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Nov. 12, 2020 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:05:29
The Podcast of The Lotus Eaters #1
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Good afternoon and welcome to the podcast of The Load Seaters, the second sort of beta test rollout podcast.
But we're going to see how we do.
I'm joined by Hugo Hlethadeh, is that?
Hlethadeh.
Hlethadeh, yes.
And we're going to be talking about things that have happened recently.
Hugo, what do you want to start with?
Well, we have a story of the UN. It's actually just come out I think yesterday that the UN is reviewing the US. It's a periodic review.
There's nothing too weird or anything like that.
But it's reviewing the US for its human rights record.
And what's particularly interesting about the story is Which countries are actually in the Human Rights Commission of the UN? I mean, the story is reported by mainstream media, obviously, and it's kind of interesting, the contrast between those countries and what they actually...
The people they're judging.
Because I can already imagine the kind of coalition of villains that we're talking about casting judgment on the United States.
Yeah, exactly.
So it turns out that the Human Rights Council includes critics like Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Russia and China.
It sounds like a Monty Python schedule something, doesn't it?
Yeah.
Well, the quote from the article is, these countries questioned and scrutinized the United States' record on rights as the Human Rights Council gave the US its turn for a regular examination of every UN member state's record on human rights known as the Universal Periodic Review.
And so this is a process that happens regularly, as I said.
Every five years the country is reviewed and the US was being reviewed together with 13 other states I think.
So it's being pointed out in relation to the US especially, but it's not just them, it's just that the story is funny because of it.
And so the other funny thing about it is what they actually have problems with.
So there's one caveat to it, which is Syria, which is alleging occupation and war troubles, basically, which is kind of legit because the US has been in Syria and has done some questionable things in there.
So that's an outlier because all the others were criticizing the US for its domestic policies, for the response to George Floyd's death and things like that.
It seems fair to point out that the US was in Syria to defeat ISIS, is that what they're referring to?
Yes, but it's also referring to...
it's also bringing up the questionable things the US did in Syria.
I mean, what examples did they give?
Well, basically funding the opposition to the government.
I mean, it's the government representative that's speaking at the UN. So the US had funded the opposition in Syria, which...
Is this under the Obama administration?
Both.
I mean, aside under Obama and most things were happening under Obama, but then Trump...
It's the sort of continuation of the US international policy.
I mean, even if Trump really wanted to, he wouldn't have been able to do anything with it.
Or not anything, I shouldn't say that.
Not that much.
I'm trying to place blame.
I'm just trying to understand the continuity of the process.
We're talking about the United States as an institution rather than the actions of any one president.
Right, right.
And I mean, even though I say that Trump couldn't do much at the beginning, he could have certainly done stuff throughout this presidency.
He's done some things about Syria, right?
The situation is not the same as it was four years ago.
But at the same time, he obviously could have done more and the situation is still pretty dire, let's say.
Which is...
Shame.
So the US defended itself by referring to the progresses made in Guantanamo.
They cited reductions in people who are actually being held there.
Then the response to George Floyd's death being a legal process with the Just to be clear, hasn't Derek Chauvin been exonerated?
Didn't he get let off?
I think he got let off, but I don't know the details about that one.
I don't know the details either.
I just saw the headlines going past, like, by the way, he's not being charged for this.
And apparently in the autopsy there are unusually high levels of fentanyl in his system.
Yeah, I heard about that as well.
But at the same time, the police in the US being exonerated doesn't exactly mean that they had done nothing wrong.
That does not.
That's true.
That is true.
We'll put a pin in that and come back to that in another podcast.
Yeah, that's probably a good idea.
So the US representative also cited the rule of law and the process being important, which is a good point to be brought up, but you would expect him to do that.
I imagine that China and Iran were just blushing.
Well, yeah, so the Chinese representative, sorry for not pronouncing the name, he rushed through, apparently, the nine points of concern, some of which were systemic racism, politicization of COVID-19, proliferation of guns, and military interventions abroad.
I've already mentioned that.
So those were the central themes.
Wow, that's quite staggering.
And then the Chinese representative also said, quote, stop interfering for political reasons in other countries.
In other countries' internal affairs under the pretext of human rights.
Which is fair, but it's coming from China.
Yeah, I mean, I guess in the defense of China they can say we don't put any pretext of human rights in place when we meddle in other countries.
And so the comments that the authors of the article add that China has often alleged that other countries unfairly poke into its domestic affairs with their concerns about the right situation in Hong Kong, Tibet and Western Xinjiang.
So that's...
It's so embarrassing!
I feel like it's an important context to mention this.
Shall we ask the Tibetans how they feel about this?
Right.
So moving on, further down in the article, the ACLU gets asked about this.
They don't side with China, do they?
No.
They might.
Not yet.
Sorry, carry on.
It's ridiculous.
It's like the Saudis being on the UN Women's Council, isn't it?
It's tremendous.
We're making fun of it, but it's also important to mention that these processes in the UN are highly formalized.
It's not that the Western countries or the rich countries or powerful ones get to tell the others what to do and if they should or shouldn't be part of any committee or any human rights.
But instead what they do is that they rotate, right?
They apply and they get confirmed because that's the way it's done.
And basically everyone's basically distrustful of each other within the UN because there are different states with different interests.
Some of them are together, some of them not.
And so it's held together by...
By this procedural kind of requirement.
And so it's funny to see things like Saudi Arabia being on the women's rights panel.
But at the same time, it's not unexpected.
It's a fun site, but it's not something to be kind of surprised at.
Right, and so back to the ACLE. The US had put out a report on its human rights record and the ACLE said that the report is one of the worst attempts to cover up US human rights violations since the civil rights movement.
And the ACLU director also said that, quote, while the American voters elected a new president who is more committed to universal human rights, the international community must continue to hold the years accountable, blah, blah, blah.
So, the ACLU openly, or at least its director openly supports Joe Biden, and they think Joe Biden is good on human rights.
Where did they get that impression?
From the media?
I guess that's it, isn't it?
Might be.
Well, Biden's actual record includes supporting and or defending wars in Iraq, Syria, Serbia and Libya.
That's been fact-checked throughout, so feel free to check that.
I imagine that Biden voted for the Iraq war, didn't he?
He did.
He said it was a mistake, but he didn't seem too remorseful.
Biden's record also includes being anti-gay.
There's an article by pinknews.co.uk which says that Which says that after some older things that had happened, it seems that LGBT plus rights were barely a blip on Biden's radar until the 90s when Biden's voting record begins to look decidedly homophobic.
And so there's a list of things that Biden voted for or against in relation to gay rights.
It wasn't exactly flattering.
He only flipped on gay marriage in 2012.
But since then, he's been credited with a lot of pro-LGBT stuff.
Fair enough.
But there's still this history behind him, so it might say more about his nature.
He's had a far greater number of years in office opposed to all of these things than in favour, is what you're saying.
And so the last thing that I have here is him obviously being tough on crime.
That's been a major theme throughout the election.
So in 1994 he led the charge to push through a crime bill which increased these How would I say it?
They call it Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which indicates what it is.
It's been both attacked and defended by a lot of people, but it instituted a lot of tough on crime things, which were in some cases criticized by human rights Assessors, let's say.
Yeah, and this is what they're all alleging is Biden's role in filling jails with young black men, isn't it?
I can see the three strikes, mandatory life sentences for repeat offenders.
Yeah, you can see how that puts a lot of people in jail.
It was also big on drugs and locking people up for drug offences.
So I would suggest that the director of the ACLE takes a second look into Biden's human rights record before endorsing him.
That's what I'm saying.
Well, I don't think he's likely to.
I've found the narrative surrounding Biden, the attempt at painting Biden as some great unifier and some champion, like Martin Luther King-esque figure, has been really gross, actually.
Well, in his speeches and in his public appearances, he's been like that.
Wholesome and unifying, right?
But it's what he's doing now and there's no real expectation that he'd do it in the future or if you look in the past, he's not really known for doing that.
That's his angle now and that's fine.
What do I know?
In the future, he might be that and he might be really unifying and really wholesome.
I'm looking forward to that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But if you judge a man by his actions rather than his words, Biden seems to be a bit two-faced, corrupt, and somewhat of a liar, I would say.
Like a corporate shill politician, like this neoliberal establishment is generally how I characterize him, and I think that's fair.
Yeah, I mean, I think characterizing him as establishment is probably the most accurate.
What can you do after spending like 25% of the whole US history in politics?
It's not that long, is it?
Fact check me on that.
It's not 25, it's something like that.
Maybe it's a bit less.
It's not exactly that.
But it's something like 47 years or something like that.
It's a really long time.
Out of 250.
So, he has been there for quite some time.
Sorry, what was the next thing you wanted to go on to?
Yeah, sorry.
So, the Human Rights Council of the UN was criticized a month ago by The Guardian, which quoted a non-profit organization saying, it's like arsonists joining the fire brigade.
Which, it's justifiable.
I mean, things like Cuba, Belarus, North Korea, Syria, Iran and China.
And other champions of human rights.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
That's what the UN Watch kind of reported, let's say, a month later.
Can you put that up?
So, yeah, so a month later, these repressive regimes that were, like, arsonists joining the fire brigade, were now among other champions of human rights.
So, that's fun.
I mean, that is just...
Yeah.
I mean, it's hilarious.
Depressing.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and so the last picture that we have is what China is asking the U.S. to focus on with respect to its human rights records.
And so, among those things, it's a bit small in the actual report, but you can find, like, it's handled, it's fine.
So, eliminating systemic racism, racial discrimination, white supremacy, religious intolerance, and xenophobia.
I mean, I'm sure some of those things exist in the US, but it's also China saying this.
I mean, where do you even start?
It's like Hannibal Lecter telling you to be a pacifist and not hurt someone.
Like, okay, Hannibal, but have you considered that I don't take lectures from murderers when it comes to hurting people?
I just find this amazing.
White supremacy.
How are they even defining that?
I want the Chinese to define that for me.
Because if they mean an ideology that's created by white people, then isn't the Communist Chinese Party white supremacy?
I don't think they mean that.
I actually think they don't really mean anything with this.
I think this is a strategy to push back against the US and to make it more defensive within the UN and to make more of the other states in the UN to be basically angled against the US. So it's just part of China's strategy to say something that We'll foment discord among Western states.
Put China in a leading position.
That's a very Machiavellian view of it.
So it's understandable that they do it.
It's just funny that this is the context which comes out of it.
It's the idea, man.
The idea.
Well, on the plus side, at least it shows that the UN isn't really very useful and we shouldn't take moral guidance from it.
We probably shouldn't.
There might be some good things that the UN can do and does, but stuff like this comes out of the UN pretty often, which looks kind of bizarre to a layman, because most people don't really know what exactly the UN does or how it works, so if they see something like this, this just looks ridiculous.
What's the point?
Right.
So, I mean, since we've been talking about Biden, we may as well go on to the election coverage that I wanted to cover.
And I thought we'd start with just an article published yesterday by the Associated Press that I think puts all the numbers and the figures into context because it's...
It's such a strange thing that has happened here.
So at the moment, 148 million votes have been tallied.
Joe Biden has won 75 million of those.
Trump has received 70 million of those.
This is staggering because this is actually the highest for a losing candidate.
And in fact, if Biden had not got 75 million, Trump would have had the most votes of any candidate in all of American history.
You know, in 2008, Obama got 69 million, so the Trump campaign's desire to beat Obama, they have succeeded at.
And in 2012, they only got 65 million.
And so this leads us to a Judicial Watch survey that was conducted in September 2020 that revealed that 358 US counties had 1.8 million more registered voters than eligible voting age citizens.
That really...
Makes me wonder what happened there.
Yeah, I mean, it makes you wonder.
At the same time, the Judicial Watch is not exactly known for its reputation.
Well, I wanted to address that too.
I wanted to say that while it's not known for their reputation, the process that they took to here in arriving at those numbers doesn't really look wrong.
It doesn't look suspicious or anything like that.
So we might want to be careful in citing that source, but at the same time, With this, it looks more legit than...
Yeah, it does.
Judicial Watch is a...
Wikipedia calls it a conservative activist group, and on their own website they do list themselves as being conservative, but they also try to stress they want to be non-partisan and merely investigate what they believe are instances of malpractice.
It could just be that one side commits more of these instances of malpractice than the other, or it could be that they're heavily biased and are not looking for the malpractice on their own side.
So I think it is definitely worth putting out.
But as you say, the methodology here seems to be fairly solid.
I mean, they've put that, before we go through that, in Alaska, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont, The study found that in these eight states, they had statewide registration rates exceeding 100%.
The September 2020 study collected the most recent registration data posted online by the states themselves.
The data was then compared to the Census Bureau's most recent five-year population estimates gathered by the American Community Survey.
From 2014 to 2018.
So they're sent 3.5 million addresses each month and its five-year estimates are considered to be the most reliable estimates outside of the decennial census, the 10-year census.
And their study was limited to 37 states that post regular updates with their registration data.
Certain state voter registration lists may even be even larger than reported because they excluded inactive voters from their data.
Inactive voters may have moved elsewhere and their ballots may show up elsewhere.
So it looks like quite a good report from the judicial watch.
It looks thorough and done in good faith.
I would say that it's something that should not be obviously taken at face value, but it should be taken by other people who will do something similar again and again until they find out whether something was done wrong or not.
Yeah, it should be fact-checked and confirmed by other organizations who may have their own partisan interests, because we need to come to a shared reality, frankly.
But the thing is, I think that in the very least, having one source saying that we've checked all this data, we've tabulated it all, and it seems that there have been 1.8 million more voters than there actually are, It seems to support Mitch McConnell then giving his speech on the Senate floor saying,
well look, he didn't expressly say in his speech that he outright supports Trump having an investigation, legal investigation to this, but this is obviously what he is saying by taking the position that he takes.
He says, President Trump is 100% within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities, And to weigh his legal options.
He also chewed out the media for calling the elections for Biden, saying that the Constitution gives no role in this process to wealthy media corporations.
You may remember the New York Times came out and said, oh, the media gets to call the elections.
And I mean, that's just such a...
Then they do come back.
It was such a ridiculous statement.
I mean, the media is not a codified institution.
It's not something you can hold to account.
I mean, we count as the media then, so we're calling it for Kanye West.
But, yeah, so he then said, let's not have any lectures.
No lectures about how the president should immediately cheerfully accept the preliminary results from the same characters who spent the last four years refusing to accept the validity of the last one.
And that's totally fair.
I mean, there was just non-stop, Russia stole the election, and now we've got to the narrative that actually the elections are inviolable, why are you even asking questions?
Seems to be that there is more than enough evidence already to suggest, but then we go on to, did you want to say something first?
Yeah, I just wanted to comment on the calling states for certain candidates thing, because I've seen on Twitter, Mark Levin, he pointed out that this practice is kind of weird if you think about it from afar, right?
Not necessarily even in this election, but overall.
And it's because...
The media can create a perception that one candidate was never close to winning or never had any chance to win.
So if on one side they call states for one candidate but on the other they hesitate to call for the other, it might seem like The one was always pretty much behind and so the other was projected to win all the way through.
Obviously, we know what sides we're talking about in today's context, but that could apply to anything.
That perception can be skewed in any way that the media wants.
It's only going to depend on who they would prefer being the president and things like that.
And it seems to be an obvious, well, I guess we'll just say left-wing bias at the moment, in the current context.
Yeah, yeah.
But the thing I really find it interesting, because it's like, A, I mean, you open yourself to being dramatically wrong.
Which is embarrassing, at the very least.
And it's weird that you would want to open that Pandora's box.
And it's not just one media organisation, that's the weird thing.
It's all of them, it seems, or almost all of them, and then a whole bunch of world leaders who see, I suppose, the press reports and say, oh well, we'd better send Biden a congratulations, even though this is not over by any stretch of the imagination.
Although the Slovenian Prime Minister, I think, he called Trump on the night of the election and he called to congratulate him for winning.
Then he got embarrassed in front of everyone.
That might not age as badly as it sounds, because like I said, it's still ongoing.
Fair enough, fair enough.
But yeah, everyone laughed at him basically.
I'm sure the president of Mexico didn't congratulate Biden either.
Right.
For similar reasons.
Because it's like, well hang on a second.
And yesterday, I think it was, Bill Barr came out and made a statement because McConnell had previously spoken to him.
And afterwards, Bill Barr gives a statement that he authorizes the Department of Justice to investigate any, quote, substantial allegations of vote fraud in the 2020 election.
He said they may be conducted if there are clear and apparently credible allegations of irregularities that, if true, Could potentially impact the outcome of the federal election in an individual state?
Well, the Judicial Watch investigation seems to suggest that, but there are also a bunch of these other ones.
There was a video by one of the poll watchers.
I actually can't remember what state this was in.
I might be able to tell you.
Sorry?
I might be able to tell you.
Oh, okay, if you can, yeah.
I've got the article that it's going to be up.
Right, okay.
Oh, okay.
Well, where was it?
No, no, no.
I don't know what you mean yet.
Right, right, right.
Which one?
There's been many.
Yeah, there have been many.
But in this particular video, the Pole Watcher, who names himself as a Pole Watcher when he's recording, goes downstairs into, like, you know, I guess the basement area.
It's a really nice building.
It's a state building.
Oh, right.
I know which one.
It was like a cafe or something.
Yeah, yeah.
It looks really nice.
And she's just sat at a round table with stacks of ballots that she's counting.
And the poll watcher comes up and asks them, well, why are you doing it down here?
I'm a poll watcher.
You should be doing it upstairs.
And her and the woman across from her were both doing it, had no answers.
You know, they couldn't say, well, we're just...
All they could say is, well, we're just volunteers.
And then when asked who their supervisor was, they couldn't even name their supervisor.
And the whole thing just looks incredibly suspicious.
Yeah.
And then you have the case of the Oregon Elections Director...
Who was abruptly fired after pointing out a series of serious issues with the state's aging and vulnerable technology for elections, say the Seattle Times.
The election director was Stephen Trout, and he learned via a text message that he was fired after pointing out that...
The voting system they have was run on Windows Server 2008, which is something that Microsoft no longer support or operate on.
There is no multi-factor identification to protect it from hackers.
This was described as a massive vulnerability, obviously, running on software that is no longer even supported.
I wouldn't even do that on my home laptop.
A multi-factor identification is a no-brainer, which it obviously is.
I mean...
Using electronic software, any kind of software to tabulate votes, I think is highly suspect.
Because anyone with any child could program an application that could just switch votes from one variable to another.
It would take no effort whatsoever.
I personally am an advocate that we go back to shards of pottery.
I agree with you on that.
I was joking about the shots of Pottery.
But physical balance, I think he's useful.
The thing is, there's no reason to assume that most elections are reported accurately.
I mean, you still need to trust the people who are actually going through them and putting them on one side or the other, or doing something with them.
And in any election, even if it's 100% paper-based, it's probably going to have irregularities.
Totally.
It's weird that so much is being put at stake in society in general on these elections because of the way that What's weird, I mean, I totally agree with you.
Any election, you're going to expect mistakes made by humans because humans are fallible creatures.
But the problem is that I haven't found a single example of mistakes yet that favor Donald Trump.
All of the mistakes consistently seem to be favoring Joe Biden.
Was it Michigan or Wisconsin, where the voting software glitched and 6,000 votes went to Biden?
The finding of dumped Trump ballots in garbage and in the desert and things like this.
And then Republican poll watchers...
The desert thing was in Iraq or something like that.
But the other ones were legitimate, as I understand it.
I don't know enough about those.
I can confirm.
They appeared to be, from what I saw.
There was a video going around of a guy at his wedding who'd found a bunch of, the day before, they had done polling in the building, and he'd found a bunch of ballots in the bin at his wedding that were mostly for Trump.
They did find one Biden ballot there.
I haven't seen that, actually.
I'll show you afterwards.
But the irony being that there was one Biden ballot in there, so it is proof that there is human error involved in everything.
No, but I mean, if I should be like a devil's advocate or something, I'd say that you have all these things being reported as glitches and mistakes and things like that, irregularities in Biden's favor.
That might be because only the Republicans are looking for these.
So if you're a Republican and you're looking for voter fraud and you find something that favors Biden, you're going to throw it out.
But it's just weird, the assumption is never that the Republicans are committing fraud, isn't it?
It's not, but the assumption on the left is that people who are alleging it are crazy.
That's weird, isn't it?
Because that just seems to be like the...
There seems to be more than enough evidence to warrant an investigation.
Absolutely!
There seems to be more than enough evidence.
And like I said, I'm not saying never investigate the Republicans.
It's just that I haven't found a single example where it might be that a Republican has shifted votes.
I mean, you've got to be cynical about these things.
You've got to ask yourself...
Why it's always on one side.
You know, for the most popular candidate in history to have, you know, maybe 1.8 million voters more, and, you know, this all seems to be shifting in the same direction.
And then you get, like, the Nevada Registrar of Voters, a guy called Joe Gloria, who has just, who's received a bunch of allegations of voter fraud, but has refused to investigate them until after the election.
Why?
I mean, it seems really pertinent that you would have to investigate them before, because how are you going to determine the election unless you know you're counting valid votes?
But, I mean, he just says that the votes are in the system at this point, so we'll just have to wait till after the election, post-election, to go after anything that's been reported at this time.
That's not how it works.
But maybe what he's saying is that if you have the votes that are already counted and you put them together, you can't tell which ones were put out legitimately and which ones haven't, right?
So what he might be saying is that the process through which this was done needs to be investigated, but we can't do anything about the votes that have already been cast.
And that's a fair point.
Maybe, but that doesn't seem to be what he's saying.
I don't know, but if that was what he was saying, he could be basically saying not that we're going to forget about this election, but we need to wrap up the process, and then if we go through the stuff that's supposed to be irregular, and we find that all of it was done wrong, we're going to call another election or something like that.
And that can happen.
I don't think that's what he's saying, but I think that's how you could interpret it so that it's fair towards him, but it still ends up with Trump having a recount or a new election or something like that.
I think that would be a very generous interpretation of what he's saying there.
It just strikes me as very, very strange.
I mean, the Nevada GOP has announced that they found 3,062 instances of voter fraud, and they expect that number to grow.
But this is just what they've investigated so far.
And then, I mean, I don't know.
Just to say, well, we'll do the investigation after the election implies that the result is going to be accepted, finalized, and then the electors will vote on the president, presumably for Biden if Biden's electors are chosen.
So the idea of doing the recount or the investigation afterwards, I mean, the horse is bolted.
I agree that that's what it looks like, but at the same time, the more charitable you make the interpretation, the stronger you make your case.
I suppose that's true, unless it really looks obvious that you're not necessarily connecting with what's really happening on the ground, I guess.
But I mean, I could just be uncharitable.
It's just, again, there are just so many examples of these things going on that I... I actually wanted to say another thing about what you said about the software.
There was an article in January, I think, this year, but it was nine months or ten months before the elections.
It was by Bloomberg and they said that many states across America are using outdated software and hardware as well, which is connected to the internet.
And a lot of security experts and people like that have said that this is a major security risk and you can basically do a lot of shady stuff with it.
Yeah.
Apparently that's illegal as well.
Oh, it's illegal as well, is it?
It's not illegal to have voters, it's supposed to be, supposedly, not supposed to be.
I can't confirm it, but that's why I really...
Yeah, right.
Fact checkers.
Yeah, I don't think they say that in the Bloomberg article, but that could be true.
But it's interesting that Bloomberg talks about this in January because it's not in the real context of the election.
So it's not something that's politicized just because of how the election turned out so far?
Interestingly, in the Seattle Times article, they do point out that in 2018, the then Secretary of State Dennis Richardson had earmarked $100,000 in federal funds to install a multi-factor authentication system for their elections, but the Clarno, which is the current Secretary of State, was appointed by Brown to replace him, and it just never happened.
They understand that there are vulnerabilities in the system.
It's just presumably institutional torpor that these things didn't get done.
I think it's significant that in what Bloomberg reported, that happens across many states in the US. Because if we find one thing like this happening in one US state, that can be kind of excused, I guess, fairly reasonably by saying it's 50 states, every state is doing something differently, and so there's going to be something that's like...
Weird with each one, just because it's a mess, right?
It's bureaucracy.
It's something that takes a long time.
It takes a long time to upgrade.
The technology is ancient, so you'll have these things come out, which will be funny and interesting.
But if it just happens in one state and doesn't happen across, that can be like, okay, what are you going to do?
That's how bureaucracy works, right?
But if it's a running theme across many states, then that's a different thing.
This is a different issue, obviously.
Right.
And the final thing I think is worth talking about is the left-wing reaction to all of this.
Can we get up the Lee Camp tweets, please?
Thanks.
This is one of those examples, just one of those scenarios where you just think, well, you get what you deserve, don't you?
I can't imagine that Lee Kamp has really made any positive comment on Donald Trump throughout his entire candidacy.
So Lee Kamp is a left-wing comedian.
I used to be quite a big fan of Lee Kamp, actually.
Go back about five, ten years.
He used to talk about, you know, corporate malfeasance and all this sort of stuff.
And he was funny and it was true.
And him tweeting out this, Yeah, and it was Trump that killed that.
And it's one of those things that's like, right, okay, so you probably were in active opposition to Donald Trump right up until the results of the election appear to have come in.
And now you're like, well, hang on a second, like nervous sweating intensifies because this is not good.
And this is the general understanding.
I think the left really, they knew, they knew that Joe Biden wasn't their guy.
I mean, he's really not.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And, you know, they knew that he's part of the corrupt democratic power establishment that has, you know, had its own, like, the way they're championing George W. Bush now shows that there's obviously some...
John McCain.
And John McCain.
Oh, God, yeah, and John McCain.
Just leave the picture.
Yeah, right.
I forgot to send it to John, but it's amazing.
There's Biden hugging Kamala Harris, and they're looking merrily at each other, and then above them in the clouds are faces of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and then two other people, and then John McCain, and people commenting on it on Twitter, like, I'm so happy, you know.
So, yeah, it's...
Oh, God, that's gross.
But let's just...
You can see that there is this kind of neoliberal establishment that had transcended both parties that has been supplanted by Donald Trump and his agenda.
His agenda is very much not the same agenda as theirs.
Trump being a peacemaker in the Middle East, not starting foreign wars, taking an interest in working class concerns in the United States.
These are all very...
He's got a completely different way of running the country and one that I think actually works a lot better.
But what's interesting is the fact that Biden and the rest of the neoliberal establishment don't seem to have known what to do with the sort of rabid leftists, the Bolsheviks in their own Ranks and have played a lot of defense for them.
Now, I appreciate that you don't feel quite as strongly, but I think that you get what you deserve here.
So the first example is at the debate, where Trump obviously was forced to denounce white supremacy again, even though the white supremacists voted for Joe Biden.
Rich Spencer is a proud Biden voter.
And when asked about Antifa, Joe Biden was just like, it was just an idea, which is amazing that you can say that, considering that in, was it New Jersey, they're counted as a terrorist organization?
And there's federal investigations going into them at the moment.
And you've got Kamala Harris posting the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which is helping to bail out the, quote, protesters, which means Antifa rioters, revolutionaries.
And this bell fund was used to get an accused child molester and a woman who stabbed her own mother out of custody.
I mean, just, they're sending their best.
Again, like with Kyle Rittenhouse.
Like, you fire into a crowd of anti-clines, you shoot a woman beater and a paedophile.
What are the odds?
Just, like, what are the odds?
Fair enough.
I mean, I definitely agree with you in that if Trump is made to apologize and denounce many, many other people which he doesn't support, then Biden should do the same or should be expected to do the same.
I mean, why should the standard be different?
Why should Trump be forced to denounce Joe Biden supporters?
I'm not wrong!
You're not wrong!
It's not wrong!
At the same time, Biden has been really effective in basically killing the far left within the Democratic Party.
And maybe it was not Biden, maybe it was the Democratic Party itself.
They got rid of Bernie and in the primaries it was...
Repeatedly.
It was suspicious, let's say, the process through which Biden actually got the nomination.
With Hillary as well, in fact.
I can actually believe that Bernie in 2019 legitimately lost the internal primaries.
It looked like he did.
It looked like the votes were just there for Biden.
In February or something.
Well, in a minute.
In the 2019 primaries, I can totally believe that Biden won it, because he did seem to have the most votes.
And I think it's the same sort of effect that was happening over here with Corbyn and Keir Starmer, is that there's about two-thirds of the party that is not radical leftists, but don't really have any good arguments against the radical leftists.
And so, essentially, they just clumped together and voted for their milquetoast middle-of-the-road, centre-left candidate to exile the Corbyns and the Burnies, which is a natural internal defensive reaction for this party.
If you go on Twitter right now, you have left...
Left wingers, or far left wingers, everyone, saying that Joe Biden is a Republican.
From that perspective, he is, essentially.
He's basically, I don't know who said that, maybe it was Michael Miles, that Biden has been more effective in fighting against the radical than the normal Trump.
It's an interesting point.
It would be really fun to compare What the two have done?
Yeah, yeah, I mean, they're certainly close to him.
But anyway, the thing that annoys me is the defense and the cover that the Democratic establishment has played.
Like, there's Congressman Jerry Nadler, who called Antifa a myth to Fleckers talks.
There was Ted Cruz addressing Maisie Horino.
And so, you know, you're welcome to say something negative about Antifa right now.
And she declines to speak and just walks off.
It hasn't been just these examples.
It's been across the board, especially in the media, in the more left-leaning media.
In the US, it's been denial of Antifa's existence.
But not only that, there's two sides of it, because it's a melee strategy.
Basically, when they're on the offensive, they can classify and they can They obviously say that Antifa exists.
They say it's like a freedom fighting organization against fascism, against things like that, right?
So that's their opinion of them when they're on the offensive.
When someone calls them out on it, they retreat, say that no, it's not an organization, it's disorganized.
It's not disorganized, it's distributed, right?
Decentralized.
Decentralized.
So that means that it doesn't exist.
I mean, that's false.
The Antifa themselves, they would say that the fact that they work like that, that they are not a corporation with the president on top, but many...
They act like ISIS cells.
They've got an ideology and they can self-organize.
Yeah, it's many local organizations that then talk to each other and organize things together, right?
Fair enough.
And so they would be proud of it because that makes the case for them that organizations don't have to be ruled in the capitalist way, right?
With the president on top in a corporation or something like that.
So they'd be proud of that, right?
ISIS-proud anti-capitalist.
Exactly.
So they would say, we're the evidence, we're the proof that organizations like this can exist and don't have to be capitalistic.
So if you have someone saying that they don't exist because of this, it's just a marketing strategy.
The thing you can always do is send them CNN's insider documentary about anti-farm.
CNN, Vice News, I'm pretty sure Vox has done one as well, where they embed a journalist with, like, Rose City Antifa, or Portland Antifa, or Boston Antifa, or wherever it was.
And they go around explaining, you know, why we do this.
There's a Vice documentary where they were complaining about patriarchy within Antifa's own organization, because the men were practicing throwing the Molotov cocktails that the women were making, and it's like, right...
So, I mean, that does imply that patriarchy is undefeatable.
If even the communists who expressly about anti-patriarchs can't stamp it out, I think we just accept that that exists.
That reminds me of May this year, when Chas was established in Seattle.
It was basically established.
They said, now it exists.
Six hours later, someone was accused of sexual misconduct.
It's not anything, obviously, against them as a whole.
I think it should be.
I think it should be.
It's just funny that these things happen, and it's funny to point that out.
It seems that Black Lives Matter and Antifa are turning on the Biden campaign, since this was nothing to do.
They were just using the Democrats as a convenient way of advancing their agenda.
So it makes sense that the Democrats have been essentially purging them, and more power to them, obviously.
But there was a video that I wish we'd got up, but we didn't, of a Biden voter in his house versus a Black Lives Matter protest.
Now, I'm actually not sure where this is, but if you can see the video, I'll try and put it in the link in the description or something.
The old white man who owns the house comes out and says, there's my Biden sign, don't destroy anything, be peaceful.
To which the mob of Black Lives Matter, mostly black, supporters say, no one cares about your white ass opinion.
"Who do you think you are telling black people how to protest, you effing white ass privilege old man?
You ask for a peaceful protest, it's white supremacy.
Asking for people to be peaceful is white supremacy." What do you make of that?
It's not my opinion on it.
I think non-white people can be peaceful.
I don't know what to tell you, Black Lives Matter.
I'm not racist.
This is not about white people saying something about black people.
This is some activists trashing some of the guys.
It's funny that this is the standard, right?
You can't expect us to be peaceful.
Let's finish this segment and then.
So yeah, I think that that should be Like, anywhere, in any context, that should be kind of the standard.
Like, you expect other people not to be violent.
So, making it sound like not being violent is white supremacy is murky.
Oh, yeah, yeah, if you can play it, go for it.
Have you got a headphone over there?
Oh, yeah.
That's it, though.
Yeah, sorry.
We should have got this ready.
I wasn't really prepared for it.
It's a test podcast.
It is a test podcast.
Yeah, yeah, I didn't think.
Can I help?
Um, maybe.
Let's see.
There's the...
I'm not sure how much you've got there.
Have you got enough?
Yep.
Great.
Okay.
Like I said, we should have properly planned this.
Never mind.
So basically just clip it to the back of your jumper or whatever.
It should sit in your ear okay.
Alright, do you want to give it a go, John?
Yep, you can watch on the screen now.
Yep.
I can't hear anything.
It's muted on the screen.
Yep.
Yeah.
Justice Hunter, the Bomber, theokay hands Micheal Moskrie British Cont mates Slamas sh cambiando right out of the crosshassian Emergency chapter alliang with Tuscas did your house?
They look like black supremacists, white supremacists are saddened?
She wants white supremacists, white supremacists.
Our President is assassinated.
Okay, so, I mean, generally that's, I don't think, a winning strategy, telling people that peacefulness is white supremacy.
It seems to be a way of enabling white supremacists.
It seems to be a way of giving them the moral high ground and invalidating everything that they've been saying about white people, which I don't think is true.
So maybe we need to disavow that, I think.
Firm disavowal.
Peace is not an aspect of white supremacy.
No.
A unique one.
But it got worse though.
It got worse than that.
Because that's just an angry Black Lives Matter race warrior protest.
Antifa went to Multnomah County and the Democrats building in northeast Portland during a planned no-presidents riot and smashed the place up.
I don't know whether we can get the images of the Black Lives Matter ones up.
Yeah, so not looking good for the Portland Democrats.
I think they might have chosen the wrong strategy, overall.
Why do you say that?
Not them, Portland Democrats.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, so I feel like that happens quite a lot.
You have a party that's not in and of itself radical, but that embraces...
Allows the radical elements to come in, yeah.
Exactly.
Kind of embrace that part, or at least allow them to kind of...
Speak for them on some level and also contribute to what they do.
So if they do that, they might find themselves in this position later, which means basically you're the enemy as well.
I mean, that's been a couple of years ago since we've seen liberals get the bullet too.
Well, yeah, but that was still just as valid now as it was then.
They still mean it.
I'm not surprised, actually.
Oh, I'm not surprised by this at all.
We in this sort of space have been predicting this.
They're going to ice-pick you in the back.
You're not going to get out of this.
Fuck Biden.
No presidents.
Maybe we're being...
Maybe we're not being charitable to the Democrats.
Maybe they predicted this as well, and this is quite a little damage.
And then it all turned out the way they wanted, and that was the plan all along.
I guess.
I think that would be the uncharitable way of looking at it, but I think it's more charitable to suggest that they are the sort of conservatives who embraced the Nazis and then got consumed by them.
They thought they could control the monster that they're riding on the back of.
And it turns out they can't.
I agree that this analogy offers itself.
Well, it does.
It's exactly what happened.
And the thing is, this is why I think the Republicans have not had this problem with the white supremacists.
Because they just explicitly kick them out of their party.
They've been really careful in denouncing it.
I don't want to be too categoric with this, but mostly it turns out that if you find questionable racial or something like that stuff in the past of some politician in the US, it's probably going to be...
There's something in relation to the Democratic Party and not the Republican Party.
But that doesn't mean that the Democratic Party is more racist or anything like that.
It just means that because of the way that they're perceived, they can allow themselves to be less careful about that type of stuff.
But this is also a thing that we can view as where it can lead to, right?
Oh, absolutely.
The same sort of thing would have happened to the Republicans had they let the white supremacists in.
You'd find that black Republicans would be harassed by the white supremacists saying, get out of our party, get back to the Democrats or something like that.
And it is internally to their credit that they didn't allow people like Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes to join.
It's not appropriate.
I think the Republicans have got to keep down this line because otherwise this future where you've got all of these smashed windows and it'll be...
F-N words that will come up rather than F-Biden.
But the principle is the same.
You've got this radical, violent fringe in your party who just don't care about your moral values.
They've got their own.
And like you said, see you as the enemy.
And there's a part of me that is quite happy with this, really, because at least this is now the own internal problem of the Democrats.
It's not the problem of the candidate I support now.
No one's pointing to Trump and going, you caused this anti-fart.
Come on.
Come on.
No one thinks that anti-war or Black Lives Matter is Trump's fault.
Because they're not.
He said that the Republican Party didn't allow Richard Spencer to join.
Had he applied?
He tried to go to the Republican National Convention in, I think it was 2016 or 2017.
I can't remember which one it was.
And he was just thrown out.
I thought he was a Democrat.
Well, I mean, he is now.
He votes Biden, at least, you know.
So he must be thrilled.
I thought he was like, yeah, I'm in line with the Democratic Party.
He called himself a progressive, and he came out in favor of Biden.
I mean, I don't know whether they will allow him.
He's not affiliated with them.
Not probably officially, but I think he certainly did vote for them.
I mean, he posted.
Oh yeah, I've seen that, but I wouldn't want to be telling someone that he's affiliated with them when he's not.
He might have voted for them, but that's the extent of it so far.
I don't think they're claiming him as a representative.
He's just a CNN analyst.
At the moment.
But, I mean, it's a ladder you've got to climb, right?
To get in on the inside, you've got to start working in with the media and then supporting the candidates.
And eventually, you know, he'll be the lead runner.
It'll be like anti-racist Hitler or something, you know?
Maybe he'll...
Maybe he'll turn and confess his sins, just as Biden had done with his LGBT stuff.
It's entirely possible.
And the thing is, in many ways, Richard Spencer very much is a progressive.
I mean, he agrees with the framework that they've laid out about whiteness and white supremacy.
He's just in favor of it rather than against it.
That's fine.
I mean, the old rights are mostly progressives too.
They're sort of Zoomer or early millennial aged kids who have that kind of opinion.
They grew up in that milieu.
There's just one other comment I wanted to make in relation to the smash democratic stuff.
You've got Antifa saying ACAB and stuff like that and not my president.
I can sympathize a bit with that sentiment as well because it's not like the presidents historically haven't been...
Awful.
Most of them, or all of them.
If you're really against Trump, you can say the same thing against Trump.
You can say Trump's been a bit better or a bit worse than others, but if you We can still say that if you have a problem with some of the systemic stuff that the US government does abroad or something like that, or even home, then Trump fits into that pattern as well.
He's not out there.
He's not out of the line.
And Biden is not going to be either.
So the sentiment is substantiated.
I won't make a joke I was going to make, actually.
I don't want to get in trouble.
Right, so we've got an audio comment from Rick Vromans, is that?
John.
Hey, what's up, Sargon, and Hugo.
I was just wondering how great you think the chance is that Trump actually still wins the election.
How great do you think the chances are of Trump winning the election?
Actually, we saw earlier today, maybe it was yesterday evening, that Pennsylvania was switched on real clear politics.
It was switched from Biden's colour to neutral.
It's grey now.
And so the states open now are Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania, officially open.
Nevada as well.
I think CNN unflipped Nevada.
Right.
Not on real politics.
That's what I'm going off of.
So these four.
And if Trump wins those four, he wins the election, right?
And if he loses one, he doesn't.
But in all of these states, things are already in motion for...
Either the votes to be recounted or something else, or investigation of what was going on.
Investigation into these glitches that seem to add a few thousand votes here and there.
So it can add up.
I just read an article earlier today, I can't remember the source, that said that in Wisconsin another glitch, quite large actually, A large number of thousands, you know, less than 10,000 or anything, but a large number of votes was discovered to be in Biden's folder instead of the Trump folder or something like that.
What another coincidence!
Just always in the same direction!
But yes, so if that If that is acknowledged officially and, like, recounted, then you'll have the Biden lead at about 1,500 votes, something like that.
So, another one, and you get it flipped.
And if Wisconsin is flipped, then Trump doesn't even have to win Arizona or Georgia, I think.
No, no, that wouldn't work, but Arizona would.
Oh, yeah, Georgia's having a recount as well.
Yeah, it is.
It was actually the first one to announce because the margin was too thin.
Yeah.
And so this is the thing, though, isn't it?
Like a thousand votes in a state could easily flip it.
The margins are genuinely raised up there.
And so, yeah, I mean, I don't think that this is over at all.
No, it's not over.
And Bill Barr authorizing, yeah, do the investigations.
Let's see where this goes.
Who knows what's going to happen?
It's knife-edge stuff.
Season 2 of America is really thrilling.
It's kind of funny to follow that because it's obviously going to be drawn out for a couple of days at least, weeks probably, and a lot of people are celebrating.
Which is pretty much her I think.
Fingers crossed that this all goes badly.
I'm really looking forward to the reaction if it flips and then maybe it flips again.
Maybe there's an audit of the votes and it turns out that many of these votes are actually, you know, the mail-in votes are suspicious and maybe the numbers change dramatically after the investigations.
We don't know.
At the same time, there's this one thing that we talked about earlier, right, where I said that you would expect most of the electoral fraud uncovered to be done in the favor of the Democrats when the Republicans uncovering it.
But if it's something official, right, if it's something like DOJ or something like that, you have a larger chance of Anything being uncovered, right?
You know it would be funny if you had massive voter fraud on the side of the Democrats, but slightly less or equally massive voter fraud on the side of the Republicans.
I don't think that would happen because people would prevent it coming out, right?
But...
The media would report on the Republican stuff.
They'd be all over it.
And that's the thing.
If any of this was going the other way, if it was, you know, Donald Trump appears to have got all of these mysterious ballots that turned up at 5 a.m., 100,000 just for Donald Trump, the media would never let this go.
This would...
I mean, this would be...
Like, if they had nothing for the Russian interference and they didn't let that go for four years, if they had just...
You know, a tenth of the evidence of interference that appears to exist for this one, they'd be all we'd hear, blah, blah, blah, Donald Trump's illegitimate, Donald Trump's illegitimate.
Yeah, it's clear.
When it comes to the media, it's clear what's going on.
When it comes to the election, things are in dispute.
When it comes to the media, they aren't.
Well, yeah, but that's it.
And that's openly gaslighting people.
They've taken it upon themselves to misinform the public.
And when that suddenly flips, I mean, A, the public impression will be something like, well, Donald Trump must have done something illegal, presumably, or suspicious, which it doesn't look like he has, actually, remarkably.
And the fact that, you know, the narrative, oh, Joe Biden got cheated, he was the most popular.
It's like...
Come on.
But anyway, thank you.
Thank you everyone for joining us.
This has been a great chat.
This has been myself and Hugo.
And if you would like to see more exclusive content, you can go and become a member of LotusEaters.com.
What have you been writing about today, by the way?
Actually, I've been compiling the article about the elections, which is basically going to be just an overview of what has happened yet.
It goes through all the kind of election discrepancies, and obviously it's not saying that it's conclusive because nothing is, but it's saying that Trump is justified, basically, in launching an investigation.
Right, okay.
And is that up now, or will that be up now?
It's going to be up in about an hour.
Right, so go check lotuses.com in about an hour.
Well, check now, actually, but checking it in an hour for Hugo's article.
There's more stuff to read, so you can check it now.
There's loads to read, and we've got some good exclusive content, and this will be useful stuff.
So thanks for joining us, and we'll see you at 1pm British time tomorrow.
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