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May 4, 2022 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:31:08

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #385

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	Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters and may the fourth be with you for episode number 385 today.
	I'm joined by Leo.
	Hello!
	We're going to talk about the calls for a windfall tax to be imposed on North Sea oil companies following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the recent assault on US comedian and all-round funny man Dave Chappelle, and the war on hobbies and escapism being waged by progressive activism.
	But before we get into the news, we have a We have this article by, oh my goodness, Brynjolfr Svajnivarsson, I hope I got that remotely correct, who is an Icelandic contributor, and this is all about how he went to some Icelandic universities to see what the courses were like, and they're pretty woke.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	So you can go and check that out.
	That's free on our site.
	We also have this article by Beau, who specializes in these rather eccentric but very entertaining takedowns of people who are up to mischief in the culture wars.
	And this one, behind the clown mask put on by our editor, Michael, is Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons.
	So I'm sure that'll be quite entertaining too.
	And finally, I just want to mention this Contemplations, which is premium that I did with Josh Firm, where I talked through 75 years of Japanese history in Contemplations Imperial Japan.
	I'm sure that will be worth your time if you're signed up, and you can go and sign up to our website for just £5 a month.
	And finally, a reminder for British viewers that local elections take place tomorrow across much of the country.
	If you are fed up of the mainstream parties, then at least consider going along and voting for an outside party or an independent or just a clown.
	I forgot to get registered to vote.
	I'm so politicised.
	I'm letting the side down.
	But let's get straight into the news.
	So we're going to talk about oil companies for a bit.
	What's your opinion on big oil?
	Big oil.
	Man, I can't believe it.
	I invested.
	I put some money in oil companies like BP and Shell.
	Also some smaller ones like Lamprol.
	There's one in the Falklands.
	I can't remember what it's called.
	thinking oh and tullo oil which uh goes and develops like explores and develops in like africa and stuff thinking well like they're obviously like we're reaching a point where there's going to be an oil crunch we're coming out of lockdown and stuff and there was there was an oil crunch and oil prices shot up and then there's the russian invasion of ukraine so we've got we can't use russian oil we've got to like you know get away from that so i thought oil prices are going to chew up and these companies are going to do well and They're not.
	I would have been better off investing in something rubbish than being really smart.
	I don't know why the stock market's not...
	Well, I don't know about the share price, but the oil major companies are set to reap a massive profit, which I'm sure your finances will be relieved to hit.
	Well, I mean, that's great.
	If I get any of that money, the dividends don't seem to be going up.
	The share price isn't going up.
	Where's that money going?
	I'll tell you why it's not rising.
	It's because the government wants to steal it off me, like I don't pay enough tax already.
	You know how many taxes I pay?
	Car tax, income tax, value-added tax on anything I buy.
	There's the national, whatever it is, the little other tax that you get on your paycheck.
	National insurance.
	National insurance.
	So many taxes.
	Everything.
	Every step of my life.
	I can't open the door.
	I can't take a breath without paying tax.
	And now they want to tax oil companies as well.
	Yeah.
	Well, they do tax oil companies.
	I think the rate is 40%, but they're looking at just throwing in a windfall tax, like a one-off.
	So we'll go through and see what the media is saying about this.
	Where was the government supporting oil companies when oil prices were super low and oil companies were losing money?
	Where was the government then?
	Why weren't they giving a windfall, like, bunch of money to the oil companies?
	I don't know.
	I don't think that would have been a very popular policy, Leo.
	Well, I don't think this should be a popular policy.
	Also, sometimes what is popular isn't right.
	Of course.
	Look at Hitler.
	He was very popular in Germany.
	Was he right?
	And having invoked Godwin's Law within five minutes of starting the podcast, let's see what Greenpeace is saying about this.
	So Greenpeace and Oil Change International project that energy firms could see the money they make just from the North Sea increase 111% from 10.46 billion to 22 billion.
	Okay.
	After Russia's war sent in due prices soaring.
	The campaigners are calling on the government, of course, to tax the windfall profits and invest the money in green measures such as insulating homes, installing heat pumps and scaling up renewables.
	We already do all of that stuff.
	And Greenpeace, no offence to Greenpeace, but when they go out in their boats to protest against oil rigs and stuff, those boats are made of plastic, which is made from fossil fuels.
	The boats are burning diesel, which is fantastic.
	Which is oil!
	Which is oil!
	You know what I mean?
	And they're wearing Gore-Tex, which again is synthetic fibre made from fossil fuels.
	Yeah, it's all for the greater good, don't you understand?
	Yeah, why don't we tax lentils?
	Why don't we tax Instagram selfies and talking about orcas?
	You know what I mean?
	Powerful point you make there.
	But just to compare, £11.6 billion over the year on North Sea.
	And then we look at this tweet here.
	And we see that Pfizer is projected to post a profit of $7.86 billion in just quarter one of profit, not revenue, profit.
	I haven't seen a single media outlet calling for a windfall tax on pharmaceutical companies.
	Isn't that strange?
	Even though a lot of that money comes from governments, comes from the taxpayer, because Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies have deals with governments where they get money.
	Look at the vaccines, for example.
	Exactly.
	That's where the government is taking your money by the wheelbarrow full and loading it into these companies.
	And oh, don't worry about their profits.
	Goodness me.
	So the media are campaigning for a windfall tax.
	This phrase has been doing the rounds on the internet.
	And the government are currently saying they've ruled it out, which for me is a good sign that it might be brought in over the next few months.
	This is classic nudge theory.
	They did the same thing with face masks in schools.
	Do you remember that whole debate during COVID? Yeah.
	As well as the vaccine passport scheme, where they said they had no plans to do it, virtually at the same time when it was revealed that they had tendered about five contracts to small companies to develop vaccine passports.
	So let's walk through what a windfall tax means and especially how this has come about.
	So a lot of people now feel it's unfair that these oil companies are making so much money because the cost of living for people in Britain has skyrocketed, mainly as a result of high energy prices.
	And that comes from terrible long-term planning on the part of our government.
	Well, and it's also as a result of inflation caused by the government just willfully printing money hand over fist like they're the king of Zimbabwe.
	The amount of money that's been created in the UK since 2008, I think, is just shy of £1 trillion.
	And that's all...
	Bear in mind, when you create money, what you're doing is devaluing all the money that's in circulation.
	Because money can only be exchanged for things, and the amount of things doesn't change in...
	You don't create more things, you just create more money.
	So it's stealing money from savers and anybody's wages, because wages won't go up as fast as inflation.
	It's the most insidious tax against the people you can find in action.
	It is a pernicious stealth tax.
	It's your moral duty to convert all your wealth into Bitcoin and gold bars and store it under the bed.
	But do you know that we used to have a strategic reserve of natural gas to essentially mitigate crises like the Russia-Ukraine conflict?
	And then Theresa May sold it all because she decided, oh, we're living in a buy-on-demand global energy economy now.
	We don't need such a thing as a stockpile.
	Yeah.
	We're getting all our gas from places like Russia and Qatar.
	Really nice, friendly places that will never turn against us.
	I know.
	And there's also these lovely people in Venezuela and Iran who we can talk to.
	So we've got auctions.
	Scotland.
	Yeah, so it's aged about as well as all of Theresa May's policies, I think.
	British people are also footing the bill, of course, for the government's disastrous price capping scheme, which led to the collapse of multiple energy providers in 2021.
	This has caused bills to raise across the board, including swinging standing charges.
	So if we scroll down and look at the standing charges here...
	Across most of the country, standing charges have increased by about 20 pence per day.
	Doesn't sound a lot, but that's a rise of between 80% and 100%, depending on where you live.
	London, incidentally, rose by just 8 pence per day and pays the lowest standing charges of any region.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	Weird, that.
	Yeah.
	Despite the fact that fuel poverty disproportionately affects rural areas, it was the countryside that was chosen to bear the brunt of standing charge increases, as we can see there.
	The price cap on each unit of energy has risen by 54%, meaning an average household will now spend £2,000 a year on energy instead of £1,300.
	Lesson is, don't be poor.
	Your compassion overwhelms me.
	Well, people say in the garden, oh my God, the government's raised the caps.
	But really, caps are an artificial, all you're doing is suppressing the market forces.
	And so the energy companies have to buy this energy on the market.
	So if it goes above the price that they can make from this capped thing that they sell it onto the consumers for, they go bust.
	And we saw loads of them going bust.
	Well, that's part of the reason why energy prices are so expensive is because they did go bust.
	And now the government is is charging us via our bills to bail out or to essentially pay back the cost of that bailout and sorting out that whole fiasco.
	So yeah, you're absolutely right.
	Price caps are a bad system.
	They never work.
	Economically, they are a brain dead.
	However, it is a difficult situation where you also don't want to have many, many people being out of pocket.
	But you have to turn to other means other than just price caps if you want to mitigate the cost of living for people like that.
	And fundamentally, it's whether your policies are good or bad that impacts whether your economy is healthy or unhealthy that impacts the cost of living in these ways.
	If we go to the next one here...
	So this is a problem in the net zero push.
	China's supply dominance and elements essential for renewable energy infrastructure leads to warnings that Xi Jinping could use his monopoly to influence and pressure Europe as it moves away from Russian gas.
	So much of our renewable stuff that we need to replace Russian gas and also just to move towards this net zero thing that we need apparently.
	We don't really need it.
	But all this stuff, the wind turbines and whatever, we're dependent on China for parts.
	And it's madness because in the UK we've got exemplary engineering facilities.
	We can construct this stuff.
	In Europe as well.
	Across Europe.
	We could be.
	Obviously it's going to be cheaper if you get Uyghur Muslim slaves to make it.
	I mean it's market forces, isn't it?
	Slave labour trumps all other kinds of worker arrangements because it's cheapest.
	But then if we go to the next one we find That actually there is a more fundamental problem here.
	If we scroll down to the graph, I'll say one.
	The bigger problem here is that even if we have the expertise, and the next one, we don't actually have the rare earth metals and the rare materials.
	This is all the stuff that you need for batteries.
	Yeah, stuff like lithium, things like this that you need to make complex technologies like electric car batteries or wind turbines, things like that.
	And if we look at this, we find that China has basically cornered the market over the last 20-30 years.
	They even call it in this paper the Chinese era of rare earth oxide production.
	And so is the light blue, is that China?
	At the top, yeah.
	Right.
	And what's the dark blue?
	The dark blue is America.
	Oh yeah, and then the other...
	Right, yeah.
	And then the orange is everyone else.
	Holy shit, so it's all China.
	Yeah, so if we're looking to move to full-on renewables without creating a massive strategic vulnerability regarding China, we need to find other sources of rare earth metals.
	Yeah.
	And we haven't done that yet, so we're putting the cart before the horse and taking a very strategically risky decision simply because it's politically, in the short term, advantageous for politicians, I think.
	Yeah, and I think Russia should really be a big wake-up call that you can't depend on autocratic states to just go along with the market.
	If it's strategically useful for Russia to cut off gas or to invade a country or whatever, then he'll do it.
	That's true, but I also don't think we can be too reliant on democratic countries, because I think, for example, if our geopolitical interests in America's clashed and they had the economic weight to influence us, they would absolutely use that, and I think other democracies would too.
	They probably wouldn't invade us like Putin.
	But our values and our strategic needs will never clash with America's.
	Of course.
	Yes, comrade.
	If we go to the next one.
	So again, from Net Zero Watch.
	Consumers are paying tens of millions of pounds for a brand new wind farm to sit idle.
	Latest offshore wind farm paid to switch off for 25% of the time.
	And partly this is for maintenance, partly this is because the wind just hasn't been blowing, and fundamentally wind power is proving itself to be an unreliable power source, even if it is green.
	If we go to the next one.
	So, some of the UK's largest wind farms have delayed taking up green government contracts, making millions from consumers by selling electricity to the grid at high market rates rather than the agreed low-cost subsidy deal prices.
	So the energy economy is a fairly complicated one, but essentially if you sell your energy at peak times, you can get better rates for the energy that you're selling and things like this.
	But then shouldn't they be doing that because then they're feeding energy into the system when it's needed?
	Yes, but it's a bit more complicated than that.
	It's a very convoluted and quite massaged and artificial market.
	It's not free markets at all.
	You could say it is free in some senses, but for example, you have the problem that nuclear energy is great, produces a ton of energy, but you have to produce a constant amount of energy over a long period of time.
	So that means you can't game the system to take advantage of high rates and low rates.
	Whereas combined cycle gas turbines, you can basically switch them on and off almost in real time with demand.
	So you can always make sure you're selling your energy at the best price.
	So there are some complicated questions in the energy economy here, rather than just that.
	But fundamentally, I want to underline the point that the green levy and VAT are contributing a massive amount of cost to what you're paying in your energy bills, if we go to the next one.
	In electricity, environmental social obligation costs is 25%.
	And then you've got VAT at 5% on top of that.
	Have you not seen this before?
	What on earth?
	A quarter of your bill, more than a quarter of your bill, isn't even stuff to do with your electricity.
	It's like you're giving it charity.
	A quarter of your bill is charity to make the world a nicer place.
	But it's enforced charity, because the government is saying, you're a good person, aren't you, Leo?
	You're a green person.
	I'm going to take your money and spend it on these wind farms.
	Yeah, that is ridiculous.
	I know.
	I thought that would only be like if you sign up to a green tariff.
	You know, you can pay for extra and get green energy, and then ostensibly they say it all comes from...
	No, they're trying to strong-arm everyone onto this.
	Well, they have strong-armed everyone onto this system, and most people don't even know it's happening, which is absolutely outrageous, I think.
	And it gets worse than that, of course, because as far as I'm aware, the cost of constructing new power lines to connect lots of small wind farms to the grid is accounted as an operating cost rather than an explicit green cost.
	I may be wrong on that, but if you see operating costs are another 16%, and a lot of that will be maintenance or network costs as well.
	Yeah.
	But also, there are ways to...
	Slide things off the balance sheet into other parts.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	So this is really far more expensive, I think, than most people realise to us, this net zero agenda.
	And if we go to the next one, so in this article, this is from Spectator Australia, where they're just looking across the pond.
	And this underlines what's happened to our energy suppliers.
	The European and UK energy crisis has seen UK energy bills almost double since 2019, a trend predating COVID and Ukraine.
	Gas is primarily used for heating homes and generating electricity.
	Supplies are short because local supply is restricted in fracking is banned in the UK.
	Global development is down due to Biden's US policy.
	Demand is high, renewables output low, coal phased out, and Russian supplies are interrupted by sanctions, of course.
	Since January 2021, 31 British energy retailers have ceased trading because customers cannot pay their bills.
	The regulated energy price cap was £1,100 per year in 2019, reached £1,900 in 2022, and is likely to be lifted again this October to a record high of £2,600.
	With millions of households facing fuel stress, UK domestic politics has shifted its focus from climate change to energy security.
	For context, the average Australian electricity bill is, and that's just shy of £1000 UK. Yeah.
	And the climate change, the sort of ideology, is through the oil companies as well.
	So you'd think people like BP would be keen on developing oil, especially now that prices are going up, developing oil, like North Sea oil, secure fields that we've got political control over, like the Campbell Field in the North Sea.
	But they're not, because now BP is like, oh, we want to move to a renewable energy company.
	Which is fine.
	You know, you can do that.
	But also, don't forget, we're still an oil-dependent economy.
	Not just for energy, but also for manufacturing and fertilizers, plastics, all the rest of it.
	So we're utterly dependent on oil.
	We need oil.
	That's why the prices are high.
	So you'd think the oil companies, at least, would be trying to get more of it.
	Yeah, but it's amazing.
	So 10 years ago, I was halfway through an engineering undergraduate degree, and we used to go to careers fairs and speak to people like BP, Shell, and so on.
	And already there, in their pitch to new graduates, they were saying, oh, we're going to be moving away from oil, we're moving into renewables, this and that, clean energy.
	Presumably because that was trendy and appealing to new recruits.
	But there's also this corporate social responsibility angle where Like, the entire corporate sphere is moving towards green stuff, and big finance companies, places like BlackRock, are saying, well, we're only going to finance you if you only finance people who are green, or tick these boxes, equity, inclusivity, diversity.
	In other words, if they're kosher, they're part of our club, corporate social responsible.
	And I think that's partly what's happening with the big oil companies, and they're realizing, yes, there is this diversification of our operations to minimize risks purely from oil, but also there's the political aspect there as well.
	Yeah, somebody should bring out a hedge fund that specifically invests in the most evil stuff, like oil, weapons, tobacco, pornography and stuff.
	I'd invest in that.
	I'd invest in that.
	Well, it's market forces, isn't it?
	Sadly, I think I would love to see that happen, not because I want to see death and destruction merchanted across the world, but because I'd love to see the rapidity with which it gets crushed.
	Because that will not be allowed to fly.
	I think it would make all the money.
	a conservative government and get a Corbynite policy, net zero.
	The Green Industrial Revolution as it used to be called.
	Well, right now it looks like this particular Green Revolution will ruin more lives than the guillotine did.
	So when you factor in the overall rise in cost of living, including inflation rates north of 8%, it's clear the British people are getting thoroughly rinsed.
	Naturally, people are out for blood.
	And the real inflation rate is way higher than that because that inflation rate doesn't include the basket they look at, the basket of goods they calculate it on.
	It doesn't include stuff like housing.
	And housing is, you know, most people need to live somewhere.
	You can't just stand on a pavement.
	Yeah, you're right.
	So that's not included and that's shot up, you know, way higher than 8%.
	Yeah, and in engineering there are some suppliers, particularly in Germany, who manufacture specialist components and their prices are going up by 20%, 30% following sanctions and squeezes on materials and things like that.
	Wind Energy actually has, I was going to put it in here but didn't have time, they are actually having a problem at the moment with the rise in the cost of inputs that is making the entire economy almost unfeasible without government subsidy.
	So they are struggling.
	Yeah.
	And so, in this climate where everyone is unhappy, we hear the media clamouring for a windfall tax, a one-off, arbitrary seizure of cash from BP. I'd like to point out, BP did not cause the Russo-Ukrainian war.
	That was, you could argue, foreign policy.
	No, it was Putin.
	It was Putin as well.
	No, it was just Putin.
	BP did not cause us to become pathetically reliant on foreign energy imports, Russian gas and Chinese materials.
	That was green policy.
	BP did not cause the collapse of energy providers across the countryside with a lunatic communistic price cap scheme.
	That was economic policy.
	And BP did not cause rampant inflation by locking down the entire country and shutting down the economy.
	That's COVID policy.
	And giving people loads of money.
	Everybody had all this money, so when they get out of lockdown, they just splurge it.
	Yeah, but in every factor leading to the rise in poverty prices and economic hardship, it is the government that finds itself red-handed.
	So do we really think that allowing the government to seize a few billion off BP is going to make everything okay?
	Because I don't believe that's going to happen.
	Yeah, and also, this is the size of a country, a country's GDP. Whatever money they seize off BP or the oil companies, it's an accounting error.
	It's nothing.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Now, unlike yourself, I don't have shares in BP. I have no sympathy for BP Shell or the oil companies.
	But I think the system is rigged so that they can't lose, in a sense.
	An arbitrary and tyrannical cash grab is going to cause more problems for British people than for, say, BP executives or people who you might want to hate in BP. It's just going to empower the government and deter investment.
	So I think that's a losing policy in many ways.
	Yeah.
	What the government needs to do is get Shell and get BP to open up North Sea oil again and make us so we're not dependent on other countries.
	Yeah.
	And for those who want more in-depth economic content, we do have a couple of articles on the site.
	This one is by Harry and Josh asking the question, do antitrust and competition laws prevent monopolies, which is a deep thing.
	It's quite in-depth.
	I think it will be worth your while.
	And we also have this article by Josh, which is free, I believe, on why inequality exists.
	It exists because it's a good idea.
	Pretty much.
	Yeah.
	Well, it is, but I don't have time to cover that in that segment.
	I can cover it in a second.
	Go for it.
	If there's no inequality, what's the point of trying to work harder?
	What's the point?
	If I can get a faster car than somebody else, I can drive in that car and sneer at them out the window.
	So the thing that makes you work is the promise of competitive advantage to your peers?
	Yes, yes.
	Interesting.
	No, I think that's true, but I was going to say there's a strategic point from the government's point of view.
	Well, that's always a terrible idea.
	From the state's point of view, if you want a diverse economy, you need to have income inequality because different jobs will naturally occupy different price points.
	Anyway, because, okay, a doctor needs, what, 10 years of training and practical experience and so on.
	That's expensive.
	A plumber is obviously a technical and skilled job, but requires less.
	A bricklayer is another skilled job, but if you absolutely had to, you could probably do it in a few months, so the training costs are much lower.
	Yeah.
	Anyway.
	So the way we get out of disaster scenarios like the one we're experiencing is to have good governance, competent statement and long term thinking.
	Have we got any of them?
	It's been a long time, Leo.
	Maybe in your lifetime, but not in mine.
	Chasing the political bauble of net zero has resulted in a suicidal energy strategy.
	and finally The Tories are set to lose 550 seats in the worst local election in a generation tomorrow.
	So make sure you get out there and vote.
	Even the good news is bad news these days.
	I can't imagine Kiel Starmer dialing back on net zero.
	But if you want to make the lunatics pay for the damage they've done, vote third party or independent in tomorrow's elections would be my advice.
	Yeah, or vote for the Tories.
	If you just want to watch the world, Burton.
	No, I mean, like, the one thing about the Tories, however bad the Tories are, you know for a fact if Labour got in, obviously the local elections don't matter as much, but if Labour got in, they'd just open the border.
	I mean, our borders are already pretty open, but Labour would just open them, because they know...
	If they let in loads of people from Syria, Afghanistan, all the rest of it, obviously a lot of those people are going to be great, hardworking, upstanding citizens, but they're going to include some people who might be ideologically opposed to the West and might have some pretty kooky ideas about homosexuality and women's rights and all the rest of it, but they know that if they let those people in, they're going to vote Labour.
	You say that, but then the local Conservative Council that we have here welcomed with open arms a huge amount of Afghan migrants who are still sitting in the hotels of this town as we speak.
	Right, yeah.
	So that's the local authority.
	They don't control the borders.
	Right, true.
	There's distribution there.
	But it's local elections next time, so damned if you do, damned if you don't.
	Yeah.
	And on that, let's see what's going on in America.
	Okay, well, comedian Dave Chappelle.
	Is this the first clip?
	I don't think this is the first one.
	Have we got the first one up?
	So comedian Dave Chappelle was attacked on stage.
	You might have seen this on the news.
	Is it?
	Just having some slight technical issues.
	Well, there's a...
	Oh, yeah.
	Okay.
	That's the...
	That's not the right clip.
	But anyway, I'll just tell you what happened.
	So, basically, in the video that you can't see, because this is a different video, an audience member ran on stage from the side and attempted to tackle Chappelle to the ground.
	And Chappelle tussled with a man who ran behind the screen on stage and was surrounded by security.
	So, it was a very exciting video...
	But you can't see it.
	Instead, you can see this is the guy afterwards.
	You can see he got, like, beaten up by...
	He got beaten up, and now his arm is on backwards.
	I saw that earlier.
	It's like, you know when you have a Lego figure and you swap the arms around on it?
	That's what he looks like.
	Yeah.
	Goodness me.
	So that looks sore.
	It's the world's most dislocated shoulder right there.
	It's good to see that, like, you know, if you attack a comedian on stage, it's not without some personal jeopardy.
	How good's your security, Liam?
	We've got...
	Man, I've done my own security.
	So, like, when I do the Edinburgh Fringe, I do the free fringe because, you know, you make more money.
	But there's no...
	It's not like you're in a pristine venue.
	There's no security and stuff.
	I mean, the venue's got security, but they're not in the room with you.
	And because it's, like, it's free to get in.
	It's like, well, you can sort of buy a ticket to guarantee a seat, but then you just let...
	To fill in the rest of the seats, you let people in for free.
	And then they donate afterwards.
	And, like...
	So you get people coming along.
	I did a show a few years ago called I Can Make You Tory and that got people's backs up in Scotland because obviously they're all for diversity and tolerance but they're not actually for diversity of opinion or tolerance of different opinions but I did the show and people come along just to mess with the show and these two guys came in and they're at the back of the show and they're heckling and stuff.
	The thing is they were doing visual heckling which is the worst.
	They weren't shouting stuff out.
	Messing around and pulling faces.
	I can't really explain it, but it was right in my line of vision.
	And it was doing my nothing!
	So I was like, what are you doing?
	Stop messing with me.
	And I got into...
	They refused to leave.
	And I was like, I'm going to kick you out.
	And then I had to jump off the stage and go and bundle them out myself.
	But, oh man, everybody thinks I'm mad when I say it was visual heckling instead of it.
	Honestly, it was worse than life.
	I wish I could have seen it.
	Oh man, it was horrific.
	There was a review of it.
	There was a reviewer in the audience of that specific show.
	These guys weren't very visual though.
	They attacked him properly by the sound of it.
	Yeah, the next clip, if we go on to the next one.
	So this is, you can see, you can see, oh, I know, because I took the other one off because it was like a LinkedIn newspaper article and videos and that.
	But this is, so this is after Dave Chappelle's been attacked and this is security surrounding the guy and just like stomping on him.
	So, he's been detained.
	So, basically, Chris Rock and Jon Stewart were among the group of comedians performing alongside Dave Chappelle when the incident happened.
	Jamie Foxx, the actor and comedian, jumped on stage to help and make sure Dave was okay.
	And there was an eyewitness, if we move on to the next one.
	Why are all the clips this...
	Now, the next one should be Sharon Carpenter.
	There we go.
	There we go.
	Oh, there's this one.
	So...
	Carpenter told the PA news agency an attacker lunged at the comedian as he headlined the event, sending him flying in the air.
	She said it looked like someone was dashing across the stage from the side.
	He fell backwards on his back with his arms and legs up in the air.
	He was obviously in shock.
	We were all in shock.
	I thought for a moment, okay, is this a prank?
	Which is what people thought that when Will Smith was attacked.
	Well, that happened to Tommy Cooper, didn't it?
	Yeah, when he died.
	He died on stage and people thought it was part of his act.
	Yeah, literally collapsed, clutching his chest, and everybody's just pissing themselves laughing.
	And then the curtains come across and I think his feet are sticking at the bottom.
	I mean, it was quite funny.
	Poor man.
	And also because they'd made jokes about, you know, they'd referenced Will Smith.
	And Chris Rock was there.
	He was one of the performers.
	So they thought this was some sort of prank referencing it.
	But LAPD were called to the incident around 10.45pm and a man who was reportedly armed with a gun and a knife was taken into custody.
	And that's reported in the mirror, but I don't know if it's actually true.
	So if we move on to the next one, we can see...
	Have we skipped one?
	Oh yeah, so that's the one that's on twice.
	Have we got one before that?
	No, we don't.
	Okay.
	So yeah, if we keep on going to that one.
	Yeah, so...
	Oh yeah, by the way, Chappelle continued with his show afterwards.
	And he joked, he came back on, he said, that was a trans man.
	Which is quite funny, because basically Chappelle's been getting stuck for doing transphobic jokes.
	He did a Netflix show, which got some controversy, I recall.
	Yeah, yeah, he's done a couple, you know, that have been exploring the issue, you know, trans issues and stuff.
	He supported J.K. Rowling.
	Well, that infamous transphobe.
	Yeah, yeah, he's never actually said anything transphobic.
	Well, that's how you tell she's a real transphobe.
	Yeah, yeah, because she's so careful to hide it.
	I know.
	She's like one of those racists or Nazis that don't say anything racist or Nazi.
	They're the worst.
	But yeah, because Chappelle joked that it was a trans man, It's a funny joke, you know?
	And also, he's just been attacked on stage by somebody with a knife and a gun.
	So, obviously, the real issue is that we've got to remember the real victims, which is the guy who attacked him.
	So all these people leave out the fact that Dave Chappelle joked that it was a trans man that ran on stage to beat him, and we don't know who it was.
	All we know is that things are about to get worse in this country and have been getting worse for trans people, and Dave encourages it.
	Well, number one, Dave doesn't encourage it.
	Number two, I'd like to see any sort of information about trans people.
	I mean, they say attacks on trans people have gone up, but the number of trans people has gone up by like 5,000%.
	So, you know, literally there's a 5,000% increase.
	Are you joking?
	Is that serious?
	No, 5,000% increase in children being referred for gender reassignment.
	And it's because they're sort of being shoveled into it.
	It's a boom industry.
	Goodness me.
	They're being shoveled into it.
	A lot of people are making a lot of money off it.
	And there's this mantra, this ideology and...
	Left-wing academia, which is the only kind of academia, transitioning.
	And it's become a fashion.
	When I was at school, people had tamagotchis or mullets or whatever.
	You know, and this thing, everyone's like, oh yeah, I've got a Tamagotchi.
	Now it's like, oh yeah, I'm transitioning.
	And it's become, now cisgender is used, I see it on Instagram, is used as a pejorative slur in the comedy community.
	And people make these statements being like, this person accused me of being cisgender.
	I'm not cisgender.
	I'm a genderqueer, non-binary, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	My pronouns are blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Where's the joke?
	No, that's not them joking.
	That's them just saying, like, I've been accused of being cisgender.
	How dare you?
	You know what I mean?
	It's become, everything's flipped.
	So, you know, before kids in school would be like, ah, that's gay or whatever.
	And now they're saying, ah, that's cisgender.
	It's nuts.
	So, other jokes that were made.
	Chris Rock came on stage, hugged Dave, grabbed the mic and said, Will, was that you?
	Referencing Will Smith punching Chris Rock.
	Yeah.
	And Chappelle could be seen thanking his famous friends for helping out, saying, whenever you're in trouble, Jamie Foxx will show up in a sheriff's hat.
	Foxx responded saying, I thought that was part of the show.
	And Chappelle joked, I've been doing this for 35 years.
	I just stomped N-word backstage.
	I've always wanted to do that.
	Jesus Christ.
	Well, he knows how to get that last.
	The sort of edge has taken off that a bit by the fact that the guy's arm is on the wrong way now.
	Oh my goodness.
	There's more reactions.
	The next one shows somebody reacting.
	The next tab.
	So yeah, this is Paul Cox saying Dave Chappelle was attacked on stage last night.
	Mental.
	A comedian's biggest fear used to be silence.
	Not being attacked by a man with a gun and a knife.
	Yeah, someone called Tony Baker said some dude tackled Dave Chappelle on stage and that dude got stomped out forthwith.
	They took his arm off and put it on backwards.
	That's what he get.
	This attacking people on stage ain't going to fly.
	Because there has been an increase in it.
	I think Will Smith brought it to mainstream popularity, but there's been dozens of comedians being attacked on stage in the last decade.
	Like Jim Jefferies.
	We've got some clips in a moment.
	Jim Jefferies was punched, like, Punch pretty nastily on stage at the Comedy Store.
	I mean, the other thing is, the flip side of it is, you know, this can really launch a comedian to prominence.
	A small time, yeah, yeah.
	Bit of controversy.
	Jim Jefferies is huge now, and that was, you know, one of the first things that sort of, you know, launched him.
	So do you reckon we're going to get false flag comedian attacks to boost popularity?
	There's already been one.
	I should have put the link up.
	Dennis Krasnov had a friend staged an assault.
	It's kind of obvious it's not a real...
	Dennis is great, by the way.
	He's a nice guy.
	So if you've got a good agent, they should stage the assault without your knowing, is what you're trying to say?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Break your knees, Tonya Harding style.
	What?
	But yeah, recently Jeff Innocent was attacked.
	Russell Hicks was attacked.
	These are London-based comedians.
	James Loveridge was somebody who threw a pint glass at him and it smashed on the wall behind him.
	So, you know, it could have been serious.
	And always over misunderstandings.
	It's crazy.
	Well, it's like a lot of this time, I think, people get in their heads what I call crocodiles, which are things that the media have sort of trained them that when someone steps on that, you go after them like that, gnashing teeth.
	And as soon as you step on one of these crocodiles, someone comes at you and they go extreme.
	Like, you know, it's not normal behavior to throw a pint glass at a comedian because he said something that stepped on your triggers.
	So it's just very strange.
	Yeah.
	I blame the media personally.
	People get worked up into hating, viscerally hating people they've never met.
	Yeah.
	Although I don't think it's the media anymore.
	I think people are doing it themselves on social media.
	So I think the media is such a small impact now.
	And social media, just that mass witch-hunting feel of it.
	But also the leftism, because they feel righteous.
	There's no self-examination or self-criticism or humility or Life becomes a permanent crusade for some people.
	Yeah, and they've got this huge sword that they've been using for decades for killing bad dragons.
	So the civil rights movement, it's like, take that racism.
	Women's rights, take that.
	LGBT rights, take that.
	And now, most of those dragons have been slain, but they've still got this big sword.
	Covered in blood.
	Yeah, they're going around looking for something to attack with a sword.
	So they go after, you know, Dave Chappelle makes a couple of jokes, they go after him.
	And Dave Chappelle is just raising questions.
	Comedians are just posing questions.
	I mean, I know it's a bit of a cliche to see that we're modern philosophers, when we're not.
	We say we're modern philosophers, and then we get on stage and talk about our dicks.
	But...
	But there's something to be said.
	He's posing questions.
	And comedy's one of the last bastions where these questions can be asked without somebody getting cancelled.
	We can say things that people can't say in other lines of work because they will get cancelled.
	And it's sad sometimes, like Steve Harvey, who presents Family Feuds and all that sort of stuff.
	He was an amazing comedian and he had to quit comedy because he knew he was going to offend someone and then he'd get cancelled from his TV stuff.
	So as soon as you step outside comedy, your comedy is vulnerable.
	Looking at the reason why Dave Chappelle was attacked, there's protests over his Netflix show.
	So 100 Netflix employees walked out over his show because he said, gender is a fact and LGBT people are too sensitive.
	I mean, that's not the most inflammatory things I've ever heard being said.
	I mean, if that was school bullying, you would probably class it as tepid or possibly milk-dosed.
	You would in the 90s, but now you'd probably have to put the kids in a cage and burn them or something.
	Yeah, because everybody's so sensitive now.
	But yeah, there's a big walkout outside the Netflix Los Angeles offices.
	Demonstrators called on Netflix to fund more trans and non-binary talent.
	Man, every single transgender person is already a comedian.
	There's no...
	I tried.
	I tried being trans.
	I changed my pronouns to she slash her, trying to get some of this action, and it's not working, which I think is apparently I'm not conforming to heteronormative patriarchal gender norms with my appearance.
	But, yeah, man, there's loads of trans comedians.
	There's some good ones.
	And, you know, this idea that transgender people are a marginalised voice Man, come on.
	They've got quite a big voice.
	And there's loads of people speaking out against it.
	So Jamila Jamil thanked people for taking part in the demonstrations.
	Elliot Page, Lily Wachowski, so they're transgender celebrities, voiced their support.
	But yeah, so there's a big backlash against the Dave Chappelle special, but also a lot of support for it as well.
	So yeah, and just to finish off, we'll look at some other attacks on stage.
	So this one is Jim Jefferies.
	So if we just play it, this is at the Manchester Comedy Store.
	Back to pushing it inwards!
	Where are you?
	Oh hang on!
	Took the audience a while.
	Yeah, I don't even think that's security.
	That's the audience!
	Oh yeah, that's security.
	The guy in the black jacket.
	I've played the Manchester Comedy Store.
	It can be a bit rough.
	I mean, oh man, I remember there was all these guys.
	As soon as I went out and it was apparent I was Scottish, all these guys started slagging me off and standing up and shouting at me and stuff.
	And I was just ripping into them, you know what I mean?
	But then they kept doing it so security came and chucked them out.
	And everybody was like booing them and stuff.
	And then I left after my set to drive back to London.
	We can stop this now.
	That's the end of the fight.
	But I left after my set to drive back to London and they're all just, the security hadn't chucked them out of the building.
	They're all in the fire.
	I had to walk through, like, all these guys.
	Oh my goodness.
	I was just like, man, if they didn't like me when I was on stage, I'd be like, what are they going to do now?
	But it was fine.
	this is luke capasso offending um uh lesbian old bananas i'll be like don't throw out them bananas girl I'll get some eggs and some milk and make some banana bread.
	Maybe we'll have some tea and eat that banana bread.
	You got a cat or a pet or anything?
	Oh, a cat, yeah.
	We can talk about your cat.
	We can talk about my plans for the garden, you know what I mean?
	Like we go to B&Q, I was going to get some hostas and line the fence with it.
	How about you put some cream cheese on that banana bread?
	That's how I feel about you.
	Whoa!
	Oh no no no.
	Oh man does she have to do that?
	What the fuck was that?
	Wow.
	That's what we call improv here.
	And then...
	The old Coronation Street salute.
	Haven't seen that one in a while.
	And then the next one, somebody pulls a gun at a gig and Mike Tyson's in the audience.
	And this is just another little open mic thing.
	But yeah, he's pulled a gun out.
	And then of course everybody's like...
	Everybody's hitting the deck.
	And Mike just sits there, totally implacable.
	So I don't know what the outcome of that was.
	And then this next one shows actual violence on stage.
	Mm-hmm.
	National Geographic, Animal Planet-looking motherfucker like her.
	Why are you sitting with that ugly bitch?
	Do you have no seat?
	Some esteem?
	Is that it?
	Ha, ha.
	That's my wife.
	You keep talking.
	Fuck that ugly roach.
	You're kidding.
	I don't need those importants.
	Hold up!
	Hold up!
	Be sure, nigga.
	Watch yourself.
	Watch yourself.
	Look behind you, nigga.
	Back of all of you, nigga.
	Bye.
	Good night.
	Good night.
	Have a nice night, nigga.
	You go night-night.
	Sleepy time, nigga.
	I told you.
	Watch yourself, cuz.
	I think we can cut that now, Michael.
	Yeah, we can cut that.
	Yeah, so those are kind of, like, they're obviously open mic gigs, you know, most of those, apart from the comedy store.
	If you have had a night like that, that looks pretty wild to me.
	Yeah, no, I mean, I've seen stuff kick off at open mic nights, but yeah, normally, I mean, the thing is with open mic nights, because people are trying out new material, that can offend people, because people are new acts, and a lot of comedians come into comedy thinking they're going to be, I'm going to be so edgy, I'm going to be so, I'm going to say things that nobody else says, and it's like, well, you've got to learn how to do it before you can be edgy about it.
	Yeah.
	So they come out and they're just being offensive.
	They're bad comedians and they're also being offensive and stuff.
	There's a comedian, Darius Davies.
	I do a podcast with him.
	When he started out, it was so funny.
	He's just the most antagonistic person.
	So he's been attacked a few times on stage.
	We don't have any of it on film, unfortunately.
	But yeah, so that's where we're at.
	Sorry I didn't have the clip of the actual assault where the guy gets on stage at the Hollywood Bowl and like tackles Dave Chappelle because I deleted it off the document because that's the sort of maverick move I do.
	Don't know what you're going to get when Leo comes on.
	But yeah, if you watch any news thing today, don't watch it in the next like...
	45 minutes.
	But if you watch any news thing today, you'll be able to see it.
	So with that, comedy is not the only thing that gets people riled up.
	Because did you know that imagination is racist?
	So I was thinking about this.
	It's May the 4th, Star Wars Day.
	And I was thinking recently how everyone needs a bit of escapism, right?
	Sometimes you just want to switch off.
	You want to get away from the real world.
	You're paying your bills, earning your wage, this sort of thing.
	Get away from the grid.
	Just put those systems to one side.
	When I want to get away from the real world, I read The Guardian.
	And some people descend into drink, which is my preferred option.
	But if you're not doing that, then there are lots of hobby groups and things of completely harmless stuff, a lot of it, like fantasy worlds, or some people play Dungeons and Dragons, whatever it may be.
	Choose your poison, whatever floats your boat.
	But the whole Culture Wars stuff really kicked off with controversy about video games to start with in 2011, which is just one of these hobby type things.
	Yeah, that sort of thing.
	It had been going on before then, but that was when it really blew up.
	And things have got so insane since then that I kind of miss the entitled activist screechings about patriarchy.
	Now, I have put this slide here because, for me, this is the feminist vision of what patriarchy is.
	It's like a psychological representation.
	You have an engorged male slug with a slave woman on a chain.
	That's what they seem to think patriarchy is, especially when it comes to nerds or nerd hobbies, that sort of thing.
	But in their noble quest to smash the patriarchy, I think that feminists have attempted to upend the gender dynamic in this picture by becoming Jabba the Hutt themselves.
	If you've seen any footage of...
	They look like him.
	Yeah, a lot of feminist activists from recently.
	They look a lot less like the lady on the left and more like the thing on the right.
	What happened to hot feminists?
	Were they ever a thing?
	Was that something when you were alive?
	There was definitely hot feminists in the 90s.
	Feminism went through its hot phase.
	I don't recall that, sadly.
	So that's passed me by.
	But the quest to upend society has seen the subversion of all hobby spaces, claiming them to be sexist or racist or transphobic or otherwise politically incorrect.
	And in this segment, we're going to take a look at some of the hobbies and hobby groups that have been invaded by WOKE. So did you know that knitting is political?
	I don't know what you're laughing about, Leo.
	I'm deadly serious.
	Ah, it's the New York Times.
	The New York Times.
	Knitting has always been political, says the New York Times.
	Traditionally, politics are not for the dinner table or the crafting circle.
	But on Sunday, Ravelry, a popular website for knitters and crotcheters, took a political stand when it announced that it was banning content that supports President Trump in what it said was a resolution against white supremacy.
	We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy, the site said in a statement explaining the decision.
	Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.
	What?
	Is this the sort of thing you expect when you want to go, oh, you know, I just want to go for a little Wednesday afternoon knitting with the lasses and stuff?
	This is why I like to get my political analysis from intellectuals with a lot of experience of politics and not people who run knitting sites.
	Right, absolutely.
	Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.
	No, it's not.
	Right, but you want to knit because you're escaping from the politics in the real world, right?
	You don't want to knit because you want to make the most politically correct stitch that has ever been stitched.
	Everything's got to be politically correct now.
	You've got to have your Stasi-approved scarf pattern.
	And on that, did you know that also gardening is racist?
	Weeding out horticulture's race problem by James Wong.
	Even in the garden, there's bigotry to be found.
	Why?
	What's he dug up?
	He's dug up the corpse of Adolf Eisman or something.
	Yeah, I don't know what skeletons he's got buried in his garden.
	But no, he was giving what seems to be a reasonable account of, in his life as a gardener, he has occasionally been a subject to what you might consider racist abuse, things like that.
	And fair enough, that might be true.
	But I then asked the question, why is that newsworthy?
	Yeah.
	And I know exactly why it's newsworthy.
	It's the availability heuristic from psychology.
	And this is a mistake, like a programming fault that all humans do, which is when we're asked how often or how popular something is, instead of actually evaluating that, we look back in our memory and say, oh, I've seen three incidents of racist people in gardening, so gardening must be totally racist.
	So they know that by putting this out, all they need to do is tell one story of one person who experienced some mild racism To then persuade their entire readership that horticulture is racist.
	Yeah.
	I just can't believe people who buy The Guardian still buy this stuff.
	This is utter nonsense.
	It makes good compost.
	There's no way gardening's racist.
	Unless Jeremy Corbyn's doing it.
	And then it's deeply anti-Semitic.
	Anti-Semitic gardening.
	There's a new one for you, folks.
	But another thing which is racist, of course, is classical music.
	Black scholars confront white supremacy in classical music.
	The field must acknowledge a history of systemic racism while also giving new weight to black composers, musicians and listeners.
	It was the old days!
	There weren't that many black composers in Vienna in the 1600s.
	That's true.
	But there have been many black musicians, many of them very talented.
	And of course there have been many non-classical black musicians, especially in jazz, which originated from black music in America and so on.
	But that's like me saying there's systemic anti-whiteness in Jamaican music hall or something.
	You know what I mean?
	Like it's Jamaican bashment music.
	It's from Jamaica.
	You know what I mean?
	What do you expect?
	There's going to be systemic whiteness in Scottish folk music.
	I think we need some systemic common sense in evaluating these claims, to be honest.
	When was it done?
	And what country was it done in?
	Was that a mostly white country?
	Is that maybe why most of them are white?
	There's no proportional thinking.
	There's a beautiful paragraph in here which could basically be cookie cutter taken out of this hobby, classical music, and put into any other hobby.
	So here we go.
	Since nationwide protests over police violence erupted in May and June, American culture has been engaged in an examination, however nominal, of its relationship with racism.
	Nominal?
	Such an examination is sorely needed in classical music because of its extreme dependence on a problematic past.
	The undertaking is complex.
	The field must acknowledge a history of systemic racism while also honouring the individual experiences of black composers, musicians and listeners.
	Now remove all of the words there, the terminology that are to do with classical music and replace them with literally anything else because you can do that and I guarantee people will have done that across the spectrum.
	Like, you are just looking at an ideological blurting out here.
	There's no actual thinking going on in that construction of that paragraph.
	I just can't believe people are still, you know, buying it, like, getting the New Yorker magazine and being like, oh, yeah, no, this is, oh, another article about what a terrible person I am because of the colour of my skin.
	Yeah.
	Like, I can't, oh, this is brilliant.
	Let me subscribe.
	It's a bizarre masochistic pleasure, they seem to take out of it.
	Why do they, oh, man, I miss it when people just went to a dominatrix and got, like, whipped.
	At least you've got a boner when you do that.
	Who's got a boner reading this?
	I don't know, there's some strange people in America, Leo.
	But another thing which is problematic is of course Magic the Gathering.
	Female players of Magic the Gathering face a daunting opponent.
	Sexism.
	What's Magic the Gathering?
	Magic the Gathering is a collectible card game.
	A bit like the old Pokemon collectible card game, but older and nerdier and still played commonly to this day.
	I do not believe that any women play this.
	There aren't many of them, that's true.
	So here we have, when Jackie Lee plays in Magic the Gathering tournaments, she doesn't just have to face her competitors, she also has to face sexist vitriol from strangers.
	And there is an idea that all of these spaces are essentially dominated by malodorous, overweight nerds with neckbeards.
	I agree.
	I see no lie.
	They do have that reputation for a reason, though, and I certainly think that there could be improvements made there.
	But again, it's the case of taking one example of someone experiencing sexism, which may be entirely justified as sexism, and then that gets reported and blown up to such proportions that people then associate, oh, Magic the Gathering.
	That's that thing that's sexist, isn't it?
	And if that's your hobby, you've spent hundreds of hours collecting, playing, getting immersed in that world, that is a real savage blow at your identity, I think.
	And it's politics invading your hobby.
	But also, if that's your hobby, you should get a better hobby.
	There's so many hobbies now.
	Why are you still doing some sort of nerd game?
	I think you could get an outdoor hobby.
	An outdoors hobby, yeah.
	Maybe one where you might meet some women.
	Women who don't complain.
	But we also have Magic the Gathering banning racist cards, which is quite funny if we just scroll down and look at a few of these.
	Invoke Prejudice was banned.
	What else do we have?
	Cleanse was banned.
	All black creatures in play are destroyed.
	It's a bit problematic.
	Virtue's Ruin was also...
	Was that not addressed?
	Yeah, that was not addressed.
	Destroy all white creatures was alright.
	I think when they say black creatures and white creatures, they're not talking about...
	The skin colour of the cards.
	No, they're different colour flavours in the game.
	It's like when you've got a game of chess and there's the white pieces and the black pieces.
	That is also racist, by the way.
	I wish I had put that in.
	That was next in this segment, but I took it out for brevity.
	People saying it's racist that white moves first in chess.
	Why is that?
	Everything's racist, gentlemen.
	Get used to it.
	Carrying on with the nerd hobbies, we have Warhammer 40,000.
	Do you know about this?
	No.
	So this is a tabletop miniature gaming thing.
	Right, yeah.
	Again, fairly nerdy, quite male.
	What do you mean fairly?
	So we have this article.
	Is Warhammer 40k fascist, racist, and misogynist?
	Yeah, it goes on and on.
	There is an entire subreddit devoted to political activism in this hobby.
	If we go to this one, this is from SigMarxism.
	Yeah, and it's just a load of political stuff.
	But we also, so Carl, the boss, did an article about the politics of Warhammer 40,000, and there is an audio track for this which is two hours long.
	He's quite into his Warhammer, and it makes some reasonable philosophical points.
	So if you are of the nerd persuasion, if you can get into Warhammer 40k and you can listen to a two-hour podcast on this, there's actually some pretty good philosophical and cultural analysis that he uses 40k as a vehicle for.
	But what else is racist and sexist?
	Is it everything?
	Well, it's also horse riding.
	Yes.
	Not in, like, America, right?
	In 1700 it wasn't.
	No, was it not?
	Well, not from the films I've seen.
	It was a Native American dominated sport.
	They weren't called Native Americans then, but they were riding around on horses.
	Bows and arrows.
	If we scroll down to this glorious picture here.
	So this is what horse riding should look like.
	I think the photo speaks for itself.
	For those people who are listening to the audio track, we have a black woman riding a horse with a massive cardboard Black Lives Matter placard on its site in the middle of a protest.
	And the title of the article is, Brianna Noble Addresses Inclusivity, Socioeconomics and Racism in a Question Sport.
	If you just wanted to ride horses, I'm sorry.
	Like, you need to be an anti-racist now?
	Anyway.
	What else is racist?
	Dog walking.
	Dogwalking is racist.
	Dogwalkers at Howard University infringe on black mecca, students say.
	In an online forum, someone said they were told to leave by students while walking their dog on campus.
	And they continue.
	Gentrification has irritated yet another community of colour.
	Classic Guardian rhetoric.
	In Washington, D.C., students and alumni of Howard University are objecting to residents who walk their dogs on the campus, feeling these actions infringe on the campus and its history.
	The university is historically black.
	And affectionately referred to as one of the black meccas of American society.
	I love the fact there are historically black things but not historically white things in America.
	Very curious.
	So this is...
	Because I assumed it was going to be people getting upset, like dog walkers getting upset that other dog walkers were black or something.
	That's what they were going to be alluding to.
	So this is black people getting upset at people for walking their dogs.
	Yes.
	Right.
	If that was the other way round...
	Walking your dog in my neighbourhood.
	I know.
	If that was the other way round, that'd be absolute arrestable racism on the part of the...
	It would be, yeah.
	Could you imagine saying, I don't like all of the black people walking their dogs in my neighbourhood?
	It's absolutely outrageous, that kind of thing.
	We've got to clip that out and just...
	I know, someone will.
	I knew that was going to happen as soon as I opened my mouth.
	Anyway.
	But on the other topic we have Dungeons and Dragons, another nerd hobby.
	All of the nerd hobbies are sexist, racist and so on.
	Mainly because nerds can't really put up a fight against it a lot of the time.
	Yeah, and also black people have better hobbies.
	Women and black people have better hobbies than playing Dungeons& Dragons.
	Actually, Dungeons& Dragons is surprisingly popular among the fairer sex these days.
	It's amazing.
	Back in the day, that was not the case, but it's been popularised by shows such as Critical Role.
	And all the wizard stuff, maybe.
	There's so much wizard stuff.
	There's Harry Potter.
	What else?
	Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
	Right, yeah.
	Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
	So it has gradually become a bit more mainstream than it was back in their day.
	But yeah, this is a lovely poster.
	Revolutionize your next Dungeons& Dragons game with this anti-capitalist anarchist campaign guide.
	Eat the Rich is a collection of explicitly anti-capitalist adventures for the Dungeons& Dragons role-playing game.
	Each original adventure dives into classic D&D tropes and puts a new spin on them, tackling issues of workers' rights, healthcare, the prison industrial complex, the environment, animal rights, agriculture and more.
	These adventures will make you passionate to join the revolution.
	Again, no space is safe.
	It's all politicized at this point.
	And do you know what else is racist?
	I don't know.
	Scotland!
	I mean, yeah.
	The SNP liked to pretend they're the most progressive country in the world, and it's like, no, you're not.
	Scotland was quite racist.
	Rural Scotland, anyway, growing up.
	Interesting.
	So if we continue here.
	Like many others, I had bought into the rhetoric that Scotland is opening, welcoming, diverse and inclusive.
	As Rabbie Burns wrote, we're all Jock Tamsin's bairns, right?
	That's the same Rabbie Burns who was on his way to manage a slave plantation.
	Which they lambasted him for, despite the fact that he knew full well it was a miserable idea and he was forced to do it for economic reasons.
	Yeah, money.
	You wanted to do it for money.
	But it appears not if you're a black or brown person living in Scotland today.
	And they continue.
	Nassar Mir, Professor of Race, Identity and Citizenship at Edinburgh University, told me that about a third of black and ethnic minorities in Scotland say they routinely experience racial discrimination.
	However, the kids of Glebeland's primary school in Dundee give me hope for the future.
	Now, if Dundee is giving you hope for the future, we're all lost.
	There we go.
	The school has launched a project called Don't Recycle Racism, which educates children on how to deal with racism if they are victims of it or see other people subjected to it.
	The pupils themselves have designed stickers that will be placed on bins in all primary classrooms, giving advice on what they should do.
	Now, personally, I've seen, in our coverage, we've seen a lot of these sort of campaigns where they are educating primary school children below the age of 10 on racism or sexism, and it turns out most of the time to be just pure propaganda.
	They put this nice spin on it, like, oh no, it's tolerance and it's inclusivity, but they're actually just essentially indoctrinating these kids into a rather toxic worldview.
	Shouldn't they be doing sums or learning how to read and write and this sort of thing?
	Well, Well, isn't this going to take away from valuable time that they could be convincing them that they're transgender?
	Well, there is that as well.
	One must consider all of the options when it comes to a diverse curriculum.
	Speaking of diversity, birdwatching is also sexist.
	RSPB vows to review sexist posters showing female birds are smaller than males.
	And this cracked me up because they're not smaller, they're further away.
	Yeah.
	I mean, progressives have really regressed to the Father Tent levels of incomprehensibility at this point.
	And it was a problem with this poster.
	And finally, this one took the biscuit for me.
	Thomas the Tank is a fascist.
	Yes, I've seen this before.
	It's spectacular.
	Is it Paw Patrol?
	It's about the police.
	They say it presents the police in a positive light.
	And that was seen as a bad thing for some reason, instead of a good thing, like encouraging children to have trust in the police, who, after all, maintain a law-abiding society.
	Instead of that, they're like, no, the police are bad.
	They should be defunded.
	And I don't think they really thought through that whole defund the police thing.
	No, I don't think they did.
	No, because anywhere they've, you know, what we're seeing in America right now, like murders and everything are absolutely surging.
	But this is the thing.
	Politics has to invade every arena of life, even a children's show.
	They have this glorious quote at the start.
	Parents like to see themselves as purveyors of possibility.
	I don't know many parents who would self-describe as that, but here we go.
	We want our children to inhabit a world in which identities are both mutable and equal and imagination and empathy reign supreme.
	But identities in identitarian politics, you know, identities specifically aren't Mutable.
	Well, they're mutable as and when they want them to be mutable.
	Right, right.
	They are open to interpretation depending on your politics and the debate you're having.
	And they continue.
	But young children, as dictated by their tastes in popular culture, have something else in mind.
	They're drawn to worlds in which identities are fixed, order Trump's imagination, and transgressions are met with routine punishment.
	How horrible.
	This clash between what parents desire for their children, because all parents are woke, and what children desire for themselves is most easily observable in cartoon preferences.
	So often, the more parents dislike a show, the more their children love it.
	Two of the most divisive shows are Thomas the Tank Engine and Paw Patrol, both of which have been eviscerated by grown-ups on discussion boards, in social media, and in widely shared essays in prestigious publications.
	Who are these parents?
	I don't know anybody like that who's like, oh no, we want our, you know, like, they're obviously trying to win some sort of dinner party bingo, where, you know, like, it's like, oh yeah, so Esmeralda, yeah, she's non-binary, you know, all that kind of stuff, you know what I mean?
	Instead of just being like, ah, the shame, the shame of having a, the middle class shame of having a cisgender, like, child.
	It's horrendous, isn't it?
	Heterosexual and everything.
	But just to recapitulate the point of why we've gone through all of these hobbies.
	Fundamentally, there is an active campaign by these anti-fans to subvert hobby groups into woke political activism.
	Most of them, do you really think they care about Magic the Gathering, Warhammer 40k, Dungeons and Dragons, Thomas the Tank?
	No, they care about politics.
	And you see the same in football and so on as well.
	A lot of the Guardians...
	I love the Guardian's sport pages, because you can tell that the writer is grinding his teeth having to talk about sport, and he gets really excited when he gets to talk about inequalities and injustices and racism.
	But the other more sinister message of all of this is, if you're not woke, if you're not with us, you're against us.
	This is a hegemonic mentality.
	It can't just leave you alone to do your thing.
	So they're just like fundamentalist Christians in the 80s and 90s with the satanic panic.
	They have to invade and make sure that what you're doing is politically acceptable.
	So these totalitarian activists will never let you catch a break.
	They'll never let you indulge in escapism and never let you go on flights of fantasy unless your fantasy adheres to their ever-changing definitions of political correctness.
	Yeah.
	And I went through, I made a list of everything that's racist, everything that's been called racist.
	And I had to stop because it was just insane.
	I thought I'd maybe get like a hundred things.
	It was just, you could go for infinity looking at things that are racist.
	And it gets smaller and more pettier the more and more you look.
	Yeah, with microaggressions and all this sort of stuff, there doesn't have to be any actual, like racism used to be a measurable, objectively measurable thing.
	You know, somebody saying something or doing something racist, but now it can be The absence now can be a facial expression.
	And it's dangerous because this is actually now bleeding into every aspect of life.
	All our institutions, every part of academia, tech, the media, it's all systemically woke.
	And so, for example, HR departments now, this is the advice that goes out to all HR departments, is to look out for microaggressions, including facial expressions.
	Yeah.
	Which can be racist.
	So how do you objectively measure?
	How do you call somebody in a tribunal and it's like, well, your face, the muscles in your face took a different form or whatever.
	It's like, that's not a...
	Yeah, no, absolutely.
	That's not something that can be measured in any meaningful way.
	I think we are potentially moving to a world where these ideas, because they are so invasive and intrusive, are becoming less and less popular with the general public, which is also more and more aware of them.
	However, what they have done, as you rightly described, is colonise the corporate world from the top down, from places like BlackRock and so on, with these rule structures that have to trickle down in order to do business with the only players you can do business with in these fields.
	And so I think we're going to increasingly move to a world where the moral order is being dictated by these essentially elite structures in top universities and top corporations, which is being forced on the rest of civil society against its will.
	And I think we're going to see more and more conflict there.
	But then I think we're going to see companies, because obviously you can be a much more agile, profitable company if you move outside those structures, because it's like the difference between being in the free market and being in a communist society.
	Yeah.
	So, I mean, in media as well, you're seeing the success of people like Lotus Eaters.
	You know, so that's something...
	Like, Lotus Eaters gets...
	Like, the BBC would kill for some of the views that Lotus Eaters gets.
	You know what I mean?
	So, people are seeking out Harry's razors as well, you know, as a response to this wokeism.
	We're seeing the collapse of Netflix.
	We're seeing, you know, go woke, go broke is a saying for a reason.
	So, I don't know.
	I've got some hope for the future.
	No, I'm sorry.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	But I think it's going to be very interesting seeing what happens to this ideology.
	It reminds me at the moment of a religion that no one really wants.
	And I think people are going to get fed up of paying the tides.
	It's got all the bad things from a religion and none of the good things.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And on that note, let's go to the video comments.
	Hey guys, part of the reason why modern-day architecture sucks so bad, I'm pretty sure, is because architects nowadays use CAD software.
	Most of the projects are going to require them to use CAD software one way or the other, and it's actually very difficult to make complex spline shapes in CAD. It's much more tuned to make simple mathematical shapes.
	The simplest thing you can make in CAD is a cube.
	Hence why we see so many freaking cubes.
	And also nowadays, we can actually manufacture those cubes perfectly, which kind of cuts that part out.
	Whereas back in the day, in Artisan, actually, it would be easier for them to make a complex line because you can hide a mistake in a complex line.
	You can't hide a mistake in a perfect cube.
	That's really interesting.
	Thanks for that.
	First of all, I disregard your opinion because I don't like the art on your wall.
	But apart from that, no, that's a really good point.
	Yeah, that's interesting.
	Although I thought like, you know, when you get something like the British Museum, the roof there, the King's Cross, you know, the extension where it's like, it's quite, it's computer, like you said, CAD designed.
	And I thought that would be like pretty much impossible to do on, you know, because it's all curves and like really complex.
	Right.
	I thought that would be impossible to do on, you know, graph paper.
	In freehand.
	Yeah, it does make it more difficult, I suppose.
	But, I mean, I will have to think about that more to see whether that is true or not.
	But it's an interesting theory, isn't it?
	We did a segment last week, I did it with Callum, about architecture and about how, I feel like, standards of architecture have declined.
	You see a lot of absolutely butt-ugly buildings these days.
	Some of them look like they've been planted in the ground deliberately to annoy you.
	Do you have fungus at all?
	Like the walkie-talkie in London.
	Or Holyrood in Scotland.
	And also, the thing about...
	I'm looking at this because when Ukraine's eventually liberated from Russia, which probably won't take too much longer, but they're going to rebuild it and it's all going to be stuff like that.
	Instead of those beautiful classic buildings from the 1800s, it's going to be this ugly stuff like Holyrood Palace in Scotland.
	And the trouble with these new buildings is they're...
	An absolute fortune to maintain because they're full of holes and they flood and all the rest of it.
	And they cost a fortune to heat as well.
	So it's a shame that people can't build decent buildings anymore with much lower running costs.
	Well, it's not that we don't have the capability.
	It's not like we've lost the technology or we're stupider than we were back then to be able to do that.
	I think there's been a cultural shift with architects and so on.
	avant-garde buildings because they have the ego complexes of modern artists they want to stamp their ego on the physical landscape rather than actually and i think the whole architectural culture in academia and so on encourages that mode of thinking and sort of poo-poo's classical architecture as something that's that's finished that's past its time now you can make that argument about some elements of culture but about architecture it's as clear as night and day people do not like the modern stuff the vast majority of them despise it and hate to live in it and around it yeah
	and the old stuff you get people traveling all across the world to see yeah these old buildings in europe and so on so i think that's a slam dunk yeah some of it looks cool like the shard looks cool but you know the walkie-talkie looks terrible i agree Let's go to the next comment.
	Hey, loaded ears.
	I'm back in Lisa Nandy's socialist utopia.
	Apologies, I've been away for so long.
	I've been busy with something, but I want to share something with you.
	I've officially completed my dissertation, and I can say...
	Get lost.
	I hope I'll be making videos, more videos in the future, now I've got more free time.
	Cheers, guys.
	Excellent.
	Congratulations.
	I hope your markers aren't watching The Lotus Eater.
	Excellent.
	Congratulations, man.
	I hope it goes well.
	Let's go to the next one.
	So for the question of abortion and the Constitution, In Roe v.
	Wade, they basically argued that pregnancy is a medical condition, akin to having, like, a disease or a heart defect, and that you should have the right to decide how you want to treat your condition.
	The court basically ruled that once the baby can survive outside of the womb, that's no longer the case, but until it can survive outside the womb, that is how we should treat it, and that's what they're going to overturn.
	What are your views on the whole abortion debate there?
	Well, abortion shouldn't be banned because you can't ban it.
	It's like banning drugs.
	You don't ban it, you just make it illegal.
	And then people get unsafe abortions in the black market, so from a pragmatic point of view.
	But, man, I was shocked to find that you can get an abortion up to, like, 24 weeks.
	Because, man, when...
	That's a baby.
	That's a baby that can live outside the womb, but it's a baby.
	That's not a collection of cells.
	That's a person.
	I was horrified when I looked into it on this channel a few months ago to find that there was a place in America, possibly New Jersey, that had allowed it up to the point of birth.
	That's insane.
	I know.
	That's insane.
	Although, I mean, I think for some people it should be allowed post-birth.
	Yeah, we made this joke as well.
	Oh, really?
	Damn, I'm just a hat comedian.
	Helicopter abortions for leftists, we reckon, for Up to 18 years old.
	That's literally what I was going to say.
	I went in a helicopter.
	I was going to see me going around with a shovel.
	But it is gross.
	And I think people get so caught up in the trenches of, no, abortion good, abortion good, abortion good, or abortion bad, that they actually lose all context of what they're actually talking about.
	It's like, look, you're advocating something which the human race for its whole existence would decry as evil, like killing a baby right before it's going to be born.
	Yeah.
	Oh, anyway.
	Yeah.
	But I mean, it's, you know, people have got to, and like, you know, somebody's been raped or there's incest or something, you know, and also if it's ectopic or, you know, any sort of issue like that.
	But yeah, man, but at the end of the day, man, you're killing, you're killing a baby.
	And like, I hate, I hate to see like, you know, these liberal women being like, like having abortion celebrations.
	It's like, man, that is, it's so disgusting.
	Let's go to the next comment.
	I recently heard the question asked of why abortion is so important to the left and I think the answer that I've heard nobody say before but I think is really true is that killing another person changes you and it totally commits you to your cause.
	This is true of soldiers in combat and it's true of gang members getting blooded and I think this is the left's way of blooding their people and creating the truly committed.
	I can see why you might think that, but from the leftists, I know I don't think that's how they think about it.
	Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting point, and I think that's true with other things, where once you do the thing, you've got that thing.
	It's like if you buy a share and it performs badly, you stick by it because you've made the decision to do it, or you stick with somebody who's unsuitable because you think you've made the decision, so you want your decision to be right.
	But, yeah, I only know a couple of people who have told me, you know, I've had any sort of depth of conversation about their abortion.
	And for both of them, it was very traumatic.
	And, you know, they're left with regrets.
	And, you know, even though, you know, it's the right thing to do, man, it's a traumatic thing.
	Like, the baby comes out and it's like, so it's, yeah, it's brutal.
	It's a psychologically brutal thing to go through.
	Mm-hmm.
	Absolutely.
	But I do question whether they actually view it as blooding in that sense.
	I think it's more that they are so caught up in the idea, and the fundamental left liberal idea, I think, which taken to extremes is actually horrendous, is I should be free to do whatever I want with my body.
	And I saw loads of people commenting on the abortion debate like that on Twitter, and I was very tempted to write underneath.
	So you're pro-pedophilia then?
	Hmm.
	Because if I ban you from paedophilia, I'm preventing you from doing something that you want to do with your body.
	So actually taken to extremes, that idea is really bad.
	So you do need limits.
	And the flaw with that argument is a lot of people on the left are pro-paedophilia.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Enough said.
	Let's get to the next comment.
	Hello, gentlemen.
	Just to give you guys the scale of absurdity that's going on Russian State TV, here's a snippet that I dubbed from one of the expert guests from the panel of one of the largest talk shows in Russia.
	And yes, many Russian normies consume this stuff as gospel.
	I think even the opponents of the letter Z must understand that if they think they will be spared, no, they won't be spared.
	It's all serious now.
	This will lead potentially to the concentration camps, re-education, sterilization.
	Yep.
	Absolutely.
	We've seen it before.
	I mean, read Gulag Archipelago.
	Yeah, it's horrific.
	It's interesting to hear somebody talking about that.
	Because, man, a lot on the internet and telegram groups that I follow to see, basically, I just like watching videos of tanks getting blown up.
	But in the telegram groups, man, everybody's so pro-Russian.
	Because, you know, there's Russians in there.
	But mostly it's just sort of Western people who are so...
	Is it red-pilled?
	Is that the right word?
	Probably not.
	I'd say they're fed up.
	Yeah, fed up.
	And you sort of hate the West.
	They're like, oh, you know, pronouns.
	Oh, this trans stuff.
	I've got to, you know, all this.
	They're like, I hate the West.
	Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
	Russia isn't your saviour.
	You know what I mean?
	Communism, autocracy, totalitarianism.
	It's not at all better.
	We've still got it much better in the West.
	At least you've got freedom to do what you want.
	Even if other people have got the freedom to do things that you don't approve of.
	Having covered Ukraine almost daily for over two months now, one thing I've found is that there are two entirely different information ecosystems.
	One of them is the one on Telegram, which is telling a completely different narrative to the one that we get in the West.
	Both of them are highly unreliable.
	They report things that don't happen.
	So, for example, last weekend, there was the story of General Valery Gerasimov being wounded in a Ukrainian strike.
	That went around the internet about three times in Izyum.
	Never happened as far as we can.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	The US has denied that he was hit or anywhere near it.
	The closest we have from them is that he was in the command post that was subsequently shelled a while after he'd left.
	But this is the thing.
	A lie can run twice around the world before the truth has its boots on.
	We're finding that in the Ukraine coverage.
	And the other thing I find is even where the facts do overlay, you find that the two different sides can put a completely different spin on them.
	So one side can say, oh yes, well, the Ukrainian army is being pounded into dust, as we can see by this, this, this, and this.
	And then the other side can say, well, the Russians haven't advanced at all, so they're just completely stalled.
	Yeah.
	And the truth is, somewhere between these two things, sometimes, at some fronts, it turns out to be more on the Ukrainian side.
	Other times, it turns out to be closer to the Russian side.
	Yeah.
	But still, I, as someone itemizing all of these events that I find that are going on, I find that it's actually quite difficult sometimes to not narrativize it and still come up with something that's relevant and not just a list of missile-striking curse on Schelling and Mykola and so on.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And also the culture wars affects this stuff.
	I know at least two people, Darius and Nico, that I do the three-speech podcast with, and they're comedians, but they don't believe anything they read in the Guardian about Ukraine because of the Guardian's cultural coverage.
	They say, well, you know...
	Because we're all comedians.
	They say, man, The Guardian said Hannah Gadsby's Nanette was the greatest comedy show in the world.
	So there's no way they're going to...
	So they transplant that same skewed bias and that same bare-faced lie onto the Ukraine crisis.
	Which I think is a shame, because I think The Guardian coverage of Ukraine has been...
	I mean, obviously you've got to filter it, but it's pretty good.
	It's not been as bad as most of their coverage.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Certainly, I mean, the cultural stuff is just absolutely...
	The biases in different fields are often very different.
	So if you think, oh, every time I read the Guardian culture thing, I basically believe the opposite.
	Fine.
	That might work.
	But if you try that for something like...
	I'm trying to think of something the Guardian reports well on.
	Give me about ten minutes.
	But...
	If they try it for another field, then they will be wrong in a very different way.
	A systematic way, they'll still have their spin and their angle and everything, but it's not going to be exactly the same.
	Because it's different writers at the company, fundamentally, with different education agendas.
	Yeah, and if you're a war reporter, nobody goes into war reporting to lie about it, I guess.
	Whereas if you're reporting on cultural, social stuff, man, you're going in with your own ideas and...
	Well, I think there is still a lot.
	It's a much more malleable thing.
	You could argue there's more spin in war reporting and a lot more National Intelligence Agency work in war reporting.
	However, that aside, I think it's unlikely that a newspaper editor is going to turn around to his war reporter and say, no, that's wrong.
	You didn't see that.
	Anyway, let's get to the next video comment.
	Tony D and Little Joan with another legend of the pines, the ghost sniper of New Jersey from mysteriousuniverse.org.
	The ghost sniper started operating in November of 1927 in Camden, New Jersey by shooting at cars going across the Federal Street Bridge.
	Witnesses never heard gunshots.
	They just saw the damage that the projectiles did.
	And after weeks of terrorizing the city...
	In 1928, the sniper disappeared.
	He was never caught.
	Well, I thought it was like a satirical thing, because, you know, we're just talking about Ukraine, the Ghost of Kiev, and all that sort of stuff.
	But no, that's a real thing, because they've had stuff like that.
	Remember, there's the guy who shot quite a lot of people.
	He had an accomplice, I think it was former Gulf War, and he was shooting people when they filled up their cars.
	Gosh, crazy.
	Yeah.
	Is that it for the video comments?
	Right, let's move on to the written comments.
	So on oil companies, we have Paul Neubauer saying, go nuclear, have a national program like that in France, begin immediately.
	And he's talking about energy, not Ukraine.
	Yeah, I agree.
	I think nuclear power is probably the, well, it's by far and away the most effective green technology that we have, because it doesn't release tons of carbon emissions.
	And we've got these modular reactors now that can be built very quickly and quite cheaply.
	Not immediately.
	It'll take them a long time.
	But compared to your traditional...
	Once they get underway, they should be really good.
	Lord Nerevar says, Don't let the politicians or mouthpieces convince you that rising costs are Putin's fault.
	This was happening before Ukraine and it will be happening after.
	The problem does not intrinsically lie with the Ukraine war.
	It's net zero.
	And I think for much of the crisis, that's true.
	Ukraine is just another piece of that puzzle.
	Yeah.
	Tim Sutton says, Belgian here.
	Our fuel prices have spiked to €2 per litre, £1.68.
	My energy bill doubled last week to €2 per month.
	I live in a tiny apartment, and this year they'll be shutting down one of our two nuclear power plants.
	Our future is one of hardship and constant blackouts.
	It could be worse.
	You could live in Belgium.
	Oh, no, you do.
	Anyway, sorry.
	Sorry.
	Got to pick on the Belgians sometimes.
	Yeah, man, I'm sorry to hear that.
	That sucks, and it's happening across the Western world, and it's something we've got to tighten our belts for.
	But I think it's arguably even worse across, say, the non-Western world.
	So Peru has been having a lot of trouble recently with riots and protests.
	They reckon their middle class has shrunk from about 54% to 29% because of economic hardship due to COVID, due to sanctions, this, that, and the other.
	And because they're Peru, right, they don't even have a seat at a table when all of this stuff is going on.
	It's quite hard for them.
	If you look at food as well, which is another thing that's been spiralling up, because Ukraine and Russia are the breadbasket of the world, so much of African wheat comes from Ukraine and from Russia as well, and sunflower oil as well.
	So, you know, we're like, in the West, we're like, oh man, we're going to have to pay a bit more for a loaf of sourdough.
	But in Africa, people are going to be starving.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It's not looking good.
	And also, people, man, people riot.
	All the riots, like the Arab Spring, that was, you know, bread prices shot up before the Arab Spring.
	So this can really foment political instability.
	It can.
	Student Hip History says, full offence to Greenpeace, they'd see you freeze and starve if they had their way.
	Yeah.
	And Freewill2112 says, the energy bills are due to go up another 40% in October, which appears to be true.
	Perhaps if enough of us refuse to pay the increase, the government and energy suppliers will be forced to backtrack.
	Well, that'll be the day.
	That'll be the day.
	Yeah.
	Bill Gabo Swaggin says, my energy bills have tripled.
	We're looking at putting in a log burner to get us through this year's winter.
	Do it, especially if you've got a bit of land to plant trees.
	So we used to have a log burning stove, and we'd chop down trees, turn them into firewood, and then use that to heat us most of the way through the winter.
	The government is actually looking, especially in more urban areas, to actually ban wood-burning stoves, which I think would be a terrible shame.
	Yeah, because of air pollution.
	Yeah.
	Well, because of air pollution, but then you are kind of growing the trees.
	So you're making it back.
	It's like no nets.
	But then, like, you're breathing it in.
	I way prefer just getting a nuclear power station, putting in some, like...
	Terrible part of Scotland.
	That's what I love about nuclear power.
	The government came out in the 60s and whenever they built the Doon Ray reactor, they said, you're going to love nuclear power.
	It's so safe.
	It's so, so safe.
	You won't believe how safe it is.
	Where are you putting it?
	Are you putting it in Westminster?
	No, no, no, no.
	We're putting it right at the top of Scotland.
	God.
	It's so safe!
	You won't believe how safe it is!
	That's a good point.
	But just in case.
	Bleach Demon says, one of the most insidious aspects of green energy is the outright destruction of nature.
	For example, in the mountains of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, they look like they are strip mined.
	And yeah, it does cause a lot of damage.
	Is that for mining the precious...
	I presume so.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Cool.
	And then looking at the Chappelle stuff, so X, Y, N, brackets...
	It's bizarre how people feel that they're empowered to enact acts of violence on people like this.
	Add to our list of prophetic individuals.
	Milo.
	He warned that if people believe words are violence, it's not a big step to actual violence.
	Well, yeah, then actual violence is just balancing out the bad words.
	That's a really good point.
	Yep.
	Omar Awad says the left have been harassing and attempting to cancel comedians for years, but literally attacking the court jester has long been a taboo.
	I'm unaware of other similar incidents before the Oscars slaps.
	I wonder if this is going to start a trend of attacking offensive comedians.
	We showed a few videos, but I wrote a thing on freedom of speech and comedy for a book by the Institute of Economic Affairs, which is a think tank.
	And so I looked at some of the court jesters stuff, and man, I didn't realise court jesters had real political power and influence.
	They were literally the only person who could say stuff.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And that gave them real power.
	But sometimes if they overstepped the line, it was a really dangerous occupation.
	You could get loads of, like one guy got the license to sell tobacco in Ireland and he got like thousands of acres and stuff.
	But I think it was the same guy.
	I think it was the same guy.
	Maybe it was a different guy.
	Pissed off the wrong nobleman and got excommunicated from the thing.
	And sometimes they get killed.
	And Aztec, it's interesting, Aztec culture had court jesters as well.
	Lee B says, Dave Chappelle is a black Muslim.
	The left are defending an obvious hate crime against an oppressed minority.
	That's a great point.
	Ash K says, the mostly peaceful Chappelle incident demonstrates how the pejorative left has gotten more violent as they have both gained in power and opposition gains in power.
	This trajectory is accelerating as the left has lost a few of the religious pillars to the cultural right.
	Ultimately, I predict this may be coming to a head as open attacks are happening to more and more famous individuals.
	And once the high public class comes under attack is when it truly kicks off.
	Or I could be wrong.
	I hope to be wrong.
	But yeah, I think they are.
	We saw Jimmy Carr a couple of months ago.
	A lot more high-profile comedians are falling foul.
	It used to be the Mary White House.
	It used to be the religious right, the conservative old people that were Italian comedians.
	And now it's the left.
	It's the people who used to be, hey, man, anything goes.
	Hey, why don't we show these controversial pieces of art?
	Why don't we put on this seditious play?
	And now they're the opposite.
	Now they're like, oh, you must follow these strict...
	Walk, strictures, and this, you know, and it's like...
	We have a new moral system now, and, yeah, exactly.
	Terrible, isn't it?
	On the court jester thing, Jordan Peterson used to say quite often that you can really tell when a king is a tyrant if he's executed his court jester.
	That's kind of overstepping the mark.
	Yeah, yeah.
	You can tell that wokeness has gone tyrannical when it's attacking the comedian.
	Yeah, like when the Taliban got into power, one of the first things they did was kill that comedian who made fun of them.
	Anybody who's in power hates to be mocked.
	On the war on escapism, Lee B says, My escapism recently has been football, but you can't watch it now without a subliminal message like Black Lives Matter or Stand With Ukraine popping off as a flash screen for half a second between plays every now and again.
	And then we get to the whole thing with the kneeling, which is still going for a lot of clubs two years later.
	They're still kneeling?
	Yes.
	In football as well, but also sports like netball, I've seen them kneeling.
	Right.
	And it's like, get with the program.
	That was two years ago.
	You should only do it in balls, because then you're kneeling anyway.
	Indeed.
	Edward of Woodstock says, they say these hobbies are filled with overweight, malodorous neckbeards.
	Leo, that's no lie.
	Carl looking up from painting a dark angel.
	You effing what?
	I hope we see him rush the podcast next time.
	Keep my hobbies necked.
	Yeah, he's not in today, otherwise I'm sure we'd have the half-brick thrown through the curtain.
	Wow, I'm just looking at these comments.
	Comrade Starmer says, Oh, 100% there's an attack on hobbies.
	It's because these people are bored out of their minds and have literally nothing to do.
	Just replace the synonyms for racism with the devil, and these arguments become very, very familiar.
	P.S. Screw you, Leo.
	D&D is amazing.
	FYI, certificates of racists.
	I wish we could go through all of these and have a live Leo reaction, but unfortunately we are out of time.
	So we're going to have to cut the stream there for today.
	Thank you ever so much for tuning in.
	I hope you've enjoyed the stream.
	It's goodbye from me.
	Yeah, subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Twitter.
	Cheers.
	I'll be Leo Kearse.
	Bye.

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