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Aug. 23, 2021 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:31:43

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #203

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	Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen.
	Welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for Monday, the 23rd of August, 2021.
	I'm joined by Helen Dale.
	Helen.
	Hello, Carl.
	How are you doing?
	Not too bad at all.
	Good.
	Right.
	So today we're going to be talking about how Joe Biden has effed everything up, as lots of people predicted he would, how Trump appears to be making his return, and how Australia appears to have fallen to COVID fascism.
	Zero COVID. It's absurd, isn't it?
	Anyway, before we begin, let's talk about the things that we've got up on the website.
	So we're doing the gold-tier Zoom call on Thursday this week rather than Friday because we've got something on Friday, a live event or something.
	And so we'll be doing that on Thursday, so 4pm Thursday.
	If you're a gold-tier member, come and hang out with us.
	Next, we've got live events going on.
	So on the 24th and 25th of September, myself, Count Dankula and Secret Guests...
	To be announced, we'll be doing basically live podcast and just, you know, stuff live in London on both nights.
	So go check out that on the website and we'll see you there.
	That's going to be great fun.
	We also, of course, have a new book club, which is Frank Dicotta's Mal's Great Famine.
	This was done by Bo and...
	Who did it with Bo?
	John?
	Josh.
	Yeah, sorry.
	Bo and Josh did this because I was away, but I have also read it.
	And it is brutal.
	In fact, if you want to know how brutal it is, just go and look at the comments that have been left on there from people like, wow, I had no idea it was quite that bad.
	people digging up their own children and eating them was something that happened during Mao's grave.
	I mean, worth knowing the consequences of communism.
	We also of course have contemplations.
	This one was about the question of political representation and is it basically a myth?
	And I don't know how represented you're feeling at the moment but I'm not feeling particularly represented so maybe.
	And we of course also have the epochs where Bo and...
	who's it?
	Josh again?
	Yep.
	Doing Caesar's expedition to Britain and what Roman Britain was like.
	This is part one of a two-part series.
	Part two will be up this Sunday.
	Excellent work, obviously.
	Go and check it out.
	Anyway, let's get into it.
	So, Joe Biden appears to have effed up everything, particularly in Afghanistan.
	I guess that's what we'll focus on today because, well, it's all the media wants to talk about at the moment.
	Weird, isn't it?
	You know, in fact, now I say that, it's actually really weird how Joe Biden has been getting a grilling by the press because, of course, he was their golden boy because he wasn't Trump.
	So anyway, he did a stream, which I saw on the White House YouTube channel.
	No comments, no questions, of course.
	And basically, he came up and just gave his, well, we're doing everything we can to get Americans out.
	We're in contact with the Taliban.
	We've spoken to the Europeans, and we've now got 6,000 troops in Kabul Airport.
	We're putting international pressure on the Taliban, and they're worried about how they can maintain the country, and we're worried about how they're going to treat women and girls.
	And there's no evidence that Americans can't get out, and one of the journalists says, yeah, but there's reports of chaos, and Joe Biden's just like, no, there isn't.
	It's like, okay.
	Interesting.
	So this was contradicted by the press secretary for the United States Department of Defense, John Kirby, who was on Fox News the very same day.
	These all happened on the same day, where he pointed out they were relying on the Taliban to get citizens to the airport.
	Chance would be a fine thing.
	We're relying on the Taliban.
	It's reached the point, and I noticed this, and even people who were involved in the defund the BBC group and that kind of thing were saying, to find out what is actually happening in Afghanistan if you're an American and you don't want to watch Fox News.
	So people like Josh Slocum, my friend in Vermont in America, were having to go, right, I need to watch the BBC to find out what is actually happening.
	And finally seeing all that incredible footage of chaos and people being trampled and looking like an Afghani version of Hillsborough, all at Kabul Airport.
	All surrounded by men wearing turbans, carrying guns.
	Yeah.
	That we're putting our trust in.
	But anyway, so this was very interesting because John Kirby was asked by the Fox News anchor, well, the Brits are sending in their special forces to extract their people.
	Why can't we do that?
	And he just replied, no, we're relying on the Taliban.
	We're putting our trust in the Taliban.
	We have a deal with them and don't consider them to be the enemy.
	Do you know what actually happened with the Australian and the British Special Forces?
	Do you know which incident?
	A fairly senior, this was in the Washington Examiner, I can't remember the name of the American involved, actually attempted to tell the Australian SAS and 2PARA, can you stop doing this, you're making us look bad, to which the response of the Australian SAS and 2PARA was...
	Dear Americans, would you like to develop an interest in sex and travel?
	Or I'm thinking of two words and the second one is off.
	You know, because the Australians and the Brits are extracting their people, basically.
	It's mad, isn't it?
	It's just completely bonkers.
	Yeah.
	And so within the same day, John Kirby was totally undermining Joe Biden's, no, we've got everything under control narrative.
	Joe Biden was also grilled by George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, which, and honestly, this was fascinating, because not only did Biden look utterly incompetent and out to lunch, he just said things that were just not true, saying, oh, well, the military advisors said the troops didn't need to stay, and George was like, did they say that?
	He's like, yeah, yeah, they definitely did.
	No, they didn't.
	They absolutely didn't.
	The military advisors, of course, wanted the troops to be the last thing out.
	He also said, oh, no one thought the Taliban would take over, and he was like, well...
	Yes, they did.
	So, yeah, but not this quickly.
	It's like, well, maybe.
	And he also claimed that no one's being killed right now and that it couldn't have been handled better.
	How do you feel about the way that Joe Biden has handled the withdrawal from Afghanistan?
	Well, I was always one of the people.
	I'm a non-interventionist.
	This is fairly typical of people from a classical liberal background, and it's common within the Conservative Party.
	You think of John Barron MP. It's a fairly common, widely held Steve Baker, it's a fairly widely held view.
	The Tory party though is divided, like every political party on the planet, between people who think you should intervene and try to make these countries somehow better, and people who say, to use the line from the Australian film The Castle, tell him he's dreaming, because it's just not going to happen.
	So we know that Trump set this in motion with trying to make a deal with the Taliban.
	But I don't think anybody expected that they would remove the military first and leave the civilians behind.
	That is the extraordinary stuff up we're dealing with here.
	The way I caused a tweet that went completely viral and I did not expect it was the just all this is done and this is why it's kind of entertaining to watch although it's terrible for the few people in Afghanistan who are genuinely liberals of one sort or another.
	But What this has done has removed the lips of the American press from Joe Biden's bunghole.
	And as someone pointed out to me immediately there afterwards, they'd want to do that because Joe Biden's bunghole is full of ice cream.
	There's nothing else in there.
	Because of the whole supine way that whenever he's reported on, and Douglas Murray made this point in The Spectator as well, whenever he's reported on, it's all about Joe Biden getting ice cream.
	Nobody in Britain does this to Boris Johnson, no matter how cute he is.
	Why are you so deferential to this guy?
	Yeah, there's this...
	Myth of infallibility around the narrative that's being spun on Joe Biden.
	He can never be wrong about anything.
	And Trump is always wrong about everything.
	Where, of course, it's much more complicated than that.
	And they're both wrong about some things and right about other things.
	And so it's really embarrassing that the American media has been like this.
	But on the plus side, as you say, and we'll get to it in a second, the American media is turning on him.
	And I guess he's being thrown under the bus somewhat.
	But anyway, so on the points that you made, are Americans being physically assaulted by the Taliban?
	Well, we have reports that they are.
	Apparently, Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin was in a briefing call with House lawmakers, and they said that Americans have been beaten by the Taliban in Kabul, according to multiple people on the call.
	And so this they called unacceptable, and they phoned the Taliban and said it was unacceptable.
	Oh, great.
	Yeah, well, I'm sure they were really...
	God, the Americans didn't like us beating their citizens.
	We've got to stop that, lads.
	There was also a shooting in Kabul, because when you have so many men around with guns and a lunatic view of the world, this is the sort of thing you have.
	I'm going to go to the next one, John.
	I don't know if we can actually show any of the video, because there was a bit of blood in it, actually.
	But if we just go to the ITV News segment, they talk about it.
	They say seven Afghan civilians were killed in the chaos surrounding Kabul's international airport, according to the British military, which shows the danger people are facing trying to leave.
	Britain's ambassador to Afghanistan provided an update on the UK's evacuation efforts.
	So we've helped 5,000 people fly out of the country in the last 14 hours, and apparently there is another few thousand people on their way.
	So that's good.
	For Joe Biden, though, this is turning into a full-blown Dunkirk moment.
	Because he is, if we can go to the next one, John, conscripting 18 commercial aircraft to transport Afghan evacuees out from Kabul.
	It's not even a Dunkirk moment because although Dunkirk was a rout, I mean the Germans won the battle as it was, The troops, the expeditionary force, the British Expeditionary Force was evacuated.
	And yes, Churchill was right when he spoke to the Commons afterwards and said, you do not win wars by evacuations.
	That is true.
	And that is why he and the British people had to sort of turn, it was like turning the Queen Mary, you have to turn this whole thing around.
	But...
	The point is, the American presence was always larger than Britain's or Australia's or France's or whatever, or any of the people, other people, NATO people who were involved.
	It is unreasonable for the Americans to expect probably the next largest force, which would be the parachute regiment from the UK, to fix America's problem.
	And I mean, I did see a couple of people making the Grenada analogy, you know, When Margaret Thatcher didn't help the United States in Grenada, you know.
	Well, why are the British angry with us?
	It might be to do with the fact that Grenada is a Commonwealth country, guys, you know.
	Maybe that's why they're not helping you.
	And this is a sort of larger problem.
	And I caused a bit of a stink when I first said it a couple of years ago on Trigonometry with Constantine and Francis.
	That there are serious problems with state capacity in the United States.
	They struggle to run things.
	And for a long time, it was just political scientists like me – well, not so much me, but Matthew Goodwin or Pippa Norris, who's the Harvard Electoral Integrity Project head – Having to say, look, there are actually very, very serious problems with this country.
	It's not being run properly and not being run properly at a very basic level.
	And the statistic that I used in several of my pieces, including the piece we'll come to on the Australian situation, is that before Trump said a word, About electoral irregularities.
	This is completely prior to a word coming out of Donald Trump's mouth about this.
	It was before the election.
	He hadn't said anything.
	Nobody else had said anything.
	Pippa Norris and the Harvard Electoral Integrity Project ranked the United States as 57th in the world for its ability to run free and fair and clean elections.
	And how many democracies are there in the world?
	That's the bottom.
	That is the bottom of all the democracies in the world.
	So I was going to say, there can't be that many.
	Yeah.
	It's rock bottom, to quote the Harvard Electoral Integrity Project.
	And, of course, the top ones tend to be places like Australia and Switzerland and Norway, you know, that kind of thing.
	And...
	Long before Trump was popping off like a frog in his sock, as Australians say, you had this problem of the United States just not being a well-run country.
	Many people from Britain or from European Union countries and Australians really notice it because Australians are very good at technically running things, which is why the government tends to be quite authoritarian, because they think they just know better, because they often are very good at running things.
	But Australians will come back and go, America, land of checks.
	America, 10 days for your proof clearing in your bank account.
	Have they not heard of BACs?
	You know, they can't do a direct deposit in the day.
	I mean, I write for a number of American outlets and I have a US bank account.
	I mean, this is quite common amongst solicitors.
	We're quite good at this kind of thing.
	And the absolute faffle I had to go through and my employer in the United States, which is Law& Liberty, which is the magazine that Liberty Fund publishes, the faffle between us that I had to go through, that their accountant, in-house accountant and in-house counsel had to go through to enable me...
	In Britain to be paid in US dollars in my bank account set up with my bank denominated in US dollars because I don't want to convert all that American money into pounds until the exchange rate is favourable.
	Of course.
	It was a bloody nightmare.
	And that is the foundation of me saying to Constantine and Francis, If you're Australian, or German particularly, or from the Scandinavian countries, and even from the home counties in the UK, your experience of the United States is failed state territory.
	And people used to laugh at me for saying that.
	They're not laughing anymore.
	They're not laughing anymore.
	Anyway, moving on to the latest failed state that America has created in its own image.
	So we've been told that apparently we've had chilling warnings from military chiefs, ex-MI5 boss, intelligence experts and security officials who feared the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, knowing that it would give al-Qaeda access to the ungoverned spaces in the deserts and mountains and the terror training grounds where bin Laden plotted his 9-11 attacks.
	They also think that it's going to allow the Islamic State's regional faction, which is like Islamic State Khorasan or something like that, to thrive.
	And this has apparently been reported at Kabul airport already.
	Didn't take long, did it?
	I didn't.
	This is completely unsurprising to me because I'm just coming out of that political tradition that always said this is an incredibly foolish thing to do and it's not going to work.
	And you can't make these countries over in your own image.
	You just can't.
	No, not even slightly.
	You can, maybe I will say this because I notice you're doing a series on Roman Britain, although obviously a different civilisation again.
	You can make conservative nutty monotheists over in your own image if you are a more liberal polity.
	However, you finish up doing what the Romans did to the Jews or what the Chinese are doing to the Uyghurs to achieve it.
	You might want to think about that before you decide to go over that particular cliff.
	There's a reason that the Jews, whenever they mention Hadrian, they say, may his memory be damned.
	May his bones be crushed is the direct translation of the Hebrew.
	There we go.
	He essentially disestablished the Jews from Judea.
	So that's how it gets done.
	And the United States, of course, hasn't done this.
	But anyway, so apparently US has declared a fresh security alert for ISIS in Kabul.
	I like the way that LBC report this, right?
	The terror group is not affiliated with the Taliban because the Taliban are the legitimate government of Afghanistan, you see.
	It's been reportedly...
	They've been critical of the Taliban in recent statements and have fought them in the past.
	So that's brilliant, isn't it?
	It's like watching two factions of socialists go at it and be like, well, they're not like these other ones.
	It's like, no, you're both exactly the same, basically.
	But you're just fighting.
	It's a purity spiral.
	Exactly.
	But this is a character...
	There's a friend of mine.
	He's an Australian medievalist.
	His name's Lorenzo Warby and he's a specialist in actually medieval warfare if you want to get somebody in here to talk about medieval armour.
	That's my man.
	So he would be...
	You'd have to organise it with Australia and he'd be...
	Well worth talking to.
	But he once jokingly, half jokingly said to me, always remember that progressive movements of whatever sort are either a Christian or Muslim heresy, depending on where they come from.
	Because they all have the utopian vision.
	They all have this idea that you can create a perfect world.
	They're all willing to make huge sacrifices in order to achieve their perfect world, but not to sacrifice themselves, sacrifice you as well, because the future is going to be better and perfect.
	This is just these two monotheistic religions and they all fall into the same purity spiral trap.
	Which, of course, is satirized in Monty Python, you know, the popular front for Judea and the people's Judean popular front.
	And where are they over there?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Well, the qualitative difference between ISIS and the Taliban is pretty low.
	Yes.
	But anyway, so we've got a summary of the catastrophe here from MSN. So, Antony Blinken said that 30,000 people and Americans and Afghan allies have been evacuated from Afghanistan since July, and 11,000 people have been airlifting the last 30 hours.
	Days after the Taliban took Kabul, Biden and the Pentagon did not predict this rapid collapse.
	But I mean, who thought that the Afghan president was going to flee to the United Arab Emirates with like $100 million in a bag?
	Well, I guess maybe we should have been predicting that.
	We're going to start getting letters.
	Instead of being from Nigerians, they'll be from Afghans now.
	You know, please deposit £10 in my account and I will give you millions of...
	Millions of American dollars, yeah.
	Yes.
	Wait for it.
	It'll happen.
	Yeah, so this has all gone particularly bad.
	And so it's been interesting to watch the media turn on Biden.
	So we can go to the next one.
	This is a one by the Wall Street Journal.
	How Biden broke NATO. My goodness.
	It's a bloody...
	I actually tweeted to this effect that NATO is toast because it became very clear when this happened that at no point had Joe Biden made a telephone call to Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron or Angela Merkel.
	He had not spoken to the other most important people in NATO. They did not know.
	You could see all of them, their press conferences.
	Macron, who speaks the most beautiful erudite, he's one of these people who speaks in complete sentences in French.
	He was just like flipping and flopping and stumbling over his words.
	This is not the way Emmanuel Macron speaks.
	Boris Johnson, who can normally just flim-flam his way through anything because he's a brilliant after-dinner speaker, totally caught on the hop.
	Merkel, just sitting there, bunny in the headlights.
	Well, I mean, this has clearly been, the rug has been pulled out from under everyone.
	And again, the fact that you pulled the military out first.
	That's the extraordinary thing.
	It speaks to a complete lack of preparation and an unnecessary show of weakness.
	It's not like the Americans have been recently defeated in a battle by the Taliban or something.
	And if they had, you'd be like, okay, well, that would make sense.
	Exactly.
	The Taliban aren't going to be able to take on the US military, assuming the US military is given orders to fight.
	But for some reason, Biden's like, no, no, we're going to retreat.
	I actually am not quite sure what has led to this because Biden has made a big deal of repudiating everything that Trump did.
	You would assume he would have repudiated and he could do this because foreign policy is an executive power in the United States.
	No one is going to quibble at Joe Biden getting into the Oval Office and just rescinding everything that Trump wanted to do.
	A friend of mine said, okay, Let's put this at its highest.
	It's a very Australian joke.
	He said, Donald Trump left Joe Biden a big pile of poo to clean up.
	Instead of, however, using the shovels to attempt to clean up the big pile of poo, he decided to dispose of it using dynamite.
	And he's coated himself and his allies in the process.
	Yeah, I mean, the way the Wall Street Journal framed this is staggering.
	So the European allies were consulted, and they say that everything about Mr.
	Biden's Afghan withdrawal has been a slap in the face to those allies.
	So this has been pretty bad.
	And you've got loads of people in the Democratic Party also turning on Biden.
	I'm going to go to the next one.
	An anonymous Democrat Congress member, we don't know who they are, Another one said, A Democrat representative from Massachusetts said, Worse, it was avoidable.
	I just, I do find this quite extraordinary.
	I'm just wondering the extent to which there's a couple of other things going on here.
	The American intelligence services have become weirdly obsessed with their own country and spying on people in the United States since January 6th.
	Too obsessed, you know, as in they are not focusing on the few individuals that actually matter who are white supremacists or whatever, and they're just like, Not caring about the rest of the world.
	Now, a lot of people would say, oh, that's America all over.
	That's what they always do.
	But this is unusually bad.
	This is unusually bad.
	So there's a bit of that going on.
	But then there's also that thing of, oh, we're not the other guy and everybody likes us and all these people are saying nice things about us and all these countries are patting us on the head and saying America is back and all of that kind of thing.
	So we can do what we like, which is a thing that you get.
	The closest analogy I can think of is the Tory party completely fouling up The 2017 general election, because at one point Theresa May had a 20-point poll lead.
	You get hubristic.
	Yeah.
	It also seems to be kind of ideological as well, doesn't it?
	There seems to be this drive to purify the United States rather than be concerned about where the United States actually sits in the world.
	They don't seem to understand that the United States underpins a lot of things in the international order.
	And, I mean, like, there's been...
	Honestly, I wonder if it's the influence of Twitter.
	I honestly do.
	Because you've got this kind of online left-wing narrative that is, you know, United States military in Afghanistan bad.
	And so it just seems right.
	Yeah, get them out then.
	It's like, okay.
	But there was a lot more connected to that that you don't seem to have paid any attention to.
	And it's weird.
	Yeah.
	It's this oversimplification.
	Douglas Murray, again, to quote him again, has written about this, I think, once again in The Spectator, where he said, look, the thing that has had the most damage on the quality of public engagement of public intellectuals is Twitter.
	Without a doubt.
	It has turned...
	And the thing is, Murray is known for being a conservative, but he just lined up people across the political spectrum where absolute nonsense...
	Had flown out of their mouths as a result of the way they've engaged on Twitter.
	It got that way, I was reading it, and I was waiting for him to make the Jeremy Corbyn argument, which is, this platform is so toxic, it should be taken into public ownership and shut down.
	I was waiting for that.
	He didn't quite go there, but that's the next step.
	I mean, that would be the sensible thing to do for the sake of our civilisation.
	But anyway, so who do you think predicted that Joe Biden would mess everything up?
	Well, it was Barack Obama, who in 2020 unironically said, don't underestimate Joe's ability to F things up.
	Well, vindicated.
	I'm not actually surprised about that.
	I mean, Barack Obama obviously had serious problems of his own, but an inability to understand things was not one of those problems.
	He certainly understood what was going on, even if he occasionally made bad decisions.
	The surprise, though, was that Obama's arch enemy, Osama bin Laden, also came to the same conclusion about Joe Biden.
	Oh, but Bin Laden wanted to assassinate Obama because he thought Obama was too competent and would get him, which turned out to be true.
	Yeah, he did.
	That was well forecasted.
	But he said, oh, if we can get rid of Obama and have Biden as the president, this will be great because Biden's useless.
	Well, that's actually what he said, yeah.
	He banned al-Qaeda from assassinating Joe Biden because he thought the Democrat would become an incompetent president and, quote, lead the U.S. into a crisis.
	I mean, he wasn't wrong.
	So what's the situation?
	So I'm going to try and hurry through this last bit.
	So the Mujahideen have risen up in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban, which I'm sure they're going to have a lot of fun with that.
	They've actually driven out the Taliban from something like, was it three provinces?
	We'll get to the next one, John.
	I can't remember how many provinces.
	So a bunch of provinces, three districts north of Kabul.
	They've killed about 30 Taliban fighters.
	Always remember, these guys might be...
	They're not the Taliban.
	They're not as nutty in a religious sense, but they are still a massive bunch of opium dealers.
	You need to deal with this reality.
	It's very tempting to just support the underdog because there's the underdog, but you've got to be really careful.
	If they're fighting the Taliban, they have to be good.
	But probably not.
	It's one of those things where, yes, they're better, but it's a matter of...
	Degree not kind.
	Yeah, well, that's exactly it.
	It's a matter of degree not kind.
	But yeah, so, you know, there is armed resistance to the Taliban going on in Afghanistan, so that's another civil war that the country's going to enjoy.
	Fantastic fun.
	Fun for all the family.
	Good job, Joe.
	Good job.
	Anyway, so what's interesting as well is the way that Biden treated the Allies.
	So Biden promised Britain they'd keep a presence, as reported by this chap, who I can't remember where he writes now, if you go to the next one, John.
	Huge story.
	Leaked memo shows Biden promised Boris Johnson and G7 leaders in June that the US would maintain enough security presence in Afghanistan that would keep Kabul safe.
	Then failed in that commitment.
	And so it's no great surprise that we are getting reports from within Boris Johnson's office that they're just openly calling Biden Sleepy Joe now.
	And they're actually questioning the sanity of Biden, which I think is a really likely thing.
	I don't know whether he's insane.
	But he is 79 years old.
	That's a very common age for people to start developing dementia and Alzheimer's.
	It is.
	A person with Alzheimer's is not insane, they're just Not there.
	They're not there.
	Some of my parts still work kind of thing, but not all of them, including this bit.
	So, yeah, it's being interpreted as sanity, but maybe, dear America, stop electing 80-year-olds?
	Yeah, it's really weird, isn't it?
	All of the candidates are like 70-plus.
	Plus, yeah.
	So why?
	Yeah, whereas Boris Johnson's only in his 50s.
	Scott Morrison in Australia's only in his 50s.
	Macron's 16 years old.
	Yeah, well, permanently 16 years old.
	I think Macron might have just turned 50.
	He's in his 40s.
	He's still 40s or something.
	It is literally, and the only reason Merkel's older is because she's part of the furniture.
	She's been there forever.
	Yeah, she's been there forever, yeah.
	So anyway, Colonel Kemp, former commander of the Rish Force in Afghanistan, has called for the court-martialing of Joe Biden.
	Of course.
	Which I totally support.
	Did he used to be in the parachute regiment?
	I wonder if he did, because the reporting of what the guy from 2Para was saying, it was literally...
	Yeah.
	You know when British military personnel get really angry and they just become incredibly restrained and you just know how angry they are underneath it?
	Court-martial the President of the United States.
	I support this.
	Tony Blair popped up calling Joe Biden imbecilic.
	This was widely reported by the media.
	So again, it's interesting to see the usual structures that would defend and protect Joe Biden all turning on him.
	It looks like Joe Biden's probably getting thrown under the bus.
	Tony Blair, the unflushable turd, has bobbed to the surface once again as I tweeted.
	But unfortunately, he's not wrong.
	Like, this was imbecilic.
	That's, in fact, a very generous way of describing it.
	And, of course, there are going to be consequences from this.
	The Europeans are worried about Migrant Crisis 2.0, of which they've almost all said no.
	Merkel has...
	Sorry, not Merkel.
	Several German politicians have said that there must be no repeat of the migration crisis.
	Macron has said no.
	And for some reason, we've said yes, Martin.
	For some reason, I know why, but we've said we're going to take 20,000.
	That's a very small number, and it's actually quite smart.
	If you're going to do the thing of creaming the top off of developing countries, you get in first, you pick and choose.
	This is very much the Australian model.
	Bob Hawke did this in 1989 after the Tiananmen Square massacre with China.
	He got in very quickly.
	He We had the cream of the Communist Party elites, children, studying in Australian universities in 1989.
	And Bob Hawke just got up, and you're not supposed to do this in a parliamentary system, and unilaterally said they all get refugee status.
	Australia has done so well out of that.
	So you literally are just creaming the top off of these countries.
	And with China, it's less of an issue because there are so many of them.
	The thing with Afghanistan is if everybody copies Britain, they will have no elites.
	And you might think, well, isn't that a good thing?
	need people who know how to keep the lights on yeah and if they're all in Australia in the UK and America and European countries then no matter how much money is poured into Afghanistan it will permanently be stuffed and I mean this the concern there is obviously this will trigger a massive wave of migrants and they're the ones you do want to keep out yes exactly Yeah, exactly.
	Italy has just flat refused to take any, which based, well, Slovenia said this, and the Greeks have built a border wall across their border.
	But the Afghan migrants are already arriving, and apparently there are already problems.
	For example, some of the families are enormous, and so we now need to build them homes.
	Anyway, let's move on.
	I've dragged on this one too much and I'm annoyed with it.
	So, Trump returned in dramatic fashion doing a massive rally in Alabama.
	And this was very impressive.
	I watched the whole thing live, actually, because...
	Why not?
	I haven't seen a Trump rally in ages.
	And Trump rally is always great because they're basically like Trump doing a YouTube live stream in front of a massive audience where he just says whatever's on his mind.
	And it's brilliant.
	But as you can see there, I mean, literally tens of thousands of people.
	It looks like Woodstock or something.
	You know, you can see it's stretching off into the distance.
	And so, you know, definitely the guy who lost the last election.
	But one thing that I found interesting about this is that he had several speakers coming up.
	There was a Mo Wood, I think it is, who's the senator he's supporting.
	And it's got to the point now where the Republicans, at least the MAGA Republicans, appear to have realized that the Democrat Party is evil, they don't care about right-wing opinions, and they're going to do everything that is within their power to overthrow anything the Republicans have.
	I don't follow American politics very closely and I don't know whether Trump will be the nominee for the Republicans.
	I suspect not, once again, probably for the age reason again.
	I don't know.
	At the next election.
	But before that, before any of this even comes to light, it's the midterms.
	And what we need to think about is midterm elections in the United States are traditionally carnage for the incumbents.
	So that's the Democrats at the moment.
	And we've seen this in the past.
	It's been bad for the Republicans when they've been the incumbents.
	Now, the thing is, it's unusual for foreign policy to completely...
	Dominate an election cycle in the United States.
	We will have to wait and see whether foreign policy comes to do so.
	The arguments against is that it doesn't happen very often in America.
	It just hasn't historically.
	It's the classic joke, the only reason war is God's way of teaching Americans geography, that sort of fairly standard joke.
	The argument against that is It's the first time the united voice of the US media class has turned on the Democrats.
	People notice that.
	You don't have to be a Fox News nutter to see that.
	Everybody has seen this and also a reasonably large number of people have been killed.
	So all of the people from all sorts of backgrounds who've had service personnel as a family member who've been killed, I suspect Joe Biden is about as popular as cancer at the moment with those people.
	Well, his poll numbers have gone down.
	Apparently they've dipped significantly below 50%, which his approval rating, which it hadn't previously.
	And previously it was at somewhere like 60%.
	So this is a massive L for Joe Biden.
	But anyway, the point about the MAGA folks on the march I think is important because...
	It seems that the – and this, I think, goes for both the left and right in Britain.
	It seems that in both – the right wing in Britain and the United States.
	It seems to me that they have had – always had the consensus that they're on the same team.
	So the Labour Party, the Conservatives, didn't go out of their way to destroy and uproot the Labour Party from everything because, you know, they've got a justified place to exist.
	And the Republicans didn't do the same thing in America.
	I mean...
	I think we're good to go.
	They're the people who think that if you yell, never kiss the Tory at them, to use the British example, they're somehow going to be more persuasive.
	I have no idea where this comes from.
	You have to build electoral coalitions.
	And the other thing that has come out with a lot of Labour people is they don't like it when a Blairite typically, so you're not even dealing with a Corbynite because of the ages of people involved, when Blairites have retired or aged out of the various quangos that Blair set up.
	And Boris has been quite systematically replacing them with Conservatives.
	And the howls of outrage!
	I know, you get this.
	So why are we not allowed to do exactly what you did for however many years?
	And I do appreciate Boris Johnson and Priti Patel just going, nope, we like this person, they get the job up your bum.
	They're not doing the thing of rolling over the way Theresa May did when there was an outcry over Roger Scruton and Toby Young.
	That's a good change.
	Callum actually had some good stats on this.
	The Labour Party, when they replaced appointments, it was something like 70% Labour Party members.
	And David Cameron apparently had a similar figure.
	So for some reason, David Cameron, the Conservative, ostensibly Prime Minister, would appoint left-wing people into positions where he had the choice of appointing whoever he liked.
	And it's that kind of silliness that has led to this point, I think.
	But the point I'm making, though, is that the MAGA folk are very clearly of the opinion that everything about the Democrats is evil and has to go.
	So they've finally achieved the same sort of warlike mentality that the squad have got.
	It's the same set of attitudes, but it's on both sides like that.
	But it's important to know that this came from the Democrats first, and now it's taken over the Republican Party.
	And they've realized that there's no holds barred anymore.
	If Silicon Valley is going to just roundly de-platform a sitting president, if it's going to be constant censorship for the right but no censorship for the left, then no wonder they feel this way.
	And I don't really blame them, to be honest.
	But anyway, Trump was on great form, actually.
	He didn't seem like a 78-year-old man.
	He seemed like he was having a very good time and had a very good return.
	He felt like he had the fight back in him, because after the previous election, you could see the wind had been taken out of his sail somewhat, because he'd campaigned incredibly hard, Biden hadn't campaigned at all, and somehow Biden was the most popular president in all of human history.
	So, anyway, we've got some great quotes.
	No administration in history has gotten off to a worse start than the Biden administration.
	I mean...
	Maybe Abraham Lincoln?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I think Abraham Lincoln wins that prize by a considerable margin like this much, as in get elected president, have an enormous civil war.
	You know, that's hard to top.
	But maybe Joe Biden's a close second.
	And Joe Biden is a failed president, and he'll always be a failed president, which appears to be the opinion that he shares with Osama bin Laden and Barack Obama.
	But there were some great, great clips.
	So let's play the first clip.
	You know what woke means?
	It means you're a loser.
	Everything woke.
	Everything woke.
	It's true.
	Everything woke turns to s***, okay?
	It's true.
	See, he can get away with that.
	It's actually funny.
	It's also true.
	And it is also true.
	I mean, I'm sorry.
	It really does.
	Okay, I'll do a riff on Donald Trump's line.
	I'll use one of my mother's about wokery.
	It sticks to everything.
	Shit sticks to a blanket.
	That's exactly what happens to me.
	It is.
	And I just love the fact that in front of tens of thousands of people and millions of people watching, he's just going to be like, yep, wokeness is the problem.
	And he's right.
	This was in relation to General Milley.
	You're aware of General Milley?
	Oh, that was the bloke who was...
	Ran all those stupid ads.
	Yep.
	That's the general who, when being questioned, was like, yes, I want to know more about our racist country and white supremacy.
	The full-on woke one.
	But yeah, apparently he's thinking about falling on his sword because even he, even the wokest of woke generals, is privately telling officers he wishes that Trump was back despite the bad blood.
	When Trump came to talk about Joe Biden's Escapades, shall we say, in Afghanistan.
	This was his opinion.
	Oh dear.
	It did not have to happen that way.
	This is not a withdrawal.
	This was a total surrender.
	This surrender for no reason.
	They weren't asking.
	We had them.
	I dealt with Abdul.
	He was the leader.
	I said, Abdul, anything happens, we are going to rain terror upon you.
	It will be a terrible thing.
	You do get the impression that- Don't touch our American citizens.
	Don't ever come to our country.
	Don't ever come to our country.
	And you're going to continue fighting your civil war.
	I can't do that.
	They've been fighting it for hundreds of years.
	That's what they do, is they fight.
	And they're good fighters.
	But I had a good relationship, other than that one statement.
	I said, after I said that, I said, now let's get down to business.
	And we had a conditions This is a disgraceful thing, the most embarrassing thing that we've ever seen in this country.
	There's never been an embarrassment.
	And the nations of the world Both friend and foe are looking at us and saying, what the hell happened so quickly to the United States of America?
	They can't believe it.
	But yeah, you can see why that little speech made it quite good.
	You can see why he gets the Caesarist or the Cordillo comparisons because that is very much the Roman thing.
	Okay, we'll leave you alone, but if you shift an inch from what we've agreed, then we will rain down terror on you.
	That was the way they did things.
	And it's also the Chinese way of doing things as well.
	And I suppose, it didn't occur to me to say it earlier, but I'll say it now, If you're Taiwanese, what do you think right now?
	Well, I think that when China says Joe Biden isn't going to defend you, they might have a point.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And I just want to point out, remember, Trump isn't just an empty, bloviating wind.
	I mean, he did drop a Moab on the Taliban.
	So it's not like Trump isn't like, we'll rain down fire and nothing will happen.
	No, he means it.
	That's the thing.
	That's why the Caesarist points actually are legitimate.
	It's not blowhardery.
	He would carry through.
	We know this.
	He did this.
	But it's also why there was peace across the Middle East and the rest of the world.
	No one was pushing around and testing the boundaries when Trump was in charge because they knew that something would happen.
	And that's not the case with Joe Biden.
	Anyway, so as he pointed out, it didn't have to happen this way.
	And this is down to Biden's weakness in the White House.
	And I totally agree.
	I don't think it's about any weakness in the American forces or their capacity to deploy troops or anything like that.
	It appears to be purely a problem with the leadership.
	Yeah.
	I think there are capacity issues, though.
	Just the whole ability to execute, I think there are capacity issues.
	I mean, the extent to which US presidents in an incremental but ramping up way have over a number of years been forced to govern or have decided to govern just by executive order, that's a sign that there are problems in the system, the ability to execute.
	I actually saw a graph of executive orders signed over time.
	And it began with Bush, but it was still very, very minimal under Bush.
	Yeah, and it just gradually gets worse and worse.
	Under Obama, it starts really going up.
	Then Trump follows the same pattern, and then Biden's just this rocket.
	So you can see that power and authority has been centralised in the executive.
	And that's fine if you've got a very strong leader, but if you have a very weak leader, that's very bad.
	But anyway, so yeah, let's see what Trump would have done differently.
	Biden failed totally on the pandemic and he's now overseeing the greatest foreign policy humiliation in the history of the United States of America.
	This is the greatest humiliation I've ever seen.
	Biden's botched exit in Afghanistan is the most astonishing display of gross incompetence by a nation's leader, perhaps at any time that anybody's ever seen.
	Name another situation like this.
	Vietnam looks like a masterclass in strategy compared to Joe Biden's catastrophe.
	And it didn't have to happen.
	All he had to do is leave the soldiers there until everything's out.
	Our citizens, our weapons.
	Then you bomb the hell out of the bases.
	We have five bases.
	And you say, bye-bye.
	No, no, that's a totally fair assessment.
	In the sense that huge numbers of military people in Australia and the UK outside of this are going, you took the soldiers out first.
	Yeah, it's mad.
	It's mad.
	It's completely mad.
	I can see why Tony Blair's calling him an imbecile.
	I can see why Boris's government think that they're mad.
	Because, I mean, just a child would be able to give you this kind of assessment.
	It's not like we're giving any deep-cutting insight into what's going on.
	But, I mean, who knows why he did it?
	You know, we've got no explanation.
	And I don't want to, this is something where I genuinely don't want to speculate beyond what I said earlier about that the Twitter idea is a possibility.
	I may be completely wrong, you may be completely wrong, we don't know.
	But what else is there?
	But it's just, it is so demented that you're left with one of those things.
	In what possible world would this seem like a good idea?
	You know, you want to play the possible worlds game that they do with first-year law students and philosophy students, that kind of thing?
	I mean, if this was a stratagem, you know, I would understand it.
	Because, okay, if you've got the Taliban there holed up in a bunch of remote mountains in Afghanistan, you can't seem to get them out.
	What are you going to do?
	Well, you could make it look like you're leaving.
	And they'll come out and, you know, tens of thousands of them will come and start taking over Afghan cities.
	And then you deploy, you know, helicopters full of Marines to surround them and gun them all down or something.
	Fine.
	If it was like a Hannibal-style trap, brilliant.
	Okay, well done.
	But it's not.
	You know, it's absolutely not.
	And so it's like, so now the Taliban are overextended.
	They're exposed.
	They're out in the open.
	And there's nothing that anybody can do.
	And you're not shooting them.
	Why?
	You know, it's really bizarre.
	But anyway, let's see why we're doing this.
	Hardest thing I had to do as president was signing letters to the families of soldiers who were killed in the Middle East.
	Parents would sometimes be unbelievable.
	You would almost not understand.
	It was like, sir, it's so great to meet you.
	And they'd always tell stories about their child.
	Sir, my son could throw a football so long.
	He was a quarterback in high school.
	He was a quarterback in college.
	Sir, I think he could have been in the NFL. He was really good.
	He was so great.
	And we're waiting for the plane to come in.
	And sometimes they'd be talking about their daughter.
	Lots of daughters were killed.
	I'd say, General, it's amazing.
	The parents seem so fine.
	They can handle it.
	No, they can't, sir.
	I said, no, I just spent half an hour talking to them.
	They're okay.
	I mean, they understand what happened.
	They're okay.
	No, they're not, sir.
	And 10 minutes later, I watched that same mother and that same father screaming, screaming, running to the coffin as it was being taken off, breaking security lines.
	You couldn't stop them.
	I've never seen anything like it.
	And for what?
	And for what?
	Well, that has always been the most compelling argument against what classical liberals and socialists, to be fair, called forever wars.
	That if you don't follow through and do what you say you were going to do, and if you don't have clear mission objectives, It is for what?
	It's for nothing.
	It's for nothing.
	It's a waste of human life and a human talent and potential.
	So, of course, Trump makes a series of very good points and the mainstream media only want to report one very small clip where he was talking about the vaccine.
	Now, Trump, as you might remember, was in charge when the vaccines were being first rolled out.
	So he was very pro-vaccine because it looked like a way to We're good to go.
	You know, it's a fair point, and it's not anything important, and yet this was the one headline.
	This is the story.
	Yeah, this is the story.
	But anyway, so will Trump run again in 2024?
	Well, he hinted at it in a Newsmax interview very recently, saying that a lot of people are going to be very happy, and he's said this before.
	And Sean Spicer, his previous press secretary from the first year of his office, also recently came out and said that he thinks he's going to as well.
	Well, we'll just have to go through primary season and see what happens.
	No one's going to beat him.
	The Republican Party is Trump's party now.
	Unless he dies.
	He is an old guy.
	Biden will probably die.
	I mean, they may both die.
	Well, that's the thing.
	As you can see from the press conference, Trump still seems to be in remarkably good health for a man who eats McDonald's.
	He doesn't drink.
	Is that the reason you think?
	Didn't you know that?
	Donald Trump is as dry as dry and has been dry since he was like 22 or something and has not touched the stuff.
	But you think that's the reason?
	I suspect it's probably got a lot to do with it.
	He doesn't smoke either.
	If he's got brain rot, it's not to do with alcohol, shall we say.
	Well, yeah, no, that's the thing.
	Trump seems just as composmentous as he's always.
	You know the family history there, don't you?
	He had people in his family die of...
	Alcoholism.
	The medical phrase that is used is an insult to the brain precipitated by alcohol.
	I did not know that.
	No, and so he's actually, I think, a brother died, and there have been other family members, which is why he's just got this absolute set against drinking.
	Right, right, okay.
	Well, there we go.
	So it looks like he's probably going to run in 2024.
	And finally, let's talk about how Australia appears to have fallen to some kind of COVID fascism.
	So, Helen is from Australia, and so we're going to get some insight into the Australian mind, because honestly, it's baffling to me.
	I don't understand why this is happening.
	But before we begin, you wrote an article called Emulate Australia.
	It's not that easy, because Australia went into quite severe lockdowns trying to pursue a COVID-0 policy.
	Now, I wrote this piece, this was obviously, you can see the dateline on it for the 23rd of December 2020, so it was the end of last year for Standpoint, British magazine.
	And what I wanted to do, it's not about COVID except tangentially.
	I just wanted to explain why all these countries, Britain is one, want to glom on to various Australian policies that have been very successful in Australia and copy them.
	And I completely understand why people want to do that.
	You know, in Britain, Priti Patel, the points-based immigration system of Australia is literally the only policy that is raised in British focus groups that has been consistently raised over more than 20 years.
	So clearly British people know about this.
	They found it on the internet or they have Australian relatives or so on and so forth.
	And they often, I mean, I know some people who work in places like YouGov or Ipsos Mori, you get sort of focus groups of people who are not obsessed with politics.
	That's why you have focus groups.
	So you try to find out what the median voter thinks is classic polling stuff.
	Telling people, pollsters, we want the Australian points-based immigration system.
	Now, that tends to be a conservative argument over here.
	In America, you get the same sort of focus group phenomenon from people on the left, from Democrats with gun laws.
	They want to copy the Australian gun laws system.
	And then there are various other things as well.
	Initially, with the earlier variants of COVID that were less transmissible than the Delta or Indian variant, it looked like the Australian and New Zealand system of just closing the borders because it meant they had open economies while everybody else was in a mess and there was no COVID, very, very few deaths.
	It looked like they could get away with it.
	So it was this sort of, oh, let's copy Australia, let's copy Australia.
	So I wrote this article for Standpoint.
	Carl's very kindly put it up on the screen for everybody here.
	Get it on the internet.
	It's not paywalled or anything.
	Standpoint's not a paywalled magazine.
	I attempt to explain that Yes, Australians are often very good at running things, but it comes at a price.
	And the price is, the country is actually very authoritarian.
	And the phrase that I use, it's not mine originally, it comes from an Australian legal academic, Professor Katie Barnett at the University of Melbourne.
	And her line, which she actually used in a piece for Quillette, was, always remember that Australians may be the descendants of convicts, but they are also the descendants of their jailers.
	So this is something that is characteristic of the country that...
	It's good at running things for particular historical constitutional reasons, which I explain in the piece.
	It has to do with the way its electoral system evolved and how unusually effective and also unusually democratic that electoral system is.
	And I do refer to some research by the Harvard University Electoral Integrity Project that I was mentioning earlier.
	But a lot of people have got, they see the immigration or the gun laws All the COVID strategy and the buoyant economy.
	Australia, for example, was completely untouched by the Great Recession, the global financial crisis, until COVID and it was a very shallow recession.
	The economy actually hasn't even gone back into recession with the current lockdowns, to give you an idea of how stable the economy is.
	The only recession that happened in Australia, the previous one before that shallow COVID recession, was actually in 1991.
	In other words, as economists say, the great moderation never ended in Australia.
	All these people were wanting to copy it, and I could see why they wanted to copy it.
	They weren't listening, and this is why I wrote this and then I did a spot on Talk Radio, I did a spot for BBC Scotland, I did a spot for BBC Radio 4, where I basically repeated what I'm saying now is Australians have achieved this because they've got very odd history,
	because they tolerate a level of authoritarianism that you would find completely alarming, and in some respects it has roots in a belief that Rights don't matter at all.
	Now, I think you can over-exaggerate the importance of rights.
	There are very serious problems when you claim that people have rights and they're not approved of by the electorate.
	We've seen that one of the reasons why you've got the unpopularity of immigration in Britain is It's this line that constantly comes up in focus groups.
	We were never asked.
	This is not a problem that exists in Australia because of the way the electoral system works.
	But by the same token, there are no rights in the Australian constitution.
	It's not the way the system works.
	Any rights that do exist, they're just acts of parliament.
	And regularly in the country's history, they're either amended or repealed because something becomes unpopular.
	Ireland, when it wanted to legalise Abortion, divorce, and same-sex marriage.
	The reason it had to have referendums was to change its constitution because it had made a stupid mistake in putting substantive moral claims into a written constitution, which you really can't do.
	That's very dangerous.
	And so you finish up having the entire population having to vote on people's rights.
	There is no reason for Australia to do this, but it held a plebiscite on same-sex marriage.
	Not the same as a referendum because it didn't require a constitutional change.
	The Australian constitution is properly drafted in this sense.
	There are not substantive moral claims in it.
	Very dangerous thing to do.
	But the reason it was done was because the government wanted to be absolutely sure that this had majority support of the population.
	And the phrase that's used by people like Pippa Norris and Professor Judith Brett, who's an Australian political scientist, is, Australia cares more about democracy and majorities than it does about liberty and rights.
	This has certain consequences in that it can produce very efficient administration, but it just means you will have scenes.
	And I described some from last year, but there have been more, and I no doubt you have them.
	Yeah, we're going to cover some, yeah.
	Of police dragging protesters out of cars, police dragging a woman out of her home for a pregnant woman who really needed to wee.
	And the ladies who are watching this will know exactly what I mean.
	If you're rather pregnant, you need to wee.
	You've had, you know, mounted police beating the crap out of people.
	And the thing is, Australian police, they don't look like the American police.
	They look like British police, who are much more sort of benign in the public mind.
	But you see them behaving more like the gendarmerie in France.
	And the thing is, gendarmerie in France have roots in military policing.
	And to see that in a Commonwealth country, I've had a lot of British friends going, They look like the Met, and they're beating people up with truncheons.
	Welcome to Australia.
	Why do I live here?
	Well, I completely agree with you that Australia is the world's largest open-air prison.
	So Australia's been in lockdowns, very, very harsh ones.
	Over nothing, as far as I'm concerned, the numbers involved here are just staggeringly low.
	So New South Wales had 818 new COVID cases.
	That's not deaths, that's cases.
	So 800 cases, uh, in, uh, like various small towns and like 39 cases, right?
	That's it.
	Everything shut down.
	Uh, Victorian health authorities announced 71 new cases recently.
	Uh, the Australian capital territory, 16, yeah, not deaths, just cases.
	And, uh, and so this has led into massive, massive lockdowns, uh, As Reuters framed this, I love the way that Reuters framed this.
	Australia suffers worst COVID day this year with millions in lockdown.
	It's not the COVID that's the problem.
	It's the lockdown.
	It's the government.
	It's 100% the lockdown, right?
	I will just add one little detail to this, and I mentioned it to Mike Graham on my spot last week, but it is worth saying there is There's a serious panic in Australia about COVID getting into the remote Aboriginal communities.
	And I had to explain this to Mike Graham as well, because people aren't aware of it.
	You know how the Native Americans, when Whitey turned up in America, huge numbers of them died of smallpox.
	At least they didn't die of colds and flu.
	It was already endemic in the population.
	Australia's Aborigines not only had no resistance to things like tuberculosis and smallpox, they also had no resistance to any coronavirus or the influenza virus.
	Now, it is true that the Aborigines that are alive now...
	Are the ones who are the survivors of that, but they've only had a little over 200 years to build up a very small amount of immunity.
	The ability of people with very significant Aboriginal ancestry, which is the ones in the remote community, tend to be, to use the old expression, full bloods or three quarters or half.
	And so they have so much Aboriginal ancestry that this weakness with respiratory illness is likely to be inherited.
	There is a real risk That this entire civilization, 40,000-year-old civilization, the ones that do all that beautiful dot art that everybody wants to buy and get in the art galleries in London, could just be wiped out if COVID gets into the remote communities.
	And the first lot of lockdowns and response, the sort of COVID zero thing, kept it out of the remote communities.
	But there's now been reports of COVID in Wilcannia, which is a remote community, in the town of Bourke in New South Bork in New South Wales, which is surrounded by remote communities.
	And people are really, really worried about that.
	So there are some...
	I'm not excusing the behaviour.
	I am trying to warn people about how authoritarian Australia can be.
	But there is something real behind the panic.
	And it's about the Indigenous people.
	So why aren't they vaccinating them?
	Well, that's the other thing.
	Australia and even worse, New Zealand, the vaccine rollout has been criminally slow.
	And there have been...
	Just to interrupt, 34% of Australians have been vaccinated.
	Fully vaccinated.
	Fully vaccinated is 34.
	And it's a bit over half have had their first drop, which looks quite good.
	But all of that's happened in the last fortnight, that incredibly rapid vaccine rollout.
	And yes, Australia's high state capacity will probably save it again and the vaccine rollout will work and they'll save the Indigenous people and so on and so forth.
	But there are some things going on with this early problems with the vaccine.
	Not all of it was Australia's fault.
	Some of it was when the EU instituted export controls, going right back earlier in the year, to stop any vaccines going out to other countries.
	It turned out contractually they couldn't do anything to the UK.
	As we all know, that story was widely reported.
	The countries they could do it to were Australia and New Zealand.
	So that actually put the vaccine rollout two months behind.
	There was another problem that was generated also by the EU and has been glommed onto by anti-vaxxers in Australia, which is remember all the catastrophizing about AstraZeneca was an inferior, the cheapskate vaccine, and it was not as good as the others.
	And there was vaccine hesitancy, quite serious vaccine hesitancy in both Germany and France, all of which is gone now.
	I mean, you had Macron and national television getting his AstraZeneca jabs and stuff like that.
	That's all gone now.
	But the problem is when it came out, you had all these very, very official looking documents You know, with European Commission all over them with the stars and the blue and by what looked like sovereign governments saying things that were music to anti-vaxxers' ears.
	And they just glommed onto this.
	Now, Australia makes the AstraZeneca vaccine by Commonwealth Serum Laboratories.
	I've actually got a friend who is a virologist for CSL.
	The country has enough vaccine to vaccinate everybody three times over, but it's all AstraZeneca.
	And you've got the vaccine.
	It's only now in the last 10 days to two weeks that the vaccine hesitancy when people have started to die in New South Wales and the fear in the Indigenous, about the Indigenous communities that people have got over themselves.
	And then you had both Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand and Scott Morrison in Australia doing this when they thought COVID zero was a viable strategy going, people complained about the slow vaccine rollout.
	You know what they would respond with?
	It's not a race.
	Literally, you had Scott Morrison going, it's not a race.
	It is a race.
	Boris Johnson was completely right that it was a race.
	That's why he talked about the race for the vaccine.
	He was absolutely right.
	That was one thing that one world leader managed to get completely right.
	It is a race.
	Amazing.
	So yeah, the current status in Australia is that about 60% of Australia's population are under a strict lockdown because of a total of 361 cases in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland.
	Getting conflicting reports here, so I'm not sure which one is.
	I think, I did check this morning, I do think that the latest figures, because I write for The Australian, I do think that, and I get an email, you know, those regular update emails that you get from newspapers and it came overnight so I could watch this morning.
	I think the latest one is something like, there are another 800 in New South Wales and there are deaths, they are getting several deaths every day now and that has scared people, that has had the effect of scaring people.
	So yeah, massive amounts of lockdowns, and there has been just really, really baffling attitudes.
	And now I understand them, but before you came on and explained this, it was just unbelievable the way that the Australian government treats anything.
	So this one I found amazing.
	Oh, Dan Andrews, he's a complete twat.
	Sorry, he really is.
	He's the Premier of Victoria, and I seriously wonder about the guy.
	I mean, he literally came out and said, watching the sunset isn't in the spirit or letter of these rules.
	Perhaps the rules are the problem then, if you're not allowed to watch the sunset.
	There have actually been instances where...
	You know how they were right at the beginning of the pandemic in the UK, there were issues with some of the coronavirus regulations that people couldn't obey them?
	And at least the British government, HMGov, went back and fixed the problem.
	Whoops.
	They were incapable of being complied with...
	There were laws on the books in Victoria like that for months.
	You actually couldn't comply with them.
	It was not possible.
	But the point is, there's this kind of weird, spiteful attitude that appears to be coming from the authorities in Australia.
	And I mean, it's just really weird.
	Like the next one here, if you go outside for fresh air, you'll get an infringement notice.
	And again, the...
	It's not even the fact that they're presenting these ridiculous laws and ridiculous positions.
	It's the anger with which they're addressing the public, as in, we are coming at you for doing something wrong by, you know, going outside to get in fresh air.
	Australians will get this joke.
	Where's your ticket of leave?
	You won't know what that means, but a convict who was released in the colonial era got what was known as a ticket of leave.
	People were called ticket of leave men and ticket of leave women who'd been allowed out.
	And we are back to the same point, the quotation that I gave earlier.
	This is a country that many of the people may be descendants of convicts, but they are also descendants of their jailers.
	And that's honestly how these people come across.
	And this is classic Aussie authoritarian policing in that tradition.
	It really is.
	But it's also just the mindset of the entire country seems to have shifted into one of just insanity.
	I mean, there was an example of apparently several impounded dogs at a rescue centre were shot dead by a local council in New South Wales.
	Burke.
	It was Burke Council.
	Under its interpretation of the COVID-19 restrictions.
	And the dogs had apparently already the paperwork had been done to have them adopted and they were shot.
	So all these families who thought they were getting a new pet dog didn't get their dog.
	What happened?
	Oh, the dog was a COVID risk.
	So we shot it.
	So we shot it, yeah.
	Unbelievable.
	It's interesting that that's the story that's being reported in the United Kingdom.
	Oh, it's not surprising to me at all.
	It's not.
	Well, Robert Menzies, Australian Prime Minister, who was very, very, very much Anglophile and very pro-British, he always used to say, on visiting your country, I am reminded by looking at your pavements that dogliness is next to godliness.
	Yes, that's exactly how the British public feel about it.
	But anyway, for anyone wondering, vaccines are apparently not mandatory in Australia.
	This is according to health.gov.au.
	They're voluntary, apparently, and this will apply to any vaccinations that come along, but there may be circumstances in which proof of vaccination will be required, such as border-oriented requirements.
	Okay, I will explain this.
	It is true that vaccines are not mandatory in Australia.
	I will be very surprised if any...
	Liberal democracy, even a very authoritarian one like Australia, attempts to make them mandatory because there was an attempt historically in the 19th century in the UK to make the smallpox vaccine mandatory and it actually gave birth to the anti-vax movement in its modern form.
	Seeing HMGov at that time have its hands so badly burnt in that way has scared everybody else off.
	I would be very surprised if anyone tries.
	Well, not bloody Scott Morrison though.
	However, the danger in Australia is, whilst they're not mandatory, is you have policies, including one that was actually introduced while I was working in Canberra.
	No jab, no pay.
	So they made benefits recipients in order to keep getting benefits.
	They had to get a jab and their kids had to get jabs.
	And these were all the childhood vaccines, obviously, or overwhelmingly the childhood vaccines.
	And it was extremely cannily designed.
	I remember seeing, because I was sitting...
	In a senator's office in Canberra, I was his legal advisor, reading through all the legal stuff.
	Because initially, there are exceptions now, but initially the bulk of anti-vaxxers in Australia did not have the same demographic profile as anti-vaxxers in the UK or the US. They were not conservative Muslims, evangelical Christians, or followers of indigenous tribal religions.
	They were not.
	Whereas it is very clear that in the US and in the UK, There is a distinct religious undertone to it for the low rates of certain ethnic minorities getting vaccines.
	We know this.
	In Australia, they were the, and I actually use this expression on my talk radio spot, they were the yummy mummies, the hippies.
	And there was this extraordinary article and then some research to back it up done by one of the public health bodies in Australia while I was working in Canberra that showed that the vaccination rates on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, full of hippies, And Byron Bay in New South Wales, also full of hippies, was lower than the vaccination rates, childhood vaccination rates, this is, than South Sudan.
	Bloody hell.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So, anyway.
	So, they introduced no jab, no pay to get around that.
	But the thing is, it's chipping away at it by placing you in a position where you have fewer and fewer choices if you are not vaccinated.
	It's such a coercion.
	This is deeply Australian, and it's much older than COVID-19.
	Yeah, I mean, last year, Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister, had to backtrack on a bunch of comments.
	If you can go to the next one, John.
	Basically, he was like, no, no, no, no, it won't become mandatory.
	It won't become mandatory.
	It's like, okay, it's all well and good, like, saying, oh, yeah, no, no, we're definitely not going to make it mandatory.
	Except when it's the Prime Minister saying it should be compulsory.
	This is just deeply Australian.
	It's just deeply Australian.
	It's like the compulsory voting and compulsory every other thing in Australia.
	It's literally the country.
	Things are either prohibited or compulsory.
	You can make that joke.
	It's like the jailers and convicts joke.
	I mean, he had said on the radio that he wanted to make it as mandatory as you can possibly make it, and then he had to walk that back.
	I dare say he had an advisor tell him about what happened in 19th century Britain.
	I've got no doubt.
	But this is basically the conversation that Australia is still having now.
	If we can get to the next one, this was an article written by Jane Williams, a public health ethicist, who's like, well, look...
	Maybe vaccinations being compulsory should be a last resort.
	It's like, maybe, maybe, maybe, obviously.
	Public health in Australia, this is another thing, is very authoritarian.
	This is something else I encountered when I was working there.
	It's one of very few countries in the world where bicycle helmets are mandatory.
	Are they not mandatory?
	No, not here.
	You can just ride around the pushbike everywhere.
	I thought they were mandatory here, like seatbelts.
	No.
	Okay, fair enough.
	And the reason they're not mandatory in other countries is because the effect it has is basically to take cyclists off the road.
	And what happens is the only people who do cycle then in Australia are the mammals, the middle-aged men in Lycra, who behave atrociously and all think that they're in the Tour de France.
	And so they make cyclists even more unpopular...
	So nobody wants to cycle.
	So it actually has the effect of reducing participation in cycling.
	And so that's one.
	So public health bodies in Australia, war on vaping, which in Britain, we all know, has basically got rid of...
	You hardly ever see a cigarette smoker now.
	They all vape.
	And I don't even see very many vapors either, to be honest.
	No.
	But anyway, so let's see how the Australian media has been...
	And the thing I want people to pay attention to here is just the general tone and tenor of the language that's being used against segments of the population.
	If we can play that clip.
	This 27-year-old chap, who apparently has expressed the view that he doesn't care less whether he spreads the virus, is one example of the worst of the worst.
	There's little sympathy for anyone ignoring the health orders.
	Even this group of teenagers caught partying after dark at the bottom of the North Bondi cliffs.
	Herded to higher ground by Polair's spotlight and speaker, the eight boys were placed in handcuffs and left to explain a $1,000 fine to mum.
	681 penalty infringement notices issued in the last 24 hours.
	More than 400 of those notices were again for people being outside of their home without a reasonable excuse.
	It's just classic.
	I can't stand it.
	It's just classic.
	It's the Soviet Union as far as I'm concerned.
	It's classic belligerent, authoritarian, aggressive Australian coppers and it has existed in the country since before the Rum Rebellion.
	Google the Rum Rebellion.
	I won't go into it now but it's worth reading the history because it features Governor Bly being dragged out from underneath a bed.
	It's just great.
	I just can't get over it.
	There are a bunch of teenagers near the beach.
	Quick, handcuff them.
	Give them a thousand dollar fine.
	Call that one guy the worst of the worst.
	I mean, you know, there are rapists in Australia.
	And murderers.
	But no, this guy who goes out with the sniffles is the worst of the worst.
	I can't get over it.
	Let's play the next clip, though, because this media coverage is wild.
	It's getting harder and harder to hide if you're doing the wrong thing, especially in the construction industry.
	A crackdown following on from the recent shutdown.
	Workers sent home if their paperwork isn't in check.
	It is a struggle, but it's just what has to be done.
	Nobody likes telling people to go home.
	They've all got families to feed.
	Our camera's rolling on another random blitz in Marsden Park.
	Authorise me under the Public Health Act.
	Inspectors have asked these tradesmen to show proof of their QR check-in as well as identification and vaccination records.
	One of the men here is from Campsy and he doesn't have his documentation so he's being sent home.
	He may lose a chunk of his pay too if officers follow through with a fine.
	Just papers please or we fine you.
	Also you can't work.
	Yeah.
	Also, you don't get state benefits if you're not jabbed.
	Well, this is awful.
	You just sit there like, yeah, yeah, that's what Australia's like.
	That's why I wrote that article.
	And the number of people who keep coming...
	And I do repeat it on my spots with Mike Graham on Talk Radio because there's a floating audience there and people who aren't familiar with it.
	But in terms of writing, just read the article from the December issue of Standpoint and I explain all the history and you just...
	If you want to copy something from Australia and you're British or American, I understand why you want to, particularly on the immigration issue for Brits.
	Just not this.
	But be careful what you wish for, okay?
	Just be careful what you wish for.
	There is a reason why in any one year, 10 and 20% of the Australian population is not in Australia.
	There are reasons why I left, okay?
	I mean, there are things I love about the country.
	It is a very beautiful country.
	There are things that are very admirable Admirable about its culture and its people.
	But there is also this and the extent to which outside of Oz, this is just...
	Brits and Americans just don't know it.
	They don't realise it.
	I mean, this is a great example.
	So the police have gone to this chap's door and he's filming, but he's on tag.
	So he can't go out after dark because he's previously been in trouble with the law.
	And yet they're insisting that he goes to a COVID hotel, a gulag, as it were.
	And so he's now going to be forced to go to this quarantine hotel, and then he's going to go to jail.
	Because he's broken his tag.
	Yeah.
	Because he's breached his tag rules.
	This is COVID Nazism right here.
	It's the damned if you do and damned if you don't.
	Yeah.
	So this is the position people are in.
	So understandably, there have been massive anti-lockdown protests that have taken place recently in Australia.
	Have you got the one with the police horses?
	No, we've got a different one, but you can see...
	Oh, that's a small one.
	The one in Melbourne made that one look like a dinky toy.
	Yeah, there have been a bunch of these.
	Brisbane's a much smaller city.
	Yep, but as you can see, it's very, very well attended.
	There was another one where there was a chap and a horse, for some reason.
	William Wallace style.
	Oh, yes.
	Riding around saying, look, they can't arrest us all.
	And it's like, well, I think they'll try.
	And unsurprisingly, this has led to violent clashes with the police, as the Guardian reports.
	So apparently in Melbourne, they say there were an estimated 4,000 demonstrators who came down and the behaviour seen by the police was so hostile and aggressive, they were left with no choice but to use all tactics available to them.
	Including pepper spraying an 11-year-old.
	Did you see that?
	No, I didn't.
	No, no, they managed to pepper spray an 11-year-old.
	Unbelievable.
	But again, I'm not exactly going to take the Australian police's word on this.
	I think that they're the ones who also came with hostile and aggressive intent.
	There were 700 police officers deployed and 218 protesters were arrested and fined $5,452 for breaching public health orders.
	There were also another 236 fines and three people were facing charges for assaulting the police.
	And so you get people taking photos of this and putting it on the internet going, well look, we can get to the next one John, this is for your health.
	This is all for your health.
	Public health.
	People getting shot with rubber bullets.
	Or manhandled.
	No social distancing going on there.
	Or, of course, pepper sprayed.
	And honestly, there's some genuinely shocking violence.
	We can go to the next one and just see this video.
	So this chap being shunted by the cop there, or this one, just kicks his head into the ground.
	Like, what the hell is this?
	When I was at university in Australia, I did my first degree in Australia at the University of Queensland.
	And traditionally, this is unusual for Victoria, but traditionally the most aggressive police force in Australia was the Queensland Police.
	And it's part of the Beocchio-Peterson government and the very, very serious problems with Police corruption in Australia.
	Anyway, when you went on a demonstration, I once went on an illegal pride march and managed to get myself arrested.
	We finish up saying things like, you chant together, Queensland police state demand the right to demonstrate.
	This is in 1988.
	This is the point I'm trying to make.
	This is a long-standing problem in Australia of police overreach.
	The only thing that means it's not worse and doesn't look like the United States or France is because the police tend not to use firearms and Australians tend not to use firearms in these kinds of confrontations.
	But seriously, if the Aus Police were given the opportunity to buy tanks like they do in America, they would.
	I assure you.
	I tell you what, after watching this, I've got a newfound respect for the American police.
	I do not think the American police are nearly as aggressive as this, frankly.
	And I've seen plenty of videos of American police doing stuff.
	This is just savage.
	Well, the Americans tend to go towards the fuck.
	The firearms route, because that's their culture.
	The Australian route, I would describe it, it's just a bullying, authoritarian police culture.
	Yeah, I can see that.
	And so apparently truck drivers are going to go on strike in order to try and bring down the Australian government.
	So I don't know how this is going to play out, because it's all very new, but it seems to be a fairly grassroots thing.
	Truckees are going to just stop working.
	And yeah, you've got the same thing in Australia, that there is a global shortage of HGV drivers.
	There is a different cultural tradition in Australia in that if there is a shortage in an occupation, people aren't imported into the country, they train their own.
	But you can't...
	I actually used to have an HGV licence.
	It's not something you can learn...
	How to do in five minutes.
	It's actually very tricky to back an articulate, particularly to back an articulated vehicle with the traditional long, wide load.
	It's quite hard to do.
	So yeah, I don't know how that's going to play out, but things, I'm not impressed with the way Australia is going at the moment.
	One thing I will add to this, and it alarms me because New Zealand has different history and a different political culture, is that New Zealand has not only gone over the same cliff, it's gone over it harder.
	Yeah.
	And I am stunned by this.
	I did not expect this.
	Obviously, I'm not a Kiwi.
	I've been there on holidays.
	I've gone there to ski.
	The usual story with Australians, they go to New Zealand, treat it as a giant snowfield.
	Pretty countryside.
	The Lord of the Rings films were all shot in New Zealand, that kind of thing.
	But Australia had this very authoritarian police culture that New Zealand did not have.
	New Zealand always had this sort of quite benign bobby-on-the-beat image that you associate with the 50s and 60s in the UK, realistically.
	And so to see New Zealand going over the same cliff, and if anything, being even more authoritarian, they locked down the whole country.
	It's a unitary state, so even though it's two islands and there were no cases in the South Island, they locked down the entire country for one COVID case.
	Now they've traced all the contacts of that person.
	And it didn't mean work, did it?
	And it turns out to have been like 20 or something like that.
	And once again, none in the South Island, but the South Island is still locked down.
	So that's even worse.
	And I don't know where that came from.
	I don't know where that came from in New Zealand.
	Because that is, unlike Australia, where there is this history going back to the colonial era of authoritarian policing, that is not part of Kiwi history.
	If you get a New Zealander in here, they will tell you.
	And it doesn't matter whether they're Maori or Pakeha, they will be completely straight about this.
	It's a new thing.
	It's not something that's part of Kiwi culture, and I don't know where it's come from.
	Well, me either.
	But anyway, right.
	We'll skip the video comments because we've run a bit late and I'll just read a few of the comments.
	So apologies for if you sent a video comment in today.
	Omar says, Well, I suppose that's true.
	Chad Kuala says, That's true.
	That's a good point.
	It's a good point.
	And one of the things as well, people are saying the Afghan army didn't do any fighting.
	That's not true.
	That's actually not true.
	And it's really, really unfair, particularly to the Hazaras and the people in the Panjshir Valley who did.
	And to be fair, Panjshir Valley is part of the Northern Alliance.
	It's one of the three provinces where they've retaken it from the Taliban.
	But that article in The Times by...
	In another context, actually defending her teacher, Kate Clanchy, by a Hazara woman.
	She made it very clear that the Hazaras have resisted fiercely.
	Something like 50,000 casualties.
	Because the Hazaras are a minority variety of Shia Islam that's sort of kind of benign and inoffensive, and they also look different.
	And you know that phrase, almond-shaped eyes, which was what Kate Clanchy was in trouble for?
	Mm-hmm.
	That is because they are ethnically different from the rest of the population.
	They look different, and the traditional way they have been identified, both negatively by Pashtuns and other Afghans, but positively among themselves, is this distinctive eye shape that they nearly all share.
	And they do look like almonds.
	The Times put a photo of her in the paper, the young woman who wrote it, and you could see the eye shape.
	It was absolutely accurate, what she was describing.
	And so...
	Huge numbers of those people have been killed by the Taliban.
	Huge numbers.
	JJHW says, the Americans are trying to remake Carry On Up the Khyber as a tragic farce.
	Yes.
	Perfect.
	That's really good.
	I wish I thought of that.
	M1 Ping says, at Dunkirk, the retreating British probably did a better job of at least disabling the military equipment they had to leave behind.
	Yes, they did.
	Yeah, they did.
	They spiked the guns.
	They spiked all the guns.
	Likewise, the Australian retreat from Gallipoli.
	It was a retreat.
	It was, you know, you don't and you don't win wars with retreats and evacuations.
	But the Australians, when they left Gallipoli, they made their weapons useless to the Turks.
	Useless.
	But I mean, on the plus side, at least the Afghan fighters probably aren't very good at flying Black Hawk helicopters.
	But that's the only thing.
	But yeah, SH Silver says, It's almost funny seeing Joe trying to squirm and dodge criticism but has withdrawn by scapegoating it as if people against him want the US to stay in Afghanistan.
	He's setting up anything that goes wrong with it as an inevitability and not a result of his terrible decisions.
	Which is true.
	It's embarrassing watching Joe Biden take no responsibility for just this panicked withdrawal when there was no reason it had to happen.
	Trying to clean up the poo with dynamite instead of a shovel.
	Yep.
	It's absolutely mad.
	Hellandale needs to realise the US is designed to have a weak federal government.
	Yeah.
	It is.
	I don't know, their courts have centralised pretty heavily over the...
	Yeah, I mean, and this is the problem with having...
	Seems to be getting away from what the founding fathers wanted.
	This is the problem with having a superior constitutional court.
	You finish up becoming the author of your own misfortune and it does centralise.
	Ignatius says, That's just so Spanish, isn't it?
	Yes.
	Not just Spanish, entirely Mediterranean.
	There's a part of me that has a bit of respect for that, you know, in the sense of focusing on what matters.
	Beer, cerveza, and a suntan.
	Well, I mean, I suppose that's not wrong.
	Tom says, even though Trump still seems to have a lot of energy, I think, like you've suggested before, he shouldn't run for a second term.
	Rather, he should endorse someone younger than him, perhaps DeSantis.
	I mean, I... The thing is, Trump does have a bit of magic about him.
	There is some magic in what he's doing.
	You know, the fact that he can get away with all this ridiculous stuff that DeSantis probably couldn't get away with.
	If you picked a Hawley or a DeSantis or even a Tucker Carlson or a...
	Oh, yeah, Tucker.
	Or what's the...
	She's a Democrat, but she's a blue dog Democrat from Hawaii.
	Tulsi Gabbard.
	That kind of person.
	They might have slightly Trumpy ideas, but they will still fundamentally be a typical American politician.
	I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it is certainly a true thing.
	Yeah, and that's the thing.
	There's something about Trump just not being a politician that makes it so magical.
	He never comes across like one.
	No, no.
	Never sounds like one.
	Ever.
	He sounds totally authentic.
	And, you know, for good or bad, at least you know that you're getting the unfiltered view that he's, you know, I mean, Trump just doesn't seem like the kind of guy who's smart enough to lie.
	You know, he just seems to blurt out whatever's on the front of his mind.
	And that's great, because, you know, that's what I want for my politicians.
	There is no filter.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I don't want a filter on my politicians.
	I want to know what they really think.
	Anyway, Rose says, most presidents look physically much worse after their terms.
	Somehow Trump looks better.
	Yeah, I mean, a couple of months ago, he was looking quite down.
	You know, you'd see the photos of him golfing and stuff like that.
	And he'd look quite down, but now he seems full of energy.
	And so, okay, well, you know.
	He did do the smart thing, though, after he was gone.
	The sport he plays is golf.
	He's pretty good at it.
	He has historically played off scratch, and I still think he's got a single-figure handicap, is he just went and got exercise and played golf everywhere.
	There are worse things to do than go for long walks in the countryside, even if, to quote Mark Twain, it is spoiled by the presence of a small white ball.
	Right, okay, so X, Y, I can't pronounce that.
	Helen says, what are you talking about the Oz Police look like the Mets?
	Cops wear jump boots, blue combat pants and carry glocks.
	Well, Australian police are armed and the British aren't, but they just don't have the same overwhelming military presence that you see with the gendarmerie in France or the militarisation of the US police.
	But by the same token, if you gave them that chance, they will absolutely try to get away with it.
	I saw when I was, once again, when I was working for the politician in Canberra, but he was a New South Wales senator, there was a period where they were sending SWAT teams who do wear those baggy pants, the baggy trousers, they were sending SWAT teams with the baggy trousers to police football games.
	Why?
	It turned out, because the politician I worked for, because it was in his electorate, took an interest in this.
	It turned out it was because at the time, the police commissioner at the time didn't like football.
	As in round ball football, which is not the main code in Australia.
	It's the one played by the English and the ethnics.
	But it literally turned out that the police commissioner at the time had an issue with football.
	It was just quite extraordinary to discover that.
	And people were sitting there going, you don't like football, so you're sending SWAT teams to police football matches.
	To be fair, I don't like football either, so maybe he's got a point.
	Would you send a SWAT team, though, to police Arsenal against Spurs?
	No, certainly not.
	Probably not.
	No, anyway.
	On that, we've run out of time, so thanks everyone for joining us.
	If you want more content from us, you can sign up to Lotases.com, check out our range of excellent premium content, my favourite being the book clubs, because you actually learned something useful there.
	But anyway, we'll see you all tomorrow.

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