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Feb. 8, 2022 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:30:20

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #324

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	Hello and welcome to episode 324 of the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for the 8th of February 2022.
	I'm joined today by Leo.
	Hello!
	And today we're going to be talking about Boris's singing, kneeling, unappealing Welshman, but I repeat myself.
	We're going to talk about the Chinese tennis player and her allegations of sexual assault which have been retracted under mysterious circumstances.
	Yeah, the mysterious circumstances of being in a Chinese torture chamber.
	Interesting times.
	That's my speculation.
	And we're going to cover the police closing in on the Canadian Truckers Freedom Convoy in Ottawa and so on.
	But before we get into that, we have all of this content on the website.
	So we have this article...
	Which I believe is by me.
	I'm waiting for the TV to turn on.
	Do you remember writing it?
	Are you black and drunk?
	It was a tough time.
	This is part three in my Reading the Future in Propaganda series.
	It's with the audio by the lovely Jonathan Crowe, a very soft voice.
	As you can see from the thumbnail there, there may be some climate stuff in there as well.
	We also have this Premium Contemplations, Why Monopolies Ruin Everything.
	That's by Josh and Harry.
	We also have a republished article here with the new audio, Are International Organisations a Force for Good?
	by Hugo Hüthlade.
	And finally...
	Depends what they're doing.
	Yeah.
	If you've got an international organisation to try and prevent cruelty to gerbils, then that's probably a force for good.
	But if you've got an international organisation for child sex trafficking, then that's a force for bad.
	I hate to push my morals onto things.
	That's a bit of a spoiler there, but I'm sure if you get into the article you'll see what Hugo means.
	There might be more detail.
	And for more stunning, informative takes like that, you can go and follow Leo on Getter right here.
	Or on Twitter.
	Or on YouTube.
	I'm doing really well on YouTube now.
	I'm shortly going to overtake the Lotus Eaters number of viewers.
	That's alright, cut, cut, cut.
	Then you'll all have to come to my house and do Lotus Eaters there.
	And it'll be called Leo Eaters.
	Depends.
	How tall are the ceilings?
	Nice and spacious?
	Well, obviously tall enough for me.
	Actually, they are.
	They're really high.
	It's an old Georgian house.
	Fabulous.
	Excellent stuff.
	But without further ado, let's get into the news.
	So we've recently heard of Boris's new hire is going to be Guto Harry.
	This is Director of Communications.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	Following the resignation of the previous occupant over Partygate.
	Now, I think you remember Guto Harry.
	He's the absolute cretin who took the knee live on GB News.
	If we can just play this clip.
	And he got fired for it.
	Yeah.
	Good job, too, as well.
	And he just, live on air, says, oh, I think taking the knee is a good idea.
	We should all support blah, blah, blah.
	And bam, off he goes.
	I think he was trying to push this Black Lives Matter thing because he fancies the girl that was sitting next to him.
	So he was with GB News and then he got fired for taking the knee and then he went on to become the press secretary for Downing Street.
	That's right, yeah.
	Yeah, so his life is obviously in free fall.
	I hope when I get fired from GB News, I don't end up as the press secretary for Downing Street.
	Yep, he's also an arch-remainer, as we can see here.
	His heart was in it.
	He's a sufficiently uniquely good communicator that he almost single-handedly helped...
	Deliver 17 million people to vote for this course of action.
	But in the end, having secured that victory, clearly Michael Gove, among others, had some doubts, grave doubts, about whether Boris was going to deliver on what he persuaded the British public to vote for.
	And there lies the mistake in the end, the miscalculation on a key issue of our day.
	And he's paid the price for it.
	The rest of us are paying quite heavily for it as well.
	So that was a clip from 2016, before Guto Harry was known to GB News, before GB News was even a thing, and we just missed the start of that clip there, but he says Boris' heart wasn't in Remain.
	Yeah.
	Sorry, it wasn't in Leave.
	Well, yeah, Boris flip-flopped on the issue.
	He saw an opportunity for self-aggrandisement, which is Boris' main motivation.
	The TV's gone off as well.
	Have you not been keeping up on the payment plan?
	I don't know.
	I don't know what's going on, but we'll get through it.
	We'll get through it.
	Sorry, do carry on.
	So yeah, Boris wrote pieces in, I think, The Spectator and somewhere else as well, actually saying, Europe's great, we should be in Europe.
	And obviously that was the official Tory party position as well, but then Boris saw a chance to take the other tack and basically get his face in the papers.
	Yeah.
	Well, this is what a lot of people thought at the time.
	Well, Boris, you know, Mayor of London and everything, he's not really pro-Brexit or pro-Leave.
	He's probably pro-EU, but this seems like a good political gamble to get a load of million new voters for a later PM bid.
	And it certainly worked out, but not in the way he expected.
	And I remember seeing the photos of him coming out after the vote was declared.
	And you would have expected, having won a seismic political victory, that he would at least manage a smile.
	But he looked like someone had just died.
	Yeah!
	It's funny!
	It's funny when people...
	There's a hint of that in Trump's face when he won, because Trump wasn't expecting to win.
	You could see he was like, oh my god, I'm going to have to do the job now.
	I just wanted to have some fun.
	But in true Welsh fashion, Guto Harry accepted the offer with a sing-song, as the Daily Mail reports here.
	Quote...
	And we both laughed.
	Then I asked,"'Are you going to survive, Boris?' And he said, in his deep, slow and purposeful voice, and started to sing a little while finishing the sentence and saying,"'I will survive.' I inevitably invited him to say,"'You've got all your life to live.' And he replied, "'I've got all my love to give.' So we had a little blast from Gloria Gaynor.
	No one expects that, but it was.
	There was a lot of laughter, and we sat down to have a serious conversation about how to get the government back on track and how we are moving forward.
	He's not all that clownish, he added, but he's a very likeable character.
	90% of our discussion was very serious, but it shows he's a character and he has fun.
	He's not a vicious man, as some misrepresent him.
	It seems almost stereotypical that a Welshman starts a job at Downing Street with a song.
	I wonder if Lloyd George, when he got in 100 years ago, he started off by singing Men of Harlech on the way through.
	Although John Redwood, who's a big leaver, when John Redwood was Welsh Secretary, there's that amazing clip of him trying to sing along to the Welsh National Anthem and he doesn't know the words.
	If you're going to be Welsh Secretary, the first thing you're going to learn is the words to the National Anthem.
	But he tries to bluff it out by miming along.
	I don't know if you've ever watched Squid Game with the English dubbing.
	It's sort of like that.
	It's a proper kung fu movie.
	You're always just like...
	Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.
	Excruciating.
	But you've never been in that situation, right, where everyone's singing a song and you're just sort of looking around and mouthing the words.
	That's never happened to you?
	Yeah, but I'm not the Welsh secretary.
	Yeah, that is quite funny when that happened.
	But rounding out his bingo card of subversive leftist ideas, what do we have next?
	So it turns out that between GB News and working for Boris Johnson, Guto has worked as a useful idiot for the Chinese Communist Party.
	Has anybody not worked for the Chinese?
	I'm starting to feel left out.
	I know, I know.
	No Chinese shills, as far as I'm aware, on this podcast.
	John, we suspect sometimes, the producer John, but I think...
	That's racist.
	So here we go.
	Boris Johnson was forced to defend his new spin doctor within hours of him starting work today after it was revealed he was lobbying the government for Huawei.
	Which is not that one.
	That sounds like somebody from Newcastle would say.
	Yeah.
	It was confirmed at lunchtime that over the past two years he had lobbied the government on behalf of tech giant Huawei, who were barred from building the UK's 5G network amid claims the Chinese state could use it to spy on the British.
	At a lobby briefing this afternoon with Mr Harry in the room, the PM's spokesman said he provided advice to the clients of a private company.
	It's entirely legitimate, it's public domain, and obviously we would not exclude from government someone with valuable experience and expertise.
	So, it's amazing how at times they almost manage to sound grown-up, which is quite nice.
	And the Guardian reports here as well.
	Guto Harry, who was appointed Number 10's press chief on Monday in the wake of Partygate resignations, reportedly asked Sir Eddie Lister which ministers he could nudge for help.
	He met Lister, who was then the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff, as well as the three top executives from the technology firm Huawei, which has links to the ruling Chinese Communist Party on 2 June 2020, according to The Sun.
	To say it has links with the CCP feels like saying Krupp had links with Hitler's war machine.
	I mean, it's part of the CCP at this point.
	I don't think that's unfair to say.
	It's widely understood to be an arm of the Chinese intelligence service.
	I was going to quote a 600-page French strategy report, but I couldn't be bothered.
	We shall go into that another time.
	They continue.
	The paper said that Harry, representing lobbying firm Hawthorne Advisors, used the 25-minute video call to ask which ministers to approach at a time when the security service was reviewing the risk of allowing the firm into the UK's core telecommunications network.
	Do you remember this story last year, two years ago?
	Yeah.
	That was a big kerfuffle about, oh, should we have China, should we not?
	Yeah, and there's also issues with the phones.
	So the phones weren't going to be updated with the proper operating systems.
	I think Google Play apps wouldn't be installed on the phones because they make really good phones, apparently.
	Really good cameras that you can use to spy on citizens.
	Great microphones.
	Great microphones.
	Voice recognition.
	Face recognition.
	Really good encryption.
	But, yeah, so there were issues around the phones as well.
	So basically anything from China.
	Because as you say, any big business in China is basically state-controlled.
	Yeah, yeah.
	They have a very interesting way of taking control of them as well.
	A lot of the time they'll put party members on the board, so there's always someone watching.
	And a lot of the time they'll be very preferential, so they'll be close ties, as I understand it, between CCP top brass and people in the big companies.
	And they'll use this sort of personal network of connections, which the Chinese called Guangxi, to do business.
	And so that means while it looks from a Western perspective like complete subversion and corruption, it's somewhat more understandable from a Chinese perspective.
	And the way they actually transitioned from a completely state-controlled economy to a sort of state capitalist economy is quite interesting.
	So they didn't have this, you know, complete revolution where they just completely privatized everything like they did in In Russia, which, you know, was a disaster because it leads to cronyism and corruption.
	You know, the state assets being sold, you know, just fire sale prices.
	So Chinese companies, if they were more productive than other companies, could produce extra and then sell that at a market rate.
	Right.
	So then gradually over time, the stuff that was being produced for the market rate, you know, grew to be a larger and larger part of the economy.
	So it was quite a smooth, overall, you know, a macro level, quite a smooth transition to a capitalist system, but still maintaining the control structures.
	Well, that is quite remarkable.
	But then I think the questions really come in terms of the rule of law in China, because the understanding I have is that rule of law does not really exist.
	There's sort of, it can be very arbitrary as to whether your business is on the right side or the wrong side of the firing line.
	And a lot of that depends on how well you play the political game.
	Yeah.
	I mean, the government, as well as controlling business, they also control the criminal justice system and the courts.
	So it's a lot like Scotland.
	So, you know, similar levels of chances of getting a fair trial.
	Yeah, I imagine so.
	Especially if you post something dodgy online.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Misgendering a senior member of the CCP. I'd love to see that happen.
	Scottish slash Chinese crime.
	Did you know you can't even name senior members of the CCP on Weibo?
	Oh, really?
	Their name block.
	Especially if you're a tennis player and one of them's blank nonched you.
	Well, that's actually one of the interesting features of that case.
	We'll get on to that in the next segment in a second.
	So in this discussion about Huawei, he said, this PM, meaning Boris, is not anti-China and is not Donald Trump, adding that Johnson believes in good relationships with China.
	He is not coming from a negative place in any way.
	He's coming from Eton.
	I'd describe that as a pretty negative place, but there we go.
	He added, we are caught.
	We want the technology, 5G. We want it rolled out.
	There's an American concern and a parliamentary concern.
	There are a large number of MPs across the political divide who have a problem with China.
	Some are Atlanticists, some over COVID, some over Hong Kong, some over human rights.
	And I imagine he stopped there because he could just carry on at that point and just listing all of the problems that people might have with China at this point.
	Because I don't think it's very popular on the world stage.
	No.
	No.
	And then finally, we have this report here.
	British using Chinese CCTV linked to repression of Uyghurs.
	Now, I'm always slightly sceptical when I hear linked to in a headline because usually the link can be very, very tenuous.
	But not in this case, it turns out.
	Schools, councils, police forces and government departments are using Chinese surveillance cameras linked to the repression of the Uyghurs, data shared with the Times shows.
	Hikvision and Dahua, both Chinese state-owned companies like Huawei, have been blacklisted by US authorities over their links to the systematic oppression of Muslim amigos in China.
	British officials and rights campaigners say they provide the technological infrastructure for Chinese concentration camps.
	Now, where do you think these might be stalled?
	Because we have so many cameras in this country, right?
	London has or had at one point more CCTV per unit area than anywhere in the world.
	Yeah.
	It's quite remarkable.
	Well, now it seems like all of those cameras are being bought at cut price from Chinese companies, who may or may not be using them for nefarious ends.
	Thousands of public institutions in Britain are thought to have installed them, which they watch school pupils, government workers and members of the public.
	Many of the devices have advanced surveillance capabilities, including facial, gender and behaviour detection.
	Gender detection is pretty good.
	Raising alarm among privacy advocates.
	Yeah, behavior detection is a really worrying thing.
	So they can use whatever cues you're giving off.
	The algorithm can actually recognize when they think you're up to something dodgy.
	When they think you're loitering about to pull out a spray can and daub Boris sucks.
	Yeah, if your eyes shift side to side, then they know you're about to do some shoplifting.
	Really?
	That's the thing?
	Yeah, and the facial recognition on these things is terrifying as well.
	Obviously, we know the technology is there.
	We can see in Google Photos and all the rest of it, it recognizes faces.
	But yeah, we've had it in this country for quite a while now with ANPR, so number plate recognition, which is, you know, you can track cars going through.
	I remember when I worked for the police, you could track cars going across London.
	Then if it went into a borough that didn't have ANPR, the car would disappear for a while and then reappear.
	But with facial recognition, there's so much opportunity for this to be exploited to nefarious ends.
	So if somebody's a political dissident or...
	Say, for example, it's a Middle Eastern government that wants to crack down on homosexuals or something.
	These algorithms can actually recognise...
	They've got basically gaydar...
	Like an actual gaydar.
	I'm not even joking.
	They can recognise people's sexuality and stuff.
	So it's really...
	And obviously ethnicity and things like that can be programmed in.
	So if you've got a racist, homophobic government, then these cameras can really speed up their process of discrimination.
	Yeah, so you should be concerned about it.
	you are on the political spectrum, unless you're actually in Downing Street, you should be extremely worried about this stuff, because it seems like they've just quietly instituted a system which can watch and track everyone in the country, to be honest.
	And no one voted for that, as I recall.
	I don't recall a referendum or any kind of discussion on this subject.
	It just quietly comes in through the back door.
	Yeah, and the advantages seem slightly nebulous.
	I mean, it's nice to be able to apprehend crooks and things, but how many of those are going to be real crooks and how many are going to be somebody who accidentally misgendered someone or fell foul of one of the new laws that they're bringing through?
	Yeah, it does seem like a very...
	A very slippery slope.
	Suddenly we lose all of these, the ability to conduct ourselves anonymously and in relative freedom and peace and security without being constantly watched and surveilled all of the time.
	We lose that and in return maybe some terrorists get caught or something.
	It doesn't seem like a good trade-off.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It seems very dystopian to feel.
	Yeah.
	It's a very big brother.
	Apparently, more than half of secondary schools in England, according to their Freedom of Information requests, use Hikvision or Dahua cameras, with 386 of 676 respondents saying they were installed.
	That's already over half of our secondary schools in the country use these Chinese cameras.
	Oof.
	Yeah, a school in Surrey said its surveillance system had object and demographic detection.
	A school in Brent said its China-made cameras are capable of detecting gender and clothing.
	East Riding of Yorkshire said that their CCTV units could identify fights occurring, track people, clothing color searching, hair color and length detection, all the stuff that you were talking about.
	And, oh my goodness, that just sounds horrendous.
	I feel like, you know, I don't know if you've seen V for Vendetta.
	We did a podcast on it a while ago.
	But there's one point where I think people go around spray canning security cameras and things like that.
	You see it as quite a common trope in dystopian fiction.
	I do quite like that idea.
	I wouldn't advocate anyone to do that, of course, but I do quite like the idea.
	I don't like the parking ones either.
	I got caught by a parking one and I had to pay all this money because I was like four minutes over the time or something.
	And yeah, I thought we should cut them down with hacksaws.
	And finally, the Metropolitan Police is among 15 police forces found to use Hikvision and Dahua and 35 hospitals and 49 universities also had surveillance systems supplied by them.
	One hospital has a face-detecting Hikvision camera at its A&E entrance.
	Theoretically, you could probably track what medical procedures people are having done, just by tracking their movements and timings and comings and goings.
	See how they're walking when they leave.
	Yeah, exactly.
	So it is a somewhat troublesome world that we are entering, and it might look a lot like communist China, on which note.
	On which note, we've got more Communist China with the next story.
	So the TV's going off again.
	Don't worry about it.
	Why does it keep going off?
	I don't know.
	It's made by Huawei.
	It's controlled by the Chinese state.
	But yeah, basically, this next story is about Peng Shui.
	So she's a retired Chinese tennis player, if we can go to the...
	That's not her, that's someone else.
	So Peng Shui, not to be confused with her sister Feng Shui, who's an interior decorator, So Peng Shui, she's a retired Chinese tennis player, former doubles number one in the world, singles number 14.
	She won the doubles at Wimbledon in 2013 and in 2014 she reached the semi-finals of the US Open as singles.
	And in November, she posted this post, if we scroll down a little bit, she posted on Weibo, which is a sort of Chinese version of Facebook, she posted this like, you know, essay.
	I mean, it really is.
	It looks like a novel at this point.
	It is, yeah.
	Because, I mean, I was wondering, you know, what is Chinese writing like, you know, but because one of the things is like a little picture, it's actually loads and loads and loads and loads of words.
	So I've read a translation of it, which I don't recommend you read the whole thing because it is dead boring.
	It's But basically she says she was sexually, you know, forced into sex.
	Yeah.
	If this were the West it would be a Me Too thing, absolutely.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	The only reason it isn't is because of different cultural norms in China.
	Oh, so cultural norms that allow forced sex to be okay?
	I mean, I think it's still a Me Too thing.
	Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
	But there isn't that feeling in China.
	So she posted this on, you know, Chinese Facebook, so Weibo, which is the social media there, and she said about three years ago, so this is an excerpt of it, About three years ago, Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli.
	So he's a top-ranking Chinese official.
	He was number seven in the Chinese establishment.
	So very powerful.
	We're talking the equivalent of John Prescott.
	I don't know...
	So she says, about three years ago, Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli, you retired.
	You asked Dr Liu from the tennis centre to get hold of me again and arrange to play tennis with me at Beijing's Kangming Hotel.
	I should imagine she won because she's a tennis star and he's 40 years older than her.
	But after playing tennis in the morning, you and your wife, Kang Ji, together took me to your home.
	Then you took me into a room in your house and just like in Tan Jin, more than 10 years ago, wanted to have sex with me.
	So he's had sex.
	She's saying he's tried to have sex with her before.
	It seems like they've had some kind of relationship before.
	There's some sort of on-off thing going on here.
	So I was very scared that afternoon.
	I didn't expect it would be like this at all with someone keeping guard outside, which is actually the guy's wife.
	Oh my God.
	I mean, that's some next-level game.
	If, like, you can cheat on your wife.
	Not only cheat on your wife, but get your wife to stand guard outside.
	I mean, I don't know who he's worried is going to turn up.
	I mean, you think the most thing you're going to be most worried about is your wife turning up.
	But if your wife's keeping guard, I don't know, maybe you're...
	It's communist Chinese levels of game.
	Maybe you're worried about the party turning up.
	Yeah, you don't want Xi Jinping turning up.
	Just having a nod.
	Are you free?
	So...
	So yeah, so she continues, because it was impossible anyone would believe that a wife would allow this.
	We had sex once seven years ago.
	So she explicitly says they had sex seven years ago.
	And then you went to Beijing for the standing committee and then never contacted me again.
	I long buried everything in my heart since you didn't intend to take any responsibility at all.
	Why did you still want to come back from me, take me to your home and force me to have sex with you?
	She uses the word force.
	Now you say in the translation, this is a disputed...
	So she might have meant anally rape.
	She might have done.
	So I'm not a Chinese speaker, but we had a word with John who looked through it before.
	It's not explicitly a sexual assault allegation, as it sounds in English, but I mean, read it on the face of it.
	This is clearly very coercive.
	It's a terrible situation for anyone to be in.
	A society that builds this kind of coercive power structures into it is clearly rotten.
	Yeah, and we see this in communist cultures basically because the party apparatchiks have so much power.
	They have leverage over people's lives.
	If somebody wants their child to go to university or wants, you know, whatever, you've got to make the party apparatchiks happy.
	Or to get a slot on a national tennis team, perhaps.
	Or to get a slot on a national tennis team.
	So, you know, these...
	People always think communism is going to be some sort of utopia.
	Everybody's doing stuff for the greater good.
	Nobody in their life has ever acted for the greater good.
	Maybe Nelson Mandela.
	But apart from that, there are very few and far between.
	You can't have a system that relies on people acting in completely selfless, beneficent ways.
	It's not going to work.
	You know, the great thing about capitalism is you can be a greedy, selfish ogre and it still works.
	It still works.
	I want to make money.
	I want to make money.
	So I'm going to provide this thing that you want.
	I know you got to give me money for it.
	And it's like, well, now they've got something that they want that is greater value to them than it was to produce it.
	And, you know, the system works.
	It's beautiful.
	But yeah, so she carries on.
	After dinner, I was still not at all willing to have sex.
	You said you hated me.
	You said you never forgot about me in those seven years since they had sex before and would be nice to me and so on.
	I was scared and panicking, but given the feelings I had for you from seven years ago, I agreed.
	Yes, we had sex.
	And she continues at length.
	You can read the full thing.
	It's very long.
	It is very long.
	I mean, this is why they need Twitter in China, to keep their sexual accusations short.
	But to sum it up, so she claims she'd been having an affair with the Communist Chinese Party, Tom Brass.
	He's 75 years old now.
	His wife guarded the door, and they had sex three years ago and seven years ago.
	And there was something ten years ago as well that they mentioned.
	Yeah, there seems to be something on and off.
	Yeah.
	It seems like deep personal drama in a very strange environment.
	Yeah.
	But this seems very nasty, what's happened to her.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And the next tab, you can see the guy that she's accusing.
	So here he is, Zhang Gaoli.
	So that's him.
	The Chinese Casanova.
	What a man.
	Look at those angular cheekbones.
	Wow.
	This is, I mean, 40 years older than her, you know, and she seems to be, you know, she was quite into him from what she says in the post.
	But there's, he's quite an interesting guy.
	He worked his way up from farm work to become one of China's top nonces.
	And there's a culture in Chinese society where high-ranking Chinese officials keep concubines.
	That's a sort of, it's a small porcupine that you can have sex with, but from the front, because you don't have sex with a porcupine from the back.
	No, they keep, I guess, basically mistresses, concubines.
	And presumably that's a status thing as well.
	Yeah, it's probably a status thing.
	It's like, here's my main check and here's my side piece as well.
	Like that guy who sings in Starboy.
	Like a rapper.
	But there's an idea that in different cultures, even though we have modern democracies or different political systems or everything, the way that people actually behave is like the governments of 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago.
	So culturally this would be like, I don't know, a warlord having concubines.
	Except today that means a top member of the Communist Party having mistresses.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, totally.
	Very strange.
	Yeah, Genghis Khan.
	Genghis Khan had loads of them.
	And Genghis Khan also had the world's first ever recorded pet gerbil.
	Really?
	Yeah, that's true.
	Do you know the story about it?
	I don't know.
	Well, basically, as the legend goes, people probably had pet gerbils, but they just weren't recorded because they weren't important enough.
	But Genghis Khan was going across Mongolia doing all his Me Too stuff, but nobody could stop him because they didn't have hashtags.
	Right, right.
	So one night he's sleeping in his big tent and an assassin crept into the tent to kill him with a big sword.
	And this gerbil bit the assassin's foot.
	So the assassin screamed.
	I don't know if you've been bitten by a gerbil, but it is sore.
	And this woke up Genghis, who then killed the assassin with his own sword.
	And then Genghis was so impressed with the bravery of this...
	Gerbil, that he decided to keep him as a pet.
	But it's all nonsense, because obviously the gerbil would have just run out under the side of the tent, because they didn't have sewn in ground sheets in those days.
	So basically what happened was, this is my reading of the situation, Genghis Khan just wanted a pet gerbil.
	Right.
	Because they're cool.
	They're like little faces.
	They sit up.
	They eat nuts and stuff.
	They're fun.
	You know, they're fun animals.
	Great pets.
	So he wanted a pet gerbil.
	But he couldn't turn around to his chieftains and be like, oh, by the way, I, Genghis Khan, the greatest warlord of all time, I want a pet gerbil because I like their little faces and I like to feed them nuts.
	So he had to make up this story about the assassin.
	So it's actually a very early example of toxic masculinity.
	Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
	Getting back to the Chinese Communist Party.
	So after making this, obviously this set huge ripples through Chinese society.
	There's a bombshell allegation.
	It was big news in the West as well.
	And it sort of peeled back the curtain and showed the reality.
	Because Chinese society and Chinese culture is quite repressed and quite closed.
	You don't talk about personal stuff.
	You don't hate your dirty laundry.
	That's a real no-no.
	Especially some relating to a top official because they've got so much power.
	People disappear and all the rest of it.
	So Xi disappeared for a while from social media and the public eye.
	And it became a public relations disaster for the Chinese government.
	So people trotted out, if we scroll down, people trotted out.
	So especially outside China, where people can freely talk about it.
	In China, any Weibo post, any social media post mentioning it was quickly taken down.
	But outside China, people could talk about it.
	So the editor of the Chinese state propaganda media...
	Hu Zijin.
	So he said, and bear in mind, this is to try and quell the situation and put people's minds at ease.
	He said, as a person who's familiar with the Chinese system, I don't believe Peng Shui has received retaliation and repression speculated by foreign media for the thing people talked about.
	The thing people talked about, he can't even say it himself.
	That shows the level.
	Chinese state media, this is them trying to cover it over.
	This happened when other people have disappeared.
	They're never photographed in public, but they're seen and carefully stage-managed things.
	So the next tab shows, this is an email that Peng Shui sent to Steve Simon, the World Tennis Association chairman and CEO.
	Because obviously her being a female tennis player, the World Tennis Association was very concerned about this, concerned about the safety of her and also the ramifications for the game.
	So she said, hello everyone, this is Peng Shui.
	Which, I mean, as a way to open an email, like have you ever...
	This is definitely Peng Shui.
	Yeah, this is definitely Peng Shui.
	Hello everyone, this is Peng Shui.
	It's like one of those, you know what I mean, like a scam email.
	So she states regarding the recent news released on the official website of the World Tennis Association, the content has not been confirmed or verified by myself and it was released without my consent.
	I'm not missing, nor am I unsafe.
	I've just been resting at home and everything is fine.
	Thank you again for caring about me.
	If the World Tennis Association publishes any more news about me, please verify it with me and release it with my consent.
	Blah, blah, blah.
	I hope Chinese tennis will become better and better.
	So obviously, reading between the lines, it's written by the Chinese Communist Party.
	It's not written by her.
	It doesn't sound like what she wrote in her original statement.
	And on the 20th of November, Hu Jixing, who's the guy who...
	The editor you mentioned before.
	Yeah, who I mentioned before, you know, the head of, editor of the propaganda newspaper in China.
	Which one?
	So he released this video showing her.
	But it's, you know, carefully stage managed.
	She's clapping for the other people.
	This is a tennis tournament in China.
	Mm-hmm.
	So, on the 30th of November, the World Tennis Association announced they would suspend all tournaments, all tennis tournaments, in Hong Kong and China.
	Good for them.
	Very brave.
	It's not like the NBA, is it?
	Like, the NBA are terrified of losing Chinese money.
	But the WTA, they actually have the guts to stand up and say, okay, well, until we find out what happens to our player, no tournaments.
	It's very brave.
	I think because there's a real risk of harm to one of the players here.
	Also, given it's sexual and all the rest of it, you can't just sweep this under the carpet.
	I've seen this with the Fast and Furious, so when John Cena referred to Taiwan...
	To give grovelling apologies.
	Yeah, he gave this grovelling apology and, you know, then basically, you know, said Taiwan isn't its own country.
	It's a province of China.
	You know, it was shocking.
	It was really shocking to see John Cena.
	You think, you know, like you're big, you're tough, you're American, you stand for freedom and liberty and self-determination.
	Where's the money?
	But yeah, what about that money?
	Everybody's got a price.
	So that was the Fast and the Furious thing.
	There's been other examples of this kind of thing.
	So on the 19th of December, she was actually interviewed.
	So they sort of stopped her while she was walking.
	And she basically said, I've never said or written that anyone has sexually assaulted me.
	I have to clearly stress this point.
	With regards to Weibo, it's about my personal privacy.
	There's been a lot of misunderstanding.
	There should be no distorted interpretation.
	And yesterday, she completely retracted the allegations.
	So the next tab has this.
	So, I mean, obviously this is a crunch time for China because we've got the Winter Olympics coming up.
	And Peng said she...
	Oh, they're going on at the moment, aren't they, the Winter Olympics?
	Oh, yeah, they've started.
	Yeah, somebody...
	I think the first medal was won by somebody who's been convicted of doping.
	Oh, dear.
	That's a good start.
	So, yeah, classic Olympics.
	Yeah.
	Gotta love it.
	Yesterday she completely retracted the allegations.
	She said she deleted the Weeble post containing the accusations after just 30 minutes because she wanted to.
	And the reason for a lack of communication with the World Tennis Association was a computer malfunction.
	Are you buying it?
	Possibly made by Huawei.
	No, I'm completely not buying it.
	I think she disappeared.
	I don't know if she spent much time in the torture chambers, but she was probably shown them.
	She was probably shown around them and being like, do you like being a famous tennis star and having money and celebrity status?
	Or do you want us to remove your fingernails?
	Maybe computer malfunction has another meaning in Chinese, which means a tour of state detention facilities.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And she says, I never disappeared, it's just that a lot of people, like my friends, including from the IOC, messaged me and it's quite impossible to reply to so many messages!
	Yeah, she was too busy!
	There were so many messages checking she was safe that she couldn't reply to any of them.
	And French newspaper Le Monde noted that Wang Khan asked, who's a journalist, or I think he's actually the sort of handler...
	Right.
	For the Chinese government.
	So he asked to review the questions in advance and the interview had to be published without any additional comments from the two journalists who interviewed Peng.
	So no conjecture or analysis.
	So completely stage managed, completely controlled.
	Completely controlled.
	No free press.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Like when you're doing an interview with Mariah Carey.
	So, but this isn't the first time this has happened.
	I mean, this is the first time it's happened and I think the Chinese government has managed it so badly.
	And, you know, actually all their attempts to sort of reassure people have just made people more suspicious.
	So, you know, previously, Zhao Wei, who's one of China's wealthiest and biggest stars...
	She was removed from video streaming sites, so all her content and stuff was taken down.
	She was in Mulan, Rise of a Warrior, the big Disney film, which I think part of it was filmed in, what's it called, the province where the...
	Ah, Xinjiang.
	Xinjiang, where the Uyghurs are.
	I mean, Western companies will just...
	I mean, I know you're saying there's links with Chinese state repression, but...
	I think Apple and someone else, another company, were actually, they had a lawsuit in America to try and overturn some legislation that would stop them using slave labour, Uighur slave labour.
	Because if you commission stuff through the Chinese government, they will use Uighur slaves in their concentration camps to produce stuff.
	It's absolutely mad.
	We're benefiting from slave labour right now.
	And it's so mad that people who You know, moan about slavery that happened 400 years ago.
	Completely silent!
	On modern day slavery.
	Completely silent on modern day slavery.
	Whoever it is, whoever's doing it, they don't care.
	They just care about the one from 200, 300.
	Yeah, yeah.
	If it's not white people doing it, we don't want to know!
	Yeah, that tells you a lot about them, doesn't it?
	But, yeah.
	And Zhao Wee, you know, she's one of China's wealthiest and biggest stars.
	She'd made comments.
	She's also very close friends with Jack Ma, who is China's richest man.
	But he's also spent some time, hasn't he?
	He's disappeared.
	So he's gone from being China's richest man and hugely, hugely powerful.
	You know, really like a sort of Jeff Bezos character.
	Right.
	You know, iconic.
	And he does these, you know, huge stage presentations that are really fun.
	Right.
	So on October the 24th, they gave a speech critical of the Chinese financial establishment and then just completely disappeared.
	Going from lots of public appearances, always being seen in public, being photographed, completely disappeared.
	Apart from carefully staged, managed appearances, so no photos in public, just photos of him playing golf and stuff like that.
	Right.
	So his IPO here, I think it was Ant Group, so he had a big fintech IPO, initial public offering where they sell the shares to the public.
	That was nixed.
	And Alibaba, so he's the founder of Alibaba, which is the equivalent of Amazon or something like that.
	It's colossal, yeah.
	Huge.
	Like a trillion.
	His business empire has a trillion dollar value.
	So we're talking huge.
	And the share price has tanked.
	I think it's nearly halved since he gave that speech.
	That's presumably because investors consents that this old CCP is moving in.
	Yep, absolutely.
	So Jack Ma has been silenced.
	He's been critical of the Chinese establishment and, you know, obviously a political threat, you know, a potential challenger to the Communist Party.
	And also closer to home, so Nigel Ng, who's a comedian.
	I used to gig with him quite a bit.
	Brilliant comedian.
	He's Malaysian.
	Absolutely brilliant comedian.
	Brilliant club comedian.
	And he really hit on this formula.
	He's got this character called Uncle Roger, He pretends he's this old guy from China or Malaysia or something and he's basically criticising white people for how they cook rice.
	That's the essence of it.
	It sounds niche.
	It sounds niche, but he's built millions and millions of followers off the back of it.
	He's just doing insanely well off it.
	But as a club comedian, honestly, absolutely one of the best.
	It's weird seeing him get famous for this weird character instead of for his club comedy, if you know what I mean.
	But yeah, so he's been collaborating with people on social media to raise his profiles.
	So he did a video with this guy called Mr.
	Chen, who's based in New York, I think, and is previously...
	I think he's Chinese, but he previously criticised the Chinese government's policies and human rights records.
	So he mentioned...
	the treatment of the Uyghurs, Uyghur Muslims, and also brought up the Tiananmen Square massacre when possibly thousands of Chinese students were massacred, shot and killed by their own government.
	And if you're watching in China, because they'll have sensed that we've said Tiananmen Square, so you will have apparatchik goons at the door soon to torture you.
	But yeah, so he brought this up and then he retracted, he deleted the video that he did with this critic of China, Mr Chen, and came out.
	And if we scroll down, you can actually see what he said.
	And what was his, here we go.
	Yeah, here we go.
	Yeah, he had not been aware of Mr Chen.
	Chen's political thoughts and incorrect comments about China in the past.
	So we're seeing, you know, China's got huge power to coerce people, to force people to retract statements.
	Obviously, Mr.
	Chen hadn't said anything incorrect about China.
	But if you want access to the Chinese market, if, you know, you want your thumbs to be attached to your body, then you've got to toe the government line.
	Absolutely.
	And on the subject of towing the government line, we have new news from Canada coming out.
	So we've been following the Freedom Convoy rally.
	I don't know if you've been following this at all, Leo, but we've had...
	Oh, these transphobes and racists!
	Right, all of these, we usually call them truckers.
	LAUGHTER Going to all over Canada, mainly Ottawa, but also other places like Winnipeg and Toronto.
	There have been rallies in support of freedom and against COVID, lockdown and public health restrictions.
	And yesterday we had some news that there was a hit and run attack, we won't play the clip, outside Manitoba legislature.
	Someone just drove a jeep through a crowd and injured four people.
	and we found out who it is.
	A man is in police custody after four people were injured in a hit and run outside the legislature in Winnipeg.
	Winnipeg police were called to reports of a collision near Broadway and Memorial Boulevard at 9.50pm Friday night.
	Police said a Jeep Patriot had driven through a group of protesters that were part of the Freedom Convoy rally outside the Manitoba Legislative Building.
	So who do you think did this?
	Well, I actually read ahead, so I know who did it.
	But I would have guessed.
	Yeah.
	So if we go here.
	Oh, it's an Antifa activist.
	Imagine my shock.
	And I believe we also found allegations that he has been accused of child rape.
	Are there any Antifa people who haven't been accused of child rape?
	I know.
	Oh my god, they're like the BBC 1970s celebrities of the political protestant world.
	Well it was like with Rittenhouse as well.
	He fires three people in a crowd who are attacking him and it turns out we have a wife beater and a child abuser and so on.
	It's crazy.
	But there's a lot that's going on, and this is just in Winnipeg.
	We have some more footage from Ottawa.
	If we have a look at this, someone spotted something.
	So allegedly this is the police breaking up a camp where they found dodgy stuff.
	There are some trucks there in the camp, but it seems a bit weird.
	And you'll notice there's something you don't hear in that clip.
	Honking.
	And that may seem strange, but everywhere else where the truckers are, they're bibbing their horns and making a hell of a racket.
	So why is there no honking there?
	Very strange.
	This is basically being used as part of an accusation that the truckers are stockpiling weaponry and things like that.
	But then we look at this one here, and someone walked by it the other day, and it seemed to just sort of be being built up.
	A bit suspicious.
	So it's a thing?
	Yeah.
	And then we have a sane take from the left, as we always do, about what's happening in Canada at the moment.
	What's happening in Canada with the use of trucks and tractors to create mobile right-wing extremist warlord convoys to try to shut down urban centres and terrorise healthcare workers and political opposition will be replicated in the US soon.
	That's quite remarkable.
	Mobile right-wing extremist warlord convoys.
	Where do I sign up?
	I mean, I didn't see them carrying AK-47s in the back of Toyota Jeeps down the side.
	How about anybody?
	I mean, this just shows how the words like far-right, extremist, racist, transphobe, misogynist, have been completely decoupled from their original meaning.
	And now, you know, anybody, these truckers, they're just opposing a mandate, a vaccine mandate.
	They're not opposing the vaccines.
	85% of the truckers have been vaccinated.
	They're opposing these work restrictions and just the authoritarian government trying to force people.
	Yeah.
	Absolutely.
	Which is a completely legitimate stance to take, and really a pro-freedom stance, not an extremist or a far-right stance.
	And they're just, you know, Trudeau's like, oh, they're transphobes.
	What's that got to do?
	They're obviously not transphobes.
	Has he done a poll of all the truckers to find out their views on transgender people?
	You know what I mean?
	No, it's just the standard smear tactics.
	But we'll notice the developments on the ground.
	So apparently the police are going around and trying to seize fuel to stop truckers from being able to move around and get to the city and so on and so forth.
	Stealing.
	Yeah, so we have an update here from the Gordelock Zone.
	Update on Ottawa police and their illegal seizures of fuel jerrycans.
	This is direct from my fellow truckers on Wellington Street.
	The truckers are completely cooperating with the police in these illegal seizures.
	This is why.
	This is completely illegal and makes the police in the city of Ottawa look weak and stupid.
	Let them take the fuel.
	This will all eventually be thrown out of court and ultimately be counterproductive to our antagonists.
	My contacts tell me that the people who do supply them with fuel are just going to keep bringing it.
	By the thousands.
	Everyone is walking around downtown Ottawa with jerry cans.
	My one contact topped off his tanks and his generator last night with no issue.
	Because it's Canada, it's cold, you need to have a generator to keep the lights on.
	Some Freedom Convoy Canada 2022 supporters are walking around Ottawa with empty jerrycans to tie the cops up by having them engage with people carrying nothing.
	It's very inventive.
	I really like that.
	So it's a load of fake jerrycans.
	There's a game you play.
	It's like the Shell game, isn't it?
	Where you've got like an acorn or whatever it is under one of them.
	The police have to search all of the empty ones to try and get one with actual fuel in it.
	There is some deep subversive warfare which some state can do nothing about.
	I don't know what he means by that.
	Hashtag jerrycan revolt as a yellow vest.
	There is no legal way for the city of Ottawa to stop anyone walking anywhere downtown.
	They literally cannot stop the flow of donations and fuel no matter how much they stop.
	Keep those jerrycans coming.
	If they take yours, let them have it.
	Cooperate.
	Be nice to the cops.
	Keep up the positivity and good vibes.
	That sounds really nice.
	Really wholesome.
	So what's Trudeau's response to this?
	Where's Trudeau?
	Does anyone know?
	Is he hiding?
	He's in hiding.
	Vancouver Island.
	You reckon?
	That's your bet.
	Well, that's where he was reported to be.
	Interesting.
	About as far away from Ottawa as he can get and still be in Canada.
	Right.
	Yeah, he didn't flee to the US, though, which would have been my second best guess.
	So the ministers have been interviewed, obviously, and people are asking the questions, well, where's Trudeau?
	And they have yet to answer it.
	Apparently he's in virtual meetings and he's been in virtual hiding, so he's basically the virtual prime minister at this point.
	As we've seen previously, they say it's in the Prime Minister's nature to go into hiding when things get rough.
	During the peak of the WE charity scandal, Trudeau took a week off of work for no clear reason.
	I believe he's been done multiple times for financial irregularities, but I may be remembering that wrong.
	But the establishment is starting to mobilise against the truckers, so this is where it starts to get a little more interesting.
	They take their time.
	Here's a statement from Trudeau.
	If we can play this clip.
	Individuals?
	We're trying to blockade our economy, our democracy, and our fellow citizens' daily lives.
	It has to stop.
	That sounds brave and resolute, which is probably why he said it before he ran away.
	Yeah, why does he go down and talk to them?
	Yeah, that's what you do in a democracy, right?
	Yeah.
	You have a conversation.
	They're not bloodthirsty mobs.
	No.
	They're not smashing things up.
	In fact, this is the so-called bloodthirsty mob.
	of.
	We'll play a five second clip of it so we don't get copyright struck.
	We've got some Bangor vibes going down in downtown Toronto.
	Big old speakers, people dancing.
	There's some truckers of colour.
	So Trudeau is being racist.
	Exactly.
	Perfectly multicultural protest.
	The cavalry is also coming, as we can see from this clip.
	The Canadian frontier says, end the mandates now.
	Doesn't that just look so wholesome?
	Riding around on the planes.
	Looks cold.
	Canadian flags.
	Yeah.
	Does that not appeal to something?
	How do you honk a horse?
	I haven't looked into that, I'm afraid, Leah.
	And then we also have the courts that are now starting to respond.
	So we have this report here.
	An Ottawa judge will order a 10-day injunction against the use of air horns at protests.
	It's a protest.
	They don't have to follow the...
	The whole point of a protest is that you do things that the government, the authorities might not want you to do because you're protesting against them.
	You know what I mean?
	I bet this guy didn't do anything about Black Lives Matter.
	I bet he was like, oh yeah, just smash up those cars, burn those businesses.
	That's a very good point.
	Yeah, but no, this is apparently too much already.
	Keith Wilson wants the order to take effect at noon Tuesday.
	So one more night of partying.
	Wilson says that, so I believe it's the defence, says this will give people time to give notice of the order.
	McLean, the judge, I believe, says the onus is on police to let them know.
	Contempt is a very, very serious matter.
	The police have requested specific terms in the language of the order to indicate they will enforce contempt of court.
	So they want the justification to go and grab people who are bibbing their air horns, basically.
	Right, right.
	And police lawyer Stewart says OPS won.
	Yeah.
	They want to be absolutely fireproof, presumably.
	When they go in and grab people, they don't want to then have to deal with lawsuits around that.
	But suddenly the justice comes out saying the order will be effective immediately instead of delayed.
	However, it can't be enforced on anyone who hasn't been warned of it, he says.
	McLean shuts down the request to allow horn blowing for five minutes a day, maybe at 5pm.
	No, completely banned.
	Completely banned.
	Cannot be born at all.
	No, out.
	McLean says he's already said the horns are just to draw attention to the protest, which isn't needed.
	So that's the judge's opinion.
	He said the police must give people found breaking the order the opportunity to agree to comply with it before they can be held in contempt.
	So this all sounds rather academic, you know, a bit sort of waffly legal speak.
	But what does this actually mean on the street?
	Well, let's go here to the next clip.
	No, not that.
	The next clip.
	Good afternoon, protesters, truckers, farmers, tradesmen, Albertans, and all Canadians.
	We want to start off by thanking everybody for the support we have received in the last week.
	Edna, go to the next clip, please.
	Just a little old man.
	He's half the size of that guy.
	He looks like a real threat to society.
	That's right.
	He's a supporter for Canadian freedom.
	Who cares?
	They shouldn't live in the capital of Canada then.
	They better leave.
	Because until the mandates are ended, this is not going to stop.
	Stop harassing old men.
	You don't have to show them anything.
	It's against the law.
	He doesn't...
	For what?
	Hey!
	What are you doing?
	Hey!
	Hey!
	That's assault!
	I've got it all on video!
	I don't know the legality of any of this, but it's not a good look.
	Yeah, he failed while you're back!
	Man handled by a guy twice his size.
	We're back.
	We're filming.
	We're doing our part.
	And, like, it's not...
	The protesters aren't being violent here.
	They're not throwing anything.
	They're not trying to start anything.
	And the police just come in and grab them.
	Yeah.
	So this is a Babylon Bee Party article in response.
	Trudeau orders all geese rounded up and shot for honking in solidarity with truckers.
	I'd like to see them try.
	But it's a glorious image they've got there.
	Now we also have, if we go to the clip after the one we just played, so not this one, we also have a statement here which is quite interesting, accusing the truckers of arson.
	Let's play this clip.
	Yesterday, we learned of a horrific story that clearly demonstrates the malicious intent of these protesters occupying our city.
	At 5 a.m., and this was captured on the building's video, on Sunday morning, two young people at the lobby of the building on Lisker Street, where they proceeded to light fire starter bricks near the elevators before taping up the door handles so residents would struggle to get out during a fire.
	Thankfully, no one was hurt.
	So apparently, like these protesters, they must be really dangerous because they're trying to seal residents in their buildings and burn them down.
	And Singh, who's a minister in the Canadian government, comes out and repeats this, if we play the next clip.
	It's clear that the stated intent of this convoy is to overthrow the government.
	It's in their memorandum of understanding.
	It's clear they're not hiding away from it.
	And they are harassing citizens.
	They are threatening people, assaulting people.
	And recent examples of setting fire to a building because they're fed up with the noise is clear this is a violent and dangerous action that is causing really severe consequences to people.
	So he's alleging there that they tried to set a building on fire because the residents were complaining about the noise.
	Well, where have they got this from, this mysterious story?
	Because this hasn't been reported on by the police or the media or anything like that, just these two officials.
	Well, it turns out someone's been doing a bit of digging and they've found out what's happened.
	And it's quite a long thread, but I find it quite hilarious.
	So the story here, he says, is that last night there was a mass murder plot in an Ottawa apartment building, with one of the would-be killers telling a passer-by, for no apparent reason, he was a protester.
	That's convenient.
	But no one called 911, and Ottawa's arson unit found out about it on Twitter a day later.
	That's a bit suspicious.
	He continues, It's been four hours since this thread went up.
	I know it's Sunday, but is there a reason the Ottawa Citizen site doesn't have a banner headline about the hundreds of lives that were saved from immolation by the bravery of anti-protest activists living in an apartment building?
	And is there a reason why this big rig trucker seems to be a college-aged teenager or young adult with purple hair?
	Is the story starting to unravel slightly here?
	Also, anyone else find it odd?
	Have they got a picture of the person who's supposed to be...
	We've got one just down a bit.
	There we go.
	Hmm.
	There's another one, I think, later.
	But anyone find it odd that the person who wrote this is oddly ambivalent about finding the people who, you know, try to murder everyone, yet is extremely interested in making sure the narrative is used to advance the political goal of expelling protesters from the city?
	Yeah.
	And why would anyone exactly hesitate to raise the alarm about a crime that, had it played out, would have been the greatest act of mass murder Ottawa had ever witnessed?
	Hmm.
	Also, does anyone find it unusual that someone engaged in a mass murder plot would use tape on a door while they were still inside?
	And then we learn later in the thread that the killers just waltzed out some other door, which apparently anyone could use.
	It's a good thing I know this is a good-faith report of an arson attack, or I'd have abundant reason to think this was an incredibly clumsy, false accusation made by a trio of amateurs looking to use this stunt to make a political statement.
	Good thing that's definitely not the case.
	Really looking forward to an update from the police, it continues.
	I just scrolled through the last two days of police Twitter.
	Many tweets about road closures, but none about mass murder arson plots.
	Maybe it's not high priority.
	My favourite detail about this real thing that totally happened.
	The tenant asks the arsonist, mid-arsen, who he is.
	The arsonist stops his arsoning and says, I'm a convoy protester guy.
	Then he continues arsoning while the tenant goes to bed in his soon-to-be immolated building and doesn't call 911.
	What?
	It's so dumb.
	And they've got the faces as well.
	I mean, surely something like this, I mean, this seems to be, this should be a criminal matter.
	Right.
	One way or the other.
	If it's fake, it should be a criminal matter.
	And if it's real, it should definitely be a criminal matter.
	So we've got the faces right there.
	It's surely quite an easy crime to solve for a motivated police force.
	Exactly.
	So this is totally how you would react, surely, if someone were burning down your house, right?
	You go and you say, hello, yeah, or just, yeah, I'll check in with you in the morning.
	Mind that Tinder looks a bit damp.
	I've got some you could use, I don't know.
	Canadians are so polite, I could almost believe that.
	That's a good point.
	Not the Scots, I don't think.
	So, yeah, so he thinks the guy in the apartment would just go up and watch Netflix, hit the sack, write a tweet about it the next morning.
	And finally, he ends with supreme sarcasm.
	Important thing is that Canadian journalists and politicians are definitely not credulously tweeting out this allegation of a mass murder plot without first ensuring that it was fact-checked by anyone.
	No, that's exactly what they're doing.
	Great.
	I guess it's some sort of progress.
	Remember when Hitler used the Reichstag firebombing as an excuse to suspend people's rights and led to persecution of the Jews and Kristallnacht and everything.
	So at least now they've progressed from actually burning buildings down to pretending to burn buildings down.
	Yeah, that's true.
	That's true.
	But it just goes to show, and that's obviously one of the most famous false flag attacks in history, I believe.
	But yeah, it just goes to show that any excuse to discredit the protesters will spread like wildfire, pun intended.
	Yeah.
	But this is also getting a little more serious as the police are mobilising against the protest.
	One of their demands has to be, I think, an amnesty for people ticketed, arrested or harassed by police during the course, because otherwise it seems the police will be able to take them out trucker by trucker, as we saw with the little old guy earlier.
	The truckers are also anticipating something big this week, and they've released this short statement, which will play a 30-second clip.
	We believe it's a credible enough issue that we wanted to do this broadcast.
	And while it is not time for alarm, it is time to, if you want to support us, if you really want to help out, what I'd like you to do is start thinking about coming to Ottawa.
	I don't want you to get in your car tonight.
	I don't want you to start packing tonight.
	But I want you to start Preparing your families or talking to your employers and saying, listen, I really feel that my place is in Ottawa this week.
	So he goes on to say in this very sort of calm, measured, slow Canadian voice that they anticipate the police will move in on the convoy this week.
	They claim that large numbers of police are arriving in Ottawa and apparently setting up a processing centre to deal with the many, many people in the protest who they would apparently intend to arrest.
	Those terrible criminals.
	Mm-hmm.
	Yeah, but it's just the fact they would need to do that because there are so many of them.
	It's not like they can just grab them, throw them in the back of a van job done.
	No, it's going to be a big operation if they do that.
	And the more people there are in Ottawa protesting, of course, the harder it will be for the police to actually mobilize simply because of the shit mass.
	Finally, it's worth mentioning this clip from Danny Bulford, who is in charge of security from the Freedom Convoy, having previously worked as security for Justin Trudeau.
	Given to believe he left the mounted police due to vaccine mandates, and now he's working as security for Trudeau, which is one of the most beautiful ironies.
	Let's hear him speak for himself.
	Good evening.
	I'm Danny Bulford.
	I was a member of the RCMP for 15 years.
	The last eight was spent here on a full-time tactical unit.
	Where I spent the majority of my time protecting our Prime Minister and conducting other tactical operations.
	I know what a lawful arrest looks like.
	We know of people being arrested for helping to fuel trucks.
	For what offense is still unclear.
	Please remain calm.
	This is a scare tactic to coerce people into submission.
	So, again, you've got to love the Canadians.
	These guys are so calm.
	There are so many countries in the world where I feel they would be quite hysterical, quite angry, quite violent even.
	Not necessarily because they came to protest with violent intent, but simply because the stress of the situation gets them.
	But the Canadians, God bless, they seem to be going about this in a very responsible manner, and Godspeed.
	Yeah.
	Let's go to the video comments.
	Science is a tribute to...
	To what we can know, although we are fallible.
	In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell, I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.
	We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power.
	This guy, very wise words, this guy sounds like the classic eccentric you don't seem to see nowadays.
	Yeah, on television.
	Do you not think television is a bit sanitised these days?
	A bit?
	Oh my god.
	Does anybody watch it anymore?
	I mean, certainly the legacy channels like BBC. I think the average age is probably about 68.
	What viewership.
	Right.
	But that goes to shows.
	People who have been watching it as a habit for a long period of time still do.
	Yeah, like my dad.
	My dad doesn't like films on demand because he can't commit to them.
	Whereas he knows if it's broadcast, then he's got to watch it because you can't pause it.
	You can't, you know...
	So he can't watch Netflix.
	He can only watch TV. That's amazing.
	I've never heard anyone with that rationale.
	I can see that it's very tempting to just pause it, go off, do something, come back to it, and then you don't enjoy it because it's not a single experience.
	But I found, on the other hand, with things like documentaries, it would be so annoying because you just get into some information and then they go to an ad break.
	And then they come back from the ad break and they just tell you what they told you before.
	By the time you're about to learn something new, they go to another ad break.
	Yeah.
	Well, that's the American style of documentary where they tell you everything about five times and it moves too slowly.
	I don't know.
	I watched The Staircase, that documentary about the guy who probably shoved his wife down the stairs.
	So it's on Netflix.
	And same with Making a Murderer, whatever it is.
	Man, those series were so slow, it actually went on longer than The Court Case.
	I could have been a stenographer in court and it would have been less arduous.
	Yeah.
	I remember watching one on the Himalaya and I was about halfway through and I thought I would probably do this quicker if I got on a plane to the Himalaya, climbed Mount Everest and came back because it was going that glacially.
	Yeah.
	I don't know.
	TV executives seem to think we're all in Quaaludes in 2022.
	So everything moves at a glacial pace.
	Yeah.
	And also that we have the memory of goldfish.
	So we have to be reminded everything every five seconds.
	Let's go to the next comment.
	Just want to correct a few things from yesterday's story.
	One, the car ramming at the protest, like the trucker protest, happened in Winnipeg, not in Ottawa.
	The horseback, the Rohirrim, showed up in Coots, Alberta, where another protest is happening right on the border for the same thing.
	And then finally, the other protest of the trackers was in Toronto.
	Yep, so it's kicking off everywhere.
	Right, right.
	I didn't realise it was in other cities as well.
	Yeah, no, Canada's a big place.
	Yeah, I used to live there.
	Did you really?
	Yeah, I lived in Vancouver.
	It was the wokest.
	That was at the turn of the century.
	And it was the wokest place.
	It was woke before woke was invented.
	There's so many people from Japan, South Korea, the Pacific, who go to Vancouver to study English and then come back.
	It seems much more cosmopolitan than Yeah.
	Well, yeah, I was working in tech there in the world.
	Yeah, loads of Chinese people as well.
	But yeah, it was a really nice place.
	But yeah, so annoyingly woke.
	People thought that I was an alcoholic just because I liked to drink and I smoked then and stuff.
	People thought I was some sort of crazy person.
	You would have thought the Scottish influence in Canada would have left a bit more of a legacy when it comes to the drink.
	It's just the rivers are named after Scottish people, but everybody's quite sort of...
	It's like Los Angeles with worse weather.
	Everybody's really sort of health conscious and also super woke even back then.
	Because Canadian society is quite rigidly polite.
	And wokeness really is sort of this enforced etiquette, this rigid politeness.
	Let's go to the next comment.
	I call the second trait the appeal to myself, because it's not quite an appeal to nihilism, but it's very close.
	They view themselves as the absolute truth, and you as an absolute wrong.
	They can't do so logically, but they will simply declare it as a matter of principle.
	Not a logical principle, but a matter of course.
	So when you ask people, well, I think that British history should be preserved, it's sacred, it's good, they'll say, no, I don't care.
	We shouldn't tear down monument.
	No, I don't care.
	We shouldn't abort people.
	No, I don't care.
	And you can't convince them otherwise, because they are appealing to themselves.
	That's a really interesting point.
	That's also the motto of Mussolini's fascists.
	No me frego.
	I don't care.
	And basically it's I don't care about your point.
	And it's I've defined myself as right already.
	So if the words I say are technically incorrect, you're misunderstanding the words and then the words change their meanings to make me right.
	Right.
	It's this kind of insufferable debating style that you see, particularly from the online left nowadays.
	Yeah, so transphobe doesn't mean somebody who is prejudiced against transgender people.
	Now it means you're protesting to stop vaccine mandates, so I'm going to call you this bad word to signal to everyone.
	Might as well call them witches!
	You know what I mean?
	It's just a signal to everybody to say, shun this person.
	They're not woke.
	Absolutely.
	It's a tribal identifier.
	And they do that to themselves as well.
	Like when they adopt the pronouns in the bio, for example.
	That's not there for any semantic reason.
	That's there to say, I'm on the good side.
	I'm on the side of the message.
	Don't hurt me.
	There's a lot of signaling that goes on with the way that they use language.
	And it's very artificial.
	And I think most people just find it obnoxious, to be honest.
	So it doesn't win the many friends outside of their echo chambers.
	Let's go to the next comment.
	English Y is equivalent to Polish J, the sound Y. The sound of Polish Y is Y. Englishmen use this sound to be offensive.
	Shit.
	Shit.
	Beach.
	Bitch.
	Nigeria.
	I thought that was actually a valuable educational point there for a second.
	It took me a minute.
	I wonder if we cut that or they did.
	Sometimes they send them in, we tidy them up.
	That was really funny.
	So the books I use...
	Sorry, carry on.
	Usually read consists of either philosophy or history.
	Usually they can be both.
	I've just recently finished this book.
	Bernard Cornwell's Warlord.
	The last of the Saxon stories.
	For those who do not know about his other work, he is the one who wrote down the legendary Sharp series of books.
	You must know Bernard Cornwell, right?
	I know Sharp!
	Yeah, he's written some other series as well.
	One about Agincourt, one about the Saxons.
	Pete in the Office is a big fan.
	Keeps recommending me the books.
	Agincourt was a good battle.
	Yeah, it was, because the French lost.
	That's usually a good sign.
	I mean, that gives you a wide variety of battles to choose from.
	But it looked like they were going to win, and then they didn't.
	Yeah.
	It's the next one I That looks like a lovely atmosphere.
	Yeah, it does look fun.
	I'd take my kids there.
	I don't have any kids, but I'd find some and take them to a truck protest.
	We had someone email in actually saying they were going to take their kids to the protest, but they got a little tired and that, so they took them off and they thought that...
	That it would be bad of them to impose their political beliefs to force their kids to go and see this thing.
	Apparently they've got a bouncy castle and all sorts there as well, but the kids weren't having it when the kids decide they want to go home.
	It was really wholesome just saying how they're not doing the horrible leftist zealot thing of prioritising their politics over their kids' needs.
	It was really wholesome.
	Good family message there.
	See the mech, how it's getting on?
	After going over the power armor with a fine-tooth comb, turns out I just over-tightened the nuts in the knees.
	So tomorrow I'll be sharing a video of me walking around in it.
	Remember, always be careful with your nuts.
	He means testicles.
	No, really?
	He's been building this.
	He's been showing us pictures of it.
	It's going on really well, actually.
	Looks like a great, fun little project.
	Let's play the next clip.
	Not enough to be said for these front-line warriors that took it upon themselves to be the first group in Canada to stand in united non-compliance.
	And the government hates them because they're not burning businesses down.
	Yep.
	They're not establishment protesters.
	They're the bad kind of protesters.
	Right.
	They're protesting against the government instead of against small business owners.
	But little shout out to Viva Fry there as well.
	He's a Canadian law vlogger and YouTuber.
	And we just saw a little clip of him there recording that, which was nice.
	And a little shout out to Global Veterans Alliance as well.
	Okay.
	For no reason.
	Okay.
	Let's have a look at this one.
	Tony D and Little Joan with another legend of the pines from Weird New Jersey Magazine.
	It's Dr.
	Smith's New Jersey Fountain of Youth.
	Dr.
	Smith and his colleagues discovered the fountain in the Pine Barrens in the late 1800s and built a spa in nearby Egg Harbor City in the early 1900s.
	The spa claimed to cure almost everything and Dr.
	Smith himself said he was over 122 years old.
	Part of the spa survives today as the Roundhouse Museum in Egg Harbor, but no one knows where the fountain is located.
	Interesting.
	He gives us little local updates, ghost stories and things.
	And when he says Pine Barrens, because that's New Jersey, isn't it?
	So that's the Pine Barrens from The Sopranos, when they get lost in the woods.
	Oh, is it?
	Well, I assume so.
	Oh, right.
	Okay, no, I don't know much about New Jersey, I'm afraid, apart from what Tony D and Lil' Joan have been telling us.
	Well, let's see what CS Cooper's got for us.
	I'm suggesting a movie, and it's this.
	Daddest movie.
	And if you don't believe me, check it out.
	This is your family.
	You call this here and that down there family?
	Dad, could you care less about me?
	All fathers care for their sons.
	I love you all, my sons.
	Slap it into your DVD player and enjoy it with your kids.
	I must say, it looks like one of those cheesy movies that might be so bad it's good.
	Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?
	Yeah, yeah.
	But if he's recommending it, it might be better than...
	Didn't they make a new one with Megan Fox in it?
	I don't know.
	Let's go to the next comment.
	Hello, Lotus Eaters.
	When you've got the time, you should look into how Hollywood has completely destroyed...
	Movie franchises.
	Interesting idea.
	Yep, that's a good comment.
	Fair enough.
	Because they have totally destroyed some, like Star Wars and Star Trek as well.
	I don't know if you've followed any of that sort of thing.
	Franchises that have just sort of gone woke in Hollywood.
	And then they've gone broke.
	Well, not quite yet, but they've...
	I mean, Star Wars, compared to the profits they used to make from Star Wars films, even from the terrible ones like The Phantom Menace and stuff, like, man, because the amount of money they spend making them and the amount of money...
	Like, the opportunity cost for a big studio like Disney should be making, like, well over a billion from each movie.
	It was a slam dunk, but they...
	They screwed up.
	I mean, they're just getting to the point.
	They're making money off it, but they're not making anywhere near the returns that they should be making off that franchise, especially compared to previous installments.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Even so, I think they still made a massive profit on it.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Which is sad, because it seems, from my perspective, like they deliberately set out to annoy, offend, and insult the sensibilities of everyone who actually liked Star Wars.
	Oh, and it also offended the sensibilities of woke people, because it's so obviously tokenistic.
	It's like, oh, here's our non-binary, vegan, Inuit lassie, and now we're going to have a...
	It seems like virtue signaling with a multi-million dollar franchise.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And some films like Spider-Man can do it.
	It's a multiracial cast and all the rest of it, but without making it an issue like there's some sort of advert for Benetton.
	They just have it instead of making it the thing the film's about.
	It's ridiculous.
	Just make the film.
	Make the film good.
	The original Star Wars films were quite progressive.
	They had a Wookiee in it, for God's sake.
	You don't get much more...
	No, no.
	It wasn't just multi-racial, it was multi-species.
	Wookie rights, I tell you, have been very neglected by the website.
	And some of the species weren't even from this planet.
	Was it a bear or a wookie?
	I can't remember.
	Anyway, let's go through the comments.
	We have some on Boris's singing Welshman.
	A student of history says, should we have our core telecommunications built by China?
	Why is that a question?
	Someone needs to ask your leaders the question, what if Britain's tea, alcohol and fish were controlled by a hostile power and see what their reactions are?
	Well, they are in Scotland, the Scottish government.
	Now imagine all these different things like telecoms, technological research, and production of required materials and items should be in the same camp.
	That's a pretty solid point, I think.
	Freewill2112 says, I wonder which MPs don't have a problem with China's human rights record.
	XYNZE says, Is there anyone since Dominic Cummings in Bojo's inner circle who isn't Labour adjacent, a card-carrying Labour member, a commie, or associated with the CCP in some way, shape, or form?
	We're still looking.
	JJHW says, AI cameras are excellent.
	They correctly identify Michelle Obama as male.
	But did they get her transgender status correct or not?
	Inquiring minds want to know.
	Oakwood Woodward says, The fact Boris Johnson has hired Guto Harry is a very bad sign indeed.
	An ardent remainer, knee bender and CCP defender.
	Wrong on all counts.
	I like this guy's knees don't bend!
	Can't even, like, when he goes to the toilet he has to, like, just fall backwards onto it.
	Like, very difficult on planes.
	No, very strange.
	Free Will 2112 says, Why would they let us vote over surveillance?
	Democracy, more than ever, is now the wallpaper hiding the authoritarian walls they're building around us.
	And it does feel like that sometimes.
	And on a sort of wider level, we're seeing the government's share of GDP just continuing to just creep up and up and up to crazy levels.
	It's just consistently been going up over the last, you know, basically 200 years since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
	And it's scary because the more power the government has, the greater share of GDP, and this is in all Western countries, and obviously in developing countries as well, The greater share of GDP the government has, the more power they have.
	And privately owned businesses are a great bulwark against government power.
	Yep, that's true.
	Certainly economically.
	We actually pulled up a clip last time I was on here showing the GDP, the public sector spending as a proportion of GDP since 1900.
	And before World War I, it's about 10%.
	Then you get World War I, and it goes up to 55%.
	And it comes back down, and of course it doesn't go back down to 10%.
	Oh no, it goes down to like 35%.
	But we're paying off our war debt.
	We've got all these excuses.
	Then it gets to the Second World War, and it goes up to 75%.
	Colossal.
	And when World War I ends, it goes down to about 40%.
	I mean...
	You've got the creation of the NHS and the welfare state and things like that, which are good things, but it also means the government's got more power and spending more money.
	And you're seeing this in Scotland, somewhere like Scotland, because it's so socialist, the government's one of the biggest spenders of money, so businesses can't afford to do anything.
	You couldn't...
	Right, exactly.
	The business owns the media because all of their advertising revenue comes from the government.
	Well, whose money are they using for that?
	Oh, yeah, it's yours.
	It's businesses.
	It's not their own money.
	They don't make money.
	It stifles criticism of the government right at the time when you need to critique the government because they've got so much power.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And you'll probably be unsurprised to note that it's crept up since World War I from 40% to now we're back almost at World War I levels around 50-51%.
	Right.
	And my understanding is that once that number gets high enough, it doesn't matter how good the government is, you're going to have some unrest because they're literally taking everyone's money.
	And now with green policy and all the rest of it, they're pushing for even more.
	And with the World Economic Forum pushing for so much state control.
	And obviously the people doing it are thinking this is going to be very beguiling to think I can solve these problems when really the solution is for government to step back and not be involved.
	The problem is when you try and solve these things with a solution is that you always create side effects.
	Whatever you're trying to do, there are going to be more effects than you can foresee ahead of actually doing it.
	And what happens with government is they attempt to solve one thing, and then even if they solve that thing, they create a load of side effects.
	So then they need to do something to solve a side effect, and then they create more side effects.
	Well, over 70 years, you have nothing but side effects left.
	So all of the social problems are related to literally...
	Government solutions.
	You're becoming the architect of your own downfall.
	And that's what we're seeing nowadays, where wherever we turn, there seems to be more spending on things which are inefficient and don't work.
	So Baron Von Warhawk says, we want the new technology, so we are going to work with Xi's China.
	We want the new technology.
	So we are going to work with Hitler's Germany.
	And while I generally disavow Godwin's law, I think there are some strong parallels between the two states.
	Student of history says, something, something, cyberpunk dystopia, something, something, you're in one.
	And then we've got the comments on the Peng Shui allegations.
	So Free Will 2112 says, perhaps I'm wrong, but I thought that in the communist utopia, everyone was equal and it was impossible for one person to exploit another.
	Well, yeah, if you listen to a 19-year-old blue-haired university student doing their gender studies...
	Where they're not making false arson.
	Degree.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Then you'd think that.
	But in reality, it turns out people are people.
	So any system you've got has got to account for people being horrible.
	It's got to have the presumption of bastards.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	A great film about how people can act under a communist system is, oh, what's it called?
	It's the one about the Stasi.
	Oh, what's it called?
	I'll remember it in a moment.
	Yep.
	Captain Charlie the Beagle says, Leo, if you think that story about Genghis Khan is cool, Attila the Hun died after passing out on his wedding day and choking on the blood from a nosebleed.
	Oh my god!
	That's quite a disappointing way for Attila the Hun to die.
	I didn't know about that.
	That sounds incredible.
	I've never heard that story.
	I thought that's how a Guardian reader would die.
	What Guardian readers get married these days?
	Yeah, it's a patriarchal construct.
	Supreme Duck It says, Denmark ended their slavery in 1848.
	I wouldn't feel bad about it, even if it was in 2050, as long as I was not personally a part of it.
	I'm talking about the legacy of slavery there.
	Yeah.
	Because, yeah, people do bang on about that.
	Well, yeah, people are kind of like, well, you should feel personally guilty and responsible for slavery that was done 200 years ago.
	Look at this thing!
	I was drunk!
	It seemed incredibly convenient at the time.
	You know, I think it's fine for all these people to pontificate and say, oh, these people were bad.
	It's like, well, you want them to do their own work in the field?
	You want them to pick their own cotton?
	I mean, it must have been incredibly convenient for these.
	Quite evil.
	Perhaps from Robert Burns on Burns Night, because apparently at one point he considered, but didn't, go to Jamaica and work as a bookkeeper on a plantation.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Just because he considered it, because he was absolutely penniless and in dire financial straits.
	Yeah, yeah, and also everybody was horrible in the old days.
	This is the thing, you can't judge people by today's morals, because back then, slavery was an accepted thing.
	Yeah.
	But like some Scottish newspaper journalist sitting in their centrally heated office with their smartphone and their latte, then feels that he has the pedestal upon which to judge Robert Burns as he is penniless and wondering how to make money.
	I mean, at that point, Robert Burns hadn't sold his soul, unlike the Scottish journalist.
	There we go.
	And Robert Burns was very critical of what we'd call wokeism at the time, so the shaming stool.
	He was very critical of the shaming stool.
	So that was something that people who'd been convicted or were assumed to have done something bad or adultery or whatever it was, they'd sit in the shaming stool and everybody, they'd be visible.
	Public shaming was a huge thing in the old days.
	It's still I didn't realise it was so institutionalised in Scotland.
	They literally had a stall and people...
	Man, every Scottish city, and they did loads of hangings as well.
	Scotland had insane levels of hangings.
	So grass market in Edinburgh.
	Is that how you're so tall, just stretched out over generations?
	No, because of superior nutrition to English people.
	But yeah, like the grass market, they did so many public hangings there.
	Callum, oh, that's the end of it.
	Wait, no, Callum Deaton says, Dear Leo, I've found the gerbil story really interesting and fun.
	Even the biggest and meanest bastards have a soft inside their core.
	The good ones that is.
	Yeah.
	Even Genghis Khan.
	Yeah, I think he was talking about the gerbil.
	The Lives of Others, that's the name of that film.
	The Lives of Others.
	The film about the Stasi.
	Really incredible film about the Stasi and how mass surveillance of people is bad and also how the power structures that come from having a communist state are bad as well.
	Does it sort of go into the mechanics of how it all works and how people behave in that sort?
	You see more of the personal impact on the citizens, but it's really powerful.
	It's really, really interesting.
	What's the name of it again?
	The Lives of Others.
	The Lives of Others.
	That sounds quite good.
	Amazing film.
	Check that out.
	On the Truckers and Trudeau, Christian Anderson says, What PM Blackface accuses the truckers to have taken away for the common Canadian citizen is exactly what he and the government has taken away from common Canadian citizens.
	Only I should wield that kind of power.
	And it's true.
	He's blaming the truckers for curtailing Canadians' freedoms when he was the one who literally locked them in their houses.
	They literally instituted curfews.
	COVID curfews.
	Now, I didn't know that COVID only spreads at night or anything like that, but apparently if you go out and you sneeze after dark, that's a problem.
	Yeah, so it's much safer to get just a short condensed period of time where everybody has to rush out and mingle together all at once because COVID can't spread when everybody's mingling together at once.
	Canadian government logic, ladies and gentlemen.
	Henry Ashman says, going off US standards for hit and runs, CNN will report that the poor unfortunate Antifa nonce was kidnapped by a sentient car that crashed them into the protest.
	Yeah.
	The protesters attacked the car with their faces.
	Yeah.
	Their faces and their legs and their poor squishy bodies.
	Chris Wolfe said, given how the establishment describes the truckers, I shudder to think what our quote-unquote enemies have actually done wrong.
	Tish Potato says, you'll note how it's our economy, our democracy, our fellow citizens.
	Trudeau is acting as if they're foreign invaders rather than Canadian citizens.
	Well, I think that's quite persuasive.
	I suspect the governments of these countries view the country as their personal possession, like their personal fiefdom.
	And they're acting like any threat to it is external.
	It's them versus us.
	When really, these are the people, like you said, you should be going out and talking to them.
	You should be having a conversation.
	Putin says Navalny is Western-funded and a mouthpiece for the West and corrupted by Western influence.
	So yes, it's used by other despots as well.
	Absolutely.
	But the fact that somewhere like Canada, which is supposed to be a bastion of freedom and democracy, the leader runs away and calls all of his opponents, his very polite opponents, Racists, terrorists, and so on.
	It's crazy.
	It's so bizarre.
	Everybody knows that they're not racist, transphobic, misogynist, whatever else.
	It's so obvious that those have just become pejorative terms for the left now to just throw at anybody who doesn't toe the line.
	And I think they will lose their power, like the word racist has.
	Yeah, I don't flinch.
	I don't flinch at those things.
	I mean, after a debate with Dr Shola, you know, all these things, you know, racist comedian and stuff, I didn't even flinch.
	Everybody knows that I'm not actually racist.
	Exactly.
	English Loyalist says, very proud of the Canadians.
	They're showing how you should protest.
	I'm worried that the media will turn it into a January 6th for Canada.
	They've really outperformed BLM, Antifa, Extinction Rebellion.
	Everyone, when it comes to protests, it's actually bringing in more people.
	Yeah, bravo.
	Very proud as well here.
	A student of history says, the court says they can't blow air horns.
	Sounds like they need special deliveries of air horns and diesel so that everyone can blow a hole all at once.
	Sounds good.
	Freewill2112 says, I don't believe the truckers tried to start a fire.
	This is most likely a false flag operation.
	The globalists will stop at nothing to maintain their hegemony.
	Yeah, it's also a blatantly obvious false flag, as we covered.
	Chris Wolfe says, the empty jerrycan revolt is brilliant.
	I wish the empty cans would give a good honk when you open them.
	Maybe a jack-in-the-box head pop.
	Grant Gibson says, Trudeau's statement was so unselfaware, it was ridiculous.
	I've actually never liked the honking.
	It's not necessary to send a message or bring the town to the halls, and they are quite loud.
	I personally disagree.
	I believe the ENT, who was an affiant, who said the volume level was likely to cause serious damage to hearing.
	Well, the problem is, as I think it was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who said, when protests aren't supposed to be comfortable, they have to be uncomfortable.
	They have to bring it home to the average person who's got their head in the sand, as much as to the government.
	And yeah, obviously, you would rather not have a truck parked outside your door honking.
	Yeah.
	But if that's going to mean that your children grow up in a world where they're not under curfew because the government just wants them to be on a whim, then maybe it's worth it on balance.
	Yeah, if the people you're protesting against agree with your means and aren't disturbed by your means, then it's not a protest, it's just a picnic.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And on that note, I think we're going to end it there.
	Thanks very much for checking in with us.
	You can go follow Leo on Getter.
	Yeah, Leo Kearse on Getter, Twitter and YouTube!
	Right.
	And we'll see you tomorrow.
	Thanks for listening.

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