Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Q&A at Portsmouth University

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March 25, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

01:42:13

Q&A at Portsmouth University

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	Okay guys, thanks for all of you to coming.
	Thanks all of you for coming tonight.
	As you can see tonight's event is going to be an external speaker event.
	We've got with us here Carl Benjamin, better known by his YouTube channel name, Sargon of the Card.
	Tonight's event is very important guys because as you know we had a whole debacle with the Hitchens BG platforms and things like this tonight are very important for free speech, especially free speech on university campuses.
	Mr. Benjamin here has had some fairly controversial things in the past and he's got his fair share of fans, let's call them.
	So tonight should be a really interesting night.
	So I'm going to hand it over to Jack who's going to do about 10 to 20 minutes of interviewing and then for the rest of the night we're going to go to you, the audience, who might want to ask him a few questions.
	Also just so you guys know tonight's event obviously will be filmed so just so you're okay with that but to be honest it doesn't imply the audience will be filmed anyway.
	So I'm just going to hand it over to Jack.
	Yeah thanks a little bit.
	I just want to reiterate your sentiments about how important it is that we all meet here today considering what happened with Peter Hitchens and how we need to really push having external speakers in and holding to account the people that don't want us to hear new ideas and for us to utilize our freedom of speech.
	And I think a good place for us to start would be if you wanted to just set out your sort of ideas and where you're coming from and what your motivations are for doing what you do.
	Right, okay.
	I am a liberal activist.
	I suppose that in my 20s I probably shamefully would have considered myself a socialist, but I've grown out of that somewhat now.
	But yeah, I'm just an English liberal.
	I think that universal rights are the best way forward.
	I think that free speech is one of our natural rights.
	And I think that the opposition to free speech is never principled.
	It's always based on strength and protection of the existing order.
	And that's honestly one of the reasons that free speech is so important because it's very unlikely that any existing order that we have at the moment is a universal panacea to all our problems.
	And so where problems do crop up, we need to be able to actually talk about them in public to let one another know that there are problems.
	These do need to be addressed.
	And the only reason that you'd ever want to stifle that is if the person who's speaking is speaking some kind of truth to your power that would ultimately unravel what you have managed to build and accomplish.
	Specifically in the case of Britain now, we're talking about the politically correct, hegemonic identitarian left, which seems to be the only group that ever opposes me speaking anywhere because I directly oppose them because frankly they're a bunch of tyrannical censors.
	I guess last time.
	A nice place to start.
	Do you think, just to come back to the free speech, especially on university campuses, because this is something that we all care deeply about, what do you think is the best way for us, maybe besides holding events like this, or what do you think is the best way for us to show our position for free speech and to defend it as much as we can?
	Honestly, I think this sort of thing is the best thing you can do.
	Actually getting a speaker who apparently has controversial views and getting them to the university to be able to speak to an audience of people who are interested in hearing what they have to say, whether they believe it or not, whether they, you know, critical or uncritical, the point is this is the best way in my opinion to actually demonstrate a commitment to free speech.
	And this is presumably what Joe Johnson was trying to legislate against having removed from the university.
	Because at the end of the day, and it's such a cliche to say it, but if you can't discuss radical and wild and out there ideas on a university campus, where on earth can you do it?
	Yeah, no doubt.
	Do you think that what you do, the political commentary, the sort of alternative media outlets, have contributed to the solutions of the free speech issue?
	Or do you think that there has been some argument or there could be an argument made for exacerbating any of the problems?
	I don't believe so.
	I don't believe that talking about problems exacerbates them.
	I think that talking about problems is the only way to finally start addressing them.
	Because otherwise, all you're doing is suppressing people who have some kind of grievance, whether you consider it to be legitimate or not.
	So obviously dialogue is the way forward.
	And at the end of the day, one of the things that annoys me most about just censorship is you can never muster any kind of moral authority for it.
	All you can do is say, I'm afraid of that, and therefore it has to be stopped.
	But that's not a principled position.
	That's not principled opposition to what's being said.
	That's, again, just an expression of power.
	You have the ability to censor them, so you do.
	And once you start down that road, I mean, there's no particular reason you should stop at any point.
	And so, yeah, I mean, it's always reactionary.
	Censorship is always reactionary.
	What limits would you place on free speech, if any?
	I mean, I've been described as a free speech extremist, which is a title so great I couldn't have coined it myself.
	I personally am quite radical on it.
	I mean, I think that even if someone is inciting you to violence, the choice to whether you actually go out and do violence is still firmly with you.
	You know, one of you could incite me to violence all day, every day, and I still wouldn't do it.
	But I can accept that there are circumstances, for example, if you're in front of a large crowd, you know, protesting some political event, where you can reasonably be held accountable for inciting.
	If you are to say, you know, if like the Day for Freedom March, I had 10,000 people in front of me.
	If I was, you know, whipping them up and saying, right, we're going to storm Downing Street or something like that.
	I can understand how that would fall out of what we consider in regular discourse to be the limits of free speech.
	Because what we're talking about is the ability to discuss political ideas.
	And I mean, I can agree completely that, I mean, it's completely antithetical to the spirit of liberalism to engage in violence in the political process.
	That's the whole point of democracy and that's the whole point of free speech.
	So anything that isn't inviting violence, I'm happy with.
	Yeah, I'm happy with being just, you know, free speech and it's up to the person hearing it to deal with it on their side of it.
	The other person has a right to say it.
	Do you think that there's a problem with the way that we engage in speech and maybe those who have a platform on things like YouTube and Twitter?
	And do you think there's a problem with the way that we engage in sort of opening dialogue?
	Do you think it's become too much about point scoring, about sort of this online smackdown kind of culture?
	The online culture war, yes.
	That's the consequence of social media, frankly.
	And the tech giants are all well aware of this.
	They are well aware that it's just a natural instinct for people to find content that they like.
	And when you're talking politics, then you find political content that agrees with you.
	And the way that the algorithms and recommended sections on various sites work is they recommend things of similar nature because they think you're more likely to click on them.
	And so you're more likely to stay on their site.
	Because it's all about keeping you on the site.
	Just clicks, click through, click through, you know, keeping you on the site.
	So their ratings go up.
	But what this is doing is having a really detrimental effect on discourse itself.
	And I think that comes in a few parts.
	I mean, Twitter being the primary culprit in this regard, you can just at anyone, anywhere, anytime, and you've got a short window, like 280 characters now, in which to say something, it kind of incentivizes people to say short things.
	And if it's to someone you're not particularly fond of, then you say short things to them that often aren't very nice.
	And the problem as well with all of this is that you never really know whether that person ever sees what you've sent anyway.
	And so I think that that sort of creates a barrier of distance between the two people.
	And so I think the person sending something will send something a lot more insulting and inflammatory than they would if they were just sat opposite speaking to them in real life.
	I think that the main problem is the sort of channeling into like essentially like ideological ethnostates, you know, where you've got a particular group with particular ideas.
	And anyone who strays any distance outside of these is essentially ostracized from the group because they threaten the integrity of the group, which is based on a certain set of beliefs.
	I mean, you wouldn't believe how many leftist groups I've been chucked out of just because I disagree with what they're saying.
	And I'm not even, you know, I'm not insulting people.
	I'm just saying, well, look, I think that this is also something you're not including, blah, blah, blah.
	And you get the petty tyrants who are moderating these forums who are just like, you know what?
	I don't have to listen to this alternate opinion.
	But it's really deeply unhealthy if we don't listen to alternative opinions.
	Even if they're foolish, even if their opinions are to which, you know, no sane person would agree, it's still good that we need to know the opposition is that because you don't know that you have all of the information that you need.
	I mean, life is a continual learning process.
	You've got to continually, you have to search out the information that you're looking for.
	It doesn't just come to you.
	And so if you're funneled into these channels, then it becomes very, very difficult to even know that there is an entire world of thought that's just one or two clicks away that you never see.
	Do you think we need to try and take the conversation off of social media then?
	Do you think that is sort of one of the best ways in which we can move forward in searching for solutions instead of having these kinds of petty conversations online?
	Yes, that would be preferable, but it's not going to happen.
	Social media is about convenience.
	In his conversation with Joe Rogan, Jack Dorsey said that he didn't invent Twitter, he discovered it.
	And what he's really saying is he discovered a way of giving essentially an addiction that people can have, which is fast access to information and fast access to one another with a significant sort of veil between each other so we don't get to see each other's emotions when we tweak something angry at each other.
	So, I mean, you know, he's essentially discovered something that's bad for people.
	So yes, and I think there is a lot more weight to any kind of conversation that happens in person as well, because a lot of human communication is non-verbal.
	You know, it's about the facial cues, about the tone of voice, about the body language.
	All of these things do matter.
	These components are obviously lost when we have a conversation with someone, you know, some random avatar on the internet.
	These things are all lost.
	And so the quality of the dialogue is definitely degraded, but the convenience of it means that it's never going to go away.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Do you think that that's a bigger, this sort of social media, the social media companies taking control of conversations that are having online?
	I know that you've been taken off of Twitter, I believe.
	Do you think that that's a bigger threat to the kind of to social discourse than the ideological extremes that we see?
	Or do you think the two go hand in hand?
	There's probably no separating the two.
	And I do think they are very important, that the dissident voices remain.
	And I think that, again, Silicon Valley is the primary culprit for this.
	And it's because they have a particular worldview.
	They have a particular set of values.
	And they're effectively imposing them on the rest of the world, or at least the English-speaking world.
	Obviously, I mean, don't ever look at Arabic Twitter because it's disgraceful, some of the things that trend on that.
	What the hell do you mean?
	Well, kill all Jews is not an unusual thing to trend in Arabic on Twitter.
	But obviously, no one speaks Arabic.
	Most English-speaking people don't speak Arabic, and so no one sees it.
	But it's not unusual because the rest of the world is not very progressive.
	They're not very politically correct and they say what they think.
	But yeah, the deplatforming of major figures, and I'm not just saying this as someone who has been deplatformed, I think is generally dangerous because these figures provide a sort of nexus point for the people who are interested.
	Using the example of Tommy specifically, he had over a million followers on Facebook.
	Now, you can look through the comment sections and they're very aggressive, but they're not the sort of alt-right, you know, neo-Nazi types who are actually following him.
	A lot of it is just, and it is genuinely working-class people who didn't really know much about politics, but know that they have problems because they personally live next to Muslim communities and there are cultural conflicts.
	And these are expressed in a variety of different ways.
	And often, the authorities don't want to hear about it because this is a very unpleasant reality that they have to deal with, which is why they suppressed it for such a long time.
	And which is why Tommy Robinson is still the enemy of the state, even though everything he said was correct.
	So, I mean, I don't see any good coming from it.
	And I think it's just going to push people further into these echo chambers and to the margins and make them way more angry at the status quo than they already were.
	And the chances are they were following these people because they were already angry.
	Yeah, I mean, I know there's some people that want to question you on this stuff later on, but were these reasons some of your motivations behind joining UKIP?
	I mean, I've always quite liked UKIP for a few reasons.
	But firstly, because they were the underdogs.
	You know, I've always had a kind of sympathetic feeling towards them because of that.
	But secondly, I've never seen anything that really resembled the media narrative regarding UKIP.
	You know, I hadn't seen anyone just going, oh, I hate foreigners or anything like this, you know, or talking about race or anything of the sort.
	It was always principled opposition to the European Union.
	And that made complete sense to me.
	I mean, I think the European Union is terrible.
	So when it was, it was Dankula who first suggested, well, like, he came to me and said, right, I'm going to put out a tweet and I'm going to say, like, you know, 100 retweets and I'll join UKIP.
	And I was like, 100 retweets?
	10,000 retweets and you get to join UKIP.
	And because, I mean, I didn't really think it was going to happen, to be honest, but he got the 10,000 retweets.
	And so he was joining.
	So I just gave Paul Joseph Watson a shout.
	I was like, hey, should we join UKIP?
	It'll be a laugh.
	It'll get everyone's panties in a bunch.
	And he was like, yeah, right.
	And it's gone great so far, actually.
	I think what I was trying to get at was, is it more, were your reasons more behind getting people's knickers in a twist than joining it because of any support you have for the movement?
	Or it sounded like you do genuinely have.
	Yeah, I mean, like, there have always been this sort of like Robin Hood UKIP channels on YouTube.
	They don't have that many subscribers, get millions of views because, you know, Nigel Farage does X at the European Palm or whatever.
	And I'd watch these sort of videos for years and just basically, I mean, I'm a bit of a fan of Nigel Farage, I suppose, because I agree with the things he's saying in Europe, you know, when he's in the parliament giving them hell.
	And same with like Daniel Hannan and people like that.
	I love watching the Eurosceptic MEPs give him hell in the belly of the beast.
	Nigel Farage has been much less part of UKIP more recently.
	Well, yeah, he's quite critical of the current leadership and current direction of the party though, hasn't he?
	Absolutely.
	But it's kind of a case of boomeritis.
	He doesn't really understand what's happening.
	And so he's just trapped in the Westminster bubble.
	And in the Westminster bubble, the narratives are very much locked in stone.
	And they have very, very, a very hard time thinking around them.
	And I mean, like, for example, Maji Nawaz, I interviewed him and he got me on LBC the other day.
	And all, like, he had so many left-wing activists going, oh, that guy's a racist, that guy's a racist.
	And Maji was like, look, I'll decide for myself if I think he's racist.
	Obviously, Majin knows I'm not.
	But this is the point.
	It's a very high-pressure environment.
	But no, I've always appreciated what UKIP have publicly stood for.
	I've never really believed the narrative on them.
	And now that I'm a part of the party, and I do quite a lot of work with UKIP.
	I've been doing a lot of work on the YouTube channel and I speak at their events and things like this.
	And I've met a lot of people.
	I've been to several of the local meetings.
	And it's just like the People's Party.
	It's so quintessentially British.
	And you get quite a few eccentrics in there, but no one hateful or anything.
	I mean, the thing I might worry about most are people thinking that the Bilderbergs are real, the Bilderberg group conspiracy and all that sort of stuff.
	That's the most extreme stuff that I've found in UKIP so far.
	The rest of it is just essentially libertarianism.
	They are essentially a libertarian party.
	And you'd still say under the current leadership, that that is the direction that they're heading towards.
	Batten's like the only politician in Britain who even cares about free speech.
	He's the only only politician.
	When Tom Watson, deputy leader of Labour, wrote to Google or Susan Mojiki demanding the deplatforming of Tommy Robinson, not for any particular reason, just because he doesn't like him, Jared Baton was the only politician who wrote a counterletter saying we demand that you leave him on the platform as per your terms of service.
	They're the only party who seems to care about any of these things.
	Okay, I've got two more questions for you before we open it up to the audience.
	Would you say that these are the most pressing issues that are facing us at the moment?
	Or do you think that the time that you and other YouTube critics of the identitarian left, the time that you spend on these kinds of issues takes away from the focus on more real world things that may affecting people more in their everyday life?
	Do you think that that's I think that the most pressing issues are the ones that are least talked about because they are the product of the political establishment.
	So, I mean, we can sit here and have a long, dull policy debate about school financing in Carlisle or something, which is a pressing issue for people's lives.
	You know, their kids need to go to school.
	But when we're talking about the sort of meta-political conversation that happens across the spectrum, I don't think there is a more important issue than free speech because the people who have the least savory opinions are the ones who get shut down the first.
	But often it's, I do think there is an underlying message, even if they've only got a kernel of truth, there is definitely something that they're complaining about.
	And if ignored or suppressed, these problems get way worse than they first present themselves to you.
	So they become much, much worse.
	And I think that people become very, very radical when you ostracize them from society.
	I mean, one of the things that all of the mass shooters have in common is that they're basically not very popular people.
	They're people who have essentially been ostracized from their friends group and ostracized from their schools.
	And often, you know, they lose jobs or whatever.
	Because they might have gross opinions.
	But you're not going to deconvert them from those opinions unless you actually bring them into the fold, sit them down and have a reasonable conversation with them.
	Okay, and then finally, do you have objectives for what would your objectives with the kind of work that you're trying to do in activism or the YouTube channel?
	Yeah, I mean, I personally would like to see section 127 of the Communications Act and the new references to gross offence in the Digital Economy Act removed.
	I don't think that gross offence should be something on which British citizens get arrested.
	Could you elaborate on those just for the people that aren't aware of them?
	Yeah, so Communications Act, Section 127.
	It's any kind of communication that can constitute gross offence.
	This is the legislation that Dankila was arrested under for making a joke.
	It's undoubtedly happened to other people in the past.
	In fact, there have been a few.
	There was a, I can't remember the guy's name, Paul Chambers, I think it was, who was arrested for sending a joke via Twitter, things like this.
	It's something that is definitely on the march rather than receding.
	And I think that we do need to present opposition to this.
	Because ultimately, the question is, whose opinion is it that we're going by for what is gross and offensive?
	I mean, we just don't agree on these things.
	And I don't think that whoever it is in charge, I mean, at the moment, it's the Conservatives, but maybe next week it will be Labour.
	And then, I mean, having an opinion on Islam could be considered grossly offensive.
	So then all of you are prevented from speaking about criticizing a religion that it is important for us to be able to criticize on the grounds that Jeremy Corbyn doesn't like your opposition.
	I think that's a pretty bloody low bar.
	And I think we can do better.
	And I think that the people who are offended by this need to learn how to be offended.
	Just get over it.
	Okay, thank you very much.
	We're going to open it up to some audience questions now.
	So if you have a question, I'll try and get around as many people as possible.
	We've got loads of time.
	All right, we're going to pass this to the who wants to go first.
	Guys, I was wondering if you're against kind of government forcing a lot of things onto the people, what your position would be on kind of vaccines.
	So you've seen a lot of kind of anti-vaccine terms coming up.
	So there's always talk about mandating vaccinations to make sure that we don't get massive kind of outbursts of these diseases that should have been eradicated years ago.
	What do you say to mandating vaccines to some degree?
	I can't say I'm a huge fan of the idea, but I'm also not an anti-vaxer.
	I obviously approve of the good that vaccinations have done.
	And you know what's interesting?
	I think that the anti-vaxxers, I think that they're the result of a sort of a spiral of conspiracy theories that have all merged together.
	Because I swear to God, I love watching conspiracy theory videos.
	I mean, effectively, I view them as science fiction.
	But it used to be, like years ago, you go back like five, six years, it used to be that the vaccines themselves, obviously a good idea, but like they were putting something in the vaccines that gave you autism.
	Now that's kind of transmogrified into vaccines cause autism.
	And so I mean, that's just something I've observed.
	But I don't like the idea of the state mandating this, but there is obviously a demonstrable good from it.
	So, I mean, it's the discussion really is how libertarian are you feeling?
	Early one, come on, we've got to.
	I answered all of those questions in my little monologue.
	How big of an issue do you think that things like racism and sexism are in modern society as a worldwide?
	Well, they're not really.
	That's the thing.
	We have the numbers.
	The numbers are all in.
	Like, we are the least racist society in the world that has ever existed.
	Right here, right now.
	We're the least.
	We know.
	I mean, like, for example, like sampling the public doing implicit bias testing, right?
	We're one of the, it was something like less than 5% of the population had a negative reaction.
	Whereas if you go to France, man, they're getting pretty racist over in France right now.
	Like, for example, one in five people in France doesn't want a foreigner living next to them.
	You know, that's less than 1% of Britons don't want a foreigner living next to them.
	And then you look at hate crimes and stuff like this.
	I haven't got the British statistics to mind because I was recently looking up for American ones.
	But the situation in America is in 2017, there were 1.2 million violent crimes.
	Out of those, hate crimes were 7,000.
	So this is less than 1% of all of the violent crime is racially aggravated, racially motivated hate crimes.
	It's a tiny problem, but it is the particular canard of the far left to obsess over racism constantly because it's an easy win.
	Who's in favor of racism?
	You know, no one's in favour of it.
	And so they can go on and on and on, and they can feel like righteous crusaders against a problem that barely exists.
	So you call yourself a liberal, and you say you don't like identity politics, and this is coming back to the whole UK issue.
	What I see from UKIP nowadays is a party that is becoming increasingly reactionary and increasingly almost ultra-nationalist.
	I mean, if you look at the fact that they recently hired Tommy Robiston to give them advice, I mean, this is the man who on a video has called for a cleaning out of the Islamic problem.
	To me, this almost sounds like an indirect call to violence.
	I mean, you know, as someone as a liberal self, you should be opposed to reactionary policies.
	And as someone who's against identitarianism, surely you would be against nationalism, which to me is one of the most dangerous forms of identity politics.
	So I was just wondering how you managed to support some...
	So, a couple of things then.
	I'm not familiar with the clip of Tommy that you're speaking about but I've never seen him say anything like that myself but I mean I don't I think that UKIP aren't an ultra-nationalist party.
	I just think that the current hegemony of the two political parties is so essentially anti-British that it's I guess by comparison they would do.
	I mean UKIP just thinks that Britain is just in principle a good idea.
	I mean they're not even suggesting that like you know anything like that you know they're not suggesting that the national anthem has to be sung in schools or something whereas in every American classroom it's every day they have to sing the national anthem.
	So I mean if we're talking ultra-nationalism I think that I think that's just an inappropriate way of portraying any British political party.
	I mean maybe the BNP would be ultra-nationalist.
	I don't really know much about them to be honest so I couldn't tell you.
	But I would assume the Britain first types they're probably the sort of you know flag waving chest dumping we hate foreigner types sure.
	But no UKIP are not like that at all.
	UKIP again all of UKIP's opposition to the European Union has always been on principle and the principle of democratic accountability and the fact that it's currently being overseen by people you have no control over whatsoever and that's an unacceptable position.
	I don't really know.
	I guess what you're saying is like UKIP are far right, right?
	Well I don't necessarily say it's the common sort of canard isn't it?
	I personally wouldn't say that but I'm scared of how reactionary maybe I shouldn't use the word ultra-nationalist but I don't mind nationalism for so because like you're on against identity politics I see nationalism as one of the most dangerous forms of identity politics.
	Well it is but the thing about nationalism at least in as an identity as an identity is that it can only be really exercised outside of the country because if the other people you're talking to are also British citizens then how is it a useful way of talking to anyone?
	Can we just repeat that?
	I'm just saying yeah I mean for example if we're going to have a political argument right let's say I'm a woman of colour and you're not me you know you you beaten your chest about being oh I'm I'm British or whatever well then I am too you know so it's not a it's not a useful conversation for us to have the difference between patriotism and nationalism I see quite clearly It depends how you define them, doesn't it?
	I mean, like, nationalism was an ideology.
	I think if you make your identity, your ideology, that's neither problem.
	So I guess that's the way it goes.
	I'm trying to be British.
	I'm a patriot, but I wouldn't call myself a nationalist at all.
	And there's nothing wrong with making that distinction either.
	I mean, it depends on how you define nationalists, doesn't it?
	Because, I mean, these days, I don't think any of the sort of, you know, the sort of old school nationalists that people are thinking of when, you know, when you're, the image it comes up in my mind anyway, I don't really think these people exist anymore.
	I think a nationalist is someone who just thinks the nation state is a good idea.
	Because I do think the alternative is the sort of globalist position, which is pro-EU, open borders, nations are a bad thing, etc., etc.
	Just against the Treaty of Westphalia, basically.
	That's how I describe it.
	Now, I agree with you that there are definitely interpretations of what we could call nationalism that I would also be against.
	George Orwell described it as a kind of commitment to power for a particular goal.
	And so under Orwell's description of what a nationalist is, I mean, like a communist was a nationalist, a fascist was a nationalist for their own particular, like an Islamist is a nationalist for Islam.
	And so they put the goal ahead of any other principles and any other concerns.
	And so, yeah, I mean, if you would suggest it was, you know, Britain uberales or something, I would agree that that's obviously terrible thing.
	But the difficulty, in my opinion, is not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
	Because I agree with you that we shouldn't, you know, I don't want to say, right, well, us British need to, like, London is the second largest French city, right?
	There's something like 400,000 frogs there.
	So I don't want to say, right, okay, well, it's us British versus these Frenchies.
	That would be terrible.
	You know, we're going to make sure that French people are second class citizens in London.
	That would be the worst thing you could do, you know, obviously.
	But by the same token, I think there is value to the British identity.
	I think there is value in Britain being a nation and a sovereign nation at that.
	And so really, again, I hate to call it just a spectrum on everything, but like there is absolutely a spectrum.
	And I completely recognize what you're suggesting.
	It can veer into authoritarian identity politics.
	And that's obviously something everyone wants to avoid.
	You and sort of your opening statements you said about on Twitter, you shouldn't say things that aren't particularly nice or that a lot is lost through sort of only saying 280 characters.
	I think from your smile you can see sort of where I'm going.
	Do you regret telling Jess Phillips that you wouldn't even rape her?
	No.
	Could you elaborate on the fact that even though you said you shouldn't say things that aren't nice and a lot is lost through, I think it was only 140 characters at the time.
	It was, yeah.
	Why did you feel the need to say that knowing it was going to be highly inflammatory and probably not great for your own argument?
	Well, it doesn't really matter because I knew that they'd ignore me.
	And so I deliberated for an hour over that tweet.
	Do I include the word even?
	Because I wanted to get their attention.
	And the problem with being stuck on the internet and blocked is that it makes it quite difficult to get someone's attention, even if you are essentially the other side of the argument that they are making, which she was.
	At the time, they were doing this reclaim the internet thing.
	Essentially, they were just advocating for government control over the internet, further speech regulation of the internet.
	Obviously, I oppose that.
	And so I thought, right, okay, what's going to annoy them?
	What's going to not get me arrested and not get me kicked off of Twitter?
	And I realised that, and the important thing with that was, A, it was highly offensive by design.
	But B, it wasn't a threat and you couldn't interpret it as a threat.
	And I didn't really think it was going to get the attention it got.
	But I am very, very pleased that the attention it managed to ghana because otherwise, I mean, she already had me blocked.
	They would have just ignored me.
	Instead, international news, it was great.
	But the thing is, this is what I have to do as an activist.
	If they can just ignore me, then I'm not doing my job, regardless of how offensive it is.
	If I have to be offensive, then I will be.
	I mean, I would love to just have sat down and had a one-on-one conversation.
	So, Jess, why is it that we have to do this, this, this, and this because of X, Y, Z?
	You know, I'd love to have sat there and had that conversation with her.
	So, look, don't you think there's going to be an impact of the idea of just collective censorship that you're arguing for?
	You know, and we would have been able to hash this out.
	But no, that's not what they want to do.
	They've got absolutely no interest in having these conversations because they don't need to.
	I can't force them to do it.
	And so, I have to be creative.
	Creative is a strong way of putting it.
	I think it's a generous way of putting it.
	So, do you think there's anything we can do about the mess Parliament's making of Brexit, or are we just stuck in the lurch now?
	Well, that's a good question, isn't it?
	I don't think anyone knows.
	I think that events are moving too quickly.
	At the time of recording, we've got 10 days left, and it looks like there is going to be no kind of resolution from Parliament as to actually get May.
	Essentially, they want to pass May's deal, but it's not going to happen.
	Wasn't it Berko who headed that off at the pass, which is a surprisingly good thing for him to have done?
	I mean, I enjoy the memes, but I never thought you'd do anything useful.
	But no, I think that we're all along for the ride at the moment.
	And fingers crossed, when they go to the EU and they ask for an extension, some Italian shitlord will say no, and they'll have to essentially kick us out.
	Well, we can only hope.
	Yeah, we can only hope.
	But unfortunately, I wish I could give you a better answer.
	I don't think anyone knows.
	What is your opinion on Nigel Farage asking in the European Parliament to vote against the extension?
	Because the whole idea was that it's about sovereignty, but don't you think therefore he was undermining the Parliament's sovereignty in making their decision and asking the people that have been that he has been accusing of taking away British sovereignty to help him?
	I mean, if he's just asking them to not extend Article 50, I don't see how that's an infringement on anyone's sovereignty, to be honest.
	And I think that the cause of gaining Britain's sovereignty back is definitely worth Nigel Farage asking the EU to kick us out.
	So I don't see that as a particular contradiction.
	So you talked of cultural clashes with Muslim communities, and you often hear from populist types about Islam being incompatible with the West or the rest of it.
	But you could argue that those are examples of sort of ethno-pluralist language.
	What I want to ask is, is this just a way of criticizing race by using culture instead?
	I don't think so.
	I actually really hate the term multiculturalism because I don't think that you get multiculturalism.
	Because to have multiculturalism, you have to separate, effectively just segregate each culture and then put up these sort of defensive speech-policing barriers.
	Because cultures change with interactions with other cultures.
	And, you know, this happened on a million different interactions that each person has.
	And over time, slowly cultural norms change.
	I don't agree that culture is tied to race, though.
	I don't think that if we bring someone from a foreign country over here and raise them in England, they'll essentially be English, at least culturally, even though racially they might come from somewhere else.
	But the thing is, saying multi-racialism sounds a bit weird, doesn't it?
	But at the end of the day, I think multiculturalism itself is a misnomer.
	I think that we should have.
	And the thing is, it all comes down to the sort of fundamental values of the cultures as well.
	The problem is that there is a unifying form of cultural values in this country.
	For example, pro-democracy, anti-violence, right?
	It's very hard to find someone who will actually advocate for violence.
	It's a safe and universal, in this country at least, form of political expression and a sort of fundamental values.
	But there are cultures who don't agree.
	They don't agree that violence is not the answer.
	They think, well, absolutely violence is the answer.
	And that's not all cultures, not all people in those cultures, but there are definitely some people.
	And so it's something that we have to be concerned about.
	And I think I'm wondering off your point somewhat.
	Can you repeat the question again?
	Yeah, so it's just whether sort of this ethno-pluralist rhetoric is a way of criticizing race by using culture.
	No, I don't think it's about race at all.
	I really don't.
	I think it's honestly about values.
	And I don't think your values are tied by race.
	I mean, your values will change over your lifetime.
	They'll change over time.
	I don't think these are actually informed very much by your race at all.
	Certain ethnic groups are going to sort of be mostly, you know, like people from Pakistan, for instance, are going to be mostly Muslim or whatever.
	And these policies targeting, say, Islam will affect them.
	So it might have the same ends as, say, like an overtly racist policy.
	So what if it did?
	I'm talking like in the case like the BNP.
	Well, no, this is this is entirely.
	So this is my problem with essentially the left-wing conception of race is that what they do exactly what you've described.
	If a policy affects X group more than Y group, then it must be in some way biased or bigoted against the first group.
	And I don't agree that that's the case.
	I mean, like, the most important thing about liberalism is procedure, right?
	It's the way you get from A to B.
	It doesn't really matter where you're going, as long as you get there through fair means and accountable means.
	But at the end of that, I mean, and this really comes down to how we even define what is just, right?
	Because, I mean, why should it not affect one group more than another if we are going through a fair and agreeable procedure, right?
	If at every point we can't point out an injustice in the procedure, then can we not declare the outcome to be just?
	And if not, why not?
	If not, what are we appealing to?
	If not the method by which we got there.
	So no, I mean, I don't agree that it's synonymous with pathologizing a race or something like that, especially if you're going about it based on a set of beliefs.
	Beliefs can change.
	Questions from everyone else, I'm God, back to Brexit.
	I guess what I would say is, how can, right?
	I've got a lot of friends who are Mainers, like most of them.
	I'll start off by saying that.
	And I guess the butt of my question is, how can we as citizens sort of pull together through this whole bloody mess and not despair and try and make try and kind of do the right thing, even if not necessarily getting directly involved in politics?
	How can we do the right thing?
	I mean, I guess you're going to, when it comes to Brexit in particular, I guess you kind of have to get involved, you know, at least giving your opinion on social media at the bare minimum.
	You know, if not, go to a protest or talk to your family and friends about it and say, look, I have real concerns about this for these reasons.
	These are my sincere beliefs.
	So, you know, but I mean, it's it's a bit of an open-ended question.
	When it comes to it, I guess we're just gonna have to grin and bear it and just, you know, do the best we can.
	I wish I could give you a more clear answer.
	Still on Brexit.
	Regarding Theresa May's Deal and her actions.
	Sorry, can you speak up a little bit?
	Regarding Treme, Theresa May's Deal is an action.
	Would you say that her actions have come more out of incompetence or an actual ideological position?
	Right, I don't know Theresa May, I've never met her or anything like that, so I wouldn't be able to tell you directly, but looking at it from the outside in, it looks like they are effectively afraid and can't think outside of their bubble.
	So one thing that I've learned about being in UKIP, because everything happens in London, you know, even UKIP happen in London.
	And so you have to go down and you end up outside of Parliament.
	And, you know, I mean, the other day I had lunch in the House of Lords, which was very nice.
	It actually was terrible.
	It was really bad, actually.
	It was duck breast and it was bleeding.
	I was like, Christ.
	The one thing you notice about Westminster is it is very much its own sort of clothes bubble.
	It's insular to the point where it's kind of, I think, becoming rather paranoid at this point.
	And they've convinced themselves that a no-deal Brexit will be so economically catastrophic for Britain that literally anything would be a preferable option.
	But they can't seem to get any other option through the process.
	And so at this point, like, I think she's just effectively painted herself into a corner and she's too weak to do the one thing that she could do, which would be redeeming, which would be at this point saying, look, I have spent two years in fruitless negotiations with the EU.
	At every point, they've blocked me.
	At every point, they have refused me.
	The only deal they will accept is what is being described by Brexiteers correctly as an outright capitulation to an enemy to which we haven't even lost a war.
	Why would we agree to this?
	The only thing that Britain is able to do now is just leave on its own terms.
	That would be the one redeeming thing she could do.
	And I don't think she's got the spine for it.
	So at the end of the day, I think they're just going to end up coming to the end of their time and being kicked out.
	So in regards to the Christchurch massacre, the aftermath of it anyway, the way New Zealand dealed with it was that they banned 4chan and assault rifles and other stuff.
	Would you prefer that instead of them doing nothing and just doing hashtag thoughts and prayers?
	I don't think that it's a very good idea that when a fascist goes and shoots up anything, that the country then becomes fascist.
	I think that's a very bad idea.
	I think, I mean, there's an 18-year-old lad who's facing 14 years in jail for sharing the live stream on Facebook.
	I mean, that, to me, is unbelievable.
	And obviously, the next day, the Prime Minister was out in her hijab or whatever it was, a shawl, saying, right, we're going to get rid of all the guns, which is precisely what the shooter wanted, because he wants to start inflaming the fears of the gun owners in the United States.
	And obviously, they're all terrified now.
	They're like, oh, look, this is how it happens.
	You know, this is what they do.
	And that's exactly what's happening.
	You know, cracking down on free speech, cracking down on, you know, people's right to defend themselves, things like this.
	This is all exactly what this fascist wanted.
	And it's turning them fascist in turn.
	I think this is just the absolute worst thing they can do.
	Now, I'm not suggesting they do nothing, obviously.
	But the problem is, you can't really prepare for an individual doing this.
	Because I mean, the guy owned his guns legally.
	He didn't have a criminal record.
	And he wasn't even radicalized on the internet.
	He had hardly any social media presence.
	But he went to France, he saw what was happening and decided, right, this is enough for me.
	I'm the person who's going to do something about this.
	And so he went to an entirely different country on the other side of the world to which he wasn't even a citizen and committed an act of terror.
	There's no particular way you can plan for that.
	So, I mean, really, I would be the I think the only thing that can actually be done is to actually see what it was he was doing this for and see, is there a legitimate complaint in there?
	Is there something that we're doing wrong that has caused this guy to do this?
	And that's a huge and dirty conversation that nobody wants to have.
	And so instead, we're going to ban this, ban that, ban the other, and ban you for talking about it.
	I wanted to ask, democracy gets glorified quite a lot as a really good thing, but you see a lot of the tyrannical societies go from sort of democracy to fascism or sort of like authoritarian socialism or communism or whatever.
	So I wanted to ask, do you think it's more important that you have sort of inviolent individual rights like complete free speech, sort of inviolent private property, all these things that sort of supersede the democracy?
	Because you get, for example, Labour will give you a lot of nice policies that in turn violate a lot of individual rights.
	What would your opinion on that be?
	So I suppose to reframe it very slightly, I guess you would say, is democracy more important than the rights and well-being of the citizenry itself?
	I would have to say obviously not.
	I mean if somehow we had no constitutional protections and for some reason a Labour majority decided to just purge the Conservatives like they're planning to, like John McDonnell wants, then obviously the democratic process has failed.
	Because I mean democracy, I really am with Winston Churchill on this.
	It's just it's better than the other systems, but it's not a great system in and of itself.
	But we don't have a better system.
	You know, if someone can think of a better way, then I'm all up for it.
	But it really doesn't look like we're going to.
	And the sort of like new technocracy that we're going into is definitely not going to work.
	So I mean, you know, my commitment to democracy is really one of practicality.
	If we can find one better, then I'm down for it.
	One that's more accountable, that does serve the needs of the citizens better.
	But I don't think we're going to.
	Where would you put that line on the rights?
	Because obviously, if you go extremely libertarian, you can be like taxation theft completely.
	Yeah, I don't agree that taxation is theft, obviously.
	What do you mean?
	Where would I put the line, sorry?
	So like for free, because obviously there's all these different rights for the right to bear arms, the right to free speech, the right to private property.
	Are those completely inviolent and the government's completely removed?
	How do you define?
	Well, I mean, all of these things are a negotiation for the society itself.
	If society at large, because all of the laws have to be the product of the mores and social, the moral norms of society.
	And if you have like 80% of people who want to outlaw guns, it's probably going to happen.
	There's no getting around it.
	Whether I agree with it or not, it really is for us as a society to determine for ourselves.
	Personally, I would like to argue in favour of the more libertarian side of it rather than the statist sort of authoritarian side of it.
	But there's no hard and fast line that you can easily draw.
	So you don't think you could justify it?
	Well, anything could be justified.
	Or literally anything you could.
	Yeah, I think democracies do j I mean like they justify outlawing handguns because just the raw number of deaths they produce in inner cities.
	Well I mean you might agree with that.
	It's hard to it's hard to find an argument against it.
	You know so it's all you can do is say well it's my right to own a handgun and it's like well you know that then then you've come kind come come kind of come to an impasse.
	But yeah, really, it's all just a social negotiation that we have to have.
	Do you not think it could keep moving up, though?
	Sorry to keep moving on the question.
	I think it inevitably is.
	Like, obviously, as soon as you steal a certain amount of money, it continues to push.
	Like, one of the things that I thought was really sort of scary that wasn't portrayed that way was when there was all of the talk about the levels of homelessness.
	And Jeremy Corbyn said, there's all these people with second homes, whatever, we need to take these second homes.
	Everyone's like, yeah, that's a really nice idea.
	But what that actually is, is a violation of private property because you're stealing someone's house.
	Commonly, everyone would be in favour of that.
	It's probably like 90% approval rating.
	Yeah.
	It's completely a violation of rights.
	Exactly.
	And I was raging about that.
	At the time, no one else seemed to notice.
	Yeah, that's what I thought.
	I said to my dad, I was like, this is the craziest thing anyone's proposed in ages.
	Yeah, it's a straight theft.
	It's openly Soviet, basically, isn't it?
	So it's going to take your stuff.
	No, you're not, Jeremy.
	While there are alternatives that don't include stealing people's property available, I think we should go for it, like hotels or buy them tents or something.
	I don't, you know.
	But anything that doesn't involve just violating someone's property rights is a better alternative, I agree.
	But the thing with all of these negotiations, because you're never going to be able to live any principle to its most extreme point, its most perfect point.
	So all of it is a compromise.
	And the negotiation, how much are you willing to compromise?
	And this is the problem that we have with free speech now, because I imagine that, like in the 70s, things were probably quite loose when it came to speech.
	They were probably, oh, you can say practically anything.
	Then you would be, oh, but that's offensive.
	This is that, this is that.
	And so it's this slow, gradual eating away of the liberty.
	And it's come to the point now where you've got people like me and presumably you guys too to sort of like start, no, no, no, we need to start going back towards the being more liberal end of it now.
	And it's a never-ending cycle in a democracy.
	It will never stop.
	It will always be going.
	And so this is why we need you to be politically active.
	If I could say one more thing, just to end it, like, that's the problem I think, as it keeps moving on, it's really difficult to get those rights back.
	And I think you can see the liberty slowly eroding.
	And over time, it can only get to a point where it does become completely authoritarian.
	And then where do you go from there?
	Because if there is no firearms, there's no means to protect yourself, what do you do?
	Well, that's really the reason that the Americans have got free speech and guns enshrined in their constitution.
	That's why I think we need some of those individual rights to find, at least hopefully agreed upon to a certain extent.
	Yeah, I would like some kind of addition to our unwritten constitution that says these things are sacred.
	I would like that.
	Because I think they always were, but they just weren't properly defined by law, but it was commonly known and now it's just not.
	These things kind of fall out of memory, don't they?
	Yeah, exactly.
	Like, I think our grandparents would never think of doing what we've done now.
	No.
	It would just be completely unthinkable.
	Okay, if we like to move on, Ben, I think you have a question, and then we'll come back here.
	Sorry, we're not used to technology in the political union.
	My question is very closely related to that one because I think I would agree with you that democracy is the best system of government for enshrining individual liberty so long as the people in a democracy have those views as preeminent views in that sort of society.
	I think it was Pericles who said that there are unwritten rules which bring upon the transgressor of them the reprobation of the general sentiment.
	And my question is, why have we lost that general sentiment?
	Why have we forgotten these unwritten rules?
	Specifically, was there a period in time in the last century when this happened?
	Because it seems to not just be in our society in the UK, but right across what we commonly refer to as the Western world.
	And also, is it possible to get these values back?
	You alluded to perhaps enshrining them, maybe something like Charter 88, but is that really good enough if the people themselves don't accept these values anymore?
	That's a good question.
	I think any change of values comes over time.
	And usually, with some kind of cataclysmic event that is forcing them on, forces the question to have to be widely answered by society.
	But attitudes can shift very, very quickly.
	Widespread attitudes can kind of flip very quickly if given a good reason.
	We just have to give a good reason.
	But generally, this is why free speech is important because it's one of those things that you can't change people's values.
	You can't persuade them that their values might need updating if you can't have these kind of difficult conversations.
	But honestly, I don't think there's a good answer.
	I don't think there's a good answer.
	It's the long, hard grind of civilization towards liberty or towards whatever goal it is you want.
	You're going to have to put in the legwork and expect to wait 20 years for any kind of payoff.
	So it's a never-ending struggle.
	If I may just ask a follow-up.
	It strikes me that in the long history of democracy, there has been a general gradual slide towards people forgetting these values, whether it's the French Revolution, the American Revolution, our current society, or even the ancient societies of Athens and Rome.
	It seems to me that you have this almost utopian democracy that slowly slides as people forget more and more the values for which their democracy was founded on.
	And I'm not particularly aware of any specific examples where this downward trend was reversed.
	So why is it different in our case?
	Or at least why should we hope it's different in our case?
	God, am I getting pessimistic?
	I can't give you a good reason why it should be any different.
	Because I mean, like, a lot of the impetus, I think, when a new republic or democracy is founded comes from people who have been long oppressed, you know, people who have lived their whole lives under tyranny and know what it is to not have freedom.
	And so once you've grown up generation after generation after generation in freedom, you don't know what tyranny is like.
	You don't know what it's like to suffer arbitrarily like this.
	And so when someone comes and says, well, okay, if we sacrifice some of our liberties, then we can get a benefit.
	And, you know, a lot of these things are tangible benefits.
	And it makes the case and it makes the case.
	And suddenly you find yourself sliding back towards it.
	I think it's a consequence of just being free, but not being comfortable.
	And that's the difference.
	Like, a lot of people will willingly sacrifice their freedom for their comfort.
	The gentleman in the second row.
	Hi.
	Do you think you'd join politics?
	Sorry, second.
	Do you think you'd join politics?
	Am I enjoying it?
	No, no.
	Do you think you'd join it politically?
	Join it.
	Like an MP.
	I mean, I'm never saying never.
	So who knows?
	Who knows what will happen?
	It depends how much I can piss some people off.
	If they look like they're like, we're not bothered by that, then I probably won't.
	But yeah.
	Okay, yeah, that's a good answer.
	And then the front row.
	Hi, you made an interesting point earlier about potentially having to open up the dirty conversation of potentially legitimate grievances in the case of the Christchurch terrorists.
	I was just wondering, would you feel the same about different strains of terrorism in that respect?
	So, for example, left-wing terrorism in the 1970s or more currently the sort of radical Islamist strain of terrorism that's really hot in the news right now.
	Yeah, I think that we should talk to these people and ask them what it is exactly they want.
	And the thing is, in the case of communists and jihadis, we know what they want.
	And the thing is, the things that they're asking for are things that we can't exactly agree to.
	I mean, the UK government can hardly agree to the abolition of the UK government.
	And the abolition of private property.
	It just can't agree.
	So it can never be a negotiation that can be had with the communists.
	So, we're going to have to treat them like you know, like terrorists.
	And it's the same with the jihadis.
	They're like, Well, we want to set up a caliphate over Britain and implement Islamic law.
	That's just there isn't a conversation to be had there.
	But the Christchurch shooters, the main core of his concern was the fact that the European birth rates are below replacement rate and mass immigration is causing noticeable change to our societies.
	Now, I don't think you have to be a fascist to be concerned about that.
	I think that just, I mean, anyone should be concerned about that.
	And I would be concerned about that for anyone else's country.
	I mean, one of Tibet's main concerns about being annexed to China is the threat of demographic displacement.
	Because obviously, there are a billion people in China and 4 million people in Tibet.
	So, they could easily just shuffle 8 million Chinese people into Tibet, and that'll just destroy the existing culture there.
	And I mean, I think that would be deeply unfair to the people who lived in Tibet.
	And unfortunately, no one ever asked any people in Western countries, do you want to have 250,000 people a year coming into this country?
	I mean, since like 97, we've had like 10 million people come into the country.
	That's an unbelievable number.
	It doesn't even matter where they're coming from.
	It's just the size of the number of people coming in that then our infrastructure has to deal with.
	But it also, the sort of cultural fabric of the nation becomes damaged by that because suddenly you find people in communities where they've never even left this community, they've never gone outside of it, but they find themselves surrounded by people who they can't speak to.
	They don't recognize, they don't know, and most importantly, they don't inherently trust just because they don't know them.
	They don't have any kind of cultural similarities with them.
	And I think that this is genuinely something that has been done to people against their will.
	And honestly, I think it's unfair.
	I do genuinely think that's unfair.
	And like I said, I'm not, obviously, I'm not pro-shooting anything up.
	I don't view Muslims as invaders or anything of the sort.
	But it's not about Muslims, really.
	It's about just the sort of lack of concern for Western countries as Western countries.
	As in, are the French a people?
	Are the French a people?
	Are they a distinct cultural group that you can point to and say that's France, that's a French person?
	And then does the French government have a responsibility to make sure that that's passed down from the generation that they inherited it from to the next?
	And if you can agree on all of these things, then open borders starts to sound like a really bad idea.
	And I don't agree that any of that is fascist or Nazi or anything like that.
	I think that's just common sense for anyone who thinks that the country they live in is inherently a decent thing.
	Could you not argue that maybe you're viewing the Christchurch motives in a bit more of a sequential sense than you're viewing the straight jihadis want a global caliphate when their sort of legitimate grievance that you could put it at is that they want to stop interference in Muslim affairs, shall we say?
	Well, I mean, I think that's absolutely a conversation that we could have with a representative.
	I mean, I don't see why we shouldn't take that as a legitimate grievance because undoubtedly the West meddles in Muslim affairs.
	There's no question of it.
	And that's, I'm more than happy to have that conversation.
	But I mean, I suppose it depends on the extremity of the person that you want to talk to.
	I mean, for example, I imagine the Christchurch shooter is probably not worth having a dialogue with him because he probably wants the absolute most extreme thing.
	It's not a white ethno-state.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Yeah, I mean, obviously, that's a terrible idea.
	I mean, I'm not even like my father's half non-white.
	So I wouldn't want a white ethnostate myself.
	And so I wouldn't have that conversation with him.
	But you can't deny that in the same way with the jihadis.
	You can't deny that Western intervention in the Middle East has been bad for the Middle East.
	Really bad.
	Millions have died.
	You know, there are drone strikes on a daily basis.
	It's a bad thing.
	And they're completely fair and bring that up.
	And I think by the same token, I think when the Christchurch shooter says, well, look, you know, there are genuine concerns about the demographic future of Western countries.
	I mean, when the Dalai Lama is saying it, then maybe it's time for a second.
	There probably is some kind of point here.
	I was wondering, do you think it'd be harder for UKIP to compete against Labour and Conservative when you now have the full Britain party and you also have Nigel Farage creating his own Brexit party?
	So in a way, you've kind of got like three parties kind of doing similar things.
	Do you think that's going to now make it harder for UKIP to gain popularity?
	Well, I mean, competition is a healthy thing, in my opinion, because we're going to win.
	Okay.
	No, I think competition is good.
	I think it's a terribly stagnant state of affairs when you're the only game in town.
	And I don't see the other two parties as, I mean, I don't even think the Brexit Party is actually a party yet.
	Oh, okay.
	I think it's an informal association.
	I don't believe it's been officially set up yet.
	So I don't really see either one as a threat to UKIP, to be honest.
	Okay.
	Yes, I was just thinking, like, I kind of had the assertion that, you know, it's going to divide into three or something like that.
	undoubtedly will do you think it'd be better if maybe uh you know the parties can work together and discuss their differences and instead of hiring just like i think that would be great if if they could do that that would be amazing okay But it doesn't look like much dialogue is going to happen in that regard.
	And in fact, I mean, what we're seeing at the moment is the balkanisation of our political landscape.
	You've got the independent group that's splitting off from the Labour and Conservatives, sort of centrists.
	And yeah, I mean, the Brexiteers are surely not long for the Tory Party at this point.
	So, yeah, I think that it is going to sort of balkanize and become a more competitive environment.
	And that's entirely to UKIP's benefit.
	Okay, cool.
	Thank you very much.
	That's right.
	Over here at the end.
	I was just wondering, because you're obviously in favour of a democracy, what you think of our voting system and first past the post and if you think it's democratic.
	I personally don't think it is.
	I was just wondering your opinion on it.
	Well, I mean, it is democratic.
	There's no doubt that even first past the post is a democratic system.
	It's not a very good democratic system.
	It is making sure that parties that get millions of votes are not represented in the parliament.
	As a member of UKIP, I would definitely prefer proportional representation.
	But things, I mean, like, I'm not angry with first past the post because really it's our fault that we still labour, not just the fact that we voted for it in the referendum in 2011 either, but it's also our fault because it becomes like a habitual thing, a generational thing, where people vote Conservative or Labour because they don't really follow politics, but that's the team that they're kind of wedded to in their community.
	You know, they could change that if they wanted to, but they've chosen not to by being kind of lazy about it.
	So it's not like it's a straitjacket, but it is definitely a barrier to entry.
	And it would be more representative if we had proportional representation.
	And then here, down at the front, behind you.
	Sorry to make you run about.
	Just as a follow-on from that question, what would you say to the idea of having more referendums?
	So we've had obviously a Brexit referendum.
	We had the referendum on the proportional representation.
	Would you be in favour of having more regular referendums on it really depends what it's for?
	I think most issues can be dealt with through the party system in Parliament, you know.
	But I do think that when it comes to like effectively like epoch defining decisions like Brexit, that a referendum is perfectly appropriate, I think.
	And I'm sure the referendum wasn't legally binding, but I think that it is democratically binding.
	And I think that the Conservatives knew that when they proposed it, which is why they said we'll implement what you decide.
	And the choices were just remain or leave.
	It wasn't May's deal or anything like that.
	So yeah, I mean, I think they're a good idea when it's sort of a giant, a giant issue.
	And just as a follow-up to that, would you be in favour of more kind of technical ways of voting, as in technological ways of voting?
	So like maybe online voting?
	No.
	No.
	I'm very, very suspicious of that.
	It would be very, very easy to gain and to rig.
	I think, and honestly, I think that we should probably stop being so goddamn lazy.
	You know, we can get off our chairs, we can walk around the corner, we can put a thing in a ballot box.
	I think there's some value to doing it the old way there.
	I agree.
	And obviously, we've got postal votes and stuff.
	I just thought it would be.
	I can see the temptation.
	I can see the temptation.
	We're struggling to get young people engaged, and I feel like that is going to be an easy way to get them engaged because they're always on phones.
	We all do it.
	And if there's an app for that, they'll do it.
	Yeah, no, I agree.
	It would undoubtedly get young people out voting.
	But honestly, I mean, do we really want you voting?
	No, they're going to have to learn to get off their asses, I think.
	So honestly, I think it would just, it's too much of a vulnerability, in my opinion.
	You know, I mean, it could so easily be hacked or you know, botted or whatever, you know, whatever it is that they can do.
	I'm not a tech guy, but I'm just way too suspicious of it.
	Just a quick question.
	I want to return back to the property rights thing.
	It was, although seriously addressed, quite a comical element.
	Everyone sort of laughed for a little bit, but my lovely government has decided to start changing the constitution.
	What's your government?
	South Africa.
	So I'd like.
	Well, my question is, they're trying to change the constitution to actually allow for the seizure of land owned by certain groups and then redistributing it.
	My question to you is: it is unlikely at the moment for you guys to face this, but if you ever do come face to face with this kind of situation, which already has shown is possible, how do you suggest fighting it?
	Because I don't know how to address this back in my country.
	I honestly don't know if I can even say what I think would be appropriate if the government was going to change the constitution so that they could just racially appropriate people's property.
	I mean, for me, that would be civil war-level territory.
	I see that's the concern at the moment.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And I don't want to advocate stuff like that.
	But that's where it's getting.
	I mean, the situation in South Africa is bad.
	And everyone knows it's bad, but no one wants to talk about it being bad.
	And the fact that they want a constitutional amendment to just start stealing people's land and things.
	I even looked, I did a bit of digging into this.
	It's not even the best way to do it.
	And I don't think it's even going to work.
	So all it's going to do is funnel land from hardworking people to party members who won't work hard, who'll let the land go fallow and end up wasting it.
	But more land has been transferred via the free market from white to black hands than by government redistribution because obviously the redistribution gets centered in the party members themselves.
	So they're a bunch of goddamn socialists and you can't be trusted.
	So, you know, it's one of those things.
	It's like if you actually let the process play out, then it'll actually, you'll get the kind of result you want, but it'll take time.
	And that's obviously not good enough for Julis Malema and the EFF who are demanding blood now.
	So, yeah, I mean, it's a bad way, man.
	It's in a bad way.
	Well, I guess that's it then.
	Sorry, mate.
	I wish I could come from the front.
	So, yeah, quick second question.
	If you haven't guessed from my first question, I'm definitely on the left wing.
	I'm a Labour Party member and everything.
	I was just wondering, because even though I am on the left, I despise the identitarian left because at the moment, I despise the regressive culture, especially one at university.
	And I think that identity politics is a distraction from more important class issues.
	And a lot of time it feels like people like me are fighting almost like on three fronts because you're dealing with, you know, just the traditional right-left dichotomy and you're just constantly debating right-wingers on policy.
	And then you're debating the right-wingers who, when they hear you're left-wing, assume you believe in all of this, and you have to deconstruct it and say, actually, no, I'm more traditional Bennite almost.
	And then obviously, you've got to deal with the actual progressive left, which are calling you a sellout or a brochures.
	They're in all your communities as well.
	Yeah.
	Like, they're not around me, but they are around you, aren't they?
	Exactly.
	And I guess my question is, what would your advice be to leftists like me in order to try and fight this current trend in our own?
	Believe it or not, I'm friends with quite a lot of leftists these days because they are, again, like I'm pro-capitalism.
	I'm a liberal, so I'm obviously pro-capitalism.
	But I can totally see why the sort of Bennite socialists are lost from their own political persuasion and just need somewhere where they can go and have a conversation about something.
	I mean, I've found myself allying with unironic Maoists before, you know, on the subject of identity politics against the radical right and the radical left, the identitarian right and left, who agree on at least the fundamental premise that we can either go pro or anti-white people or black people.
	They don't really care about the rest of it when it gets beyond them.
	But yeah, you guys, I actually feel worse for you guys than I do for the other people.
	Because I can go and talk to the right wingers.
	I don't consider myself a right-winger.
	I consider myself very centrist, but I can at least go over and have a conversation with the right-wingers.
	And we can have a perfectly normal conversation about politics.
	I can figure out where they stand.
	They can figure out where I stand.
	I can say, well, reasonable compromises, blah, blah, blah.
	And that's all fine.
	No one gets angry.
	No one gets insulted.
	We have a disagreement.
	You've got nowhere to go to do that.
	You're a terrible person, whether you like it or not.
	Honestly, even if, like, this is the thing, even if you disagree with a lot of the right-wingers, they are your allies when it comes to dealing with identitarianism.
	Because, I mean, like, the screw the British Conservatives, they're basically identitarians themselves now.
	In fact, that was something that annoyed me so much.
	Oh, look how much we're paying our female members.
	You don't care about that, you morons.
	You're not, you're not.
	Anyway, but like, like the American Republicans, honestly, I'm starting to really get a kind of shine to them because they're not bad people at all.
	They're just really belligerent, like belligerent for liberty.
	And so, yeah, they treat any kind of like I've had so many of them saying, well, you know, you're a socialist because you want them roads.
	All right.
	But yeah, so basically start talking to them because they understand the problems.
	But you're just going to have to make common cause with people you wouldn't have otherwise liked, which just goes to show you just how awful the identitarians are.
	We've got a question at the back.
	I would just like to go back to the point that you made at the very beginning about inciting violence, whether it should or should not be criminalised.
	And it seems that your argument is based on the notion that each individual has some kind of inherent sense of rationality, which seems to, to me, contradict the research that's been on mass psychology or famously Philip Zimbardo, who proved that even good people, quote unquote, can do bad things.
	If that is the case, how much responsibility do you think political social media influences like you should bear?
	How much responsibility should you have for the actions of your followers?
	That's my question.
	Well, that's a good and complex question.
	I'm aware that there's definitely a level of influence when you're someone who has some kind of authority and speaking to a crowd, which is why I'm not actually the free speech absolutist that I'm painted as.
	I do agree that there probably should be some kind of reasonable limit there.
	But when it comes to influencing, well, what can you do?
	What can you do?
	If someone is giving their political opinions and they're not preaching violence, then you can't point to anything that they've done wrong.
	I mean, like, for example, Elliot Roger, the misogynistic mass shooter, big fan of the Young Turks.
	Used to watch their videos all the time.
	Do we lay blame at the Young Turks?
	I think we can.
	Even though I disagree with a lot of their opinions, I don't think it's their fault.
	I think it's Elliot Rogers' fault.
	And at the end of the day, anything that you ingest, you have to do it critically.
	It's up to you to be diligent about this.
	And even then, where would you even start drawing the boundaries?
	Where would you even start drawing the lines by which you would say, right, okay, this is too much influence.
	There's no good standard.
	And so if someone isn't openly preaching violence, then I don't think that we can really find a good standard to hold them to.
	I mean, do you have any ideas?
	Well, what you said was that if you told me to go and kill someone, I wouldn't do it because I'm not an idiot and I'll, you know.
	But does that work in a wide sense?
	Well, no, no, I agree with you.
	I agree.
	I mean, that's like, if I were to speak in principle, then I do believe that the personal autonomy of each person resides within themselves, and it is up to them to be the sort of like the sensible captain of their own ship.
	But when you get group experiences, we've got lots of people, there's emotions running high, you've got someone on stage demagoguing.
	Yeah, I mean, I can accept there is kind of deferred responsibility in that regard.
	So I'm not an absolutist on that.
	Okay, but then if we believe in capitalism and market economy, then surely the corporations should be allowed to make their own rules about what they define as preaching violence or hatred and stuff.
	I believe they do.
	Well, I have to say, well, no, that's not.
	I think they should be subject to the law of the land, obviously.
	So, I mean, they're not just...
	So if platforms like Facebook, Twitter, other stuff have their own rules and you find them to be too low as a bar for free speech and they ban you, do you accept that or do you...
	What choice does one have but to accept it?
	They've got the complete executive power in this regard.
	What are you going to do?
	You're going to chain yourself to Twitter's door?
	Well, I'm asking this because I come from the Czech Republic, and last week we had one MP proposing that Facebook should not have the right to ban anyone.
	And I would want to know whether you, from a libertarian perspective, you should think that that is.
	Well, I'm not a libertarian.
	I always call myself a liberal for a reason, and that's because I do agree that the state should exist and that it should have functions in society.
	I mean, this is, you know, it should have regulatory powers.
	The question, the problem really is that social media has brought us into a new world for which we weren't really very well prepared.
	But I suspect that every technological advance we've ever created has done exactly that.
	And so this is very much like the printing press.
	It's created a new sort of a new dimension along which politics can occur.
	But I do think there's no doubting that people use it as a town square.
	They use it as a public venue.
	And that's very much how the platforms advertise themselves.
	You know, sign up.
	It's free.
	You know, anyone can sign up.
	Get an account.
	You know, use our service.
	Obviously, to get as many people using them as possible.
	But I don't suppose anyone considered the effect that this would have on political dialogue, especially when world leaders start using it.
	I mean, for example, Donald Trump's Twitter feed has been declared by the US Supreme Court to be a public forum.
	That puts Twitter in a hell of a legal position because now, how do they justify banning a single American citizen?
	Because now you're preventing them from interfering in the electoral process, the political process.
	That's election meddling.
	So when it comes to like, you know, someone else asked, you know, what about the deplatforming of high-profile figures?
	It's like, well, Jesus Christ, you know, if we're worried about Russia just spamming ads on Facebook, I think removing someone for political opinions you don't like, that's way more egregious.
	But I don't have all the answers here, and I don't know if anyone has the answers on this.
	And it's really about the sort of where we fall after a reasonable dialogue.
	But I do agree, though, that there probably is some onus on the social media platforms to act as a platform and not a publisher, though.
	I do dislike the idea of them having a kind of editorial policy in this regard.
	And I think that, I mean, Tim Paul made a great point in his conversation with Joe Rogan, where he was saying that the laws of the United States generally permit stuff, a lot of speech that people are banned from Twitter for.
	So it's actively preventing US citizens from engaging in the political process lawfully because Twitter happens to have sort of like European style speech regulations.
	And that's a genuine concern.
	I think that's a real problem.
	And like I said, I'm not saying I have all the answers, but at least we can lay out the problem and see where we are from there.
	Thank you.
	My question, my second question rather, is on British liberalism.
	Because I would also consider myself something of a liberal in the old Whig tradition.
	So I wondered what your opinion on the Orange Book was and why you think the Lib Dems have become so hostile to the Orange Book movement in the last option, in the last 20 years.
	I'm afraid I'm not familiar with it.
	So I'm not familiar with it.
	It was a book published during the New Labour years by David Laws, Paul Marshall and a few others.
	It included several prominent classical liberals within the Lib Dems at the time and tried to push seeing the New Labour consensus as sort of a centrist monolith.
	It feared that the Lib Dems would be sucked into this and as many would argue, they have end up standing for absolutely nothing except big government, the European Union, etc.
	Exactly.
	And they feared that the Lib Dems were increasingly, this is about 15 years ago, losing what it meant to be a liberal.
	Well, I agree.
	Yeah, and they got some movement in various conferences going up to the 2010 election, had some influence.
	And then some people, most people in the Lib Dems accused the Orange Bookers of the reason for the Lib Dems alliance with the Conservatives, arguing that coalition with the Conservatives would have been impossible had it not been for the resurgence in classical liberalism.
	And then obviously following the EU referendum, people like Mark Littlewood, who was an orange booker for the Institute for Economic Affairs, for example, was one of the few prominent Lib Dems, although it was roughly a quarter of party members who supported leave and was chased out of the party as a result.
	Yeah, I've never paid too much attention to the Liberal Democrats because I don't think they're going to achieve anything in future.
	I don't think they've got a firm moral or philosophical foundation for the party.
	And I can't stand the fact that they're unbelievably disgusting Europhiles.
	Just, you know, I find them kind of gross in that regard, which is a real shame because, I mean, on the face of it, being a Liberal Democrat sounds like a great idea.
	So I'm sorry I can't answer the question, but I'm just not an expert in the history of the Liberal Democrat Party.
	I don't know if you've seen, but it's now crime under the Terrorism Act 2000 to view terrorist propaganda even just once.
	Yes.
	And I was just wondering what your opinion is on the implications this might have on alternative media, including content creators like yourself, but also for students and even like independent or freelance researchers.
	It means I'm probably going to jail at some point because I've read a lot of terrorist propaganda.
	I've read the Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, the management of savagery, this chap's latest manifesto.
	I find these things fascinating and I think it's important that we do read them because A, if you don't know what they're saying, how do you know why it's bad?
	How do you even know you oppose it?
	How do you know you aren't proliferating these beliefs yourself by accident if you don't even know what they are?
	But more importantly, I don't think the government has the goddamn right to keep ideas out of my head or your head or anyone else's head.
	You know, again, it's up to you as a responsible individual to be able to read something and distill from it what is good and what is bad and what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.
	And then your behavior following from that is up to you.
	The government absolutely should not have the power to criminalize people for reading something.
	I mean, it's genuinely Orwellian.
	It's the kind of thing that the party would do.
	It's utterly, it's utterly irredeemable, in my opinion.
	And it's utterly unjustifiable.
	I don't care how many potential lives they think they're saving through terrorism.
	It is not justified at all.
	Can I also just ask as well?
	You've got a Christchurch video coming out.
	Have you got a time span on that?
	No particular time span.
	Honestly, I'm kind of waiting for to see what happens because this guy is going to defend himself in court and he is not going to take the process seriously.
	And I think he's going to do something quite outrageous.
	And I want to know what happens.
	Because I'm going to make a...
	Yeah, well, exactly.
	Yeah, you saw him doing the okay sign, which is now a Nazi hand sign, which again, that's not a Nazi symbol.
	He's doing it because you think it's a Nazi symbol, you're on.
	And now you've given the okay sign to the Nazis.
	Can we not stop giving the Nazis things?
	Oh, a Nazi touched it.
	Here, have it.
	It's not a germ, you idiots.
	You know, it's like it's not infected.
	Christ.
	But yeah, so I'm waiting because A, I'd like to have my channel for a little bit longer.
	But B, I'd like to see what happens, you know, because the thing is, the worst part about it is the statistics he's using to justify what he's saying are all correct.
	They're not controversial at all.
	And it's something that maybe we should think about.
	I mean, like, a few years ago, Denmark had noticed themselves that they had falling birth rates, below replacement rates.
	Denmark's only got five million people in it.
	You know, you have one or two generations where people only have one child, and then you're down to one or two million people in Denmark.
	So they naturally, okay, if we want our civilization to go on, then we have to start encouraging people to make babies.
	But there was a noticeable spike in pregnancies and births the following year after the.
	After the, it was just an advertisement campaign saying, hey look, Danish people, maybe you want to think about having kids at some point in your life, because you know, then we want Denmark to carry on and it works.
	So I mean, you know and, but this again, forget the forget the shooter, forget his manifesto.
	This is a genuine concern anyway, you know, because the question and the reason, often the reason mass immigration is justified is on the question of pensions.
	It's, uh well, who's going to pay for the pensions of the people who didn't have kids, because their kids are not paying uh, not earning them enough of money to, and with the extension of life expectancy in people now anyway, then there aren't enough young people to pay the pensions of the old people.
	So we're gonna have to get immigration, have to get immigrants in, and it's okay.
	Well, that's a conversation we have to have, isn't it?
	You know, I don't think just unfettered access to the country for anyone in the world is a good idea.
	I think maybe there are other alternatives.
	If we're having problems paying pensions for old people, let's have a conversation, but instead we'll just leave the borders open, so okay.
	oh there's a few questions here at the phone if you want to just slide the microphone over i love it everyone's always nervous on the first one because they're not sure what to ask but as soon as i start talking oh wait a minute uh hopefully a bit of a nicer question uh what book what book would you say is influenced you the most and could you elaborate a little on it please the most um perhaps your favorite book
	I don't even know where i'd begin, I think honestly, right.
	I think that one of the most important books is The Prince by Machiavelli.
	And a lot of people kind of ignore it, because what he's talking about is the power dynamics of feudal politics, which doesn't sound very useful now.
	But what he really did, and this is the thing that he got completely censured for in his own lifetime, was essentially create political science, divorce the moral aspect of politics from the realistic aspect, the realpolitik of it.
	Because at the end of the day, people have a great deal of difficulty distinguishing what they think would be a moral good and what should happen with what will happen, or you know what is uh, and and I guess, what I would call a more objective critique of the situation.
	And that was something that he, he created and in in the.
	In the case of Machiavelli, it was to demonstrate that um, you're gonna have to commit moral injustices if you want to see an ethical justice because of the system of hereditary feudalism.
	I mean, obviously that's not a problem.
	We have now um, but it was.
	It was something that was so radical in his time, just to say it, even though everyone knew it was true and they abided by these rules.
	Anyway, it was such a radical departure from the sort of uh, Christian ethos of the time that um, that it got Machiavelli in a lot of trouble.
	And the thing is, even now his name is kind of sinister, which is a real shame, because he was a complete patriot or you know.
	All he was doing was just being realistic about the political situation.
	I mean, he was Pro-Republican, he was you know he was.
	He was a diplomat, he was a civil servant, he was tortured by the, The Medicis, yeah, You know, the guy wasn't like some evil villain.
	It's just he was saying, well, look, if we just take a realistic look at these things, then we come to different conclusions than the idealistic look that honestly often ends worse than the other, than the alternative, in my opinion.
	But there are loads of great books on this kind of thing, but I don't know why, but that's always one that's really stuck out for me.
	I don't know why.
	Thank you.
	At the end here.
	In a recent meeting, UKIP meeting that you attended, Jared Batten stated the reason why they don't allow ex-EDL and BNP members to join UKIP is to protect the party.
	How do you feel that allowing Tommy Robinson to join the party actually protects it in a UK?
	He's not a member of the party.
	Or being involved within the party then?
	He's just an advisor to Gerard.
	Is that not even more involved than being just a member then?
	No, no.
	Being an advisor?
	Well, I mean, talking to him isn't being a member, but I mean, it's not my rule.
	I didn't make it.
	You know, I don't get to have any say over it.
	And if Gerard wants to talk to Tommy, then he talks to Tommy, doesn't he?
	I mean, generally, seeing as you tend to be a supporter of Tommy Robinson, are you in favour of him?
	Well, like, to be honest with you, it's not my decision.
	I actually think that the rule preventing BNP and EDL members from joining is actually a good thing because we've been doing this tour in the north and twice now.
	We've had like the lone BNP guy who's stood up and gone, what about the white race?
	And I'm glad that Gerard has been able to forcefully and with no ambiguity reject their message.
	Because he openly states, well, these parties do actually have roots in neo-Nazism.
	Even if they've kind of shed the trappings of that over the decades that they've been going, they do still have their roots there.
	And I don't want to be involved with that at all.
	And so I am genuinely happy to have that sort of barrier there.
	But then there is the argument: well, you know, people make mistakes when they're young and things change.
	Like in the example of Tommy, he joined the BNP for a year because you've got to pay for one year's membership, obviously.
	And he didn't really know what it was about because he was like 18 years old or something.
	And, you know, what's an 18-year-old know about politics?
	You know?
	So it's entirely possible that he was just looking for something to be engaged in and doesn't hold any of those beliefs that they would have separate to his or UKIPs.
	But I mean, honestly, I'm fine with the rule.
	And I mean, you know, Gerard's probably being a bit cheeky by circumventing it, by having him as an advisor, but you can't stop him from taking on an advisor.
	So I mean, would you, in that case, taking Toby Robinson as an advisor if you're in his position?
	In principle, I don't see a problem with it, but I think the political timing of it was terrible.
	I think that Gerard was operating from a point of conviction, because I think that he sees Tommy as being someone who is speaking truth to power and being persecuted for it.
	And to be honest with you, that's how I see him too.
	And so I think that Gerard was sort of being brave when he did this, but I do think the political timing was terrible.
	Let's go to the top.
	What about the word race?
	You stated the idea of multiculturalism not working, so how would we...
	Sorry, I can't hear you very well.
	Sorry.
	Sorry.
	So you discussed about how you don't agree with the idea of multiculturalism.
	How would you, per se, integrate Islamic culture into British culture?
	Or you know what I mean?
	I mean, I think that it'll end up integrating itself if we give it some time and we allow people to say what they think.
	Because, I mean, a lot of the time, the things that will be said won't be very nice, but there's a reason that someone wants to say something to someone else that isn't very nice.
	And at the moment, what we're saying is that none of the Muslim communities in Britain have done any wrong.
	If we're not allowed to tell them what we think of them, then we are saying that they've done nothing wrong.
	And I mean, it's not a popular thing to say, but any communities that produce grooming gangs on the regular have community problems.
	Like there's a story of, there's one example of this one girl who got taken by a couple of Muslim guys, raped, escaped in the same day, gets picked up by another guy, raped, and escaped.
	And then I'm pretty sure on the same day, she got caught again.
	And it's just like, that is a community problem, right?
	That is a problem with the ethos of the community.
	It's clearly not isolated.
	It's clearly quite widespread amongst these communities.
	And now I've probably just committed a hate crime, right?
	So I'm probably in trouble now.
	But this is a truth.
	This is demonstrably true.
	But the thing is, if I can say these things, then the difference is if I can't say these things, then the community to which, you know, and it doesn't have to be Muslims, it could be any community, but just whatever community it is, don't have the kind of sort of reception from the wider society to let them know that they're doing something egregious, you know, because it could well be that they don't think that they're doing anything wrong.
	They don't realize that anyone's bothered by this.
	You know, it could be that.
	And how else are they going to know?
	We can come down here to the second row.
	I was just wondering what your response was to the current resurgence in prosecution allegations for the Bloody Sunday killings and what you think the position of Corbyn arguing for these prosecutions says about him, the party, but also future British operations.
	Will future British operations be hindered by such a thought as that any action taken by a British soldier will end them in court?
	Right.
	So I don't know the ins and outs of the events of Bloody Sunday.
	I'm obviously aware a massacre occurred, but I'm not very well informed on what's happened there.
	But I can see our anti-nationalist friend here shaking his head.
	But I'm actually on your side.
	If the British soldiers did something wrong, then they should be prosecuted.
	Because fundamentally, we are the nation that created the idea of the rule of law.
	And we can't just suspend that because it's our guys who've done something that we're now going to have prosecuted.
	No, they absolutely should be held to account if they've done something wrong.
	But again, I don't know the situation.
	So it could be that they're being falsely accused or they were justified in doing what they were doing or something.
	I don't know.
	But if there is something that has happened, just because they're ours doesn't mean they should go without punishment if it's warranted.
	And that's the whole point.
	That's the reason that we have the rule of law, is that no one is above it.
	And it's not just about, you know, oh, they're British, so they're ours, so we're going to take care of them.
	Because that's the sort of thing that corrupt dictatorships do, you know, to protect, to maintain the loyalty of their people.
	I think that's terrible.
	I think that's utterly unprincipled.
	And I think that's the opposite direction in which the country should go.
	Just to follow up from that, do you think it's then fair for someone like Corbyn and the governments that he's supported to then pass off atrocities committed by the IRA as almost unguided and it necessarily wasn't their fault and now they're reformed and should be let go or should they be prosecuted side by side?
	They should be prosecuted side by side as a natural corollary of what I've just said.
	If ours have to be held to account, theirs have to be as well.
	But Corbyn will find any reason to side with the terrorists.
	Corbyn doesn't argue for the prosecution of British soldiers out of a point of principle.
	He does it because he kind of hates them.
	I was wondering if there's any chance of ever seeing this weekend stupid back.
	It's a sorely missed series.
	I'm really sorry.
	get that a lot man and i'm sorry that i stopped it but i'm not any no plans to revive it uh because i'm too busy doing stuff like this um i've got a I've got to travel.
	I've got to do a lot of work.
	Yeah, exactly.
	You should see our schedule.
	So, I mean, like, tomorrow I'm not even going home.
	I'm going to another interview with someone else.
	So I just don't have time at the moment.
	But I guess when I'm ready to retire from doing this kind of thing, it'll probably come back.
	Just across the.
	Me too and the concept of slacktivism.
	What do you kind of do?
	Do you think slacktivism is a problem if you're aware of the term?
	I'm aware of the term.
	It doesn't get all that much done, so it can't be that much of a problem.
	I mean, I'm doing my dissertation on it, and I think there's a fundamental problem with the definition of it of you just do a tweet or change a profile picture.
	And I think that's what most people consider it as.
	That's what I consider to be.
	I would argue that it's doing that and then subsequently not doing anything else.
	So there's a couple of people who consider doing that.
	You have to take into account what they do after the fact so you can be politically active and do those things, posting hashtags, doing profile picture filters or whatever.
	But you have to do something as well as that.
	Attend marches, sign petitions or whatever.
	Do you think what you're doing on YouTube or on when you were on Twitter or on Minds or whatever you're on now?
	Would you consider that kind of slacktivistic in and of itself?
	Maybe, maybe when I first started, because I was just putting a video up or something to talk about whatever topic I want to talk about.
	But these days, obviously not.
	I mean, I'm actually outdoing the things that I'm supposed to be doing as an activist.
	I mean, yeah, I think that the main problem with slacktivism is it makes people feel like they've done something.
	And nine out of ten times they haven't.
	Like, the example I always use is, you know, when the Charlie Hebdo attacks happened, and everyone put a picture of a French flag on their profile, I just looked for all my friends' profiles, and I was just like, none of you know a single French person.
	Not one of you.
	So not one French person out of all of my friends is aware that you guys are pro-France now.
	So it was just an empty gesture.
	It's a signal to one another that, oh, I'm a good person.
	And, yeah, I think it's really insufferable, frankly.
	And would you accuse me too of a similar thing of being slacktivist?
	No, me too.
	Very active.
	Very.
	especially the Time's Up movement.
	It's one of those organisations that engage the democrat machinery in the US.
	And because it's, from the democratic point of view, the unimpeachable moral good, it's very easy for them to marshal resources and labor from fellow activists or TV presenters or whoever it is, you know, celebrities.
	It's very easy for them to drum this up because, I mean, how are you going to what you're again?
	What are you for rapier or whatever?
	It's hard to argue against.
	And so we end up arguing in a procedural way.
	It's like, well, you know, it's presumption of innocence.
	You're going to be, you know, necessarily committing injustices in the witch hunt that's going to go on.
	And then, I mean, you get like some feminist outlets who just openly say, yeah, this is a witch hunt and we're coming for you all.
	I wish it was just slacktivism, frankly.
	There'd probably be a lot fewer people who have been mishandled by it.
	But I mean, and the problem with things like Me Too as well is that you see predatory feminist activists who are well aware.
	I mean, this is the thing that happened in the atheist movement.
	Like, all of the sort of famous atheists in the US all became very leftist and they all completely bought in to the sort of the axioms that the worldview is built on.
	And so, as soon as some angry feminist activist like Stephanie Guthrie or something, who you know has an agenda because she's just open about it in her social media, comes along and starts making allegations.
	You know, those allegations aren't true.
	I mean, you can look through the story that she's given, and there's no, there's actually no like allegation of actual sexual impropriety in the allegation.
	It says, we had a kiss, and then I said I had to go, and so I left.
	Ah, I've been raped.
	Obviously, this is what you at a conference drunk and you had a fumble.
	Okay, whatever.
	But now, sort of, David Silverman is, you know, he's been absolutely chewed out by all of the people around him as if he's some sexual predator, which I don't think he is.
	So I wish they were slacktivists, frankly.
	I think that some movements should become slacktivist movements.
	But mostly, I think that slacktivism is kind of an easy cop-out.
	It's an easy cop-out.
	Right, we've got time for one more, one more, everybody, over here.
	Sorry.
	My question is actually about voting age.
	So several times today we've heard.
	This is what I want you to talk about.
	So I'm in full agreement.
	You know, if some philosophers can get charged for corrupting the youth, why can't Corbyn be for lying to us about tuition fees, for example?
	So, and we know democracy fundamentally doesn't work, so I want to hear your perspective on raising it.
	I would suggest to probably about 25 go back to what it used to be.
	And I just want to hear your take.
	Yeah, well, I'm completely favourite.
	I mean, I'm pretty certain at this point.
	I mean, you only ever hear about lowering the age of voting from radical leftists.
	You don't hear about it from the centre conservatives or the Lib Dems or anything like that.
	It's always the radical left who are like, yeah, yeah, we need to lower the age of voting.
	Why?
	Oh, because these kids should vote.
	Kids don't vote.
	You know, you're going to get a marginal number of them who vote.
	So what's the point of it even?
	But really, what it is, is they know that what the, and this is a distinct problem with the radical left at the moment, is that the moral framework they're offering is deceptively simple on the surface, but actually comes from profoundly complex philosophical roots that most adults don't understand, let alone 16-year-olds, and will never understand.
	And so it's a very easy and seductive way of kind of slipping their political positions and morality into the public discourse and theoretically shifting a voting block that didn't previously exist in their own favor in order to win elections.
	So it's entirely cynical.
	I mean, I'm personally at this point just for raising the voting age just to spite them.
	Get bent.
	But no, I mean, you know, do we want 16-year-olds voting?
	Do they pay taxes, really?
	Do they own anything?
	Do they have any real investment?
	Do they know what they're talking about?
	Do they know what they're voting for?
	I guess, again, one of these sort of social negotiations.
	And I'm planting my flag firmly in the adult white property-owning male camera.
	Obviously, adults.
	But I mean, I would say 21 is probably fair.
	Because, I mean, one of the things that we see a lot recently as well is the age of consent.
	Oh, consent, consent, consent.
	Oh, nobody understands consent.
	You know, kids are raping each other left, right, and center because they don't understand consent.
	It's okay, well, why do we want them voting then?
	You know, if they can't even have sex with one another without raping each other constantly, they don't understand all these things, if they're too young, if they're too silly, if they're too foolish, then we probably shouldn't have them voting, should we?
	So, yeah, raise it.
	That's where I'm at.
	Okay, fortunately, that's all we've got time for.
	Was there anything you wanted to say just close or thanks for coming down and making it an interesting night?
	I really enjoyed it.

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