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April 6, 2021 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:33:40

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #104 -With Helen Dale

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	Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for the 6th of April, got that right?
	I'm joined by Helen Dale, writer, lawyer, extraordinaire.
	So we're having a guest episode.
	Carl will be interviewing you later for, I think that's going to be premium, I think.
	Helen's been a writer on our website for a long time.
	You write for Spectator.
	God knows what else.
	Oh, all sorts of things.
	I started at the Spectator.
	I'm a spectator over here, but in Australia I started at The Australian and that's a relationship that goes back 25 years.
	So The Australian, The Spectator, Quadrant, Quillette, Standpoint, The Critic, Wall Street Journal, Law and Liberty, all the sort of fairly standard centre-right press basically.
	So, a lot of our works, some of your work is premium on our website as well, so if people want to sign up to see what you've written, and also the premium work we've got coming out, which we have pretty much every day at this point, that's not promised, just seems to be what's going on, sign up at lowdeceasers.com, but let's get into it because time is of the essence.
	So the first story I want to talk about today was the, what would you call it, the dissent from the Supreme Court on a court case surrounding Donald Trump.
	So Donald Trump had a Twitter account back in the old days, in which it was his Twitter account, and then he became president, and his comment section was ruled to be a public domain, sorry, a public forum.
	People who were being blocked sued on the basis that they had been denied this right, and it was a First Amendment breach.
	And then they sued.
	They won in the Circuit Court, and then they went to the Supreme Court, and it has now been shot down.
	So this is an article reporting about it.
	So Justice Thomas argues for making Facebook, Twitter, and Google utilities, which is not the outcome I imagine they wanted, but that's where the conversation has gone now.
	Because the court case was always a bit silly.
	Like, Donald Trump can't block people because his comment sections belong to the world.
	But it's his Twitter account.
	But it turns out, of course, it's not his Twitter account.
	It's Twitter's Twitter account.
	Exactly.
	If we go to the court document, so this is Justice Thomas giving his view.
	So I read the whole thing.
	We're going to skip through some of it because it's long-winded and we don't have all the time in the world.
	So it essentially points out that Twitter allows blocking, Trump did some blocking, and the people who were blocked then sued Trump.
	And he says here, "The Second Circuit held that the comment threads were a 'public forum' and that then-President Trump violated the First Amendment by using his control of his Twitter account to block plaintiffs from accessing the comment threads.
	But Mr. Trump, it turned out, only had limited control of that account.
	Twitter has permanently removed that account from the platform." He continues, "Applying..." So this is him getting kicked out and him making the point, "Well, he doesn't know this at all, therefore." It's not Trump's account.
	You're there at the pleasure of the social media company, whichever one it is.
	I've always likened it to, it's almost like a relationship of landlord and tenant.
	If you have a Facebook profile, I have a Facebook profile, lots of people do, or an Instagram account.
	I mean, my Instagram account is mainly my cat, but to be fair, only my cat, I think, or all my cats over many years.
	and you effectively rent the space, and the payment you make is, of course, in your data.
	But it's even less in renting, because they don't view it that way at all in the terms of service.
	So then pointing out that they removed him, therefore the comments section, including the account, aren't the government property, even if he's president.
	That's all property of Twitter, as the law terms it.
	So then he goes on to make the argument about turning them into a public utility.
	So he says, Applying old doctrines to new digital platforms is rarely straightforward.
	Respondents have a point, for example, that some aspects of Mr.
	Trump's account resemble a constitutionally protected public forum, but it seems rather odd to say that something is a government forum when a private company has unrestricted authority to do away with it.
	The disparity between Twitter's control and Mr. Trump's control is stark, to say the least.
	Mr. Trump blocks several people from interacting with him and his messages.
	Twitter banned Mr. Trump not only from interacting with a few users, but removed him from the entire platform, thus barring all Twitter users from interacting with his messages.
	And he states that in the Twitter terms of service, they point out that they have a statement in there saying we can ban anyone, quote, at any time or for any reason or no reason.
	So the initial court case is definitely bunk.
	There is no argument of that.
	It's interesting, though, that the people who brought the original litigation clearly didn't like Trump and wanted to be able to abuse him.
	He didn't like it, so he blocked them.
	But at no point did they conceive, even though they were anti-Trump, of the platform deciding to ban the president.
	It just hadn't entered their heads, or otherwise you wouldn't bring that.
	Yeah, I mean, no one thought about it.
	No one would have thought that.
	You wouldn't bring that sort of litigation.
	It clearly didn't occur to them that that could actually be the outcome.
	They just wanted to be able to take a piece out of the president, which is a normal part of Living in a democratic society is if you're the big cheese at the top of the tree, then people can have a piece of you.
	And everyone knows what Trump is blocking.
	Like when you went to his account, when he had one, there'd always be like a bunch of verified check marks trying to get their own in.
	And it was because everyone looks at his tweets, at least people who are interested in them, I didn't really bother.
	But then whoever was the top voted comment would get a bunch of new followers.
	So it was sort of a competition to get...
	New followers.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So then they'd be as mean as possible to get more.
	And the other one was the classic quote, dunk.
	The dunk tweet.
	People were trying that on as well.
	But that's not what they expected.
	I mean, one of the interesting things as well is this court case had to be renamed, as he points out, because Donald Trump's not the president anymore.
	So the idea of the president's comments being a thing, it now has the words Joe Biden on it in the court case, because it's now Joe Biden's problem.
	Well, there's been a change of administration, yes.
	Yeah, which I imagine the people suing did not expect to happen.
	So he continues talking about the idea of a public forum here.
	So, the Second Circuit's conclusion that Mr.
	Trump's Twitter account was a public forum is in tension with, amongst other things, our frequent description of public forums as "government controlled spaces".
	A government agency that leases a conference room in a hotel to hold a public hearing about proposed regulation cannot kick out participants out of the hotel simply because they express their concerns about new regulation.
	That's what a government-controlled space would look like.
	And then he gives an example of the opposite.
	But the government officials who informally gather with constituents in a hotel bar can ask the hotel to remove pesky patrons who elbow into a gathering to loudly voice their views.
	The difference is that the government controls the space in the first scenario, the hotel in the latter scenario.
	So him pointing out the difference here and then getting into the argument of maybe there should be something here because you can tell where he's going.
	But this utterly destroys the plaintiff's case in Second Circuit Court.
	Yes, it came to a natural end...
	The plaintiff's case, but not in a way they would have expected.
	And I have to say, not in a way I would have expected either, regardless of your views of Trump.
	And obviously the plaintiffs in this instance were people who were opposed to Trump and didn't want to be blocked by him because they wanted to score one, as you were saying.
	But they would not, as I said earlier, they would just not have imagined that it would have come to this sort of natural end.
	And it's kind of awkward for the SCOTUS now to be forced to deal with the fallout of this litigation because it's kind of disappeared in a puff of magic.
	But so now it's allowed, in the case of Justice Thomas, it's allowed him to sort of think about some of the issues that arise from that, which is actually a useful legal exercise.
	It's good for law students and young lawyers starting out in practice to see this kind of thinking.
	But it's also good to see that, because I imagine even at Twitter, they never thought that they would ever go down this path because...
	That's my suspicion as well.
	I'm sure that it...
	They tried for ages to be like, we'll just put context or whatever and little warnings about everything he says, and that'll be enough.
	And then they seemingly just panicked.
	I think they panicked.
	Yeah.
	I think a lot of people panic, to be fair.
	And they're going to be already starting to be fallout from that decision, which seems like a very stupid decision with hindsight.
	But they should have known that.
	There's also the question here.
	So when most people think of social media, you do think of it as your property.
	Like, this is my account.
	I put effort into it and all the rest of it.
	Of course, legally, that's not the case.
	No.
	And even conceptually, if you apply conceptual legal thinking to this...
	I mean, one of the things I have tried to do, and going back ages, I actually did prepare some advice for the Scottish Parliament Act, this was back in 2012, on the whole problem of social media and who owns what and how do you engage with it if you're a parliamentarian or if you're Hollyrood House or that kind of thing.
	It became clear because I became one of those very rare people who not only drafts end user licence agreements but reads them all.
	And it became very clear when I read through Twitters and through Facebooks and did a legal analysis as part of my job at the Office of the Solicitor for the Scottish Parliament, was that not a lot of thinking had gone into this.
	And these corporations had placed their lawyers, American lawyers in this case, in a very difficult position by asking them to try to draft something up that isn't really real and doesn't really work properly.
	conceptually the relationship that you have with Facebook is Twitter or Twitter is very much like rent.
	They own it like a landlord owns a house and you pay in your data for the use.
	So it's like you pay rent to live in the property.
	There is no sense of that kind of thinking In any of these license agreements when you go on these platforms, they've just not been worked through.
	And I do take the point that people like Douglas Murray, who isn't a lawyer but is a very experienced journalist, and more thoughtful people in the press have made this observation as well, is that the social media giants, big tech, is trying to reinvent the wheel.
	And in this case, it's a wheel that journalists have spent about 400 years figuring out How to make it run true.
	And now you get these sort of slightly hopeless nerdy boys, as my father used to say, the people that nobody wanted to dance with in high school, trying to reinvent something that came out of the back end of the wars of religion and then took 400 years to get right.
	And now you get this.
	Yeah, I mean, particularly the censorship point.
	I've read Douglas Murray's views on this.
	It's like, how could you people think you're the first in human history to have to deal with the concept of censorship?
	Yeah.
	It's just absurd that they think that this is something we've never dealt with.
	It's like, yeah, we've been here a million times.
	Yeah.
	I don't know how you think.
	Even an organisation like the BBC, for example, a state broadcaster, a government broadcaster, all of the really complicated and thoughtful ideas and conceptualisation of the relationship of a media organisation to government and funded by a licence fee, all of this all of the really complicated and thoughtful ideas and conceptualisation of the relationship of a media organisation to
	So you've got something that's nearly 100 years old in the world of broadcast, and it appears that say, to give you an example, YouTube, have just not, nobody even bothered to go and make a telephone call or send an email to somebody at Broadcasting House and go, can we get all the original inquiry reports when the BBC can we get all the original inquiry reports when the BBC was first set They would give them to you.
	They would give them to you for free.
	And nobody has bothered to do this.
	They have literally tried to reinvent the wheel.
	And it's just turning out to be an absolute mess.
	And it's just car crash.
	Yeah.
	I mean, so just to reiterate, that's his first half in which he destroys the previous court case in which he's saying this is obvious nonsense.
	My understanding is the majority of the court sided with him on this and saying that it's nonsense.
	You will have seen the word written there, concurring, Justice Thomas concurring.
	And so he's concurred with the majority, which is probably nine zip.
	He then has gone on to produce, I presume, a dissent, but also because of the way this litigation has gone.
	There's an expression known in the legal profession as obitadicta, which means literally things said by the way.
	And that's where he's, first of all, he's concurred in the main ruling.
	Then he set out a dissent, but he's also made some observations on the state of play, and that's known as obitadicta.
	Now, obitadicta isn't binding, obviously.
	It's things said, by the way.
	It doesn't form part of the doctrine of precedent, but it can be persuasive in legal terms to other lawyers, and it can also, because it's a Scotus judgment, it's the country's apex court, it's very influential, and it's very thought-provoking, and lawyers will look at this and think about it, basically.
	Yeah, so his observations here we're not going to go through.
	So this is him looking at the state of play of, let's say, just social media interacting with everything else.
	And he says, Our legal system and its British predecessor have long subjected certain businesses known as common carriers to special regulation, including a general requirement to serve all comers.
	This court long ago suggested that regulations like those placed on common carriers may be justified even for industries not historically recognised as common carriers when, quote, a business by circumstance and by its nature rises from private to being of public concern.
	Telegraphs, for example, because they, quote, resembled radio...
	Because they resembled railroad companies and other common carriers were bound to serve all customers alike without discrimination.
	And in return, they would get special privileges.
	So they would get agreements from the state of certain...
	What do you call it?
	Like a guarantee that you get this business...
	I'm trying to remember the word.
	Licenses, things like this.
	Licensing, yes.
	Yeah, so they would get certain privileges.
	And then the example with social media would be the protection from being sued.
	For example, Section 128.
	Section...
	Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, yes.
	You get protections from suit and also a lot of this.
	There's a little bit of history here.
	He talks about the telegraph, but you had the postal service.
	We have examples of litigation from this going back to Roman times because they had a very good postal service of the Imperial Post.
	And they were common carriers.
	They had to serve everyone because people needed access to the postal service or to the telegraph, and it was not in the business of the company to control what people put in their telegraph messages or what, going back historically, people put in the post.
	There was, before common carrier rules and utilities rules were developed, you had situations where people were being Charged with misusing the males.
	That was the old expression that used to be used, was misusing the males.
	And a lot of the people who were on the receiving end of this early litigation were, for example, early feminists sending information about contraception through the post, or even sending condoms through the post, misusing the males.
	If you went, and this is going to really date me, and to be fair, it's something that's really only I remember from when I was a very little girl, Before people widely travelled to the continent for their holidays to get their blast of sun, they would go to the seaside, so the whole Brighton and Skegness and Blackpool and all of that kind of thing.
	And one of the notorious activities that happened when you would go to the beach, pebbles – I grew up in Australia, it looks like pebbles to me – is people would sell you dirty postcards, naughty English seaside postcards.
	It was a thing.
	And because of these misusing the males rules, people, you couldn't send those postcards just as they were with a naked woman on them or whatever.
	You had to put them in an envelope because otherwise it wouldn't be delivered.
	That was a leftover of the old rule about misusing the males.
	But as soon as it was put in an envelope, it ceases to be an issue.
	But if the post office company wasn't regulated like this and they could say, we're very Christian, we don't send pornographic materials.
	And that's what was happening and that's how this kind of litigation emerged in a number of countries around the world and saying, no, no, no, you can't say that Mormons aren't allowed to use the telephone service or the telegraph or...
	Or black people aren't allowed to send items through the post.
	You know, you just can't do this.
	You have to stop.
	You're a common carrier.
	You serve everyone.
	To give their side of the argument here, he mentions that there has been fair argument that some digital platforms are sufficiently akin to common carriers or places of accommodation that be regulated in this manner.
	So he's referencing the fact that back in the old days of the Telegraph, they would argue, well, we put the cable down, we deliver the post, we do all of these things.
	You know, that's us doing it.
	Therefore, you have no right to regulate us.
	And social media is making the same argument today.
	We're like, well, we host servers, we write all the code, we set everything up.
	You know, it's our free speech right to un-person people, because that's as far as it's gotten, especially with people like he who cannot be named on this podcast, because he's banned from one of the servers we're streaming to.
	That is, yes, I know.
	I read, yes, I know exactly.
	It's ridiculous.
	The only places where you can use this particular individual's name...
	Welcome to my show!
	Weirdly, once you are big enough to fall under the aegis of Ofcom, you will then be able to say his name and there won't be a damn thing that YouTube can do about it.
	It's just bonkers.
	Yeah, it's crazy.
	But he makes the point here that they make argument about, oh, what about our market share?
	And he's like, yeah, well, Google's got 90% of the market share.
	We have to build infrastructure.
	Yeah, well, the Telegraph had to build infrastructure to send things.
	And also, you guys profess to be a platform.
	You openly say this is what we are, so don't give me that BS. And then he makes the point that it's also incredibly worrying the fact that one person control all of Facebook, two people control all of Google, whereas a comparison to email doesn't make any sense.
	No one owns email.
	It doesn't work.
	So then he goes on to point out that they openly censor speech, which we're going to skip over because the examples he gives our audience and most people are familiar with at this point of what they do.
	I mean, particularly with the unpersoning of that individual, which is the most extreme example.
	And then it's now happening to Trump.
	I don't know if you saw, Trump's voice is now banned from Facebook.
	Yeah, someone else tried to put a little video of him up and...
	Yeah, it's not just him interacting with it.
	If you interview him...
	Yes, it's gone.
	It doesn't matter who you are.
	My brother-in-law is a very keen golfer.
	He played off scratch for many years and he still has a handicap in single figures.
	After that little news story broke, you couldn't even interview Trump.
	He made the point, he said, could I put a video up?
	Because Trump's a good golfer.
	He used to play off scratch and I think he still plays in single figures.
	And he said, could I put a video up of Donald Trump just to show other people in my golf club where he's the treasurer, to show them his golf swing?
	And I said, give it a try.
	And he said, no, I don't want to give it a try, but that's ridiculous.
	The answer would be no, by the way.
	I suspect it would be no, yes.
	Because we have an interview that's on LotusEaters.com in which we interviewed Ryan Hartwig, who was a whistleblower within Facebook's content moderation department.
	They were contracted with Facebook.
	And he gave us all the documents of them.
	They have like official hate figures, is what they call it.
	And the guy we can't mention was on it, for example, alongside the leader of the Nazi party, the leader of the American Nazi party, and so on and so forth.
	It was pretty weird to see them in the same category, regardless of what you think of them.
	But then Trump will be on that list now.
	He will be what's called a hate figure, because it's a broad range.
	And literally any reference to them that can be considered positive is to be memory-hold.
	And if it's negative, it's allowed to be stayed up.
	So if him doing a dutiful thing that's not negative, memory-hold.
	It would go.
	Bumpers!
	My brother-in-law, yeah.
	Because he just didn't want to put it to the test.
	Is it because I don't want the whole golf club to finish up getting its Facebook presence zapped?
	Because they put things like tournaments up and all the usual stuff that golf clubs do.
	Yeah.
	So he continues in here talking about this sort of thing where he's saying, It's
	possible to build over time, but the thing is, if he took the golf club, To Minds, for example, which is a popular one now because Parley doesn't seem to be working properly anymore.
	It's a better comparison for Facebook as well.
	Yeah, and it's more Facebook-ish and you can do little groups and chat groups and so on and so forth like you can on Facebook.
	It would take months for him to get everybody in the golf club To get across, basically.
	And you would need to be able to.
	The other thing is, you need to be able to say on Facebook, oh, we've got over to Mines now.
	Come and have a look at us on Mines.
	And very often, they won't let you do that.
	Yeah.
	BitChute, for example, I tried to upload one of our clips yesterday, just explaining the defence's position, George Floyd's case.
	Any link to BitChute on Twitter is now gone.
	You can't post it.
	Right, you can still...
	Rumble is still okay.
	Rumble is still out.
	But Bitshoot, just a straight link, it will say this content is harmful, therefore you can't see it, regardless of what the video is.
	It could be dogs fighting or something.
	Yeah.
	It's gone.
	So I don't know why they wouldn't extend that for Facebook being like, you know, links to mines.
	Mine's a horrible alternative site full of people we don't like, therefore it's harmful, therefore you can't post it.
	So they'll go down that route at some point.
	At some point.
	At the moment, it's still okay.
	I've put mine's links up on Facebook and Twitter and had no issues with them.
	But for some reason, they've decided it's innocuous at the moment.
	I'm not quite sure why.
	So just to end this, so Justice Thomas ends this point in which we were speaking about earlier.
	So he says, Congress has given digital platforms, quote, immunity from certain types of suits, but it has not imposed corresponding responsibilities like non-discrimination.
	So, him pointing out that if you're going to have these privileges, as we privileged platforms in the past, you are going to have to have the same responsibilities, which is non-discrimination.
	Because, I mean, you said this earlier, I can't remember the exact phrase, but if we keep going down that route of, well, we can get rid of this and that, the only people left are just going to be that guy shouting in the garden.
	Well, this is the...
	Telling people that they have freedom of speech and not allowing them to exercise it in...
	sort of public forum, it does mean you finish up in a situation where you can talk in your garden with your friends and maybe shout over the fence, but then you can get done for public nuisance or private nuisance.
	And if Hamza Yusuf has his way in Scotland, you've got this situation where people can even, you know, if you've got a neighbour who's a snitch and you say something untoward about St Nicola of the Sturgeon, the fishy lady of Scotland, then you could genuinely finish up with litigation then you could genuinely finish up with litigation brought for something that you have said in the privacy of your own home.
	It's just extraordinary.
	And if you're willing to go there, why not thought grave?
	Well, where do you stop?
	You go back to a situation where you got feminists prosecuted for giving information about contraception for misusing the males.
	You were literally going back to the 19th century.
	That's the thing.
	This argument has been gone out a million times, especially in the Anglosphere.
	If we were talking about these tech companies being set up in Mongolia or something...
	There's no long history of liberal democracy and debates about these sort of things.
	You might expect them to sort of get it wrong, but the fact that we're in these nations which have had these long histories and long debates about these exact subjects, it's all the more embarrassing when you see these tech companies just pretending that this is not happening.
	At the moment, the wheel is sort of roughly octagonal.
	Not a wheel.
	It's got lots of squares.
	It's got a lot of straight bits.
	But talking about the tech companies, they're not the only ones who are messing up this reinvention of the wheel.
	So let's move on to another free speech issue, which is, again, not again, but it's irritating to have to defend, but it is one of these problems.
	So this is what we're going to be talking about, which is what the headline is here.
	Quote, So this was a couple of years ago.
	So this is a lady who decided to make what is known as anti-Semitic songs in which she denied that the Holocaust happened and so on and so forth.
	The quote there, Holocaust revisionist, is her naming herself.
	That's what she names herself.
	That's what David Irving calls himself as well.
	I mean, many, many years ago I actually interviewed for The Australian, the newspaper I was referring to earlier.
	It was a long time ago and I can't even really remember the detail of what I wrote because it was so many years ago.
	I interviewed David Irving and he would describe himself as a Holocaust revisionist as well.
	That seems to be the language that they use.
	Yeah.
	So it says in here, we'll just take a few quotes and then we'll move on a little bit.
	So she says, BBC say, a blogger and self-confessed, quote, Holocaust revisionist is on trial accused of broadcasting a, quote, grossly offensive anti-Semitic songs on the Internet.
	The songs accuse Jewish people of unethical money laundering, questioning whether the Holocaust actually happened, and describing Auschwitz concentration camp as, quote, a theme park for fools.
	The court heard the two songs that were performed in the London Forum event held in Grosvier Hotel in London in September 2016.
	Not a crime, that part.
	And then uploaded to YouTube days afterwards.
	That's the crime.
	Section 127, subsection 1 of the Communications Act 2003.
	Yeah, so we never criminalized Holocaust denial in the UK because criminalizing a fact or denying a fact is just weird and all the rest of it, but we'll get into those arguments in a bit.
	So that wasn't a crime, but her uploading it to YouTube, that's the crime.
	So we've brought in those rules by the back door, thanks Tony Blair's administration, I suppose.
	It's the use of a piece of legislation, though, because that 2003 legislation was an example of consolidating legislation.
	And the original legislation, with the whole grossly offensive element in it, in subsection 1 of section 127...
	It goes back to the 20s and the 30s and it was developed and I've explained this on talk radio to Mike Graham but I will explain it here as well because people are often unaware of where these things come from.
	It's not hate speech legislation.
	It was designed to deal with a new phenomenon that emerged as soon as telephones and of course telephone books became popular of looking up A person you didn't like in the phone book, getting their telephone number, and then ringing them up and abusing them down the phone line.
	That's what it was designed to deal with.
	And sometimes, as is always the case, it's the same thing as the sending the dick pic thing now.
	It wasn't abuse down the phone line.
	It was a bloke who fancied a woman who didn't fancy him back, so it was heavy breathing.
	So that's where you get the grossly offensive element limb in there.
	And there are various others that are about hate and threat and harassment and so on and so forth.
	These are old rules and old principles.
	They go back to the 20s and 30s when we were trying to deal with the fact that we had this new communications medium, basically.
	Inherently not exactly political either.
	No.
	So that's one of the weird things.
	Hate speech is political.
	Yes.
	In essence.
	Relatively rarely.
	I don't like hate speech legislation.
	I think it should all be repealed.
	But it is important for people to realise that in situations like this, it's very seldom the hate speech legislation that is actually used.
	They use Section 127, Subsection 1 of the Communications Act.
	They use the Public Order Act when it's people out in the street handing out copies of newspapers or whatever.
	They don't actually use the hate speech legislation.
	If we just had the hate speech legislation and got rid of all this other silly stuff, then you'd have some proper test cases and we'd be able to work out what Hateful or harassing, actually, or seriously annoying.
	That's the latest one in the bill that people have been protesting about over the Sarah Everard matter.
	You've got this rule, seriously annoying.
	Now, there was legislation in Australia a few years ago where a state government tried to do that seriously annoying limb.
	And the response of the courts when it finally got to the High Court in Australia was, this is incapable of definition.
	What's seriously annoying?
	And so the legislation fell.
	That is why they are using the It's material that was enacted to deal with a different problem and not political, rather than hate speech legislation, because it relieves you of the duty of actually defining what it is, and it just says, oh, it's grossly offensive.
	Yeah, which could be literally anything you determine, because, I mean, all these cases get thrown before judges to do it by the seams of it as well, so it's up to the specific judge you happen to get, whether he decides or not.
	I should probably point out, I think I did with saying the fact, but I'm a supporter of the general accepted narrative of the Holocaust.
	I imagine you are too.
	Yes, I wrote an entire novel about it.
	I find Holocaust deniers are very strange...
	Set of creatures because this is just so well evidenced.
	Yeah, that's why it's so absurd.
	It's so bonkers.
	Why?
	But just also, really, you need to criminalise the people saying this?
	Is this not an easy argument to make?
	We still have Holocaust survivors today you can speak to.
	It's not difficult.
	And there's just so much evidence.
	I don't know how well-traveled you are or people necessarily are more widely, but I mean, I have been to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland.
	And you can see why when you go there, Poles get really sensitive when people start saying Polish Holocaust.
	You're just sort of going, no, it wasn't the Poles who did it.
	It was the Germans who did it.
	And if the Poles objected to it, they got themselves killed just as...
	Thoroughly as any Jews did.
	I'm trying to remember.
	I can't remember which camp it is.
	I think it's the one outside Munich.
	I can't remember the name.
	Dachau is the one outside Munich.
	I think it's Dachau.
	There's a section in which there were a lot of foreigners killed there as well.
	There's plaques to all the different foreigners.
	Most of them obviously not Jewish.
	There were Turks who were killed for hiding Jews.
	British people who came over and escaped from camps of war.
	And then they were sent to the death camps.
	So yeah, it's a whole thing.
	But that's why I find it just absurd that you have to think you have to criminalise it.
	I'm sorry, this is an easy argument.
	Well, I actually have a view with something when it is so well evidenced and the people who are Holocaust deniers are such obvious crackpots.
	I mean, it cranks crackpots.
	This is when the word crank is illegitimate.
	Do we have to criminalise saying that the Queen is a lizard?
	Yeah, because what it does, the effect of it, if you criminalise crank speech like this, is it makes people think, and I encountered a little bit of this with my first novel with the hand that signed the paper when it came out.
	When people make a huge song and dance about it or criminalise it, so criminalisation is worse, but even making a huge song and dance about it is dangerous as well, because you start getting ordinary members of the public thinking where there's smoke, there's fire.
	that's the problem with criminalisation Oh, gee, if they're saying it's illegal, maybe there's something in it.
	It's the same principle as drugs, pale criminality, Sigmund Freud called it.
	If you make the drugs illegal, then to a certain sort of person, they become more attractive.
	One of the examples I read was when the, what is it, the Bahn of Mein Kampf was listed for a small period of time in Germany, then they were mass sales of it.
	But let's get back to the court case just to get through the details.
	So they say here, as the videos were played out in court, Miss, I can't say her name, Chablos, I'm just going to say because I don't know how to say that.
	Her supporters in the gallery applauded.
	The judge got very angry at this and said if they did it again, they would be forced to leave.
	She was prosecuted and gave her defense as that this was an attempt to limit her free speech.
	She therefore pled not guilty to the charge of being grossly offensive.
	The judge did care because it says grossly offensive.
	That's the law.
	He's the judge.
	So he has to do what the judge has to do.
	Again, it's not really his fault.
	It's the legislator's fault here for passing this and keeping it conservatives.
	So he says, by the standards of an open and multi-racial society, they are grossly offensive.
	The videos.
	So she was convicted.
	So if we get to the next one, she did an appeal on this.
	The appeal was upheld.
	She did not win her appeal.
	And she was sentenced to 20 weeks of imprisonment, suspended for two years, and banned from social media for 12 months.
	So you can't post anything.
	And you're also...
	We're threatening you with 20 weeks in prison if you break the law within two years.
	So if she did it...
	So it was a suspended sentence.
	Yeah, so they didn't...
	So, okay, so she appealed her conviction and she lost...
	But normally when a sentence is uplifted like that, they've done the same thing again whilst under...
	Did she repeat the...
	So I don't think she did up to this point, but she will talk about what's happened to her subsequently.
	So the defence lawyer, just to get a quote from him, defending her on this appeal, he said,"...it would be a very, very strong thing to say that criminal penalty should be imposed on someone for singing polemic terms about matters on which she feels so strongly." Again, the point, you don't change her mind by sending her to jail.
	It's not going to work.
	That actually makes her believe it more.
	He continues, I would simply ask the court to find that however offensive her lyrics might have been to some, they do not cross the line of being grossly offensive.
	Bad argument, because that's, again, public up to the judge.
	So she described herself as a Holocaust revisionist and said that her music was satire, which again, not a defense in this case.
	I'm sorry to say, we do not have that right in the UK thanks to laws like this.
	So the judge in the appeal said that her content was manifestly anti-Semitic, and she was clearly a Holocaust denier, and utterly obsessed with what she perceives to be the wrongdoing of the Jews.
	And then the campaign against anti-Semitism gave a statement in this, in which they said this is the first conviction in the UK for Holocaust denial on social media.
	Thanks, guys.
	Like, that's not a good thing, I don't think, in terms of free speech, but...
	Yes, I'm just reading that now.
	It started as a private prosecution.
	I mean, a lot of criminal prosecutions used to be done privately.
	And one of the good things, as Steven Pinker writes about this, is that when the state does them instead of private individuals, it drains out the element of vendetta.
	That existed historically with private prosecutions because they were almost like a form of duel.
	And if the ruling wasn't abided by, then you sometimes did get violence afterwards.
	So having the CPS do it instead is generally considered to be a good thing.
	What's nasty here is that, just looking at the sentence there, the case started as a private prosecution by the campaign against antisemitism before the Crown Prosecution Service took over.
	I'm really not persuaded that Going around with a shovel after an organisation that brings private prosecutions and cleaning up for them is a good thing for the CPS to be doing.
	I think it's probably a fair way of putting it.
	Yeah, but I think ultimately this does actually lie with the legislatures.
	If you continue to have this law on the books, I mean, the Conservatives have been in power for God knows how many years.
	I mean, now they have their majority.
	I mean, I know there may be, you know...
	taking up a lot of their time with coronavirus, but there are other ministers to do this sort of thing.
	Yes, some of this stuff needs to be dealt with.
	It's just ridiculous.
	It really does.
	So this was bad enough, the fact she was given a suspended sentence, but no, it got worse.
	So if you can have the next link, this is the Jewish Chronicle reporting that she's been given 18 weeks in prison.
	She has been sentenced to now serve this sentence.
	And this was because she made comments on what they say is, quote, far-right podcast in 2019.
	So she didn't have her mind changed by being criminalised.
	And she repeated the behaviour while under a suspended.
	Yep.
	And then got the sentence applied to her.
	So she's going to now serve 18 weeks in jail for denying the Holocaust, even though the UK has no laws against Holocaust denial.
	It is just on the basis that...
	The judges in this case.
	It's the grossly offensive rule in section 127, subsection 1 of the Communications Act, yes.
	So a quote from the judge here, he says, I'm not sentencing you on the basis that you are anti-Semitic.
	I'm not sentencing you on the basis that you are a Holocaust denier.
	I'm sentencing you on the basis that, on two separate occasions, while subject to a suspended sentence, you participated in radio programs where you made grossly offensive comments.
	The grossly offensive contributions by the defendant to both programs are insulting to members of a vulnerable community.
	Which vulnerable community?
	The Jews.
	So it is an anti-Semitic sentient, and therefore the grossly offensiveness of that is because it's anti-Semitic.
	So yeah, you are sentencing her for being anti-Semitic.
	I'm sorry.
	He's trying to separate out the principles behind a suspended sentence.
	The suspended sentence is a classic case of, if you do it again, we'll send you to jail.
	It's a really simple system.
	And he's trying to to contain the if you do it again we'll send you to jail principle and separate it, keep that self-contained and separate it out from the actual politics involved.
	But this very much does represent the use of a piece of legislation that is not by nature political because of its origins in the 20s and 30s about dealing with people who were abusive on the telephone or rang up old ladies and did heavy breathing down the line and so on and so forth.
	And it's now being put to a political purpose Yeah.
	not grossly offensive.
	But the problem is how long is a piece of string?
	It would just be here all day.
	And this is classic not been thought through stuff.
	So the campaign against antisemitism issued a statement in response to this as well, in They said it sends a clear message to all those who might be tempted to go down the same path.
	There's a bunch of other stuff in there, but that's the main iteration of it.
	Yeah, of course, that's their opinion.
	They're in favor of bringing Holocaust denial laws to the UK, by the looks of it.
	And if you get the Wikipedia link up, just so we can see a map, this is a map for people who are just listening of Holocaust denial laws.
	They're in Russia, lots of Europe.
	Not the UK, or Kanzuk, or the United States.
	I mean, none of the Anglo nations ever implemented these.
	I mean, it's not because we're not close to where the Holocaust happened either in the UK, or unaffected by it happening, or some such.
	We just understand that you shouldn't criminalize doubting a fact.
	This is doing it by the back door, using legislation that was never drafted with that view, there was no legislative intent to achieve that effect, basically.
	And if you're going to construct legislation purposefully, which is what you're supposed to do these days, legislative construction is You're meant to use the purpose of construction of legislation.
	If you're a call for a lawyer and you're meant to think in terms of what mischief are we attempting to remedy?
	What is the purpose of this legislation?
	That legislation was not drafted to do this.
	That's what hate speech legislation is for.
	If you're going to have hate speech legislation, that's what you use it for.
	You don't do this and use something that was designed to deal with people being rude on the telephone to their neighbours.
	To shut up someone politically.
	It's just bonkers.
	I mean, if you sympathise with this position, though, and you think maybe we should bring these laws to the UK, maybe this is a good thing or something, I just want to state where this is going, because we have some facts from the European continent on this.
	So this is not exactly the same sentiment, but it's a similar sentiment, in which there was a court case brought before the European Court of Human Rights about a, I believe it was an Austrian teacher, who referred to the prophet of Islam, Mohammed, as a paedophile, Because he married a six-year-old and had sex with her when she was nine.
	I mean, literally almost every country on earth would say that's paedophilia, with the exception of perhaps some Islamic countries.
	And some Islamic countries do it precisely because they have that historical record.
	It's why the age of consent in Iran is nine.
	It doesn't come from...
	Not for men, but for women.
	Like, it doesn't come from, I don't know, some socialist theory or something, although I suppose the socialists would have a hard time fighting that because they're them.
	But that's why it is the way it is.
	So they say in here the Strasbourg-based courts ruled that the Austrian courts carefully balanced the applicant's right of freedom of expression with the right of others to have their religious feelings protected and served a legitimate aim of preserving religious peace in Austria.
	That's where that's going.
	I'm sorry.
	If you accept that denying a fact that the Holocaust is insulting religious feelings of Jews and so on and so forth, where does that end?
	It ends with someone like Richard Dawkins on Question Time saying something like that and then getting arrested.
	That's where it ends.
	Yeah.
	And it's not just Judaism either.
	No, no.
	Think about Richard Dawkins' views of the conservative monotheisms.
	I mean, these are well known.
	He's written entire books about this.
	And we all know what Richard Dawkins' persona is like on Twitter.
	He's very combative and he's very snarky.
	It's exactly the kind of thing that could come flying out of his mouth.
	And then, oh, good God.
	But even then, that's, you know, opinions.
	But, I mean, in the first instance, denying the Holocaust, you're denying a fact, right?
	In this instance, saying that Muhammad had sex with a nine-year-old, you're stating a fact.
	I mean, the Islamic world accepts this.
	So it's not even just, if you deny something that happened, oh, that's where it'll end.
	Even stating something that you know to be true and is factually recorded, if it offends religious feelings, that will be criminalised.
	And so that becomes a blasphemy law, effectively, by the back door.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Which is just the absolute state of the situation here.
	I just...
	We rally a lot on this show about Section 127, which is, it was the thing I went out and supported the Conservatives on in my local area, because I was just like, alright, you guys have put in your manifesto multiple times about free speech.
	This is exactly the thing that's been the thorniest issue for British politics in the corner of free speech.
	And it's still being used in a negative way.
	We've got lots of evidence of that.
	Yep.
	What's stopping you?
	What is stopping you from actually getting rid of this piece of legislation?
	Because it is garbage and you know it's garbage.
	Yes.
	For example, all of them voted against it as well.
	All of them voted upon the Communications Act and all of the Tories in office still, they all voted against the Communications Act.
	So it's like, you can't say you support it.
	No.
	What are you doing?
	Get off your hands.
	Stop sitting on them.
	Yeah, so that's where we are.
	That's why we couldn't play the songs either.
	I did want to play them, not because I spoiled them, but just to show that's what she's done.
	But because we're online, that would actually be a crime in the UK. And there's also the point too, that sometimes with these people, there's a part of me, I don't want them to be arrested or charged or anything for their speech, but I mean, it's quite possibly crimes against music.
	The music isn't good.
	I don't know if you've heard the songs, but it's not great.
	I have no desire to...
	No.
	Life is too...
	It's one of those things where you listen to a song that's really bad and you go, well, that's five minutes of my life.
	I'm never getting back.
	Yeah, that's that.
	I wanted to go on to something else here, which is, again, keeping with the sort of edgy topics, because I mean, why not?
	I mean, it's the thing of most interest to me, to be honest, because you get the most insane opinions, especially out of The Defenders.
	So I wanted to talk about the Communications Act, because...
	You've pulled up the Equality Act 210.
	Sorry, the Equality Act, not the Communications Act.
	Because the Equality Act is strange, and of course it comes from a place of goodwill, in which you want to say that because someone's black or because someone's Asian or white, you don't want them discriminating against customers of not their race, because that just ends up in a world where the black guy's broken down, goes into a gas pump to get gas, and is denied and is then completely screwed.
	Things like this.
	It's not a world people want to live in.
	And so there's a section here on protected characteristics is how they define it so if you can scroll down just so we can read the protected characteristics that are listed in this act so they list here so these are also kind of privileges I'll just point out because people want to expand the number of acts sorry characteristics Age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation.
	Belief's a bit of the odd one out there because, I mean, again, how long's a piece of string?
	What do you define as your belief?
	And it also says religion or belief rather than and belief.
	Yeah.
	So, and because beliefs can be, that suggests that belief can be separable from religion.
	Doesn't have to be religious belief, which is true.
	There was a court case about a guy who was vegan.
	He got kicked out because the guy didn't want a vegan in his workplace.
	And then he sued and he won because they were like, well, his belief of veganism.
	It's a belief.
	Yeah.
	If it's not a religious belief, it's a belief.
	Yeah.
	So, I mean, there have been plenty of these cases.
	One of the more funny ones has just happened.
	So let's go to the next link, which is the lazy English workers of this country.
	So this is a lorry driver who worked at a firm that does lorry driving.
	And the people in this place like to make fun of him for being English because it was a minority English, the number of workers here.
	So they say in here, He claims that,
	long Punjabi name that I can't read, boss of Burke Holdings was heard to say, quote, no more English drivers should be used as they are lazy and only interested in claiming benefits.
	It's the kind of thing you'd hit at a pub, you know?
	But I kind of love that it's also something to keep in mind here is that Indians are the best performing ethnic group in the UK. So this chap is, by comparison, saying that you guys are lazy compared to us.
	Well, by the government's data, they have their data.
	I've discussed this on Mike Graham's spot on Talk Radio as well.
	It's an example of stereotype accuracy.
	And this is what you want to be very, very careful with stereotype accuracy because it can lead you into all sorts of awkward places.
	More men commit more crime and more violent crime, particularly sexual crime, than women many times more.
	But then you, that's true.
	And you can say that and People will sort of give you a little bit of side eye, but they'll shut up.
	But the next bit of stereotype accuracy is that, you know, black crime rates in London are eight times the white crime rate.
	And then it gets, and violent crime, same problem again.
	And that was in, you know, Home Affairs Committee, Cressida Dick, you know, completely standard political reporting.
	And then it just gets worse and worse and worse.
	Every single other stereotype is true, like Indians are.
	Actually hardworking.
	Hence the productivity data.
	Hence there are higher rates of welfare dependency amongst Gypsy Roma travellers and also Pakistani Muslims, higher rates of welfare dependency.
	Then it starts getting even more awkward.
	A lot of Jews do actually work in banking.
	It's stereotype accuracy.
	The reason stereotypes exist is because often that they're true.
	What you have to train people out of is just because the stereotype is accurate is to not apply the stereotype to the individual who's standing in front of you because you don't know about them until you ask.
	Just because Indians are the best earning group of money per month in the UK doesn't mean every Indian is...
	Super hardworking.
	And earning loads of money.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And so on and so forth for every other group mentioned.
	So they defended themselves, the companies.
	They said the company insisted that the workers had been joking.
	The panel found, however, that Mr.
	Healy had suffered racial discrimination and harassment.
	Quote, many extremely upsetting behaviours can be dressed up as jokes, the tribunal said.
	And I'm kind of torn on this because I'm like, I believe them.
	I bet they were just cracking jokes.
	There's no way this was some heartfelt opinion that they just hate the English or something, especially when it's Indian sounding, in my view.
	I think they were just cracking jokes that, yeah, you guys are shirkers compared to us, Chad Indians, earning all the money.
	Yeah.
	But anyway, so they go on.
	So they give some examples of some of the things they said, and I'll let people judge whether or not they think these are jokes or actual hatred.
	So, quote, Can tell your British as you don't have a coat, are you drunk from last night?
	So some guy turning up to work without a coat.
	Are you drunk?
	Quote, Oh, the lazy English worker has decided to come back to work.
	Next one.
	Quote, Lazy English workers are always off sick.
	Quote, These aren't sincere hatred of the English, I don't think.
	No.
	They'd have much terser things to say about him and the English if they genuinely hated the English.
	I think these guys literally are just having a laugh.
	But it doesn't matter.
	This is the Equality Act and that's how it works.
	So Healy was awarded £2,500 for, quote, injury to feelings and a further £961.74 for breach of employment law.
	So, injury to feelings.
	There you go.
	Injury...
	My feels, literally.
	Literally my feels.
	Because, I mean, there are plenty of these cases.
	What does Josh, Josh Slocum on Disaffected, he's another podcaster, he's got this little sound effect whenever something like this comes up and he presses a button on one of his screens and it goes, ka-ching!
	Yeah, literally, stop hurting my English feels.
	I'll have two and a half thousand quid for my hurt feels.
	And you're being called not a hard worker for being English.
	Your feels are super hurt, I bet.
	I bet you can already feel them hurting.
	How many pints down the pub is that going to be?
	Yeah, so let's move on to the other part of this.
	So this is the part laid out that we shouldn't discriminate.
	Of course, this is one of the more ridiculous sections.
	But then there's the positive discrimination part.
	So this is where the government wrote, oh, we shouldn't discriminate against anyone on the basis of race, blah, blah, blah.
	Yeah, but what if we want to?
	Well, then we'll write in another section that just legalizes it.
	So they did.
	So section 159 is the positive discrimination section.
	So if you scroll down so people can read the whole thing in their own time, but we're not going to read all of it, in which they point out what you can and can't do.
	So the first part, the section applies if persons who share a protected characteristic suffer a disadvantage connected with that characteristic.
	Or participation in an activity by persons who share a protected characteristic is disproportionately low.
	So if you can say, this black guy standing in front of me, for being black, he's lived in a poorer neighbourhood, therefore I can give him the job.
	Or that you don't have enough women in your banker's board, therefore you need more women, therefore you can hire the woman candidate over the male candidate.
	Supposedly it applies only if A is as qualified as B to be recruited or promoted.
	It's the classic tiebreaker provision these are sometimes called, which is where you get two exactly candidates with exactly the same or very similar qualifications and one is white and one is black.
	You hire the black one to try and even up the numbers in your organisation.
	I always used to think, historically, that if you were going to make an argument for any kind of positive discrimination, that would be the only one that you can do it.
	It has to be a tiebreaker provision.
	You have to make requirements that they are equally skillful, equally as well qualified or equally as well trained or whatever.
	In the real world, how do you even measure that?
	How do you measure that?
	We get back to how long is a piece of string.
	And it has led to problems and people can see this where, and I will talk about because it's been in the news, that the MASH report getting cancelled.
	And it was blatantly obvious that the minority comedians on that, particularly Nish Kumar, were diversity hires.
	Not funny, not very talented, promoted too quickly beyond their ability, with the best intention in the world.
	But as a friend of mine who's not Indian, actually, he's Nepali, but he made the comedy, he says, Nepal has got the Buddhists in the hills and the Hindus who live on the flat.
	And he's from the area on the flat.
	He's not from the hill people.
	So he looks and sounds more Indian than he does Chinese.
	It's a sort of ethnic division in Nepal.
	And he said, Nish Kumar makes everybody think that Indian people aren't funny.
	And I'm sorry, he said that and I did the whole...
	Because it's a beautiful joke.
	It is.
	You're laughing as well.
	It's a beautiful joke.
	And he's this very Indian-looking man in front of me making this very beautiful and very clever joke.
	And I'm going, well, yes, and you've just shown that Indian people can be very funny.
	Do you want his job?
	I heard it's going.
	Do you want Nishkamar's job?
	Because that's a good gag.
	Yeah.
	So they mention here that the action they're referring to in this section, the action is treating person A more favorably in connection with recruitment or promotion of a person, person B. Because A has a protected characteristic, but B does not have that protected characteristic.
	So, that's what they want you to do.
	And this is what has led to some of the things we've been logging.
	So, on Logistics.com, we have an article called UK taxpayer-funded racism.
	And if you can scroll down so we can get to the MI5 and civil service section, because there's some other stuff, but we're specifically relating to our hiring and promotion here.
	So, some are diversity internships for the MI5, where they only hire people who are BAME, the forbidden term that's now...
	It's now fallen out of favour...
	Yeah, but well, it can't fall out of the memory hole.
	We all remember what happened.
	And then the next one here is the civil service doing exactly the same thing.
	I have a personal vendetta against this because I applied and was rejected on the premise that I wasn't BAME enough, I suppose.
	And then there's also the BBC who did exactly the same thing in which they wanted BAME internships.
	And everyone's saying, come on, this has to be illegal.
	No.
	They just passed another section in there, legalising it.
	Now what?
	What are you going to do about it?
	Nothing.
	But this isn't good enough, of course.
	See, this to me is the type that really can't be justified because it does lead to the situation where people with obviously less talent and ability are promoted.
	Yeah, it destroys meritocracy.
	It destroys meritocracy.
	Now, there are problems with meritocracy.
	People like Professor Steve Davies have written some very trenchant criticisms of meritocracy.
	People like Michael Young going back years ago, Toby Young's father, The Rise of the Meritocracy.
	It's a very good book.
	It's well worth reading.
	There are issues with meritocracy, but if you are going to have...
	A criticism or an undermining of meritocracy.
	It needs to be a public debate in which everyone participates and not through the back door like this.
	Because there's also this back door kind of thing.
	The other thing is it leads to nepotism because it means you don't have to take the best qualified person.
	So you can find another way of hiring your nephew.
	Because that's what nepotism means.
	He's got the same characteristic as me.
	Nipote in Latin, it just means...
	It's one of those ones that could be either sex.
	It just means niece or nephew.
	That's all it means.
	So it's literally...
	That's where the word nepotism comes from.
	It's literally...
	Hiring your mates.
	And the fact that it's a romance word from an ancient civilization, I mean, the Romans knew it was a problem as well.
	And they had it in their society.
	And there's lots of complaints by Roman writers that, you know, jobs for the boys and jobs for the girls and all the matey boys and all the people who are related to the right people and married the right person and so on and so forth.
	It's been an issue for it since forever.
	I believe it.
	But there's also the point here that I personally felt when I applied for the civil service job, because I made two accounts.
	I told them where I was on one, didn't tell them where I was on the other.
	I still got both emails.
	Guess which one got a callback?
	Yeah.
	Oh dear, so...
	Yeah, the personal vendetta I have against that is you're saying to me, some kid who was born in 97, that you shouldn't be able to have this job because you've got the wrong skin tone.
	And I'm just reminded of this meme of, there's this little Asian girl who's like three years old.
	She's like, do you blame her for Pearl Harbor?
	No, of course not.
	So why do you blame this little white kid for being, you know, for slavery or for historic racism?
	It's like, I lived in, you know, I was born in 97.
	So you sent, you did the thing of sending two applications and one with an ethnic minority name and one where I was female.
	I think I might have put transgender as well.
	I can't remember.
	It's just all sorts of nonsense.
	But the same test, I took it like a minute after, the same details.
	Screw me.
	But that's the thing.
	I have all the other arguments.
	You could say, oh, well, maybe it could justify if you've got two candidates and you want to help the blacks out.
	But then this white kid, he's not responsible for the historic racism.
	There's also...
	You've actually just raised another point here, too.
	One of the traditional arguments for the tiebreaker rule, not this one, which is obviously silly, but for the tiebreaker rule, was that there was a phenomenon, supposedly, of people with ethnic-sounding names...
	Defined very broadly here, got their CVs binned and people with boring names didn't get their CVs binned.
	And I often see that wheeled out where they say, well, the person with the ethnic sounding name is getting discriminated against here.
	And the problem is what they don't do is drill down into the data, which shows it's just an ethnic sounding name.
	Huge numbers of the people who weren't getting callbacks were white.
	But of course, until 2020, we had free movement.
	So these people who were being discriminated against, because they had an ethnic name, they weren't...
	They were French or German or Polish or, you know, they had a name from a European Union country and were probably whiter than both you and I are.
	And so that data collection is also – this is typical of me.
	I'm always one of these people going and digging into statistical data.
	I found really quite alarming because what the surveys tend to show is that an Afro-Caribbean will have a name – Probably more like yours than mine, although like mine now, they're unlikely to have the sort of surname, the old alliance posh Norman surname that I was born with.
	But they're very likely to have, you know, Tom Jones or Peter Smith or Jennifer Riley, just a very boring English or Irish or Scottish or Welsh sounding name because that's the nature of the settlement and the history of the West Indies.
	So they won't be discriminated against On the basis of their name.
	But someone who's got Pierre Armand or something on their CV will because it's foreign.
	And he's a Frenchman.
	And he's a Frenchman.
	So it's a good point.
	I hadn't thought about it.
	Yes.
	Well, that was just me just looking because I keep seeing it tweeted.
	So I went and gone dig, dig, dig, dig, dig.
	Actually, most of the people being discriminated against here were white Europeans.
	Yeah, because that's where most of our immigrants came from.
	Because that's where most of the immigrants came from in the relevant period.
	Anyway, just because we're running out of time.
	So this wasn't obviously enough for the left-wing parties of the UK. This is a Liberal Democrat MP at the time.
	I think she's probably lost her seat by now.
	Poor Lib Dems.
	This was her arguing that they need this for election candidates as well.
	She wanted to legalise drawing up all ethnic minority shortlists for election candidates.
	So all of the candidates in this seat, all the people they might put up, would be black and therefore you'd always get a black candidate.
	Or people who can identify as black.
	Yes, because there was a Labour councillor who was a man and identified as a woman in the all-women shortlist.
	To get onto the shortlist, yes, I'm sorry.
	The jokes write themselves.
	It's just so badly thought through.
	It's ridiculous.
	But anyway, getting back to the legislation, I was just going to say what you said earlier, which is that there's a section here that says it's only for when A is perfectly as qualified as B. Otherwise, you can't do this.
	Which then leads us on to the case in which they got screwed over by a white male who decided to sue the police for discriminating against him.
	So we can go to the next one.
	I love the headline here.
	It's just white heterosexual male discriminated against legislation.
	I just, you know, the white straight male, like that kind of thing from the SGWs.
	I love how the BBC have it here.
	But the male applicant here, we won't go through the whole thing, was more qualified than the other applicant that got the job demonstrably.
	It was unbelievable the amount of training he had done.
	The gap was different.
	Yeah, big gap.
	It wasn't a proper tiebreaker.
	Like, of course, it's impossible to ever have equal applicants unless they've lived the same life.
	But in this case...
	Well, that's the whole problem with equality of opportunity, actually, is to do it properly, everyone has to live the same life.
	And of course, that's impossible because people are different.
	Yeah, so you're just wasting your time.
	But one of the things I wanted to argue with you about is because you have a better legal background than me is I wonder combining that piece of legislation with what has come out now with regards to the race report.
	So if you get the next one up this was the race report which we've covered a large amount and it was mostly them saying that Britain isn't a racist country but some of the things in here I found more interesting.
	So it says in here it said children from ethnic minority communities did as well or better than white pupils but overt racism remained particularly online.
	Children from ethnic minority communities did as well or better than white pupils in compulsory education, with black Caribbean pupils the only group that performed less well.
	And it's not just this report that's been saying things like this.
	There is Ben Bradley.
	That's been known for a very long time.
	Tory MP, Ben Bradley, who is just great.
	I can't go over how well he is.
	He's a very capable MP, yeah.
	Let's get the next one up.
	So it's just him giving a speech about exactly this.
	I believe this was in Parliament, like the Equalities Committee or something.
	They're pointing out the white working class boys who top all statistics when it comes to poor outcomes in school.
	So it's not like people haven't taken notice.
	And then we get to the universities.
	So people who go to university is particularly bad for especially working class male British.
	So in this report they say 13% of the male white British free school meals group go to university.
	This compared to ridiculous percentages for other groups.
	So black African, for example, of also free school meals being 51%, whereas the white men being 13%.
	There's a pretty serious case to be made in terms of actual active discrimination, like really vicious, nasty discrimination in this country that can escalate to physical violence.
	Is directed against a white minority group, Gypsy Roma Traveller.
	And particularly with the travellers, some of it has history going back to anti-Irish prejudice because travellers, even from this country, often still have Irish accents, even if they were born in this country, because they're quite Very tight-knit communities.
	And you look at, yeah, you're starting to see the figures there.
	So we have an image up here, which is just the full data.
	Who's on the bottom of the pile?
	Travellers, Gypsy, Roma.
	For people who are just listening, on the left side here we have children who are free school meals, so this is a measurement for who's poorer in society, and then male and female.
	And at the very bottom you've got, for the male side we'll just look at for now, So Traveler, Irish Heritage, Gypsy, and then White British.
	Those are the three groups at the very bottom.
	And then above them, you've got a whole bunch of other groups.
	So just Pakistani, Free School Me Old Men, 42% of them go to university.
	Black Caribbean, 27%.
	black african 51 percent uh white british 13 so of the groups i mean gypsies and irish travelers are a difficult group to measure at the best of times yeah because the lifestyle of the groups that are said say just say traditional easy to measure uh white british performing the worst so then it's no surprise that you get people arguing for positive discrimination in favor of whites working
	that's what people are doing because when we first got these figures it was typically black Caribbean boys that were at the bottom.
	And now that's changed.
	And now that's changed.
	One of the things I wanted to mention is in 2008, Trevor Phillips was saying this.
	So if we can get the next link up, Trevor Phillips, what was he?
	He was the Tsar for the Equalities Department.
	He's also, too, what's very good about Trevor Phillips, although he was traditionally out of the Labour left, his training, if you watch his interview with trigonometry, was in statistics.
	So he was very, very good at number manipulation in a way a lot of lefties aren't.
	The great flaw of the modern left is they can't do sums and the great flaw of the modern right is they don't understand people who aren't like them.
	Those are the sort of two big stereotype, political stereotypes.
	Trevor Phillips was very unusual because he came from the left and could do sums.
	So he knows just things like this.
	I watched his interview with Trigonometry.
	It's a great interview.
	And you just get a sense whenever Trevor Phillips speaks that this is a guy who knows what he's talking about.
	This is a guy who studied it so much that there's no point even arguing with him.
	He's like, right, you know better than me, mate.
	We'll just let you talk.
	And so even in 2008, he was saying that we need to start positive discrimination for young whites.
	He makes the argument in this article on the basis that if we don't, we're going to start fueling anti-immigrant rhetoric, and this is going to help people want to leave the EU, which is a bit foreboding, I suppose.
	I mean, eight years before we did, and we did.
	But there's the point now.
	If the data shows that...
	Because it's not just...
	It's not Black Caribbeans at the bottom now, if it's white British...
	Well, the law then surely has to go along in congregate with the data, which is that they are...
	Well, that's what someone like Trevor Phillips would argue, because he's numerate.
	Because he's fundamentally a numerate human being, he would be saying, no, no, you have to follow the data here.
	So in 2010, when this Equality Act was passed, you would have been able to say that Black Caribbean faced more disadvantages in life, therefore you can discriminate in favour of them.
	Well, now that the data has changed...
	I want to ask you, would it be perfectly legal for a company to set up a job and say, if we have our candidates of the same qualifications, we will discriminate in favour of the white working class lad because he's faced more gaps in his life?
	I think it would be a very interesting exercise.
	It would turn into a test case, I think.
	That's what I would...
	I hate forecasting and I actually think it's not...
	Possible to do particularly well.
	I mean, a lot of people who go around and want to forecast, I think they should be in the same part of the newspaper as Mystic Meg.
	I've said this a number of times, including people like some of the super forecasters, I have my doubts about them, and the Bank of England, I have doubts about them, and all the economic forecasting and Think of all the epidemiologists poo-footing themselves with their coronavirus predictions.
	They were all wrong as well.
	It's an example of getting your maths, literally getting your sums wrong in public.
	So you need to be very careful with forecasts.
	But what I will say is that something like that would be a very interesting legal test case and very controversial.
	It would massively blow up.
	In media terms, I imagine.
	Yes, it would.
	But, I mean, we do need to have that conversation.
	Because, I mean, I'm an advocate of getting rid of the Equality Act altogether.
	I know you are as well.
	Well, I think it should be repealed.
	Yeah, you should explain.
	But a good half, perhaps more, of the Equality Act is actually what's known as consolidating legislation.
	Now, consolidating legislation is when you get a whole bunch of disparate pieces of legislation from here, there and everywhere and put them all together in one place and it makes it much easier to make the law knowable and part of the rule of law is the law needs to be knowable, it needs to be accessible and it needs to be knowable.
	So what the Equality Act did in 2010 was consolidate all the anti-discrimination legislation dealing with women, dealing with blacks, dealing with gays and so on and so forth and put it all in a nice, convenient, clearly drafted place.
	That legislation is still important in my view.
	Some of it goes back to Thatcher and Wilson and Callaghan.
	Some of it goes back to the 60s.
	It's got real history.
	And so you still need that legislation.
	So if you repeal the Equality Act, you need to structure the repeal in such a way...
	That that historic legislation, which is perfectly serviceable and didn't cause any grief at the time, it revivifies as the legal expression.
	What you need to get rid of with the Equality Act is all this positive discrimination and all of the metrics, the constant demands on people to say, how many women are you hiring or how many black people are you hiring or so on and so forth.
	I mean, that is really, I'm sorry, it's not the government's business and they can, if the government wants to provide that information to the public, that's fine.
	But asking people Ted's parking garage or something to do it.
	As if it's relevant.
	As if it's relevant.
	It's just nonsense.
	Yeah, it's absolutely garbage.
	But yeah, we're going to move on to the comments.
	There are no video comments today because we also got video comments from the other two days.
	We're going to be playing them tomorrow because people didn't know Helen was going to be in, so a lot of them are directed at Carl, so we'll save them.
	of them.
	But we do have a bunch of comments from the page.
	So the first set of comments here coming from the Twitter case.
	So Benjamin Charles saying, section 230 can be fixed with an addition of a single sentence.
	Quote, a publisher may not enforce terms of provision regarding user speech and or conduct that are inconsistent with US law.
	Okay.
	I'll just flag up here.
	As I often say, I am a lawyer, but I'm not an American lawyer.
	I haven't passed the bar.
	I have some awareness of the American legal system, and it is notionally a common law system, but it's very different from the training and experience I've had in the UK and Australia.
	I'll be the first person to say that.
	Yeah.
	There's one of the problems here, because a lot of people say, why don't we just apply US law?
	I mean, that is what 4chan is, and there's a reason 4chan is an absolute mess, because on their not-safe-for-work boards, you just get...
	Wall-to-wall porn.
	Yeah, but also just the kind of stuff that's really not safe for work, or for your family.
	Or for anything.
	For the dog.
	For the cat.
	For the budgie.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, so that's the complexity here.
	Like, Twitter do need to be able to...
	What would you call it?
	They need to be able to do stuff like that if they want to be a family-friendly service.
	But what I've always thought in my mind is, why not just have it so we will apply US law, and if you click this button, then we will filter it.
	And then it's up to you to do it, and then they would be able to...
	Well, that was the logic behind the nanny idea, which is if you wanted to control the internet...
	I think we're good to go.
	There's a writer called Jerry Barnett and on Twitter he's at Porn Panic.
	He wrote a book called Porn Panic and he's now finished up with that as his Twitter name because it was a popular book.
	So it's just at Porn Panic, which I think is gorgeous.
	It's one of the funniest handles on Twitter.
	And basically, he wrote an entire book about this huge fight over trying to regulate pornography and basically trying to take away from an individual family saying, no, we don't want our 12-year-old kid looking at porn and making it at the government level.
	It's just about impossible to do.
	You finish up with a situation where you might as well just switch off the internet.
	It just does not work.
	Theresa May passing that, what was it, spanking was going to be banned from all UK pornographers.
	It was like, spanking, okay.
	Right.
	Like, you guys have no idea what you're doing.
	No.
	But I mean, at the Twitter level, if they were in charge of it, I reckon they would be able to do a better job.
	Probably, but it would require a bit of competence.
	And one of the things, and I do take Douglas Murray's point here about reinventing the bloody wheel.
	Yeah.
	Anyway, the next one, SheSilver.
	People are skewing this case about the President of the United States blocking on Twitter being thrown out as a victory.
	Really, it just means this restriction now doesn't apply to Biden now that Trump has gone, and the case can't be used as precedent for other cases like AOC blocking critics.
	That's probably true, actually.
	Yes, I would think.
	Based on my limited knowledge, I have to say, always remember if it's English or Australian, or I can comment with a degree of authority, but not American law.
	So Joshua Kitchen, read Twitter.
	Twitter tried to get ISPs regulated as utilities back in 2014 as net neutrality, based on the theory that ISPs might impose non-neutral requirements on entities using their service.
	Now Twitter could potentially end up being regulated as a utility based on the practice of imposing non-neutral requirements on entities using their services.
	Confusion, though the project is real.
	Yeah.
	Sorry, confession, though the project is real.
	Projection is real.
	Sorry, Carl's not here.
	I can't read.
	But it is embarrassing.
	That's true.
	James Quinn.
	I've lived on my workplace, therefore my only internet access is through a company.
	BitChute is blocked here.
	Categories, pornography, and hate speech.
	Yeah, this is exactly what you were talking about earlier, the point about BitChute.
	BitChute links.
	You can, like, redo the link so it's allowed, but there's only a amount of time until they figure that out.
	Well, yes.
	A lot of people, when Facebook were trying to bully the Australian government and then came a cropper, one of the things that they were doing was killing Australian links to news reporting.
	And Australians found a way around it by using the...
	That tiny URL feature, and basically a day before Facebook rolled over and showed its belly to the Australian government, they realized that's what everybody had been doing.
	I mean, even I was doing it.
	I wanted to put a piece up.
	A friend of mine wrote a very good piece for the Sydney Morning Herald.
	You weren't allowed to share things for the Sydney Morning Herald.
	So I used the link shortening thing, the tiny URL, and there was her article on Facebook.
	And I had that horrible, irrational thing along the line of going, well, sucks to be you, Facebook.
	And I'm going, this is very juvenile, Helen.
	Why are you?
	You're 48 years old.
	Why are you behaving like this?
	What do you make of all that?
	Because we did cover it, and I feel like Facebook may have just been arguing with the government that was going to screw them out of money anyway, from what I saw.
	Basically, Australia is a very distinctive policy.
	I've written a lot about this.
	I'll do a piece for Lotus Eaters at some point that explains a little bit about it, but I've written long features for Standpoint magazine, for Law& Liberty, and for The Critic.
	And a couple for the spectator as well, but the most recent ones were for Standpoint, there were two big features.
	Australia has very, very distinctive politics and culture.
	It has a view about the way it likes to do things.
	It tends to do them very well.
	It's one of the reasons why it's managed coronavirus so competently.
	And it basically has this view that if you won't play by Australian rules, then you should leave.
	And you will see the same attitude towards immigration.
	Which is why the immigration policy is the envy of the world.
	Is the world, basically.
	And anyway, Amazon, and what I explained in a piece, actually this was for Reaction, Ian Martin's magazine, Reaction.
	Ian Martin's columnist for The Times and a very good journalist.
	And what actually happened with Australia is that That you finished up with a situation with Amazon trying to do the same thing back in 2018 because Australia wanted to force them to apply the GST, which is the Aussie equivalent of that, although it's only 10% in Australia, wanted to apply it to products sold through Amazon.
	And Amazon said, no, we're not going to wear this.
	We're not going to pay this much tax in Australia.
	We will not provide anything to Australia.
	And they expected that the government would roll over.
	And the response of the government at the time was also still the Morrison government was fine.
	And the problem was Amazon engaged in this bluff calling behavior for a year.
	And in that year, their market share was just shot to pieces by Australian companies who then rushed in to do all the things that Amazon did.
	Amazon had once done, but for the Australian market.
	And what has happened in Australia now is there is a website called Booktopia, which has completely colonized Amazon's book sales in Australia.
	And Booktopia, until 2018, Booktopia had just been a rival, but now it's ahead of Amazon and it was purely Amazon trying to Hold the Australian government to ransom, realizing that Australians are an odd people.
	You may not like this characteristic about them, but they are completely intransigent about the way they do things.
	And it allowed another company to come in and gobble up their market, a local company to come in and gobble up their market share.
	Because you've seen they tried to do it with the EU, they did it with Spain, you know, Google pulling out stuff.
	And they tried to do it with Australia and it just didn't work.
	Yeah.
	I have to look a bit.
	Well, I have a couple of Brussels types and they're sort of going, we think we're going to copy their legislation and stick it in a directive.
	Yeah.
	That's what's coming.
	They'll copy Australia's high state capacity and well-drafted legislation and then apply it in much bigger jurisdictions like the EU. I saw in the response, like the Canadians, the British government, the EU, all of them came up and went, ooh, wait, what if we just do that?
	And I was like, yeah, yeah, you will.
	Anyway, so in relation to the Holocaust denier segment, so T.F. Allspark, hate speech laws are honestly some of the most anti-sign ideas I have heard of.
	Asinine, I think.
	Asinine ideas.
	Sorry, I can't read for toffee.
	In my 30 long years of life, the very concept is just an excuse for the power-hungry to dictate what the people can and can't say.
	The very people they work for.
	Heinlein's future can't come fast enough.
	Also, hello Helen Dale, it's a pleasure having you on the podcast.
	Cheers.
	I mean, true apart from the hate speech law thing.
	I mean, I'm also guilty of this.
	I've generally described it as hate speech because that's the way it's used, but of course its origins are not that...
	No, it was not drafted with that in mind.
	And if you look at the legislation shown of the implementation, it's clearly nothing to do with speech or race or religion or bigotry or anything like that.
	It was drafted to solve a different problem, a problem that no longer exists.
	So this is very much one of those things, a solution, looking for a problem.
	It's definitely a bad idea.
	The problem with making things like Holocaust denial a crime is it just makes people who believe it feel vindicated.
	Yeah, and also victimized.
	Like, they see themselves as martyrs and also just, why is the state coming after me?
	Well, I don't know who Brave Instance is, but Brave Instance is exactly right, because what you get, particularly when it's something that's so well-edited and it's like the Holocaust, is you do get people thinking, not only that they're vindicated, but you get other people thinking that where there's smoke, there's fire.
	What if there's some...
	Well, if there weren't anything in it...
	You can't say the Queen's not a lizard.
	I'll put you in jail.
	Maybe the Queen is a lizard then.
	Or maybe there's something in that.
	Maybe she's a little bit lizard-y.
	Maybe she has a lizard toe.
	Which is just how it goes.
	So he continues, All chance to bring them back to reality through debate has been ruined.
	The same thing is happening on a larger scale with Conservatives moving to Gab.
	Yeah, that's the other part of it.
	That is true.
	Well, I've written about – I wrote a piece about this, I think it was last year sometime for The Spectator, and it's just called The Silo Effect.
	So if you just Google my name and The Silo Effect in inverted commas, you'll find the article in The Speccy and they give you a few free reads.
	But this is quite a serious problem.
	It's where you can't shut people up, like the lefties have found they can't, for example, cancel some people.
	They can't cancel me.
	Because I've got a good home in the conservative press and I earn a good living and all of that kind of thing.
	They're not going to be able to get The Spectator or Quillette or Standpoint or Law and Liberty or The Wall Street Journal or The Australian to stop publishing my stuff because we have our own ecosystems.
	But what you finish up with is a situation where one large group of people, roughly half the country, read The Wall Street Journal and The Australian and The Times.
	And then one large lump of the country, roughly, roughly half once again because of the way politics works, reading The Guardian and The New Statesman and watching the BBC. And the danger with that is that you finish up with everybody just talking to themselves and never actually engaging with arguments from the other side.
	And that is very, very bad for civil society.
	It creates echo chambers.
	In the olden days, when people just read things on the internet or whatnot, at least you would interact with someone who'd read something else.
	On social media, you can just block them.
	You can block all of them.
	And then what?
	You can just kick them all off Twitter and they're all on Gab.
	You'll never see them.
	It's not even that you won't see their stories.
	You'll never see a person that disagrees with you.
	Yeah, so you just finish up with, potentially, if Gab really does take off, and it may well do so, because they put a lot of effort into building it up.
	It certainly has.
	I think it's like the one, what is it, I think, on the Alexa score, it's like almost a thousandth most popular website.
	Yeah, it's quite nice to use, too.
	I mean, I have a Gab account, although I... For a while there, I didn't want to go on it because it was so slow, but they fixed it now and it's quite nice to use and it has good features and it has things that Twitter doesn't have, like an edit button, and it's always had an edit button, so that reflects well on Gab.
	But you could potentially, and I don't think we're very far off this, just have all the lefties on...
	Twitter, and all the righties on Gab, regardless, so it could be moderate to extreme...
	Gab is openly partisan in its view, and it's owner Andrew Torber.
	It's fine.
	It's fine.
	It's not like Twitter isn't doing that.
	No, well, Twitter, I mean, when you've got Twitter on the main account, you know, doing the whole Black Trans Lives Matter thing, I mean, they've nailed their colours to the mast as well on the other side.
	And, I mean, the fact that the Gabbers and the Twitterers never talk to each other...
	And then they're expected to deal, if any of them are elected to public office, to deal across the aisle in Congress or the House of Commons or the House of Representatives in Australia.
	This is not good for civil society.
	You have to learn that other people exist and they disagree with you and that they come from a different position and they have reasons.
	Everyone can see the train and there's no stopping it.
	So, Simon Blanco, what happens with grossly offensive speech that doesn't target a specific vulnerable group that's still criminalised?
	For example, communist revisionist rhetoric denying the many excesses of these regimes.
	Can I deny the Holodomor?
	Who am I targeting?
	Ukrainians?
	Hungry people?
	This is preposterous.
	Yeah, that still could be grossly offensive.
	Actually, that grossly offensive limb, this is why it's not traditional hate speech.
	I'll do a little bit of history here, could actually catch something like denying the Holodomor, partly the way, because the Holodomor was traditionally understood.
	I mean, my first novel, The Hand That Signed the Paper, is largely about the Ukrainian famine.
	It was traditionally understood as a I think?
	That no, the Holodomor was actually a genocide as traditionally understood as in it was directed against an ethnic minority, in this case Ukrainians.
	And it was directed specifically at a particular group within the Ukrainian community known as kulaks.
	And traditionally, this was always viewed as an example of people being picked on because they were We're good to go.
	And they were basically, they were being picked on a combination of their race, their ethnicity, and being good with money.
	And one of the reasons why left-wing conceptions of racism are just so confused at the moment is they're only good at understanding racism in terms of people being picked on because they're at the bottom of the pile.
	The traditional disadvantage attached to being black in the United States is a really obvious example.
	However, a lot of a significant amount of racial prejudice historically has not been on that basis.
	It's been on the basis that a particular minority is economically successful, but for whatever reason is deprived of political power.
	And the classic examples of that are Jews in Western Europe, kulaks in Ukraine and Russia, Chinese people in Malaysia and Indonesia, some of the Asians in Uganda.
	That's why when Idi Amin wanted to expel Rishi Sunak and Priti Patel's ancestors, it was exactly the same reasons that Hitler gave for disliking Jews.
	I'm laughing because I'm thinking the SNP wants to do the exact same.
	Absolutely.
	But yeah, racism is not well understood as a phenomenon because people don't, and this is very bad on the left, is they don't grasp that a significant part of historic racism going back over probably 600 years has been to do with picking on people because they're good at something, either because they're clever or because they're good at money.
	Or because they've monopolised particular jobs like being, you know, jewellers and diamond cutters.
	I mean, to give you an idea, the stereotype was so intense.
	At the end of the Second World War, people agreed generally that Jews should have a homeland so you don't have this situation arising of people trying to kill them off.
	And it was widely believed at the time that they couldn't really have been given the Palestine mandate or any part of the Palestine mandate because it would lead to war in the Middle East.
	That's, of course, precisely what happened.
	So various countries around the world offered Jews a homeland.
	And Australia's offer to Jews, so if you want to have a country, you can have it in our vast country.
	We have lots of land.
	You have it in the Kimberley.
	And the Kimberley is a region of Australia famous for one particular thing.
	It's got a very significant percentage of the world's diamond reserves.
	So it was literally the Australian government at the time just thinking, oh, if we import all these fantastically talented jewellers and gem cutters, we'll have our own domestic jewellery industry.
	Is this like the 30s?
	No, at the end of the war.
	So like 1945, basically.
	End of the First World War, okay.
	Yeah, end of the Second World War.
	Second World War.
	Yeah.
	I can't remember the exact details, but people will be able to find the source.
	I think it was like a Zionist conference or something, which they were discussing where they should move to.
	And one of the suggestions was Anchorage in the United States.
	I was just like, really?
	Like, of all the places, they're in the middle of goddamn nowhere.
	In Alaska.
	There were a whole bunch of proposals, but...
	But yeah, I always found that story very funny.
	Why do they offer them the Kimberley?
	Because it's got most of the world's diamonds in the middle of it.
	You can actually picture the politicians having that discussion as well.
	Yes.
	Particularly a certain sort of Australian politician of a certain sort of vintage in the late 40s.
	Yeah.
	So we'll move on to some of the questions about the Equality Act section.
	So David, Polish name that I can't say.
	I once worked a job with two co-workers, got fired because they were joking, and the guy they were teasing reported them for the joke.
	He never really wanted to get them fired, but that's what ended up happening.
	That doesn't surprise me, actually.
	That's the problem with litigation.
	And you say that as a solicitor to clients all the time.
	You've got to be aware of this, that if you pursue it to the bitter end, it can get completely out of your control.
	I mean, again, if you're just a layperson, you're not paying attention to politics like most people watching this or anything.
	People are just going about their lives.
	They don't know how people react to this kind of stuff.
	And if you're our manager who's politically savvy and knows all this legislation, you're probably thinking, geez, and then you react in a way that they're not expecting.
	It's no joke.
	People get screwed over by all this.
	I don't think it matters that the individual insults weren't very racist or quite bad, but that there was a cumulative effect.
	I worked for an Indian vice president who loved making snippy comments about the English, loving our tea, and how the English ruled India.
	Classic Marxist doctrine.
	Ruined India.
	Sorry, ruined India.
	I bit my tongue to avoid blurting out that tea is indigenous China and it's only in India because the English transplanted it there and that it was us who helped stop the Indians burning widows on the funeral pyre with the corpses of their husbands.
	There is actually a demented...
	He's got a point.
	There is actually a demented post-modern essay, post-colonial essay, by a woman called Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, which will probably give away her ethnicity.
	Is she the one who argued that we owe India $1 trillion or something?
	I don't know if that was her, but she certainly translated Deneda's of Grammatology into English for the US market.
	And she also wrote a piece trying to...
	What he's describing there is Sati...
	The practice of, not all parts of India or Hinduism, but the practice of burning the widow on the funeral pyre if her husband died.
	There's this really weird piece that she wrote trying to justify it and say that, well, it was part of the classic moral relativism.
	This is part of the culture and so on and so forth.
	You're just sort of sitting here going...
	If that part of the culture prevailed anywhere, my dear, someone like you wouldn't be able to read because of your sex.
	It's just the complete lack of awareness, the extent to which a university academic who is female and brown in a Western liberal democracy is utterly dependent on all of the structures that have been built up over several hundred years by Western liberal democracies.
	And these things are simply not...
	Present in many other parts of the world.
	It's like reading anything from, was it, Yasmin al-Bai Brown or Ash Shaka, especially.
	Yeah.
	Where they're talking about, like, how horrible England is and isn't, like, Ash Shaka's taste.
	And the appropriate response is very much, you've never had it so good.
	Mind your manners.
	I think the best one actually might have been that lady, what was it, like Australian Question Time with the hijab, and said that, to me, Mohammed was the, sorry, Islam is the most feminist religion.
	Yeah.
	It's just like, Jesus Christ.
	You have no idea what you're thinking or what you're saying.
	Have you read any of your own religion's holy books, yes, or its lore?
	I just didn't know Muhammad was such a male feminist.
	So, Callas B. I blame Callum for the oppression of my people for 800 years.
	Prot?
	P-R-O-T? I don't know what that means.
	I don't know what that means.
	The Japanese girl is innocent of Pearl Harbor, though.
	I mean, what do I do?
	Is your Callum Irish or Scots?
	It's Dara, so Irish.
	Irish.
	So...
	Okay, so the Irish are in trouble for something or other.
	Who did the Irish oppress?
	I'm pretty sure they were the ones getting oppressed.
	Pressed by pretty much everyone.
	I must admit, I do like the way no Irish sporting team takes the knee.
	Not the rugby, not the football, not the hurling, not the shinty, nothing.
	Yeah.
	They just don't.
	They're Irish.
	Have you heard about our story of oppression?
	Yeah, I've heard it.
	Not impressed.
	I'm Irish.
	Yeah.
	Like, I don't have any Irish nationalism or feeling in me.
	It's just my last name.
	But I can see the whole thing.
	And to be fair, when you did go back to the days of really, really awful, obvious public discrimination, the signs were always no blacks, no Jews, no Irish.
	Yeah.
	So, that's the UK for you.
	I think we probably should actually wrap up because it's at 2.30 and Carl has to do an interview with you soon.
	Okay.
	So, thanks for tuning in.
	Check out LotusEasers.com for the reporting and we'll be putting clips up on, I think it's Bitchute and Facebook and Rumble and so on and so forth.
	Not on YouTube because we are banned from YouTube for two weeks.
	The same as Steed and Crowder and the same as, what is it, Salty Cracker?
	Everyone, all of a sudden, all got a strike for saying naughty things about the US election.
	So...
	So you're not on YouTube until next week then, basically?
	Yeah, the algorithm got an upgrade and all of a sudden literally all the conservatives in the middle of the George Floyd trial got banned.
	I was like, hmm, that's convenient.
	For stuff that you'd said last year?
	Yeah.
	Great.
	Great.

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