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Jan. 28, 2021 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:21:04

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #56

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	Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the podcast of the Load Seaters for Thursday, the 28th of January, 2021.
	I'm joined by Callum, and before we start, I'd just let you know that we're currently looking to expand our team.
	So if you would like to be a news reporter and you have relevant qualifications or any experience or anything like that, and you can work from the office in Swindon, do email us at contact at lotusseaters.com.
	You can also go to losesees.com and check out all the premium content that we have if this isn't enough for you.
	We're going to be having a new book club going up in the next couple of days about what's Andy Noah's book called?
	Unmasking Antifa?
	Something like that, sorry.
	Yes, sorry, I should have had that prepared.
	Unmasking Antifa, it's Andy Noah's new book.
	Antifa Unmasked.
	Andy Noah's new book, who we managed to get an advanced copy of.
	It's just been released though, hasn't it?
	It's not released yet.
	It'll be a few days and then when it's released we'll be releasing a video.
	That's the agreement with Andy.
	And it'll be the first book club that we have where we have the author in to talk about the book with us.
	So we're very much looking forward to that.
	That'll be excellent.
	So yeah, that's part of the premium content that we provide and we'll have The Ethics of Social Justice Part 2 hopefully up in the next day or two, I assume.
	3pm today, apparently that'll be up.
	So yeah, lots of good premium content.
	It's well worth supporting us over.
	But anyway, let's not delay anymore.
	Let's get into what's happening with WallStreetBets.
	So we've got another 2,000 people watching, so I want 2,000 likes, 2,000 stonks.
	Gotta see it.
	Alright, let's get into it.
	So we covered what happened with WallStreetBets the other day, and the fallout is still going on, and it's still hilarious, so I thought we'd cover it again.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I think that we should definitely cover any...
	These sort of populist uprisings, I guess we can call them.
	The memes have been fantastic.
	Yeah.
	I mean, it is a moment in history, for sure.
	So the first thing here was that the subreddit for WallStreetBets did go down.
	It was invite-only for a period of time, and people thought that this was Reddit shutting down the subreddit.
	It wasn't...
	Apparently the mods, as we have verified here, saying that, no, we just had too many people coming in and we needed to verify everyone.
	So they had 2 million new users.
	Wow.
	Within a day, it's a bit much.
	Fair enough to him having to deal with that.
	I love the Jordan Belfort meme there.
	Anyway, so the first thing that sort of got my eye is that they've started to come after people trading on GameStop, because apparently this is a threat to our democracy, I guess.
	And Trading212, if we can get that up, were saying that they, due to unprecedented market activity in GameStop, It is causing extreme strain on the entire trade execution ecosystem worldwide.
	And you're going to say basically they had to shut down for a little bit because of GameStop.
	Well, because of people on Reddit message boards getting involved, right?
	Yeah, because there are just so many degenerates just throwing out money.
	I should have prefaced this and say this again just for everyone's sake.
	We are not financial advisors.
	This is not financial advice.
	We are laymans, so do not take this any whichever way.
	We just think it's funny that a bunch of self-professed degenerates can put extremes train on the entire trade execution ecosystem.
	Yeah, and apparently it wasn't just Melvin Capital, the one hedge funds, that got in trouble here.
	So there was some reporting that apparently a few hedge funds are all in the same position, because they'd also shorted GameStop, and they're also making massive losses.
	Because the stock didn't just stay where we thought it would...
	We're assuming one was dead, people would stop.
	But no, it's Sage Sable, and apparently it's going to open at $470 now per share.
	So yesterday it was, what, $175?
	It opened at $350.
	It's now trading at $470.
	When we finished, it was $175, then it was $350, and now it's trading at $470.
	It's ridiculous.
	So they're going to hit Elon Musk's goal of $1,000 at this rate, is what we're saying.
	We're not advising that or predicting it.
	We're just saying that was Elon Musk's goal.
	That was Elon Musk's goal, but they're halfway there.
	The trend is up and has been up.
	Which is just weird.
	I said I don't understand why people are still doing this, but whatever.
	And then we spoke about this yesterday.
	There was this prophecy that Vice News would publish something like Wall Street Bets shows that there's white supremacy in the stock market or some such garbage.
	And the prophecy has come true.
	It only took a day.
	The first thing here is some guy professing that he's managed to find out that the Nazis are trading game stock.
	Okay.
	Like, who cares?
	Like, I'm sure the Nazis are also drinking water, mate.
	I don't.
	But whatever.
	Mother Jones writing about the internet tech and disinformation.
	Well, thank you for that.
	Important insight from Mother Jones.
	I saw The Hill were also retweeting this guy, being like, can you please confirm how many Nazis and whatnot?
	Oh, probably hundreds of thousands, mate.
	You know, you better run.
	Yeah.
	So there's also the Financial Times went after Wall Street bets on this.
	So I think they've now corrected this or, you know, edited the article to take away.
	Yeah, they have.
	So the wording that was there that they've now gotten rid of was, it would be tempting to dismiss the Reddit bros, some of them alt-right supporters, as dumb money and their frenzy buying as a Ponzi scheme.
	Instead, this is a cautionary tale on how social media can be co-opted to attack financial establishments.
	So they deleted the alt-right thing because they're just calling Wall Street bets alt-right on the basis of nothing.
	I've got a theory about the harmonization of narratives, but I'm not going to go into it now.
	The other thing here was CNN getting dunked on for they reported that this is Trumpism.
	Shut up.
	Okay, so this guy, Chris Silliza, he's essentially like a culture warrior who works for CNN. I watch a lot of his videos, actually.
	He basically does the same thing that we do and talks about the culture thing.
	And so I'm not surprised that he sees Trumpism in what's happening here.
	But to be honest with you, I kind of agree with him.
	There's a sort of strain of populism, but his argument is that it's, you know, some kind of, you know, like with the other guy saying, there's some kind of related to racism on the alt-right or something like that.
	And, of course, this is all absolute nonsense.
	They know it's nonsense, but they're part of the swamp people, so they've got to take down.
	Is it nonsense, though?
	I think it is nonsense that Wall Street is full of racists.
	They're just objectively not.
	Most of them are not white by the looks of it, so it's pretty weird.
	That's not what he's saying, though.
	What he's saying is Trumpism is a revolt of the small people against the establishment.
	If he was using it in that language, I'd agree.
	I think that's what he means.
	As with the previous examples, talking about the alt-right, shut up.
	But they can't distinguish between the two.
	But, you know, you can say this all you want, but what's actually happened, whether we like it or not, is that, no, they are apparently engaging in hate speech, and they are alt-right hateful people, as Discord has confirmed by shutting down their Discord.
	Oh, why wouldn't they?
	They shut down our WallStreetBets server for hate speech, glorifying violence, and spreading misinformation.
	LAUGHTER We like the stocks is now misinformation.
	To be clear, we did not ban the server due to financial fraud related to GameStop or other stocks.
	Oh, that's good, because what fraud has occurred here?
	They can't claim that they've broken the law because they haven't.
	So they're just saying, oh, we took them down for hate speech.
	Name the hate speech.
	They've got nothing.
	It's just these people are...
	It's the synchronization of all these narratives.
	It's us versus them.
	But sorry, let's go on.
	Yeah, Elon Musk responded to this, saying that even Discord has gone corpo.
	I assume it means, like, corporate.
	I mean, it's not really that.
	It's the SJWs again.
	Like, they run everything.
	And I did sort of wonder about this, because, yeah, it is horrible what's happened with the Discord getting taken down.
	But really, was anything of value lost?
	So if we can get this up, like, we're not going to play this, because it's just them screaming at each other.
	Like, hundreds and hundreds of people in the voice chat.
	This is meant to be, like, the floor of WallStreetBets.
	Yeah, screaming buy and sell.
	Which, you know, for no reason, 24-7, that's the Discord, so I don't know.
	Maybe this is for the better.
	But the obvious point here is that the reaction to this has been the following meme, which is that we can't let people know that money isn't real.
	LAUGHTER Like, yes, all of this is a social construct, and if you mess with the social constructs, interesting things can happen.
	Yes, that's true.
	And the worst example of this was a guy on Fox News saying that they should ban social media from talking about short stocks.
	What is this guy's dress like?
	Yeah, I mean, not great fashion sense, but this, you know, there were a few other people, a guy on CNN said a similar thing, where they were basically like, we need to stop people talking about stocks, and that'll solve the problem.
	It's like, right, but not stockbrokers, not the guys in Wall Street.
	You mean regular people.
	Yeah.
	That's the problem.
	He looks like a Batman villain.
	Well, I think this is a new one called The Cow.
	Which, I mean, why is he dressed like a cow?
	Yeah.
	Anyway, so the White House also got asked about this, and they responded by saying that they were monitoring the situation.
	But don't worry, we've got a woman monitoring it.
	That's the important thing.
	It's very progressive.
	So she responded by saying, I think the wording was like, we have the first woman secretary looking over this, something like this.
	And it was just like, oh god.
	It's like that.
	So many jokes spring to mind that I probably can't say.
	Let's continue.
	But it wasn't just the White House as well.
	NASDAQ also issued a statement saying they were threatening to halt the stock over social media chatter.
	So the plebs were saying things, and therefore we must shut down the idea that you could trade this stock.
	This just reinforces Chris Siles's point that this is Trumpism.
	Because this is exactly what they did.
	This is exactly what they do with the Trump supporters.
	Every time the Trump supporters do something, shut it down, shut it down, shut it down.
	But when our guys do something, oh no, look at that, the COVID, the COVID thing.
	Oh, you know, actually, Black Lives Matter protests didn't spread COVID, but your Trump protests do spread COVID. It's exactly the same thing.
	There's definitely some similarities to be drawn here.
	I love the idea that as soon as they start messing with the system, in the same way Trump started messing with the system, go on, got to get him done.
	Like Wall Street backed Joe Biden.
	You can look at the donations.
	Absolutely.
	So we have the NASDAQ CEO apparently saying here that it's important for regulators to understand that manipulation is manipulation, if you can get the next one.
	So, yeah.
	Buying and selling a stock because we like the stock is manipulation.
	And they're saying whether or not it happens on new technology or it's happening through traditional mail, it's manipulation.
	It's like, right.
	It's not manipulation when we do it.
	When Wall Street has a backroom dealing and they decide we're going to overshort this stock that destroyed the company, that's not manipulation.
	That's perfectly fine.
	But if a bunch of retards on Reddit go, we like the stock, and then 10,000 of them buy the stock, That's market manipulation.
	Looks like Linwood's prophecy is coming true.
	Every lie will be revealed.
	Yeah, but the plebs engaging in the stock market is them manipulating the stock market.
	That's right.
	That's what they think of you.
	That's literally what they think.
	Anything you do is bad.
	Shut it down.
	You're not allowed to join this club.
	The obvious question here is, well, okay, we're going after the plebs because they've done a bad thing and therefore they're guilty and we need to go after them.
	Well...
	Apparently, it's not just the plebs engaging in this.
	So a lot of people on Wall Street started to notice GameStop being the hip new thing.
	And if we can get the next one, this is some guy claiming that Morgan Stanley, for example, were investing in GameStop.
	What?
	If the idea is that this is all market manipulation and we need to go after everyone who engaged in this, well then, Wall Street's also guilty.
	Well, duh.
	In which case, what are you going to do with them?
	Yeah.
	Well, the question is, what's their understanding of what's happening here?
	Are they just looking at a spreadsheet and going, well, GameStop, I don't know anything about it, but it's really going up.
	It looks like, wow, it's really shot up quick.
	We better buy in quick so we get on that train or what?
	Who knows?
	It's hard to tell.
	We'd have to do a subpoena and get inside what they were saying.
	Exactly.
	I don't know.
	I'm speculating.
	Just like they are, in fact.
	you know some 4d chess going on but i can't confirm anything so i don't want to speculate on that yep anyway the the next thing here was the the secretary of uh exchange for uh massachusetts coming out and saying that they should be a 30 day halt on all trading of gamestop shut it down Literally 30 days.
	No one should trade anything.
	No one should be able to buy or sell.
	Five minutes ago, no one cared about GameStop at all.
	Now it's showing down the financial markets.
	Yeah, so the quote here from him is saying, I really think at this point it calls upon the regulators, in this case, New York Stock Exchange, to consider simply suppressing it for a month and stop trading it.
	That's William Galvin, the Secretary of State for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
	He's in charge of...
	Just come out and openly admit, yeah, we're just going to have to use force.
	Yeah, we should absolutely stop trading this in any sense.
	And I can sort of see an argument for this, so my understanding is in cases of bubbles, the argument is you should intervene on a governmental level to stop everyone losing their money.
	And I could somewhat agree, maybe, but that's not what this is.
	And his next sentence alludes to how he's thinking, which is, these small and unsophisticated investors are probably going to get hurt by this.
	As in, the guys throwing in for a meme are going to lose their money.
	They want to lose their money.
	That's kind of the point.
	They want to lose their money because them losing their money makes you lose your money and you lose a lot more money than they lose.
	Yeah, like they lose 2%.
	Well, it's not much to them, but you lose 2%.
	$300 or whatever that was given to them by the government.
	You lose $6 billion if you lose 2%.
	Exactly.
	So they know exactly what they're doing.
	Yeah, this is obviously absurd.
	Oh no, those poor people on Wall Street bets have no idea.
	Dude, look at the memes.
	Look at the avatars.
	They know exactly what's going on.
	Just look at the comments.
	The comments are like, 420 bro, let's go, let's go.
	Sure thing.
	It's well worth spending $300 to make Wall Street quake.
	Well worth it.
	That's the opinion of Wall Street Bets.
	I saw one guy laying out his plan.
	Like, here's my advice, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And then just a sub note at the bottom.
	Also, I'm higher AF right now, so maybe don't take this advice.
	Like, that's the people you're dealing with.
	These are not people who are really worried about the loss.
	They're there for a joke.
	But they got given free money by the government.
	Yeah, you give them 2,000 bucks, what are they going to spend on?
	GameStop.
	So there's a good meme here, which the guys...
	So this is not an official account just for people.
	Because Twitter actually verified the official account because, you know, they had to.
	This has got out of hand.
	I'm saying, let people trade the stocks, and I absolutely agree.
	Like, what's wrong with people trading the stock?
	Yeah, we just like the stocks, man.
	If I just like the stock, I should be able to buy the stock.
	It's my money, it's a free country.
	And there were some other people defending the position of WallStreetBets and whatnot, saying we shouldn't regulate this, and you shouldn't crack down on people just because they embarrassed you, which I'm in agreement with.
	So that was going on, I think this was Fox News, if you can scroll down a little bit, just so I can remember.
	Yeah, it's Fox Business talking about this, and his response was that this is unbelievably stupid if you think you can go after them.
	So let's play the first clip.
	First of all, all of this nonsense, all of this noise, all of this whining by Wall Street, it's making me sick.
	140% of GameStop was short.
	I didn't hear one person on TV complaining about Wall Street trying to crush GameStop.
	140% short.
	Neil, you can't allow Wall Street to short 75% of a stock and nobody says anything Crush these companies into the dirt.
	And then when the individual investor makes money, everyone's up in arms.
	Oh, they're going to lose their shirt?
	Don't you think people are trading?
	If it traded 80 billion shares today, people are ringing a register.
	I have a kid who bought a house.
	He made $50,000 and bought a house.
	So, yes, some people are going to lose and some are going to win.
	But if they want to change the rules of the game now because the general public is making money after decades of the shorts crushing $50,000, Thousands of stocks into the dirt.
	I've watched stocks being crushed completely to zero, and no one ever whispered anything because those stocks didn't have Wall Street sponsorship.
	They were small names.
	Maybe they went public through a reverse takeover.
	Whatever it was, the shorts have had their way with the market for decades.
	No one's ever complained about it.
	So I am thrilled.
	If you're going to try to destroy a company by shorting 140% of a stock, you have to accept the fact that individual investors are playing the same game that you're playing, and now you're losing.
	I just love that image.
	It looks like a meme, like it shouldn't be real life.
	It does look like a meme, but that guy was based as hell.
	Yeah, he was essentially making the point that, well, you guys shorted this over-the-top ridiculously, where you deserve to pay for your mistakes.
	And, well, that's the market.
	That's how it works.
	And why shouldn't these people make some money out of their investments?
	Yeah.
	I mean, if you screw up, if you screw up your portfolio, well, people should be able to basically take that money out of your portfolio because you're the one who's messed up.
	That's how it works.
	But that's not how it works for Wall Street.
	Wall Street is that we win every time and other people winning is not fair.
	So you saw that there were some issues with people trading stuff, people stopping trades happening on certain things.
	And one of the interesting things, I heard some rumors that apparently trades on buying and selling the stock have been limited on a lot of platforms.
	Like in the last hour, I think it was like Ameris Trade or something also did it.
	But they're not stopping you on buying shorts.
	So, you can't buy the stock, but you can buy the shorts.
	It's like, okay, well that doesn't look fair.
	No.
	We're going to carry on the practice that put us in a vulnerable position that we were hoping to exploit, but you can't do anything in return because all one way and none of the other.
	But you can literally invest in the Wall Street position, but you can't invest in the shit poster position.
	Strange.
	And there was also the guy here, we mentioned him before, he invested a few hundred thousand for a laugh, you remember?
	And he's now cashed out, and his defense of this was also pretty good.
	Well, how much did he make?
	He says, I think it was 500,000 in total, he made.
	Excellent!
	Let's play this clip.
	You tweeted yesterday that you bought $115 calls in GameStop.
	Can you tell me what your position is as of this very moment?
	I ended up closing up my position this morning and I wanted to announce that I'm taking all the profits that I made plus my original position.
	So I'm going to take $500,000.
	And I'm going to donate to the Barstool Fund for small businesses.
	Oh, absolutely.
	I think that what you're seeing is essentially a pushback against the establishment in a really important way.
	A lot of people who believe that, you know, coming out of 2008, what happened was Wall Street took an enormous amount of risk and they left retail as the bag holder.
	And a lot of these kids were in grade school and high school when that happened.
	They lost their homes.
	Their parents lost their jobs.
	And they've always wondered, like, why did those folks get bailed out for taking enormous amounts of risk and nobody helped and showed up to help my family?
	Instead of having idea dinners or, you know, quiet, whispered conversations amongst hedge funds in the Hamptons, these kids have the courage to do it transparently in a forum.
	And I'm not saying all of it is perfect.
	By any means.
	But I think it takes an enormous amount of faith in the system to be that transparent, to talk about things, and then for each individual to make their own mind up and to do things.
	So I'm absolutely right.
	I mean, good on him for donating the money to a small business.
	There'll be more people he can get.
	Well, no, the Barstool Fund is to help small businesses that have been ruined by the COVID lockdowns.
	Lots of other things as well.
	Yeah, sure.
	But that's one of the things.
	Yeah.
	But that's a very worthy cause.
	But the point here being that the guys on Wall Street Bets are basically the kids who were destroyed by Wall Street back in 2008.
	They got bailed out for messing up their portfolios.
	Undeserved.
	Completely unjust.
	I have no idea why anyone agreed to this.
	Because they control the government.
	And they're now in a position where they're basically doing a similar thing, you know, investing.
	They're making tons of money off some, you know, obviously some kind of, I would describe it as sneaky, let's say, practices, because this is pretty sneaky.
	But the thing is that, you know, Wall Street's no better, so stuff them.
	But he's also making the point that Wall Street Bets is a forum that's open to literally anyone on the planet can read what your proposal is and what you think people should do.
	Couldn't be more transparent.
	There is no such transparency on Wall Street.
	You do not know what J.P. Morgan's up to.
	Or anything else.
	J.P. Morgan's dead now, actually.
	But anyway, you know what I mean.
	Yeah.
	And true.
	True guy.
	There was also another prophecy that has apparently come true.
	So this was a prophecy here saying the top five richest people, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Bernard Aldert, and retard6969, And yeah, this is not coming exactly true, but it has come somewhat true.
	So there's a guy who's a new billionaire out of all of this.
	So someone actually became a billionaire, if you can get the next one up, which is this guy.
	So he is a pet store entrepreneur.
	He does lots of other things.
	Goes by the username FrodoTBaggins.
	And he decided to invest $76 million in buying up more than 9 million GameStop shares.
	He invested $76 million?
	At the tail end of last year.
	So this was just him thinking GameStop could be reformed back in the day.
	That was optimistic.
	Buying 9 million shares.
	And then this has happened.
	So his position is up 800%.
	So he now has a market value of $825 million in GameStop.
	So he's doing very well.
	And he's now a very rich man.
	So retard 6969, I hope you're doing well.
	And it's not just GameStop, obviously.
	So this is something we've had less time to cover and we don't really know what's going on.
	Obviously, again and again, we're not experts, not financial advice.
	But a bunch of other stocks have also been experiencing something similar.
	So this is Bed Bath& Beyond.
	It's been soaring.
	And then the next one, some other stock has been soaring.
	I don't know which one that was.
	AMC Entertainment has been going up.
	A lot of people invested in that one for some reason.
	That stock was low.
	And then the next one, GameStop, obviously.
	I also saw Dogecoin is up 400%.
	LAUGHTER Why not?
	But I love the idea here.
	It's like some kids remembered their favourite places from 20 years ago and just decided to invest in them.
	Well, I was literally going to say that, right?
	I bet all of these people, or at least a lot of these people who are like, you know, focused on GameStop, give a damn about GameStop, one of the reasons that they think about it is because when they were kids, they were going in there and buying console games secondhand and stuff like that, you know?
	I imagine that's part of the reason that GameStop became so special.
	Exactly.
	I imagine.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Because apparently there are plenty of other stocks that are overshorted.
	Yeah.
	It's just this one happened to be in their mind.
	It's a bit of meme magic that's going on.
	Yeah, it is.
	I love it.
	So there's also the point here.
	So I've seen a lot of people saying, you know, like Mia Khalifa, for example, tweeted out that you should buy AMC. And, you know, loads of other people jumping in the band when they're buying stuff.
	We're not advising anyone to buy or do anything.
	No, no.
	But the argument here is that people are, and a lot of people are going to lose money and whatnot, because they've brought into this myth that game stock can only go up, and obviously that's not true.
	There's just a false narrative that the media are publishing.
	And the real message here from WallStreetBets and everyone else is this message here, which was posted on Reddit.
	We can remain retarded for longer than they can stay solvent.
	It is just memes.
	These people are just doing it for a laugh.
	They're going to lose money...
	They know they're going to lose money.
	A lot of people have made money out of this, sure, but this is going to go down.
	And I don't want anyone claiming that this is some nefarious practice.
	People are screwing over ordinary people.
	No, if you're investing in this, I think you're nuts.
	Oh no, not the hedge fund managers.
	Will someone think of them?
	No, but when the stock crashes, the people who have shares will lose it.
	But if you haven't realized now that this is a joke, I don't know what world you're living in.
	It's also part of a culture war.
	What this is is just make sure that the stock stays high enough so when they're forced to buy back or whatever from the short selling that they have to fork out huge amounts of cash.
	That's what people are doing and they know what they're doing.
	Yeah, it's the Joker meme of having a bunch of money that you've saved up and they're just burning it to piss off Wall Street.
	Yeah.
	But look how much money you're burning in return.
	Yeah, you have to burn ten times as much as I do.
	Yeah.
	So isn't that funny?
	Yes, it is.
	Like, that's all that's going on there.
	It's not some, you know...
	It's absolutely perfect.
	I'm seeing the Joker memes in regards to this everywhere as well.
	It's great.
	I love it.
	Yeah.
	And that's why this is so amazing.
	I can't take my eye off the thing.
	Markets are going to open at the end of this podcast again.
	And I dread to think how high it's going to go.
	But...
	I hope everyone gets out of this with a smiling face that they understood that this is a meme and you are going to meme your money here.
	Yeah.
	But the thing is, I think we underestimate the importance of symbolism because that's what this is about.
	This is about sending a message.
	It's exactly as the Joker says.
	It's not about the money.
	It's about sending a message.
	And it really is.
	And the message is, messaging is important, right?
	This is why I wanted to talk about the Gondor has no king lawsuit to try and overturn the US 2020 election.
	Because this is important.
	Symbolism is important to people.
	Things that have happened fit into a kind of narrative framework in life.
	And that's why the GameStop stuff is so important.
	So, let's begin with the 2020 election.
	Now, we're not going to go over all of the hoo-ha regarding it.
	We'll just summarize it by saying there's a website called hereistheevidence.com.
	And on this website, they list hundreds and hundreds of news articles and documents and various other things that talk about election irregularities in the 2020 election.
	And there have been literally hundreds of these.
	They break them down to various categories, such as voting legislation categories.
	You can see it's like the Pennsylvania court rules against the post-election vote curing, for example.
	So that's something that happened.
	That was illegal.
	Doesn't matter, apparently.
	The executive branch of whatever, Wisconsin there, you can see they changed the rules on receiving mail-in ballots after the date and things like this.
	This is unconstitutional.
	So there are lots of things that have happened that appear to be a problem, something that should at the very least be investigated.
	Then you've got, like, illegal votes.
	We've got examples of double voting, fraudulent addresses, thousands with addresses that don't even exist, the fact that in Pennsylvania you've got more votes than voters and about 10,000 dead voters, something like that, right?
	Then you've got the polling place irregularities.
	We've got hundreds of sworn affidavits by people who are saying, look, I was a Republican poll watcher.
	I wasn't allowed in.
	There's also video evidence of this.
	Then you've got discarded or destroyed ballots, voting machine irregularities, other general problems.
	Hundreds and hundreds of examples of things that should be investigated in and of themselves.
	Each individual one is probably a crime and someone should probably go to jail for these crimes.
	I mean, there have been various other people, like Texas and Florida, who have been convicted in recent months of voter fraud.
	These things happen.
	This is a problem.
	This undermines the legitimacy of Biden's presidency.
	And the legitimacy of Biden's presidency is further undermined when it comes to his dealings with foreign countries.
	Tony Bobulinski, being the hero of the hour here, When he came out and after the New York Post got hold of Hunter Biden's laptop, went through it and found, oh look, Hunter Biden's taking 10% for the big guy.
	Well, who's the big guy?
	Well, it turns out Tony Bobulinski is Hunter Biden's business partner through all of this.
	And he just came out and said, yeah, well, that was, you know, H is holding 10% for the big guy.
	And the reference to the big guy is in fact a reference to Joe Biden, says Bobulinski.
	So it's all right, okay.
	Oh, that's confirmed now.
	Thank you.
	Absolutely confirmed.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Hunter Biden continues to hold 10% for the big guy, as the Daily Caller reported, I think it was yesterday.
	The reference to the big guy, of course, was Joe Biden.
	And Hunter Biden is still holding the...
	He holds stake in this Chinese private equity firm, despite the reports that he was planning to divest from it.
	So basically, it was said to the media, oh, well, I mean, he is, but he's going to get rid of all this.
	He's going to get rid of all this.
	It's like, okay, but your father is now the president.
	We can see a direct linkage between you taking Chinese money from these equity firms, taking it to you, and then passing it to your father, and you still hold that.
	So you're not doing what you're saying.
	You are being just as corrupt.
	And of course, like the allegation, oh, well, you know, Joe Biden never spoke to his son about it.
	Bobulinski was just like, no, that's not true.
	I was there.
	I saw them talking about it.
	This is absolutely the case.
	And, I mean, in his view, he says, the Biden family aggressively leveraged the Biden family name to make millions of dollars from foreign entities, even though some of those were from communist-controlled China.
	So, it's transparent, right?
	So, what we have...
	is a position where the president and the people around him are not considered to be electorally legitimate.
	Now, the way that we should, I think, look at this...
	It's not simply in terms of the sort of legalistic framework in which politics happens, right?
	So, yeah, okay, if I can turn up with X amount of ballots on a certain day, then by the law, I'm the winner.
	But if there's no faith in those ballots and the ballots are not investigated, and basically no one believes that the person is legitimate, even if you go through the process, you still have, like we saw in other podcasts, Roughly half the electorate believing that Joe Biden effectively stole the election.
	Now, whether he did or didn't, again, none of this really matters, right?
	Because now it comes down to the concept of belief.
	It comes down to the concept of commitment.
	And this is why the Gondor has no king lawsuit actually makes sense, because the person at the top of any political system has to reside there through some legitimate means in the minds of the people above whom they're ruling.
	Now, in each political system, this is different.
	So in medieval England, there were various other ways of getting a legitimate king.
	And this is why the sort of Robin Hood story with King John, the phony king of England, waiting for the return of King Richard, is such a story with such resonance, even into the modern era.
	Because if you feel that you have an illegitimate ruler above you, then you feel like you're being oppressed by a tyrant.
	Everything they do will be illegitimate, and therefore you don't buy into the political narrative that runs your country.
	And that's what this is about.
	So the way that The Guardian covered this was obviously as ignorant as you can imagine.
	Donald Trump's diehard supporters are often accused of living in a fantasy land, but one court case recently launched to try and reinstall him as president has surprised even the most hardened observers of Trumpian strangeness by citing as evidence a mythological realm from Lord of the Rings.
	Sorry, what were your pronouns again?
	Was it she, her?
	Yeah, okay, nice receding hairline, you know what I mean?
	Like, don't tell me that this is the Trump supporters living in a fancy land, when you guys literally are like pantomime horses are real horses, okay?
	But anyway, right, I'm not going to go off track here.
	So, as they say, Gondor has no king, the lawsuit states, a footnote providing an explanation of the woeful fate of Tolkien's imaginary land.
	It's like, okay, but there is a reality to this story.
	I mean, that's the point of stories.
	The point of story is they map onto something we recognize as reality, right?
	Even if it's in an allegorical way.
	And that's what the lawsuit was bringing up.
	So if we actually just go to the lawsuit, you can see that they're not saying, well, if there's no king in Gondor, then the Rohirrim won't ride, although metaphorically that is what they're saying, right?
	They literally say Gondor has no king to invoke a very appropriate line from Tolkien's epic classic Lord of the Rings.
	The judicial branch is currently the only remaining legitimate branch of government and therefore has a duty to uphold the checks and balances in the constitution to curb the unlawful power grab perpetuated on the electorate by the defendants.
	So, as you can see, they were just using it as a metaphor for framing to explain that, look, we don't think that Biden's presidency is legitimate.
	And if we don't think it's legitimate, we're not going to play along with it.
	We don't want to pretend like you're the real king.
	No one believes King John is the lawful king of England.
	No one believes that Joe Biden is the lawful president of the United States, or at least these people don't.
	And that really is a surprisingly large segment of the American population, as polling has shown.
	And so the thing was, the court must immediately act to check the power of the legislative and executive branches by placing them into a state of stewardship to preserve the state's, quote, anti, pending a preliminary injunction, blah, blah, blah.
	None of this is going to happen, right?
	This is obviously total nonsense.
	It's not going to happen.
	The powers that be are never going to let this happen.
	But listen to what they're saying.
	They believe that the judicial branch is the last remaining branch that's legitimate.
	And the actions of Joe Biden kind of prove their point.
	Let me just find the bit I was on.
	So they literally say, So, like I said, this isn't going to affect anything, but it speaks to a longing for good and legitimate governance.
	And it speaks to a requirement for the permission of goodwill from this side of the aisle.
	And we've said this before.
	If Joe Biden actually thought that he won this legitimately, he shouldn't be trying to persecute the Republicans.
	He shouldn't be cracking down.
	He should be going through the things that they claim are problems and either proving why they're not true, We're good to go.
	And the thing is, he isn't acting like he is in charge.
	He's acting like a usurper king.
	This is the sort of thing that a usurper would do.
	The rush of executive orders is astounding.
	It's unprecedented, as we covered the other day.
	But Ben Shapiro actually did a fantastic podcast about this yesterday, going off on a bit of a tangent here.
	But where he explains why executive orders are what they are, what they're for, and shows clips of Joe Biden objecting to rule by executive order.
	Now since Joe Biden has done something like 35 executive orders in his first week so far, which is miles higher than any president since like going back to like the turn of the century, last century in fact, This abject hypocrisy just, again, continues to add layer upon layer to the idea that Joe Biden is not the legitimate ruler of the United States.
	The hypocrisy is obvious and palpable, and it is obviously manifestly unjust.
	You can't just sit there and say, I'm against all of these things, and then go and do all of these things.
	It can't carry on.
	And it's no surprise, really.
	Again, the narratives are important, right?
	This is why the left is focused on narratives all the time.
	And the narratives that are going around now are that Joe Biden is illegitimate, and everything Biden does reinforces this.
	And it's no surprise that there's heightened terror warning from the Department of Homeland Security.
	I think they're in a heightened threat environment, who are warning about ideologically motivated violent extremists, motivated by perceived grievances that fueled by false narratives could continue to mobilize or incite and commit violence.
	Obviously, you don't want anyone to commit violence, but what I'm trying to say is that you make these things inevitable by failing to engage with the narratives of the people who do not believe in you and your narrative.
	And Joe Biden is not in any way trying to engage with other narratives.
	He's trying to supplant the American narrative.
	And I don't think the Republicans are going to go for it.
	I don't think the MAGA folk are going to accept this.
	But anyway, the bulletin says that domestic violent extremists, motivated by a range of issues, are plotting to carry out attacks on government facilities.
	So, oh, okay.
	And this violence is going to carry on.
	But again, the fundamental crisis of legitimacy is the main point.
	A Texas secession bill has been filed.
	Now, Bill HB 1359 is pretty simple.
	If approved by the Texas House and Senate, signed by the Governor, obviously all of these things aren't going to happen, then it would include a non-binding referendum question.
	Should the legislature of the state of Texas submit a plan for leaving the United States of America and establishing an independent republic?
	Again, it's not going to happen, but what it is, is the belief that the United States as a political entity, as a republic, is dead, which is exactly what they say.
	A Republican guy called Biedemann.
	I didn't get his first name.
	Do I get his first name?
	No, I didn't get his first name.
	Biedemann said, The Republic as we know it is dead.
	We all hoped that Trump would pull a rabbit out of his hat.
	We know the election was stolen.
	So it doesn't matter whether he's right or wrong.
	It doesn't matter whether what's true or not at this point.
	What matters is what people believe.
	And what they believe is that the right ordering of the world has been broken.
	There is no king in Gondor.
	The steward is illegitimate.
	Like, these things matter to these people.
	If the world is not rightly ordered, then the world has to be reordered.
	Things have to change, which means, oh, secessionist movements, which means terrorism, which means all of these other things.
	And the only way that Biden can fix any of this is by coming to the table with these people and having it out with them and saying, well, look, let's go through it in detail.
	I want to actually address your complaints.
	Instead, he's persecuting them.
	And the paranoia is just off the charts, right?
	I love the most ridiculous examples of paranoia of far right is amazing, right?
	So, Biden's first White House sign language interpreter has ties to the far right.
	Oh no!
	The sign language interpreter is a Nazi, is he?
	God!
	And the thing is as well, like, So, today's interpreter was introduced, and it turned out that some of the videos that he had also done sign language on had made false claims about Michelle Obama being transgender and, like, you know, other conspiracy theory things.
	So, basically, it's just someone who has been paid to do sign language interpretation.
	And so the paranoia is ramping up.
	Canada has declared the Proud Boys a domestic terror group.
	Why not?
	I mean, I don't really know what sort of terrorism they've actually accomplished or engaged in, but all of Canada's political parties, without a single objection, decided to name this American group a bunch of terrorists.
	But it turned out that Enrique Tarrio is a Fed, so he was glowing in the dark.
	It turns out that he was, according to Reuters, I don't know how reliable this reporting is, but it's been widely reported, that Tario, the non-white leader of the white supremacist group The Proud Boys, was a past informer for federal and local law enforcement, repeatedly working undercover.
	After he was arrested in 2012, according to a 2014 federal court transcript obtained by Reuters.
	Tarrio himself denies this, but I mean, I guess you would, wouldn't you, if you're in that position?
	So I don't know whether it's true or not.
	But what's interesting, though, is apparently the FBI agent and Tarrio's own lawyer described his undercover work as helping authorities prosecute more than a dozen people involving various cases of drugs, gambling, and human smuggling.
	So I was like, oh, is that bad?
	Sounds kind of honourable.
	Yeah.
	Sorry, he's preventing human trafficking.
	What a bad man.
	Yeah, terrible.
	So yeah, anyway.
	I suppose the claim there, though, is that he's got ties to the Feds.
	Well, yeah, obviously.
	Some kind of glow-in-the-dark or something like this.
	Well, he is a glow-in-the-dark if he has ties to the Feds.
	But yeah, so the left and the mainstream can mock the Lord of the Rings...
	Lawsuit as much as they want, but they really need to start paying attention to the underlying ethos that's under it.
	And what are you on your phone for?
	Because Andy's a bit worried about getting lost, so...
	Just sending him directions.
	Right, okay.
	Sorry.
	That's okay.
	Obviously, if we're going to do the book club with Andy, we want him to arrive here.
	So, I mean, what do you make of any of that?
	I think it's definitely interesting.
	Like, you're making the point here, but it's just that if he doesn't address the points, as people have said, I mean, you remember the trigonometry guy saying, well, I hope he does because that would be something fair and honourable.
	Yeah, I'm sure he'll be fair and honourable and do an investigation.
	I imagine that Constantine's a little bit miffed that he's not doing that or a little bit upset that he said he would.
	I don't doubt.
	I don't know what's going to happen.
	If there is going to be no reconciliation, I imagine we will end up with a larger amount of the Republican Party just openly saying we don't believe this election and so on and so forth.
	In a similar vein that the Democrats did with the Russia stuff, but the obvious difference being that the Republicans never got their day in court.
	The Russia stuff had two years to investigate.
	Gone nada.
	Joe Biden looks like the phony king of England.
	I'd love to interview Enrique Tarrio about his days as being a Fed, though.
	He literally claims, I don't know any of this, I don't recall any of this.
	So he seems to be saying fairly tight-lipped.
	But I imagine that's part of the agreement working with the Fed.
	I can only imagine, yeah, I can only imagine.
	But that's really the least important part.
	The point is, you know, the paranoia being exhibited by the Biden regime.
	Regime, I say.
	That was an accident, but, you know, is it?
	It makes them look illegitimate.
	It makes them look illegitimate.
	And the fact that they can't form a coherent...
	And these narratives are moral narratives, right?
	They're not about...
	Yeah, that legal case is not anything legal, really.
	No, it's garbage legally.
	Exactly.
	It's not anything legal, really.
	It's a moral statement.
	We do not believe in the legitimacy of the king, which just means the person in charge.
	And as Ben Shapiro is pointing out in his podcast, Biden effectively is ruling like a king.
	Like, that's the thing.
	He's ruling via executive fiat.
	And Chuck Schumer and the Congress essentially are deliberately taking a back seat because the Democrats control these things now.
	They're just essentially standing back saying, we're not going to object to the fact that Joe Biden is using all of this as executive authority that...
	Theoretically, it's backed by the legitimacy of Congress, and so Congress should be having an oversight and having an input in this.
	It is super weird as well, though.
	They own the House.
	They've got 50 senators in the Senate.
	Why not just pass legislation that would be hard for the Republicans to undo, but instead they're just using executive orders, which any Republican president could just kick to the curb?
	I guess it's because then you don't have to have the hearings out.
	People can't object to it in the Senate.
	People can't say anything.
	The other side doesn't get to present their case.
	Again, it looks like they're illegitimate.
	They rule by executive fear.
	They don't want the conversation.
	They don't want the conversation.
	They want to shut out their opposition as much as possible.
	And this seems like tyranny.
	Ben Shapiro's right.
	It looks kind of tyrannical.
	It looks like Joe Biden has become a dictator.
	And it's like, okay, well...
	Sorry, I'm just thinking of the yikes memes from the leftists.
	Well, you know...
	If all my legislation will be done by fiat, yikes.
	Well, it's fitting.
	Well, exactly.
	If Joe Biden is going to rule like King John, then don't be surprised when people start treating him like King John.
	Yeah.
	And what I love about it as well is the meme magic is really sort of a lining up.
	So if Joe Biden's the phony king of England, I mean Kamala Harris really does seem like the sheriff of Nottingham, doesn't she?
	Let's be honest.
	Yeah, there's a great article that Hugo did the other day, Kamala the Cop on LotusEast.com.
	It's a really good article.
	I'll post it on the community tab or something at some point.
	Because it's really good.
	So the meme magic's all lining up.
	And Donald Trump's looking a lot more like King Richard on the Crusade in Exile, isn't he?
	But anyway, the final thing I'm going to talk about here today is COVID derangement syndrome.
	And I'm just so tired.
	And you're very tired as well of talking about COVID in lockdowns, aren't you?
	Yeah, I just don't care.
	Like, I'm at the point where now if the government came out and said I'm going to shoot everyone who has it, I'd just be like...
	Because the British public's doing nothing.
	There is no opposition to this.
	There's no political opposition.
	There's no will.
	No, there's not.
	There's literally nothing.
	And in all the sort of, you know, public areas of the internet that I go to where this is discussed, it's one-sided narrative, where it's just like, we needed to lock down harder, harder, harder.
	It's like...
	Yeah, all the reasonable conversations have been had.
	Yeah, and they're gone.
	It seems the public generally believes nonsense when it comes to COVID as well, which in fact we'll go through in a second.
	So yeah, the UK recently reached 100,000 deaths within 28 days of a positive COVID test.
	That's deaths for any reason within the 28-day period.
	We do not, and again, this is not something that the general public have got any method of expressing, it seems.
	We are not sure, and in fact, we could probably be sure that these people are not all COVID deaths, as in deaths from COVID. They're deaths within 28 days of a positive test.
	Now, what was it, like two weeks you had to quarantine for?
	I think it depends.
	Well, there have been various sort of standards, but back last summer, whenever it was, you're supposed to quarantine for two weeks, and then you would be out of the danger zone of, you know, you'd have been out of it.
	So within 28 days means that literally someone could get tested on the first day, be fine 14 days later, and then on the 28th day, get hit by a car, and then be marked as a COVID death.
	This isn't to say that we believe 80% of these are fake or something.
	No, no, no.
	No one actually has a good metric on this.
	The NHS had previously revised down their figures.
	They sliced off like 5,000 figures because they said that their reporting methods were not accurate.
	And they're still just within 28 days.
	So we don't actually know how many COVID deaths there are.
	It's just these are the reported statistics that we have.
	And so we'll just go with that.
	Right.
	So, we reached 100,000 people who died within 28 days of a COVID test.
	And the media has been hamming this up like nothing I've ever seen before.
	A heart-wrenching, incomprehensible figure that many experts and scientists believe to be rooted in the failures of a reckless government that has overseen one of the largest avoidable losses of lives in generations.
	I hate it.
	I hate everything about it.
	Can't stand it.
	The government is not responsible for COVID. They're not responsible for people dying of COVID. And they're not responsible for preventing people from getting COVID. I know that everyone's in their mindset.
	It's like, oh, well, the government should do this, the government should do that.
	It's not the government's job to prevent me getting a flu-like disease.
	Plus, this is the point we had previously, where they essentially put most of the country on what they call Tier 4, which is essentially lockdown.
	And then people were like, no, we need a national lockdown.
	It's like, what's the difference?
	Schools are still open.
	That was what the difference was.
	The difference was they closed the schools and that was it.
	Because everything was already closed.
	What more do you want them to do?
	There is nothing left to do.
	And so moving into year two of the lockdowns, we've seen no improvement.
	I mean, there's a very small dip in the number of cases going up, but like, okay...
	We're still, you know, there are still thousands of people dying from within 28 days of a test positive for COVID. So what's the solution?
	Did it solve the problem?
	You know, is the third lockdown the solution?
	Seems not.
	Just a preface, just like saying solve the problem is kind of simplistic and I don't like it because people say...
	Well, yeah, yeah, that's true.
	The goals were to lower the curve, but that's the thing.
	It's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Julie Hartley Brewer points out, which is that, you know, if...
	If it goes up and doesn't go over the top, then that's proof that the lockdown's working.
	But if it does anyway, then that's proof that we didn't lock down hard enough.
	There's no real way to argue against it.
	But the fact we're in our third lockdown implies that lockdowns are not a miracle cure for COVID. They are tremendously damaging in every other respect, though.
	So what we have, I think most generously you could say, is a policy that has not been proven to work.
	That's just it.
	That's the only tool that the UK government have.
	But more than a quarter of all UK deaths have been reported in the last month alone, which means that it's just getting worse, apparently.
	But yeah, the way the press are going on about this, they're really hyping this up.
	The reality is that such statistics barely scratch the surface of suffering that has paralysed the UK over the course of the crisis.
	Each life lost was a mother, a father, a child, a friend, a neighbour, a colleague, someone known and loved by another.
	Yeah, yeah, they were.
	Which is why locking them up alone was bad.
	Anyway, so Boris did a press conference yesterday in which he said very little, apart from the very little new information, apart from the fact that the earliest they're considering opening up is March the 8th.
	And that's not even opening up.
	That's just schools in England can go back if it will not cause a, quote, surge in the disease.
	So nothing in any way guaranteed.
	It seems that for another month more we're going to be locked up because our government is just tyrannical and doesn't know what else to do.
	The BBC put out what I would call a totally deranged report about the 100,000th Death within 28 days of a positive test.
	And it was sort of mourn porn.
	And it's been gross.
	It's like they want the public to be in a persistent state of sadness and paralysis.
	And one of the most interesting things about this was this clip that we'll play now that just really highlights why lockdowns are such an evil thing.
	Ada Jackson was 90 and had early signs of dementia, but families say she was happy, strong and feisty until COVID came into the care home where she lived.
	It started to go from one person to three people to five people.
	You then started to just think, my goodness, they're not going to be able to stop this.
	They had the residents locked in their room.
	I felt helpless, that solitary confinement in the room.
	I wonder if Ada felt abandoned at that point in time.
	Ada died on June the 3rd.
	She hadn't seen her family since March.
	These are human beings.
	These are people with families.
	They have lives.
	They're not just numbers.
	This is a life that's gone.
	And the impact is huge.
	Since March.
	So that woman spent nearly a year on her own, eventually catches COVID and dies.
	How old was she again?
	Ninety.
	Is that the way that you want to go out?
	Is that the way that any 90-year-old wants to go out?
	Alone.
	For months.
	And months and months.
	Locked in a room on their own.
	Not able to see the family.
	Oh, because you might die.
	I mean, you know, she's probably 90 years old, you know?
	It's not like I'm looking forward to skydiving next week or something.
	You know, I'm not about to go climb Mount Everest.
	I'm not going to go on a world trip.
	When you're 90 years old, you don't have that much to look forward to, apart from seeing your family.
	I mean, my nan died at 91, about a month and a half ago now.
	She didn't die from COVID. She died from cancer.
	Because old people die of lots of stuff, especially when they get into their 90s.
	It's a cruel reality.
	It's just what happens.
	But she couldn't see her great-grandkids.
	I couldn't see her until a couple of days before she died.
	And she wasn't even conscious.
	And it's all because of these COVID restrictions.
	And yet she still died.
	It's not going to change anything.
	It's not going to prevent old people from dying.
	And at the moment, currently, it's ripping through old folks' homes.
	So even all of these lockdowns, all of this stuff, a quarter of the overall deaths in total have been in care homes alone.
	And so that's just the elderly in these care homes.
	But obviously it's mostly elderly people generally, but a quarter of them.
	So that's 25,000 Old folks' homes have had people dying from COVID. That's a quarter of the deaths.
	Even with all the lockdowns.
	Even with all the precautions they're taking.
	Because it turns out we're actually not the masters of disease.
	We actually don't have magical powers that control the coronavirus and stuff like this.
	It's infectious disease.
	People carry infectious diseases.
	Old people can catch infectious diseases and therefore they end up dying.
	It's just a sad reality of life.
	I don't, you know, I'm not happy about it.
	I don't relish it.
	But it's just what happens to very old people when they get very old.
	And so despite the damage we've done to ourselves, no one has been saved.
	No old people have been preserved.
	This is just something that's happened.
	And when asked about what's going on, I mean, there was a lady called Teresa Coffey, a conservative MP for Suffolk Coastal, who went on Good Morning Britain the other day and was, you know, interrogated by Piers Morgan.
	And she just basically has to come out and say, well, look, it's because we have a very old and obese population.
	It's not really a very nice way of putting it, and she had to kind of reprimand Piers for putting it in that way because it's not very polite, but it's the truth.
	As she says, generally, the general public is older than many other countries and has a high level of obesity, and this is really just a consequence of people living longer and having lives full of unhealthy food.
	And the worst hit place, the BBC, I think it was, or is it Sky News?
	We can go to the next one, John.
	Sky News did a report about the worst place hit in Britain, right?
	It's the Rhonda Valley.
	One of my ancestral homelands, in fact.
	My mum's family comes from the Rhonda Valley.
	It's half Welsh.
	And it's the worst place hit in Britain.
	And so I just went and looked at some of the statistics about the place.
	Well, it turns out it's got one of the highest percentages of old people in Wales, presumably in the rest of the UK, in fact.
	The statistics don't look very good there, but basically they have a higher than usual number of old folks in Rhonda than they do in other places.
	Like Cardiff is roughly the same number of old folks, but there's a much higher percentage of younger people, for example, because it's a big city.
	But the Rhonda Valleys are just full of small towns, you know, where it's just old folks living the last years of their lives.
	And also the population there is not very healthy in.
	It's in fact the least healthy place in Wales.
	If we can get the image up.
	I've circled the Rhonda Valley in red.
	And the lighter colours on this graph.
	This is from just the Welsh Government's NHS Wales Population Health Observatory.
	And so this, I just took this out of the thing because this shows you a summary score of the physical health.
	And as they say there, a higher score means a better health, and the higher scores are in the darker blue.
	Well, you can see that the Rhonda is very light blue because it's a place where people are not very healthy, presumably, because on average, they are older than usual.
	And so it's like, right, okay, what can you do?
	What can be done?
	The way that the media and the activists are acting is that this is Johnson's fault.
	And Johnson came out and took full responsibility for this.
	He's not responsible for the people in the Ronda Valley being old and unhealthy.
	He's not responsible for that.
	And it's not judgment.
	It's just life.
	It's just what happens.
	He's not responsible for COVID getting into the old folks' homes and killing old people.
	He's not responsible for any of this.
	This is not his fault.
	There's nothing he could have done.
	I mean, what else could he have done?
	What are the other options?
	Can you think of any?
	But we're still all under lockdown, and it's still all going on.
	And the public, of course, are totally poorly informed.
	They don't know anything really about COVID. This was a poll that was done in November, and the public think the average age of COVID deaths is 65, and it was the UK's biggest killer.
	It's not, and it wasn't.
	The average age of death is 82.4 years.
	The average life expectancy is 81.1 years, according to the Office of National Statistics.
	The average age of death for COVID has been, as far as I'm aware the entire time, over the age of life expectancy.
	So all of this is like, right, okay, old people are dying of a flu-like disease that we can't seem to stop, even if we shut down all of society.
	And it's just out of our power.
	It's out of our control.
	We're just not in control of this.
	I mean, there are 17,000 flu deaths a year.
	Obviously, all old people, mostly.
	Almost all old people.
	And this is just something that happens year by year by year.
	Some years it goes down to like 13,000.
	Some years it's as high as 28,000.
	But it averages about 17,000 flu deaths a year.
	We don't ruin all of society for this.
	We don't shut down because we can't stop this.
	And we know we can't stop this.
	And we should have taken this sort of attitude towards COVID, as rough as it is.
	The World Health Organization doesn't advocate for lockdowns.
	This is the thing.
	We are currently operating against the best wishes and the advice of the World Health Organization.
	As they say, under what is the whose position on lockdowns as a way of fighting COVID-19, large-scale physical distancing measures and movement restrictions, often referred to as lockdowns, can slow COVID-19 transmission by limiting contact between people.
	However, these measures have a profound negative impact on individuals, communities, and societies by bringing social and economic life to a near stop.
	Such measures disproportionately affect disadvantaged groups, including people in poverty, migrants, internally displaced people and refugees, or those who live in overcrowded and under-resourced settings, dependent on daily labour for subsistence.
	Oh yeah, I should have pointed out, the Rhonda Valley isn't exactly Sussex.
	It's not exactly a place that's swimming in wealth either.
	But anyway, carrying on...
	The WHO recognises that at certain points some countries have had no choice but to issue stay-at-home measures and they should make the best of their lockdown time.
	But they hope that the countries will use targeted interventions when and where needed based on the local situation.
	They do not advocate for lockdowns.
	As they say, they have a massive and profound negative impact.
	And back in August 2020, we actually knew what this sort of impact was because a report had been given to the government that had suggested that, in fact, there was something like for every three COVID deaths, there were two deaths caused by the lockdowns.
	Okay, that's awful, isn't it?
	These are what's called excess deaths.
	These are not people who otherwise would have died.
	These are people who have died as a consequence of the lockdowns.
	And this is continuing on.
	Again, we're going to hurry up because time's moving on.
	But the lockdowns...
	Speaking to our own little sunny island of paradise in Swindon, the lockdowns are destroying this town.
	Absolutely destroying this town.
	This is a large town, right?
	But, like, here's River Island.
	There's just yet another high street store that's closing because they can't afford to stay in the high street now because no one's allowed to go and buy their stuff.
	But it wasn't just them.
	John Lewis, Debenhams, the Oasis, which is a swimming pool complex.
	All of these have been shut down.
	Like, the Swindon high street is just totally bereft of any value now, right?
	And then you've got, like, the weird sort of mental mindset that the Conservatives must be in at this point, right?
	Boris looks like he's a man who's been destroyed by this.
	Giving his little COVID briefing yesterday.
	I mean, there's a part of me that kind of feels bad for him, right?
	Because I don't think that he's naturally inclined to want to tyrannize people.
	I don't actually think that he's that kind of guy.
	But I think they're just in a position where they think they have to act as if they're in control of everything, and any failure on their part is a reflection of them personally, rather than a reflection of them trying to do something they just can't do.
	But anyway, so apparently the Conservatives were floating the idea of using children to spy on their parents if the parents break lockdown, and getting the children to report to the government that their parents have broken lockdown.
	Orwellian.
	Actually something from 1984.
	Actually evil.
	Ian Duncan Smith, of all people, had to come out and be like, no, this is terrible.
	And it's looking like there's going to be a conservative backbench rebellion over this.
	Thank God.
	I mean, you know, why are you even discussing it?
	Everyone I've spoken to, says David Davis, has been horrified when it's been explained to them.
	It will allow 16 and 17-year-olds to spy on their parents and authorize them to commit crimes as well.
	So it needs to be extremely tightly controlled, and those controls need to be tied to what the government is proposing.
	No, you shouldn't be thinking about this.
	The idea that you should get children to spy on their parents is insane.
	And then you've got the next thing, which is there's a school in Oldham, U-Tree Community School in Oldham, that wants to punish children who've been visiting other people outside their households, breaking the lockdown.
	And they want to eject these children from their online learning at school?
	It's like, my God, what an evil thing to do that would be.
	As if it's the children's choice that they go out and see other people, right?
	But what an evil thing that would be.
	And it's because the parents are putting the staff in danger.
	Not true.
	Absolutely not true.
	Again, at yesterday's press conference, one of Boris's scientific advisors laid out, look, the teachers are not in any particular danger of COVID because the teachers are way below retirement age.
	The children can spread COVID. It's not clear that the teachers catch COVID from the kids, although let's be fair, they probably do.
	But it's not clear that there's any particular connections here, and it's also no particular danger for the teachers.
	This is the government position, as laid out yesterday.
	This is bullshit.
	Sorry, I shouldn't...
	I shouldn't swear.
	You know, we do try not to swear, and this is nonsense.
	This is absolute nonsense.
	And it's probably connected to labour domination of the unions, but I'm not even going to go into that, right?
	Let's just make Jess Phillips' argument for how keeping kids out of school is actually unfair and unkind.
	I completely agree with you, Jess Phillips.
	It is indeed, as you pointed out in July 2019, totally unfair if kids can't go to school.
	Hundreds of children and parents marched on Westminster to object to the early closing of schools on Fridays.
	They waved placards that said, we're the future, don't cut us short.
	Make the future bright, stop being so tight.
	Totally agree!
	At the time, I probably, in fact, I didn't necessarily disagree, but I did say, well, look, is it the government's job to make sure your kids are in school?
	Well, I mean, it's the government's job to make sure that you're not prevented from going to school, at the very least.
	But yeah, the reality is this is affecting people all across the country.
	It's no surprise to me that all parents want their kids in school for five days a week, for their own livelihoods, and for the future of their children.
	Well, as a parent, Jess, I totally agree with you.
	I want my kids in school for their futures, for my wife's mental health.
	You know, she's trapped all day, every day with the kids, and it's bad for them and their education.
	But yeah, unfair and unkind.
	I won't even bother going through wrestling because we're running out of time.
	So let's just...
	Have we got time to do Super Chats?
	Yeah.
	So yeah, basically...
	I don't know what's going on with the Super Chats.
	There's nothing legitimate about these lockdowns.
	They didn't work.
	I hate it.
	I know you don't care, but man, I'm so angry about this whole thing.
	Oh, it's not that I don't care.
	No, no, you resigned.
	Yeah, you resigned.
	Yeah, resigned to this is nonsense and it is what it is.
	Anyway, let's go for a video comment.
	I will soon start preparing to run for its state-level office in my home state of California.
	Question for Carl.
	What advice do you have regarding campaign strategy?
	Well, I don't know why you'd ask me that, Christ.
	I wouldn't say I'm any kind of expert.
	Check your social media's account, I guess.
	Yeah, make sure your social media's clean.
	Optics matter is one thing.
	Which sucks, but...
	Yeah, which sucks.
	So, you're going to have to shave and get a haircut, I would suggest, is the first thing to do.
	Not being rude, obviously, as someone who doesn't shave and get his hair cut, you know...
	But optics matter.
	You've got to make sure you're cleaned up and you've got to make sure that you've got effective rhetoric.
	And honestly, again, another weird thing is I would practice projecting your voice, speaking with confidence and conviction.
	Again, I hate to say it, but optics do matter.
	It's not the best answer I wanted to give, but...
	But other than that, just, I don't know.
	Be sure about what you're saying.
	Will the Impaler says, I've said it before and I'll say it again, never in the field of human virology has so much been owed so few by so many.
	MEP Flyerboy, if anything, the GameStop stonk is not a gentle reminder that without the peasants working the land, the feudal lords have no bread on their table.
	It can be upsetting realizing that your servant is your master.
	Yeah, it's about whether the servants realize their position, isn't it?
	That's the thing behind all of these popular uprisings.
	And it's been the same principle behind every peasant uprising through history.
	So don't be surprised they're clamping down on you, basically, chaps.
	Do you want to read a few out?
	So, MuteStream.
	The Lotus Eater body pillows when?
	Never.
	Seriously, guys.
	I've been asking since day one.
	We also need a Hugo 24-7 cam.
	Not happening either.
	Is this meme dead yet, or can I stop paying you money?
	You can stop whenever you want, mate.
	The meme is definitely dead.
	Are they perhaps Hugo's stonks I can invest in?
	God.
	Hugo, you need to start a company.
	Stealth Creations.
	I've heard from people in their examination of Trump by comparing him to Thatcher of Great Britain.
	I think it was on Nigel Farage's show.
	What are your thoughts on this, and do you think it's apt?
	I was born in 79 and Thatcher came in in like 81, something like that.
	So I have no idea what the sort of social environment was like.
	I was talking to my dad about it.
	My dad's obviously very working class.
	And he just hated labor because labor are a bunch of communists who are ruining the country.
	And Thatcher was like, well, we're going to open the markets up.
	Anyone I talk to who's old enough to remember Thatcher, that's the narrative essentially.
	Labour completely destroyed the country and was like, right, to hell with you people.
	And then Thatcher got in.
	So I don't think it's an apt comparison in the sense of where they came from.
	Maybe in the fact that they're strong, but that's about that.
	Yeah, I wouldn't call them parallels necessarily.
	The Cold War loomed too large, I think.
	Norwegian money for our British heroes.
	The era of Wall Street is over.
	The time of the Spurg stonks has come.
	This is a pleasant white pill, not gonna lie.
	Yeah, it is.
	Well, we'll see how it plays out first.
	Hail Callum of House Stonk, vassal to Carl of Aisipur.
	How do you even say that?
	As per our new?
	I don't know.
	Sorry.
	Okay, enough of that.
	Swedish money for our British.
	That is a better meme, to be honest.
	May we all be saved by your great taste in chocolate, but nothing else too greasy.
	Fair point as well.
	We do have the best chocolate.
	Hi, Carl.
	I've been since I was 15.
	I'm now 20.
	Feel old yet?
	Yes.
	Uni is beginning to feel like a huge waste of time.
	Tell me about it.
	I'm in my first year.
	What should I do?
	Find some other stuff that makes you happy while you're doing it.
	That's all I can say.
	Yeah.
	I would definitely recommend keeping your head down, sticking it out, and getting your degree.
	It's very useful to have a degree.
	Shadow Rodney says, got the father's blessing and I'll be joining the stocks tonight.
	Now for Ruin and the world's ending stocks.
	I hope I'll farewell, good luck.
	Well, don't take any financial advice from us, is my advice.
	Oh, nobody can buy on Robin Hood, alright, okay.
	Oh my goodness.
	Right, okay, don't use Robin Hood, I guess.
	Right, yeah.
	People can't hear Robin Hood saying they're not being able to sell things now, so that sucks.
	Liberty Crime says, is the right of every red-blooded American patriot to get their stonks?
	Add Victorian brothers.
	My money, my choice.
	Yep.
	Hello, guys.
	Love the podcast.
	I subbed for the website.
	By the way, I am working on an entire timeline of the 2020 election.
	Find me at ThisJustTrevor.
	Should be available on Mines and Rumble by early February.
	Excellent.
	God, I love capitalism.
	It's amazing.
	I don't know what that's about.
	I'm sorry.
	Send two dozen Dutch people with basic farming tools to Mars and they will have a fully functioning colony in three decades.
	Gecko, lions...
	Yeah, since we're short on time, John, did you want to get the ones up where people have sent us large...
	What do you mean?
	You can scroll and read it, can't you?
	Slowly.
	Sorry guys, we have Andy coming in and was time sensitive.
	Yeah.
	Oh, there's one.
	So from Ian Brown for £50.
	Thank you, sir.
	According to Kamala Harris's father, Donald J. Harris, they are descendants of Irishman Hamilton Brown, who owned 1,120 black slaves in Jamaica in the 19th century.
	If this is true, it's a little awkward, don't you think?
	Yeah, I've heard this too.
	And, I mean, a little awkward is a very understated and British way of putting it.
	Would she owe herself reparations?
	No, because she's not black.
	Wait, but if her father's descendant...
	As an Irishman?
	Yeah, but he's, like...
	I thought he was Jamaican, so, like, he would be descendant of...
	He's an Irishman who owned a Jamaican plantation, and her mother was, like, Indian.
	No, I'm pretty sure her father is, like, half-black or something.
	He's meant to be Jamaican.
	Yeah, but he's also of Irish descent.
	Yeah, that's the point.
	So it would be an interbreeding at some point between a previous slave and a previous white man.
	Yeah.
	So, I mean, like, I don't know, but I think, like, I mean, I don't care about, like, people's race and stuff, but, like...
	But it is awkward, for sure.
	Yeah, don't make weird claims of ancestry, I guess.
	Adam for 50 US dollars, thank you, says, Occupy Wall Street filled the powder keg and Gamergate lit the fuse of the culture war.
	Now, Game Stonks is going to be what pushed us over the edge towards the biggest depression in a century.
	I just wanted to play video games.
	This is a great L for Antifa and Occupy Wall Street.
	You guys suck.
	You can do anything.
	These guys, it took them a day and they've destroyed at least a couple of hedge funds.
	But it's not just they've destroyed a couple of hedge funds.
	All of the others are on notice.
	Yeah.
	All of the rest of them are like, wait.
	Coming for you.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Wait, they can just come for us like this.
	It's like, yeah, anytime.
	We don't have to hang you in the streets.
	streets we'll hang you at uh at the market deus flex says michael moore rightly pointed out in 2016 that trump was a human hand grenade working class americans used to blurp the system that took their lives from them i would not be surprised they resort to a more creative arsenal well i Disavow, but again, we're not in favour of any of these things.
	We still hold the position we originally held, which was come and talk, sit down at the table with the people who actually need to have these conversations.
	It shouldn't be so rare.
	Anyway, how long have we got?
	I think Annie's just arrived, so...
	Right, so we're going to have to be pretty quick.
	Ian Rayson says, for the next flu-like pandemic, I suggest we offer a massive tax break for people between 50 and 20 to get the disease and stay home for two weeks.
	Herd immunity achieved, prolonged lockdown is avoided.
	Well, I mean, if the goal is to make sure that as few people as possible die, then essentially you have to prevent everyone from seeing their grandparents.
	And that also means preventing care home workers from working with elderly people.
	You know, until a vaccine is available.
	It's an impossible task.
	It can't be done.
	Seagullboy says, recently turned 16.
	Now I can vote for someone other than the SNP. I hope Scotland remains in the UK, even though it's riddled with the English.
	Seriously, though, I love you guys.
	I'm a huge fan.
	Well, thank you very much.
	To be honest with you, at this point, if the Scots want independence, I want the Scots to have independence.
	Kingdom of England.
	That's what we need to go back to.
	Like, good luck in your fight against the SNP, but they rule the roost.
	Yeah, exactly.
	For some reason, the Scots keep voting for them.
	Yeah, as soon as you convince the rest of your countrymen to stop being SJWs, then I'd love to have Scotland as part of the union, but Carl's got me convinced that...
	Kingdom of England.
	Enough, I say.
	Time for MAGA to regroup and refocus.
	The key issue right now is to prohibit pre-shredded cheese and make America great again.
	Ha ha ha.
	And a salute to Mick the Farmer.
	The engaged few say, the GameStop drama is a cross between the musical chairs and the game of chicken.
	It's just plain funny to watch vulture capitalists get in high dungeon when they get their cocaine-packed noses tweaked.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's amazing, isn't it?
	And that's a good way of putting it.
	It's a game of musical chairs and a game of chicken.
	You can't trade stocks.
	That's our job.
	Only we're allowed to manipulate the market.
	Yeah, but like I said, they can remain autistic for much longer than the Wall Street people can remain solvent.
	So, Godspeed.
	Because literally the plan is burn my money to say F you.
	Yeah.
	Well, no.
	Love it.
	Who's going to play chicken first when I'm convinced I'm going to burn the money?
	Yeah, exactly.
	Where'd you get the money from?
	The government.
	Yeah, I've got a lot of Jewish friends who say the same thing, basically.
	They're over it, obviously, like the rest of everyone.
	Just like, yeah, these people call everything a narty.
	Moving on.
	JJHW says, Wall Street Bets is the new merry men who have swapped quarterstaffs for buy buttons.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	You know, the men in the greenwood who are firing their arrows at the sheriff.
	Sean Upton says, January 31st Freedom Day.
	Q said the first arrest will shock the world.
	Well, I mean, I'm not a planned truster.
	Like, disavow Q. Yeah, I don't believe that there...
	You're also contractually obliged by YouTube to disavow Q. I'm not a plan truster.
	I do not believe in what Q says.
	I do not believe that there is a plan.
	I think that this was a big cope, to be honest.
	But, you know, I mean, I'm all for arresting the international satanic pedos, though.
	God, I wish.
	Byron says, Wall Street Bets Discord apparently was in Discord sites for saying the word, what we should probably say is the R word, an estimated 600 times a minute.
	Yeah, but they're calling themselves it.
	Yeah, but it doesn't matter.
	It's the R word now.
	Okay.
	Harry Taylor, there is black privilege and there is proof.
	Mike Curran, farmer Mick here.
	I've got loads of stock on the farm.
	Is it about to go up?
	So people were asking, are we going to get loads of stock?
	And I'm like, look at the absolute catastrophe that's going on.
	There is no way I'm selling stocks in this company.
	No.
	We are earning our money legitimately by doing hard work.
	The real work.
	I'm positive that our coverage is better than pretty much anywhere else.
	Because we've always got so much stuff to go through in such detail every day.
	I'm like, wow, we are actually doing a great job.
	Yeah, like I mentioned the other day, I think, you know, no hate on Sky News Australia, but this was just an example.
	They did, like, a whole video on a single tweet from Nancy Pelosi.
	Yeah.
	I was like, that's five seconds from us.
	Yeah.
	But I mean, love Sky News Australia, don't get me wrong.
	Yeah.
	They're doing a great job, too, in the arena in which they operate.
	But I always feel that we're way ahead of the curve.
	But the point is, we hopefully are earning our money legitimately through hard work, through the sweat of our brow.
	So definitely go and sign up on lotuses.com.
	Not through stonks.
	Not through stonks.
	Even though stonks are funny.
	No, they are funny.
	Especially when they can be used to hurt grifters.
	Seerjin says, have the common folk found a way to extract wealth from the elite and establishment?
	Will Elon Musk go full Hank Scorpio?
	It's only a matter of time, isn't it?
	Like, the memes are just all coming together.
	I can't believe The Simpsons predicted everything.
	He hasn't said how much of GameStop he owns, so he may be the doubly richest man in the world now.
	Hopefully he can buy Malta and set up his own island.
	Adam says, it would be cool if you could make Memento Mori slapstickers to put on one of those people will die posters.
	Yeah, that would be cool actually.
	We can't at the moment though, but that would be cool.
	FencingMitch says, I guess earning nothing makes you happy unless you're a hedge fund manager.
	Just tell them, look, it's just part of the Great Reset.
	If you've got any questions, ask Klaus Schwab.
	Just reply to all of them.
	You'll learn nothing and you'll be happy.
	Just send them that.
	Love it.
	Yeah, LearnsCode.
	Anthony Wurst, the fact that the UK was able to source vaccines independently of the EU and beat them to it by three months has probably saved thousands of UK lives.
	That's true, you know?
	I mean, like, the only option seems to be vaccine as many old people, vaccinate as many old people as possible.
	That seems to be the only solution.
	And so, yeah, get rekt, EU. You know, what were you doing?
	Andrew Knapp says, tens of thousands of people buying stock isn't market manipulation, it is the market.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	Which is why they think you're manipulating it.
	Which is why their attempts to ban it are going to kind of go nowhere.
	Because it's like, we're going to ban people from being part of the market?
	Yeah.
	So there's the meme that they're trying, you know, insider trading is illegal.
	They're going to ban outsider trading?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	All that will be left is insider trading.
	Nexion says, since we're undermining the status quo, when is Elon Musk going to successfully privatize world peace?
	Well, Donald Trump basically privatized peace in the Middle East.
	So, like, it's only a matter of time until billionaires actually solve our problems.
	2.0 says, Yeah, Marx Aurelius reads like a modern man.
	That's the thing.
	Like, even, you know, he's in the context of, like, the second century Roman Empire, but he reads as if he had been writing this today.
	You know, it's...
	But that'll be the book club for next week, in fact, because we'll have Antonio doing his book club impromptu today.
	In person, sorry, today.
	Zeo says, none of this would be happening if Zoe Quinn had kept her legs closed.
	That's not true.
	She's just one...
	If it wasn't her, it would have been something else.
	Could you imagine the butterfly effect if you did go back and...
	What, like, explaining to people, like, six years ago during Gamer Game, you're like, look, this seems fun now, but one day, basically, you'll have...
	You'll put an orange man in the wire house and you'll destroy the stock market.
	Yeah, you'll destroy the stock market, yeah.
	Oh, my God.
	Just wanted to play video games.
	Charlie the Beagle.
	Shout-out to Roma Army on YouTube, advocating for men's rights.
	Also recommend the Art of Manliness website for everyone watching.
	Jake Bartlett says, This Game Stonks event brings to mind the video cryptocurrency levels of manipulation just with the roles reversed.
	To the moon, gentlemen.
	Yes, indeed.
	I really want to see it hit 1,000.
	Just why not?
	I love it.
	Danny the Bear for £5, thank you.
	Charlie the Beagle, check out the translation for the song La Donne Immobile by Verd.
	Dude was red-pilled on women.
	Wolfgang Deo says, small investors will care when stuck with the stock, but the big investors are vultures.
	Use this to improve GameStop, AMC, and RadioShack, NNTP servers.
	Yeah, well, that's the thing, isn't it?
	I do wonder about, will this giant Reddit forum essentially have controlling shares of GameStop?
	Will they put up an elected representative to go over and tell GameStop what to do?
	That'd be very interesting.
	Just wait for the next shareholder meeting, I guess.
	Yeah.
	God, that'd be funny, wouldn't it?
	It will.
	I want to be in that Zoom call.
	Yeah, right.
	Andy should be here pretty soon, so we need to end so he can transfer files.
	Right, so we'll do two more.
	Mr.
	Mayor, I'm sorry if I've been too spicy.
	Let me clarify.
	I believe violence should be avoided at all costs, but we must resist tyranny at all costs as well.
	Correct.
	William says, I'm Dr.
	Rustonknik.
	I love this stock and hate that hedge fund.
	Very good.
	Anyway, thank you all for joining us and we'll be back tomorrow, of course, at the same time, covering the things that we find interesting, the current events.
	And hopefully better than everywhere else.
	In the meantime, if you'd like to get more content from us, you can go to LotusEast.com, sign up, become a premium member.
	We've got a huge amount of premium content there, including the book club, various premium podcasts that talk about subjects we're not allowed to talk about on YouTube.
	And we will soon have Andy Ngo's book club, again, with the author himself in the studio.
	It's very exciting.

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