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Aug. 22, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
52:22
This Week in Stupid (21⧸08⧸2016)
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Hello everyone, welcome to This Week in Stupid for the 21st of August 2016.
This week we have an awful lot to go through because an awful lot has happened, but to really understand it we need an awful lot of context.
We'll be talking about British politics and I will try to make everything as clear as possible for people who know nothing about British politics because I really think it's important to see how these mechanisms operate.
And I think that what's happening is probably going to have a knock-on effect for people outside of Britain.
Usually I prefer to arrange things by order of relevance, as in, you know, are they anything to do with the same subject.
However, in this case, I'm going to have to do things chronologically, so you can see how these things came about and how they ended up intertwining to create the total clusterfuck that we are looking at now.
Jess Phillips is the MP for Birmingham Yardley, and she was elected in 2015, and in May 2015 she gave her maiden speech in Parliament.
Jess is a particularly outspoken person, especially on the issues of feminism and socialism, and within six months of her assuming her position, her ideological bigotry and outspokenness about it was already pissing people off.
When a fellow MP Philip Davies tried to address male issues in Parliament, Jess responded in a predictably feminist manner.
She was spotted laughing and covering her face before saying, as the only woman on this committee, it seems to me like every day is International Men's Day.
She said, when I've got parity, when women in these buildings have parity, you can have your debate, and that will take an awfully long time.
Jess's feminism and ideological inflexibility on the subject is the sole reason that she does not want to discuss men's issues such as divorce laws, child custody, prison sentencing health issues, and skyrocketing suicide rates of her own constituents.
After being so willfully and publicly bigoted in Parliament, Phillips then decides to play the old feminist card of claiming that she is being threatened.
The only evidence that she seems to have provided for this and that I can find of this is her posting a screenshot of what looks like Reddit with some people talking in a thread saying he should have asked her to kindly shut the fuck up or he'd rape her in front of everyone or you know what would be funny and then some kind of hypothetical situation.
As vile as these comments are, and they are, they're not something that one would say in polite company obviously.
They are not threats.
These are not people sending Jess a direct message of a threat of action saying we will do something to you.
And in typically feminist fashion, this is the narrative that is being presented, whether it's true or not.
And Jess, of course, played this up as much as possible, because this is the feminist playbook.
Piss people off, be an open bigot in public when you are in a position of power, and then claim that you are the victim, because people are responding to you in incredibly negative and hateful ways.
I am confident that Jess Phillips is lying about being threatened, because so far she has not provided any evidence of a single actual threat, but also because in the UK, we jail people for threatening others on Twitter, and someone as high profile as Jess Phillips would certainly have warranted an investigation, just like an internet troll who threatened to rape another female MP after she sported a successful campaign to put Jane Austen on the £10 note,
and he was jailed for 18 weeks.
If Jess was actually being threatened, legal action would be taken.
I think it's interesting to note as a quick aside that all of the top comments on these articles are entirely in favour of having an International Men's Day.
These people seem to genuinely want equality and if you're going to have an International Women's Day, then you need an International Men's Day.
And this is something that I think should happen.
I do think that there should be a time and place to discuss these specific issues, because I am not a raging feminist man-hater, like most of the general public.
A month previously, Jeremy Corbyn had been elected to the leadership of the Labour Party.
I know that sounds like it's probably an unrelated event, but you'll see how this all ties together.
Jeremy Corbyn is actually quite an interesting man, and he has done to the British Labour Party what Donald Trump has done to the Republican Party in America.
He has taken it over with a grassroots movement and his own force of personality.
Jess Phillips does not approve of this, and in December she said that she would knife Corbyn in the front if he damages the Labour Party.
Jess Phillips has spoken of her determination to see Labour win the 2020 general election, saying that she would knife Jeremy Corbyn in the front, not the back, if it looks like he is damaging the party's chances of electoral success.
When asked in an interview with Guardian columnist Owen Jones if she would want to change the leader of the Labour Party, Phillips said, I would do anything that I felt was going to make the Labour Party win the general election, because if I don't have that attitude, then all I'm doing is colluding with the Tories.
If that means making Jeremy better, I'll roll up my sleeves.
If that's not going to happen, and I've said this to him and to his staff to their faces, the day that you are hurting us more than you are helping us, I won't knife you in the back, I'll knife you in the front.
Jess's opposition to Corbyn doesn't come from an ideological difference, it comes from a methodological difference.
Her opposition to him is out of a sense of partisanship, about defining herself in opposition to the Conservatives.
And this is almost entirely due to pragmatic reasons.
Phillips said that the general public still didn't trust the Labour Party on the economy and, rightly or wrongly, they were starting not to trust the party on issues of national security.
Phillips said that she was frustrated with the party talking to itself.
It's all too easy to dismiss the idea of good communication and good messaging, associating it with blare-ide years of spin.
It's okay to want to be clear with the country about what you think's best for them, and it's okay for some of those people to have voted Tory in the past.
Jess is concerned, above all, of the success of the Labour Party.
She wants the Labour Party to become elected at all costs.
Jess's position on this is more far-seeing and wiser than Jeremy Corbyn's.
She is paying attention to the reality of politics on the ground, how people are seeing it and how they're engaging with it, and she thinks that it's okay to compromise her socialist principles in order for Labour to achieve power.
For her, this is a greater good.
It's not that she's complaining about what Corbyn is doing in regards to the police policy of shoot to kill, as she says, it's just the timing.
Jess is trying to play the game, but the thing is she's not very good at playing it because of her own ideological biases.
A prime example of this political ham-fistedness came after the New Year's Eve attacks in Cologne, where she likened the unique circumstances of the Cologne attacks to the average night out in Birmingham, her own constituency.
Needless to say, this pissed a lot of people off, with local police officers saying that the city centre was a safe, positive and vibrant place, and even David Cameron being forced to say that no, that no, he does not believe that the average night out in Birmingham is anything like the Cologne attacks.
By May 2016, Jess and a coalition of other feminist MPs had launched a campaign to end sexist bullying on the internet.
Like Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn before them, Jess Phillips and her cabal have found that people respond badly to open bigotry.
Jess Phillips is demanding an end to sexist abuse on the internet after a study uncovered thousands of hate-filled attacks on women.
She joined forces with other high-profile female politicians to launch a campaign called Reclaim the Internet, designed to end the abuse.
They've published a study which monitored the use of the words slut and whore by UK Twitter users over a three-week period and found 6,500 people were being targeted by 10,000 explicitly aggressive and sexist tweets.
Of course, they failed to mention that 50% of the misogynist abuse against women on the internet came from other women.
Because this isn't about misogyny.
This is about people pushing back against open sexism, such as Jess Phillips displays when she laughs at men's issues.
From the start, I have been directly opposed to Reclaim the Internet and their nebulous set of goals and procedures.
On their website, they say, this is for everyone.
That's what Tim Berners-Lee said when he invented the World Wide Web almost 30 years ago.
This campaign is calling on everyone to make a stand against abuse.
It's a new way to crowdsource ideas and share experiences and build a campaign for action.
So far, so good.
It's a bit vigilante, but okay, fine.
Then they say, we want to stop online abuse, including threats, misogyny, racism, homophobia, and intimidation online.
Jess Phillips and other feminists like her are quite happy to lie about threats.
They're quite happy to lie about what is and isn't misogyny, racism and homophobia, and probably intimidation as well.
Like any sane person, I am not prepared to accept any kind of control that is predicated on such elastic terms.
Threats, misogyny, racism and homophobia do mean anything Jess Phillips wants them to mean.
Not only is it patently obvious that these terms are going to be expanded to include anything that mildly inconveniences the people in charge, but it also is absurd to suggest you are going to stop these things.
You can at best, the very best, try to minimize them, which is what Twitter and everyone already does.
I mean there are already laws against sending threats online.
So no, I do not trust a cabal of ideologues and liars with the power to police the internet.
I simply don't think they should have it because I know they will abuse it.
They have demonstrated in the past that they will not adhere to any kind of definition of racism, sexism, misogyny, and the very worst one that pisses me off, the threats themselves.
They are quite happy to cry wolf on all of these issues because being a victim is the currency they are using to purchase this power.
They are deliberately misrepresenting the events that have occurred and they are using this misrepresentation to prey on the feelings and emotions of people who simply aren't informed on this issue.
This is how they are trying to get quote-unquote popular support for what they're doing.
They don't care about the truth.
And that's where I came in.
After discussing Jess Phillips' Orwellian Reclaim the Internet campaign, I tweeted the video at her so she could see my commentary, along with the deliberately provocative words, I wouldn't even rape you, Jess Phillips.
Hashtag anti-rape threats, hashtag feminism is cancer.
Before I actually sent this tweet, I did deliberate on it quite a lot.
I wasn't sure whether I'd put the word even in there.
But after a while, I decided that I would.
Because put simply, there is no interpretation of this sentence that makes it a threat.
You might say, well, it's a terrible and horrible thing to say to someone, especially someone who is a rape victim themselves and I'd agree with you.
It's a devastatingly horrible thing to say.
But it is not a threat.
So when the mainstream media narrative, encouraged by Phillips herself, is that she received 600 quote rape threats in one night, we know that they are wrong.
We know that they are lying.
We know these people will not be responsible with the power to determine who is and who isn't sending threats.
It must not be for these people to decide, because they will lie.
But I do want to make something clear.
Jess Phillips never claimed that she received 600 rape threats.
She was clever enough to simply word what had happened ambiguously enough so that a casual reader would get that impression without her actually saying it.
Jess hit out at Twitter for allowing mass bullying to take place and said their business model was totally flawed.
To see the attack of a pack on here, check out my mentions.
600 odd notifications talking about my rape in one night.
A, that's not true.
It was 600 people speaking specifically about how you wouldn't be raped.
Because that seems to be all you want to talk about in public, Jess.
But secondly, people talking about your rape isn't inherently offensive.
It's not inherently bigoted or bullying or anything of the sort.
People could be discussing Jess Phillips' rape in a totally neutral way.
However, if she can enhance her status as a victim, she will accrue more power to herself.
And that's what she did.
And that was the mainstream media narrative.
But the problem with this is that Jess had painted herself into a corner.
And when she went on TV to talk about it, well, prepare your sides.
The number of tweets and then the retweets and those people piling in, dogpiling as you call it, mean there have been something like 5,000 tweets pretty much referring to raping you or not raping you.
That's lovely and ambiguous, Victoria.
I mean, it could be raping or not raping.
I mean, it just so happens that it was 100% not raping, but it could also have been raping.
Yeah, I mean, their level of discourse is that they're saying that they don't want to rape me.
And there we have it from the horse's mouth.
They are saying that they don't want to rape me.
So why did Victoria Derbyshire frame this as if some of them said that they did?
Because they want to craft a victim narrative.
And honestly, this is where it just goes off the rails and becomes absolutely hilarious.
As if raping is something that they do to someone they liked.
And there we come to the most ridiculous thing I think I've ever heard in my life.
Jess, you and I both know that people don't rape people they like.
You and I both know your nonsense has got to a point where you look like a fool trying to justify it on TV.
It's a strange gosh knows where they've got it from.
Anyone with an ounce of common sense knows exactly where this has come from, Jess.
Anyone even vaguely familiar with your political tactics knows exactly where this is coming from.
You know you're full of shit.
We know you're full of shit.
And now you're on TV pretending not to be full of shit and you sound like an idiot.
But yeah, it's about 5,000 people, 5,000 notifications or mentions that I've got.
Horrific.
Yeah, and the ones that are saying I wouldn't rape you, and the others that are saying, this is not an insult, that they're saying they wouldn't rape you.
It's as though you should be grateful somehow for that.
I mean, I don't normally, when I'm walking up and down the street, feel the need to say to people, I'm not going to mug you, I'm not going to hit you because we're normal human beings.
Great point, Jess.
But if you see someone walking down the street who sounds unbelievably paranoid and is screaming at the top of their lungs that everyone is trying to mug them constantly, despite there being no evidence that this is true, maybe you might think about reassuring them saying, hey, dude, I'm not going to mug you.
And if it turns out that this person is making up stories about being mugged in order to get sympathy from other people, and then when you say, I won't mug you, they then scream, my God, this is another mugging threat.
You will finally see where we're coming from.
But yeah, it's as if I should be thankful that these people are saying that they're not going to rape me.
See, this is what a narrative does.
If you just push people to continue their narrative, they end up looking like total buffoons in front of millions of people.
You describe them as idiots.
Go on, where are you going to go from here?
They're a bunch of idiots on the internet, and now I'm trying to brew up my little storm in the teacup.
For what?
For what?
You've just dismissed them as idiots.
Why are you giving them any attention?
I've looked at the guidelines for what should be, what under existing law could be treated as a crime.
And there are a number of credible threats of violence to a person or property.
Communications targeting an individual which may constitute harassment or stalking.
Communications which may be considered grossly offensive, indecent, obscene, or false.
Have you contacted the police?
That's a very interesting question.
Did you go to the police, Jess?
If you're genuinely receiving all of these threats, did you go to the police?
I mean, it's the first thing you'd do.
Isn't it, Jess?
I haven't.
And there we go.
That's how we know you're full of shit.
You are talking nonsense.
You know you're talking nonsense.
We know you're talking nonsense.
Victoria Derbyshire knows you're talking nonsense.
The police would know you're talking nonsense.
And you now have just demonstrated that everything you've said is just hot air.
It's you crying wolf.
On this incident, I mean, obviously it all sort of happened yesterday.
It was a bank holiday.
I was actually, whilst these people think that I'm sitting around playing the victim, I was playing games in the garden with my children most of the day.
If none of this affected you whatsoever, what are you doing on TV discussing it?
Of course, Jess is on TV discussing this because she has to be.
This is how she's going to push her agenda.
So I don't let it bother me.
I will speak to the police.
I don't need to contact the police anymore because the police, my local police officers, watch what happens on Twitter and they get in touch with me.
I'm sure they will get in touch with me.
If you live in Britain, you might be thinking, wow, my taxpayer money is going to pay police to watch Jess Phillips' Twitter feed for the non-threats that she receives on a daily basis.
And yes, this is where this narrative goes, but it gets far more wasteful.
Although actually I think that the vast majority of these people who are doing this are in America, so there's very little West Midlands Police can do about it.
But I certainly will be contacting Twitter about some of the ringleaders of this dogpiling.
I will also, I think that actually I've got to the stage now where I feel that legal action, be it civil or criminal, in some way is the way to attack these people.
And there we go.
Despite having not threatened her by her own admission and this not bothering her by her own admission, she now wants to attack these people because they're ruining her narrative.
They are ruining her game.
People should just be buying into the feminist bullshit victim narrative and they're not.
And now those people need to be silenced.
But this is where the light-hearted side of Jess Phillips' saga ends and the more serious side begins.
In the lead-up to the Brexit vote on June the 16th, Labour MP Joe Cox dies after being shot and stabbed by a mentally ill man.
The police arrested a 52-year-old former psychiatric patient called Tommy Mayer.
The alleged killer, who was born in Scotland, had spoken of his mental health problems in a local newspaper interview in 2010, telling of the benefits of volunteering in a local park.
Quote, I can honestly say it has done me more good than all the psychotherapy and medication in the world.
Mayer's motivation seems to have come from the right-wing party Britain First, and their pro-Brexit stance in comparison to Joe Cox's outspoken Remain stance, and I would venture to say that his mental illness led to him murdering her in broad daylight.
This attack was not preceded by a threat.
It was not motivated out of any kind of hatred of women or of feminism.
The only connection that this murder has to Jess Phillips is that Jess Phillips knew Joe Cox.
Less than two weeks later, Jess Phillips was one of the dozens and dozens and dozens of Labour MPs who decided to resign from their positions in the cabinet, the Shadow Cabinet, because of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership.
In her public resignation letter to Corbyn, she attacked him on ideological grounds, claiming that he isn't being socialist enough.
She says, I'm really worried that you cannot see that you've made this all about you and not about them.
Be the socialist you say you are.
Do the right thing and let the Labour Party be the opposition it needs to be now, when people need it most.
Writing or saying things against you risks my job, the livelihood of my family and the threats are already rolling in.
Turns out when you stand up for what you believe in, you are principled.
When I do it, I am an opportunist, careerist, Blairite, or even a Zionist plotter.
Funny that I am a socialist.
I live my life as a socialist.
I speak up regardless of the risk because I am considerably less important than the struggle.
Jess's words to Corbyn are of course totally hollow.
She cannot attack Corbyn for not being socialist enough.
The problem with Corbyn, and the problem that the rest of the Labour Party are having with him, is that he is too socialist, and he is not playing their game.
He is not prepared to play ball with them because he doesn't need to.
It's exactly the same effect that Donald Trump had on the Republican Party in the United States, but I'll explain why in a short while.
I said at the beginning of this video that the threats Jess Phillips claims to have received in October 2015 were probably not true.
And I have seen absolutely no evidence that they are true, and her reaction reinforces my opinion on this subject.
However, by siding against Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour Civil War, Jess has picked for herself a new selection of enemies who are not nearly as trivial as trolls on Twitter.
A month after Jess resigned from the Labour Shadow cabinet, she was part of a group of 45 female Labour MPs who wrote to Jeremy Corbyn demanding he does more to stop disgusting abuse from his supporters.
They say his response to the intimidation has been inadequate and tell him, Jeremy, this is being done in your name.
The MPs demand he signs a three-parts pledge to do more to stop the rape threats, death threats, smashed cars and bricks through windows seen in recent weeks.
Although this was reported on, it went largely under the radar and failed to garner any kind of sympathy with the public.
Which is, of course, the price of crying wolf.
Corbyn himself, of course, said that he's not responsible and says he deeply regrets Miss Eagle's comments.
I've set out a very clear code of conduct on how I will behave and how my supporters will be asked to behave during the selection process.
However, Owen Smith, his leadership rival, said a culture of bullying had been allowed to develop under Mr. Corbyn's leadership, the likes of which we've never seen before in Labour.
We can't deny the facts.
This wasn't something that we saw in the Labour Party before Jeremy Corbyn became leader, and now it's commonplace.
I believe that these MPs have been receiving threats from hardline left-wing radicals who have joined the party in support of Corbyn.
And I think one indicator of this is that the nature of Jess's narrative has changed.
Now it's not threats of rape, now it's actual death threats that people are sending to her, and these might be legitimate.
Although I don't really see the immediate benefits of this, Jess publicised that she's had the locks on her home changed in an attempt to improve the security of her house in response to this, and we can see how then the narrative changes.
Not only is anyone who's ever upset Jess considered to be a troll, and therefore lumped into the same category of people who are actually sending her threats, but now the murder of Joe Cox is also woven into the narrative.
And ironically, it's actually more accurate if Joe's murder is given more prominence, because it was a political act, it was done by a lunatic, but it was still done for political reasons.
And the narrative of this that's coming from the Labour Party and being accepted by the media is that these attacks and threats are coming from supporters of Jeremy Corbyn.
And honestly, after seeing the hard left in action in Antifa demonstrations, I can believe it.
Oliver, Oliver, just go, go that way, go that way.
No, we're staying here because this is public property.
Oliver Randall!
We're not fascists, you're the fascists!
You're denying people free speech!
You're denying people free speech!
No, I'm staying here!
This guy is beating us up and he's trying to grab the camera.
That was rebel media commentator Lauren Southern and her crew being attacked by hard left radicals at an anti-FAR demonstration.
Now, if you don't know anything about the anti-FAR or anti-fascist movement, they are hardcore left-wing communist radicals who seek the overthrow of the system.
You could, in fact, probably, accurately, describe them as Trotskyists.
And I say this because at the beginning of August, the Labour Party was accused by one of its own members, Tom Watson, to be facilitating Trotskyist entryism into the party.
Watson has accused Trotsky entryists, who have returned to the Labour Party of trying to manipulate younger members to bolster Mr. Corbyn's chances of remaining as leader.
He said that Trots have come back to the party despite them not having the best interests of the Labour Party at heart.
Watson claims to have evidence of this, and although I haven't personally seen this evidence, I suspect that he's telling the truth.
I think the hard left are getting back into Labour.
Corbyn himself said, rather than patronising members and peddling baseless conspiracy theories about Trotsky entryists, he should be working with Jeremy to unite our party so that we can get back to campaigning to dislodge this Tory government and help elect a Labour government in its place.
He says this in spite of the fact that his own hardline supporters have been threatening the other Labour MPs already in the party.
I don't think Jeremy Corbyn can be trusted to be honest about this situation.
He has far too many biases and sympathies for Trotskyists to be able to give us an honest analysis.
Corbyn has always had deep sympathy for Marx, Marxism, Russia and communism.
He has declared his admiration for Karl Marx as he insisted he wants to be elected Labour leader and ultimately Prime Minister.
He says Marx analysed what was happening in quite a brilliant way.
The philosophy around Marx is absolutely fascinating.
And it is.
It genuinely is very interesting as a dispassionate observer, but I really do not believe that Corbyn is a dispassionate observer when it comes to Marxism.
And neither do the moderate MPs in the Labour Party, who fear thousands of activists from the far left, who are former members of the Militant Tendency or Communist Party, who have signed up to Labour in order to vote for Mr Corbyn.
Corbyn's own response to this is to attempt to talk around the label.
When he says, The entry-ism I see is lots of young people who are hitherto not very excited about politics coming in and saying, yeah, we can have a discussion.
We can talk about our debts and our housing problems.
He said Labour under Miliband was too pro-business and promised to put up corporation tax and restore the 50p top rate of tax for the highest earners if he won power.
Labour has been too close to big business.
It's been too close to economic orthodoxy.
It has been incapable of offering Labour voters and the majority of the electorate a real alternative, and that was the fundamental problem in the last general election.
So at this point, it might be worth going into detail about what a Trotskyist is, and whether Jeremy Corbyn actually is one.
This was obviously in response to deputy leader Tom Watson's allegation that the party is being infiltrated by anti-democratic Marxist revolutionaries, Trotskyists, which Corbyn, of course, says is nonsense.
Professor Stephen Fielding, a political historian who has written extensively on Labour, says, A Trotskyist is someone who thinks the former Soviet Union was never a workers state, and that it was deformed by Stalinism and bureaucracy, and that it never truly represented the workers' interests.
Trotskyists want to go straight to the working class revolution.
This is fundamentally incompatible with the Labour Party because it is, by definition, a democratic party.
Broadly speaking, a Trotskyist is someone who believes that the parliamentary struggle is just an element of the broader class struggle, says Professor Fielding.
Strikes, social movements and other tactics are equally valid when it comes to changing society.
If parliament can be used to bring about change, well and good.
If not, there will be other ways.
Professor Keith Layborn of Huddersfield University says, in the 1930s, the communists tried to enter the Labour Party and the Labour Party kicked them out.
They were often referred to as the Lost Sheep.
There are Labour Party files called the Lost Sheep files on people who are a bit too left-wing and extreme.
In the 1970s and 80s, Militant, a Trotskist group, had some success taking over local parties in Liverpool and elsewhere.
Neil Kinnock took action against them.
Michael Foote wasn't quite as active, but there were a number of entryists and Labour got rid of them.
They're coming back because Corbyn sees actual Trotskyists as socialists.
He doesn't really see them as being an issue for the Labour Party.
In the 1980s, he didn't think militants should be expelled, even though they were trying to take over the party and turn it into a particular sort of organisation.
Corbyn isn't a Trotskyist, but he is an enabler for Trots and Trotskyists to enter the party.
Corbyn is obviously sympathetic to these people, which is why he's letting the militant tendency chief rejoin the Labour Party 30 years after it was kicked out.
Peter Taff, a veteran activist behind Militant, said he believed Corbyn was prepared to open the party up to all strands of socialist and working class opinion if he defeats Owen Smith in the leadership election.
And it's worth remembering that in 1988, Corbyn called for a complete rehabilitation of Leon Trotsky in parliament.
When he was a backbencher, he demanded the Marxist revolutionary and other communists have their achievements formally recognised by the Russian state.
Personally to me, this sounds like Corbyn demanding that Germany rehabilitate the National Socialists.
But the thing is, Corbyn has a history of having bizarre perspectives and political opinions.
Since he became the Labour leader, there have been numerous allegations of anti-Semitism levelled at the party.
He thinks that it might be a good idea to open diplomatic relations with ISIS.
Good luck with that, Jezza.
And he has previously called for NATO to be closed down and the members to give up, go home, and go away.
But worst of all, Corbyn is probably a secret Brexiteer, and during the Brexit campaign he was lambasted by his own party for failing to be anti-Brexit enough.
It's important to remember that the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of people, grassroots activists who have signed up to join the Labour Party to support Corbyn, have no idea what a Trotskyist is.
Book from Liam Trosby, no.
No.
I can't, no, it's very easy.
No, no, no, please tell me I don't think I've actually heard of him.
I'm blotting to the fridge.
Should I know who he is?
I don't know if I'm old enough.
I thought I'm cultured now, but no.
Is he right, sir?
Is there anything... Inappropriate?
Well, I know that he was murdered in Mexico in 1940, but apart from that, that's all I know about Trotsky.
I'm on Tumblr.
I'm on Facebook, I'm on Twitter.
Never heard of that in my life.
Liberal philosopher Frederick Hayek predicted exactly this kind of ignorance when he wrote The Road to Serfdom in 1944.
On page 46, he discusses economic planning and says, like so many Marxist ideas, it is now found in many circles who have received it at third or fourth hand and do not know whence it derives.
This is precisely what is happening in the modern Labour Party.
These people do not know they are supporting communism.
They have no idea about any of this.
They don't even know who Leon Trotsky was.
I do think that Deputy Labour leader Tom Watson is right when he says that Trotskyist entryists are manipulating young people in order to further their own agenda.
These young people are acting in good faith.
They just want to make the world a better place.
But in doing so, they have found themselves in common cause with radical communist revolutionaries who do not think that violence is an illegitimate means of achieving their goals in a democracy.
These people are anti-democratic, and they aren't shy about saying it.
Except for Jeremy Corbyn, who I think is a wise enough politician to know when and where to keep his mouth shut.
But these people are some of his most fervent supporters and he never turns on them.
Never.
At Labour Party rallies or left-wing protests, Corbyn stands with the militant groups.
He appears on their stages.
He associates himself with those party members.
He avoids the other ones, and they can see the power dynamic in the party shifting, which is why they have begun to revolt against it.
The difference between Jess Phillips and Jeremy Corbyn is not that they are not both socialists.
They are both socialists.
The question is, what kind of socialist are they?
Jeremy Corbyn obviously has deep sympathies for a Trotskyist interpretation of overthrowing capitalism and instituting the rule of the proletariat.
The complete and total revolutionary change of the system, abandoning democracy in the process, of course.
Jess Phillips is not like that.
She is a Marxist, however, she is not interested in destroying democracy.
You may well be thinking, well, these are mutually exclusive, and ultimately they are.
But in the short term, Jess has made her goals the continuation and promotion of the Labour Party, and to do, as she says, anything to get it back in power.
And that means not living according to the most hardline Marxist principles.
This is what has put her at odds with Corbyn and his supporters, and this is what they are trying to intimidate out of the Labour Party.
So when Jess Phillips says to Corbyn that he should name and shame the ringleaders abusing MPs, and that she carries around a panic alarm alongside a recording device for her own personal safety, and that she has legitimately felt the need to install a panic room at her office, at taxpayer expense I imagine, she isn't doing it because of people she has described as idiots on Twitter.
She's doing it because there is a genuine undercurrent of violence in the Labour Party, led by communist revolutionaries.
And the mainstream media seems to be having trouble putting this information together.
And believe me, if I didn't know all this, I would be the first to be mocking the hell out of Jess Phillips for installing a panic room following threats on Twitter.
But there have also been threats and acts of violence in real life.
And these people have a history of committing political violence.
She isn't hiding from people like us on Twitter, who are just irreverent and don't really respect her bigotry.
She's actually hiding from her fellow party members because they might actually do physical harm to her or her family.
I know you weren't expecting me to be defending Jess Phillips' decision to install a panic room, and to be honest with you, as far as I'm aware, she is the only one.
However, it may be because she is easily the most outspoken about these issues.
If I wasn't so sure that she was crying wolf before this happened, I might be inclined to think that she has become slightly divorced from reality and has become paranoid, and is interpreting almost everything as a potential threat, and with the media playing into this narrative as well, she may well have got to the point where she thought that actually this is a legitimate thing to do over Twitter threats.
However, I think that all of the extra information that we have means that it's not an irrational decision.
I think it's important to remember that other prominent left-wing voices have noticed the shift away from the traditional focus of labour, which is working class people, and onto identity politics, and they specifically ask for a return to focus on class, because that is their strong suit.
That's how they get the working class to vote for them, because they've obviously noticed that the working class is voting for the conservatives, because the conservatives gave them the fucking Brexit referendum, and are not turning into a bunch of ideologically batshit, civil war-having navel-gazers.
The Conservative Party hasn't been overrun by people who want to destroy British democracy.
And since we're on the subject, I'm going to explain to everyone exactly why Jeremy Corbyn is so popular.
And he's not popular with the working class.
He's popular with the middle class, with people who don't know anything about anything like we saw earlier.
He is popular with people who are well-wishers.
They want to do good, and they think that this is the means to do it.
But Corbyn resonates with these people on a more fundamental level.
And I'm going to give you a historical example to illustrate the point.
In the 12th to 14th centuries, in northern Italy and southern France, there was a Christian heresy called Catharism that spread like wildfire all across Languedoc, and this was the cause of the Albigensian Crusade.
The Cathars called themselves the Good Christians, and they had something called the Consolimentum, which was a ritual that one went through to become a Cathar Perfecti, or perfect one.
And this meant living very much like Jesus Christ in every way.
These people were excessively ascetic, unbelievably poor, but the spiritual leaders of Cathar communities.
Most Cathars didn't go through the Consul Lamentium, and they ended up just being believers and adherents, but not the sort of priestly class.
The Catholic Church spent a lot of time trying to combat Catharism without violence.
They tried to deconvert them.
They tried to bring them back to the Catholic Church.
But the problem was, there was nothing about the Catholic Church that could persuade a Cathar, and so few of them returned to the fold, whereas the Catholics lost more and more to Catharism each day.
The Cathars believed that the world and everything in it was created by the evil God of the Old Testament.
They believed that the Catholic Church was evil, that Islam was evil, that everything, even the body itself, was just an evil, destructive vessel created by an evil god to imprison their souls.
The Catholic Church was probably the largest single landowning organization in all of medieval history.
They had such unbelievable amounts of wealth and power that they ended up building massive cathedrals that still stand today.
It's very hard to argue that you are not corrupt and sinful and directly opposed to the principles of Jesus Christ when you are walking around in fine silks and you live in a colossal cathedral, especially when the people who call themselves the good Christians walk around barefoot in rags, just like Jesus.
The Catholic priests who were charged with deconverting the Cathars were totally unable to make any headway, because they would initially turn up in their finery, which wouldn't impress, and then they would, at some points, decide to remove their clothes and take off their shoes and walk into these villages barefoot, which just put them on the same footing as every other perfecti in the entire faith.
It was not persuasive to the average villager to return to Catholicism.
It seemed as if this was just a trick.
And this worldview was going to sow the seeds of the demise of the entire Catholic Church if they didn't take action.
It undermined everything about Catholic dogma, and that's why the Pope called a crusade to wipe them out, which they did.
The perfecti were so well regarded by their communities, and they were so loyal to them, because they actually lived by the principles they espoused.
They lived in poverty, they worked all day, they meditated, they prayed, they acted like a good Christian should, and that's why they called themselves the good Christians.
Jeremy Corbyn is a perfecti.
When, for example, last week, Jeremy Corbyn is photographed sitting on the floor of an overcrowded train after refusing an upgrade to a first-class seat, that is him living by his principles.
Now, you can debate whether this was a cynical move or not, all you want.
You can question his motivations as much as you like.
But to the people who are sympathetic and support him, this is him doing what he should do as a good socialist.
He is not only not taking advantage of his position of power, he's actively refusing it.
This is going to engender a deep loyalty in his supporters.
And the only person who can break these bonds of loyalty between Corbyn and his supporters is Corbyn himself.
The only way for Corbyn to lose this popular support is for him to go against his principles, and I don't think he's going to do that.
And I don't think when he says, is it fair that I should upgrade my ticket whilst others who might not be able to afford such a luxury should have to sit on the floor?
It's their money I would be spending after all.
You could not find a more pure example of his integrity in the minds of his supporters and sympathisers.
And any attacks on him for this will look petty and low and mean-spirited, and it will just make Corbyn look better.
Jeremy Corbyn is so popular because he practices what he preaches.
And in many ways, this is very much like Donald Trump.
Donald Trump says he is against political correctness, and he is so obviously against political correctness, this engenders a fierce loyalty in his followers.
This is the same effect.
So at this point you may be thinking, okay, so how does any of this affect me?
I'm not a member of the Labour Party.
I don't run around at anti-FAR demonstrations causing violence.
I don't threaten people on Twitter or in real life.
All I do is a bit of irreverent shitposting.
Something is not illegal.
It's barely even frowned upon.
How is this affecting me?
Well, unfortunately, the Marxist civil war in the Labour Party has wider ramifications.
When it was just people like you or me shitposting on Twitter, nothing could really be done.
It wasn't illegal.
The worst that could happen is Jess Phillips could make a fool of herself in public, which frankly, I'm all in favour of.
Now, it's gone a step further.
We are part of a narrative that has been illegitimately built up by the media, but has now been legitimised by actual political violence that has happened from within the Labour Party.
Because the media uncritically uses the word trolls when describing any kind of quote-unquote Twitter harassment, this means they are lumping us into the same category as the anti-farce sociopaths who will actually do something terrible.
And as Jess Phillips said, they are taking action.
Scotland Yard has spent £1.7 million of taxpayer money to set up its Twitter squad, which will have five detectives running it.
It will be supported by an army of volunteers trained to seek out anything they deem inappropriate on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
They will then report it to officers who will attempt to track down the culprits and possibly prosecute them.
The establishment of the new unit comes after a surge in reports of racist and sexist abuse on social media, with some trolls jailed for making death threats against MPs.
Just trolls, as if this is a legitimate categorization.
It's not in inverted commas.
No, it's just trolls, as if that is an accurate way of labelling these people.
As if they live under fucking bridges or something.
I probably don't need to explain exactly why I find this such an absurd and repugnant thing to do.
This is going to end badly.
This is going to cost a lot of money.
It's not going to be very successful, and innocent people are going to fall foul of it.
People who do not fall within the definitions of the categories they're looking for, but because someone will be offended by it or because of their own political biases, they will be persecuting people over this.
And I know this because it's already begun.
As I said at the beginning of this video, these people cannot be trusted with power.
They simply cannot be trusted to do the right thing, because they think they are morally justified in doing the wrong thing because they are doing it for the greater good.
I will give you an example from last week.
There was a chap on Twitter called Paul Perrin.
I don't know anything about him, but he tweeted the Daily Mail asking if the whole of Team GB is gay and or ethnic.
I couldn't find the tweet, so I guess it must have been deleted.
I don't know what the context is, I don't know what the subject's really about.
However, that's totally irrelevant as to what the Met LGBT network did.
Now you might be thinking, what the fuck is the Met LGBT network?
Just like I was.
When they say, another reason for our network, an undercurrent of homophobia, racism, and just general nastiness here.
As you can see, it looks like their definitions of homophobia, racism, and general nastiness have been expanded to asking inconvenient questions.
But not only that, this looks remarkably like a witch hunt.
The undercurrent of homophobia.
So can you point to any homophobia?
No.
Can you point to any racism?
No.
We just detect an undercurrent of homophobia and racism and general nastiness.
Yes, we happen to detect this undercurrent everywhere and we can literally point a finger and we will be pointing at a homophobe racist, but trust us, this is a genuine case.
So Paul Perrin replied with, Are you presenting yourselves as an official police presence or just impersonating while off duty?
To which they responded by saying they work at New Scotland Yard, 8 to 10 Broadway, London with their postcode.
And yes, feel free to write to Scotland Yard with request-free staff details.
We're a staff support association within the Metropolitan Police, but we also focus on hate crime and responding to trollers.
Now, I just want to point out that this is the Metropolitan Police establishing that they are against certain members of the public.
They don't know who these people are yet until they tweet the wrong thing.
This in itself, in my opinion, is disturbing enough and should be enough to get this shut down.
I do not think the Metropolitan Police or any police force should be acting in such a manner.
But then I saw this.
Paul tweeted, You want to see Big Brother?
Here it is.
The Met LGBT network.
A bunch of ham-fisted cunts piling in who aren't fit to be parking wardens.
To which they replied, Delighted you've taken an interest in us.
We'll take an interest too.
Open source is a gold mine.
Give my love to Caroline, his wife.
This has to stop.
When a police organization decides to attempt to intimidate a member of the public by tacitly implying that they are going to do something to his loved ones, all over a Twitter spat, they have proven that they will abuse their power.
They are already doing it.
This is not a power they should have.
All of this nonsense should be shut down.
The Metropolitan Police should be serving the public without exception and without prejudice.
This is not acceptable.
This must stop.
And don't fool yourself for a fucking minute if you think that there won't be a narrative that causes this to be expanded.
Guess where it's going next?
So each of these red dots is an anti-Islamic tweet coming from the UK.
And that that we can see happening right now, that's a digital reaction to the Nice attacks.
Massive red mass.
That's right, angry, abusive, anti-Islamic, all happening in the immediate aftermath of Nice.
Anti-Islamic.
That's what they're concerned about.
Anti-Islamic tweets.
Can you even imagine being critical of a religion and then the government starting to put measures into place to track you, to monitor you, and let's be honest, they're going to eventually punish you.
There needs to be some kind of coordinated effort led by an MP to engage with these organizations and get them shut down, to which they will naturally be resistant because they're going to be staffed by people who are entirely dedicated to the cause enough to spend their time policing social media and they're getting paid for it.
So this is not going to be an easy thing.
We need to find an MP to talk to about getting this solved because this is genuinely a civil liberties issue that's coming out of all of this bullshit.
We have to do something.
Has Sargon of Akkad ever tweeted sexually offensive or racially offensive comments at you and the consequence of that was that you were dogpiled by a lot of his followers?
Have you ever woken up to find your Twitter feed with more than 99 notifications because Sargon and his fans have filled up your feed with disgusting comments?
And when you go to your notifications, is it filled with notifications of people who are retweeting the same offensive comments over and over again directed at you?
If that is the case, then please- You could shut off your computer, okay?
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