose supporting Islamism and the rise of Islamism. So he protests outside the thing, burns the Quran,

Two people attack him, one with a knife, the other some deliveroo driver starts kicking him. He gets prosecuted in a court of law for inciting the violence, and the judge actually says the fact that you were attacked is proof that you were inciting violence, right? It took the free speech union in the UK to have that overturned, to fight on his behalf, to say, That's a peaceful protest. It was his copy of his book. We don't have blasphemy laws in the UK.

But now the CPS, the Crown Prosecution Service, is trying to overturn that'cause they want to see this guy go down. And the that is what we're talking about. We've we've got bodies like the Crown Prosecution Service saying, No, we want an Islamic blasphemy code in the UK. The Labour Party wants an official definition of Islamophobia, so you can't criticize, you can't peacefully protest, you can't burn a book that you bought. You know, and all of that and we're seeing this happen in front of us.

And people are just saying, Look, we believe in plurality, we believe in freedom of religion. You should be able to you know, we're not we've got nothing against Muslim people. What we are uh objecting to is the idea that we shouldn't be able to ridicule your religion or mock your religion or protest against your religion and you're gonna pathologise it by saying we've got a sickness, we're Islamophobic. I think people I think that case

The fact that you can't burn I mean, some kid in uh a school in Wakefield accidentally scuffed a copy of his Quran and he got hit with a non crime hate incident and there was a big issue and the police got involved. You know We have to hold fast to this idea that No, no idea no idea doesn't get criticized. No like I d and so I d I just think the more stories like that happen, maybe I'm naive, but I think the British public's patience I hope so. Um but

In the meantime, your book, The End of Woke, it's available. Did you do the audio version of it? I did. It took me ages. Yeah. I'm glad you did it though. Yeah, I'm sure it is, but it's so always so much better when it's someone's voice, especially someone like you.

Uh thank you, Andrew. Really appreciate it. And I I hope you guys figure it out over there. But in the meantime, I'm glad you're here. Well I got away. I'm glad. So so I'm glad, but I mean that's that's it shouldn't be that everybody has to escape. That's crazy. No, I know. You know, it's nuts. And then what you what's gonna be left? Like

only people that are submitting and then the chaos of what you've loud in is fucking nuts. Exactly. So you gotta make sure that America doesn't go to pop. Because I need this place to work. I need it to work too.