Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Aug. 19, 2022 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:30:23

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #462

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen.
	Welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for Friday, the 19th of August, 2022.
	I'm Jonathan Harry.
	Hello.
	And today we're going to be talking about Sam Harris's recent appearance on the Trigonometry podcast, how things could possibly get any worse, and the diversity IRS division that is actually armed and is going to be wheelchairing their way towards you very soon.
	Menacingly, even.
	Menacingly.
	But apparently they are required to use lethal force, so pay your taxes.
	And it really does put a thing on, you know, well, you're doing this at the barrel of the gun.
	It's like, well, they're literally doing it at the barrel of the gun now.
	Yep, libertarians vindicated, as always, every single time.
	It always sounded like hyperbole.
	Like, you know, they're doing it at the barrel of the gun.
	It's like, alright, calm down.
	But actually, anyway, we'll get into it later.
	But before we get started, this afternoon at 3.30, I'll be doing a live book club with Connor talking about Nietzsche's on the genealogy of morality, or morals.
	And that's going to be very interesting because I've had to spend a lot of time reading and re-reading and re-reading Nietzsche to understand the madness in his mind.
	But I actually think that there's something interesting in there.
	And I don't have a natural aversion to Nietzsche because I'm not a Christian.
	I'm like Connor, who's a Catholic.
	Well, yeah, that's why you should tune in.
	It should be very interesting because Connor is not the biggest Nietzsche fan.
	Yeah, so it should be fun.
	But anyway, let's get into it.
	Alright then, so, Sam Harris is deranged, and he has a very particular derangement.
	We all know that he has Trump derangement syndrome, a very terminal case, as shown from his recent appearance on Trigonometry, the podcast hosted by Francis Foster and Constantine Kissin.
	Francis, who appeared on our podcast last week with you.
	Friends of the show, I've been on their show a few times.
	Yeah, very nice guys.
	They try and be very open with their discussions that they have, but Sam Harris was very eager to let everybody know just how much he hated Donald Trump.
	But before we get into this, I have to say, I like Sam Harris.
	Sam Harris has publicly come to my defence in the past.
	Oh, has he?
	Oh, yeah.
	When I was booted off Patreon, he shut down his Patreon account in Solidarity.
	Oh, really?
	Yeah, I know.
	So I like Sam Harris, but he has admitted that, look, I know I have Trump derangement syndrome, and so the critique that we may give in this section, I just want to soften it slightly by saying, look, this isn't out of a personal animus or anything.
	On many things, I do agree with Sam Harris, but just on this, just...
	Well, I'm not particularly familiar with his work other than a few things.
	I know he's written a few books.
	I know he's a well-known neuroscientist and he was a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, which was obviously just a kind of informal group of people who didn't have too many proper connections with one another beyond just discussing things.
	He was one of the new atheist horsemen, and about 20 years ago, I thought of myself as a new atheist.
	So, you know.
	Yeah, it's very interesting to point out that the new atheists and the intellectual dark web all seem to be people who are very connected to the idea that enlightenment rationality will rule us all.
	all.
	Once we get rid of any sort of religious fervor in the world, everybody will just become a rational, well-meaning human being who cares about humanism, cares about the human race, and everything will go great from that point on.
	But it seems that as soon as Donald Trump came into the picture, a lot of these people suddenly lost any ability to be reasonable, any ability to be rational.
	All of that went out of the window.
	You know, just before we go on again, I can't but feel that this is kind of proof that yes, man does have a rational side, but his irrational side is very, very powerful.
	And we should try not to deny it.
	but instead understand it.
	Oh, absolutely.
	I think it's far, far easier to get irrational about these things the more abstract the subject becomes.
	None of these people have met Donald Trump personally.
	None of them know him personally.
	I would imagine if you really push them on it, most of them wouldn't really be able to articulate the disagreements they have with particular policies that he has, other than maybe just saying, oh, the Muslim ban was racist, etc.
	No, it's what Donald Trump represents, though.
	Donald Trump represents the kind of irrational id of America.
	That is prepared to lead by the gut and prepared to go, no, I just instinctively feel this is the right thing to do.
	And I think that Donald Trump was completely vindicated in this style of governance by the fact that the world was peaceful, it was prosperous, and everything was going really well for just everyone.
	He's the only president in who knows how long that didn't start any new wars.
	Well, not even that.
	He created a lot of peace.
	But, like, everyone was doing well when Trump was in charge.
	You know, the media were doing great because of the clickbait headlines.
	They had lots of money in their pockets.
	The regular person who was getting, you know, their pay was going up.
	They had, you know, the lowest unemployment, all that sort of stuff.
	Like, the economy was doing great under Trump.
	Trump, he was a hilarious figure.
	He got people into politics, right?
	It was worth paying attention.
	I mean, even though at the time I was also suffering from a bit of TDS because it was just the culture I was surrounded by, I had not been familiar with any of this stuff before, even he got me into it a little bit because even back then I was like, oh, he's funny on Twitter though, isn't he?
	Exactly, right?
	And so everyone's doing really well.
	The world is a lot more stable.
	And all of this was done without a rationalistic plan.
	Donald Trump did not sit there, get a 10-point plan, and was like, right, this is what I'm going to do.
	Now, he just reacted and intuited what to do, and it was always the right thing.
	And that is why I think the new atheists hate him.
	Oh, absolutely.
	And I just thought I'd get a few examples of these sorts of arch-rationalists up.
	Because he does represent the complete opposite worldview that they're presenting.
	Oh, yeah, absolutely.
	In terms of temperament, they try to present themselves.
	I mean, the Sam Harris interview, which we'll show a few clips of, is a perfect example of it.
	They try to present themselves very calmly.
	Every word, I'm mulling over it to let you know that I've considered this deeply.
	Donald Trump...
	Straight off the cuff.
	The exact opposite.
	And I can't help but feel it is probably just that temperament difference that people disagree.
	I mean, even Richard Dawkins back in 2016 when it was still the run-up to the 2016 election kind of exemplifies this in this tweet that I got here where he was saying, oh, in one of the debates that they had, Hillary was knowledgeable, intelligent, and presidential.
	Yeah, sure.
	Okay, buddy.
	But Trump blustered incoherently like the ignorant, fact-disdaining, vainglorious bully that he is.
	Okay.
	Alright.
	No real criticism of anything that he said other than just his temperament.
	No, no, no, but that's fine because the question is what position is he applying for?
	Is he applying to be a university professor or is he applying to be the biggest dog in the world?
	Because Putin didn't invade anywhere on his watch.
	I mean, North Korea backed down under Trump's blustering.
	Yep, so did the Syrians, so did the Chinese.
	Everyone was like, okay, let's just accept that we're the slightly smaller dog here and let him flex.
	And that's the way humans work.
	Absolutely.
	Except Steven Pinker is also one of the most insufferable when it comes to Trump.
	I like Steven Pinker as well!
	I cite him often!
	Steven Pinker can be very good, except on Trump, and he also has this weird blind spot where he just thinks everything good to do with humanity comes directly from the Enlightenment, and he always cites the Enlightenment as this ground zero for human prosperity.
	And he did this...
	Sorry, I can't help but notice that, you know...
	Graph go up?
	Yeah, but graph go up when Trump gets elected, really sharply.
	Oh, that's true.
	That's a good point.
	I mean, that's not obviously an accurate graph, but it's just funny how that's their lead into it.
	Yeah, but Pink has said some amusing things about him.
	He said, Trumpism, this is back in 2018, is of course part of a larger phenomenon of authoritarian populism.
	Incredibly authoritarian.
	Giving the people what they're asking for is authoritarian, of course.
	I mean, Trump just jailed all his political opponents and persecuted the previous regime, which is why Obama is currently being raided by the FBI. And why Hillary Clinton did go to prison.
	Yeah.
	Oh, wait!
	Oh, wait!
	Exactly.
	The FBI covered up a lot of her emails.
	It's a kind of counter-enlightenment ideology that Trumpism promotes.
	Now that's true, and that is why they hate him.
	Well, that's the thing as well, is it's like, okay, you've got the burden of proof there to prove why that's a bad thing.
	Yeah.
	If the Enlightenment, for all the good it's done in terms of progression of technology, has led us to the cultural mire that we're in right now, as you say, the decoupling of the individual from any sort of metaphysical reality beyond just chasing immediate pleasure, then...
	Maybe.
	Well, that's the thing.
	The Enlightenment is great for scientific endeavors.
	However, politics is actually not a very scientific endeavor.
	It actually works on human narrative storytelling.
	So that, Donald Trump played into very strongly, and that's why he won.
	And so the Enlightenment rationalists are, of course...
	I'm frustrated by this because, well, we hitched our entire wagon to the idea that anything irrational, or like, you know, human, is kind of bad and primitive.
	And Donald Trump just leveraged this primitive feeling and stormed to victory.
	Yeah, I mean, these people are the sorts of, like, they always go on about how nationalism is evil, etc.
	They would say there's no rational reason to support nationalism or anything like that.
	That's not where it comes from, though.
	No, but there are loads of really irrational ones that work.
	But with these sorts of things, looking back, you can kind of see how the intellectual dark web as it was, a lot of the figures within it, yeah, they criticized the left, but they also acted massively as gatekeepers towards anything that was even slightly to the right of them.
	Yeah, they weren't right-wingers.
	They weren't right-wingers, but they were actively trying to prevent...
	They were trying to keep people either in the centre or the centre-left, which I don't think is particularly useful for where we are culturally in the West right now.
	And Sam Harris, moving on to him, is a perfect example of all of this put together.
	And this is a tweet you put out a few days ago.
	Yep.
	First they came for the people who stole nuclear secrets, and I said nothing.
	Is there any proof that Trump stole nuclear secrets?
	Not that I'm aware of.
	And to paraphrase Nigel Farage when he was quoted on this, to think that Donald Trump would steal nuclear secrets and just hide them in a random safe for a year and a half in his house in Florida is so absurd as to be insulting to expect anybody to believe that.
	Oh, Sam.
	What a joke.
	I'm sorry, Sam.
	Once again, Carl wants us to go soft and, you know, that's his feelings.
	This makes you look like a joke.
	But the thing is, like, the problem is, look, if you're going to say, well, look, I'm mediated and rational and philosophical and all things, to then have this deeply irrational prejudice against Trump simply because he comes from a different paradigm leads you into a position like this, where you're totally on board with the narrative that is not true.
	It's also, just once again, entirely vindicates your view that rationality is actually under sway most of the time of your irrationality.
	It's not even my view, it's Hume's view.
	And Height's view as well.
	Yeah, because it seems to be true.
	Every single time there's more examples.
	And then he appeared on the Trigonometry podcast very recently when they were doing their tour in America after they went to go, they were on Joe Rogan, I think.
	I've not watched that one.
	And I've watched most of this.
	And, you know, They do a very good job, to be honest.
	Constantine in particular I really like because he pushes back against Sam when he goes off on these very, very strange tangents.
	And Sam, along with a lot of the other new atheist types, very much critical of tribalism But I don't think they recognise that politics is tribalism.
	That's what it is, at the very base of it.
	So I think that's just a completely worthless topic to discuss on these sorts of things, because just saying to somebody who's on the left or the right, oh, you're being very tribal, they go, okay, what do I care?
	The other side are evil, obviously.
	And I'm sorry, Sam, the left are evil, and you know this.
	But let's just check out some of these amazing clips.
	This is the first one.
	This isn't the really controversial one, but it just goes to show the kind of blind spot that these intellectual experts have when it comes to their assessments of other experts.
	The belief of, well, if we just trust the experts, bro, everything will go fine.
	Constantine's got a great tan, hasn't he?
	Yeah, he does.
	He's fantastic.
	As I'm aware, he's in Florida at this point.
	He's the most tan Russian I've ever seen in my life.
	But yeah, let's play the clips just so we can see it.
	You're not going to get worse than Trump if you pick at random.
	And, you know, Hillary Clinton, for all of her flaws, was not worse than Trump.
	Joe Biden, we could have known Joe Biden was going to just be comatose in office.
	Not worse than Trump, right?
	Kamala Harris, not worse.
	And again, it's not just a marginal call.
	It's just, these are people who are Normal politicians who are so much more constrained by predictable machinery, right?
	There's such less of an opportunity there to destroy institutions that we have to rely on, right?
	With any of those people in charge, including a random person in charge, a random person who's going to be terrified at the responsibility of the office and default to expert opinion across the board.
	Okay, that's really interesting because notice how Sam Harris is pointing to possibility.
	Oh yeah.
	It's predictable as in something may happen in the future.
	At least Joe Biden is predictably evil, guys.
	Yeah, but you could also look at Trump's concrete track record of what he actually did that was actually successful, that was actually good for the economy, that actually raised the living standards of regular Americans.
	You could actually point to the peace deals in the Middle East.
	You can point to The normalization of relationships with places like North Korea, and the fact that the Chinese and the Russians didn't do anything spicy when he was in charge.
	You can actually point to a direct benefit of having Trump in office, and Trump's unpredictability made the rest of the world more predictable.
	But instead, Sam is saying, well, there is a possibility that may have happened, and I'm not happy with that, because he's looking for absolute certainty in all things.
	And you can be certain that Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, We'll just continue business as usual.
	It'll be the continual decline, the continual corruption.
	Trump actually represents the possibility of something different to the decline, and he hates it.
	Well, yeah, I mean, from my perspective, you know, I'm generally a supporter of the idea that if a politician is in office, the less they do, the better, because there's less chances for them to mess everybody up.
	up but the fact of the matter is what donald trump was trying to do the whole drain the swamp thing is a very positive thing because if the executive just comes in and does nothing when the system around him is set up to just continually screw over everybody then that's not a good thing if donald trump i know he wasn't completely successful in doing it but he went in with the right intentions to drain the swamp and perhaps then we could have been in a position where you could have some predictable person come in and not be able to screw everything up but as it stands right now like you say business as usual
	everything's still screwed and everything's getting worse oh everything's like literally twice as bad you know Things cost twice as much.
	You've got half the disposable income you had previously.
	If you're in America, you're twice more likely to have the IRS knocking soon enough.
	It's just demonstrable how much worse things are under Biden.
	It is a remarkable position for Sam to hold here.
	And the most notorious clip that's been going around, and this is the one that caught my and everybody else's attention as well, is this one.
	And just to put it in context, Sam Harris comes out with what he's about to say after Constantine is already trying to move them away from the Donald Trump subject, and Sam Harris just can't help but butt in with one more thing.
	Let's play the clip, Michael.
	I mean, Hunter Biden, at that point, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement.
	I would not have cared, right?
	It's like, there's nothing.
	First of all, it's Hunter Biden, right?
	It's not, it's like, it's not Joe Biden.
	But even if Joe, like, even whatever scope of Joe Biden's corruption is, like, if we could just go down that rabbit hole endlessly and understand that he's getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden's deals in Ukraine or wherever else, right?
	Or China.
	It is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in.
	It's like a firefly to the sun.
	It doesn't even stack up against Trump University.
	Trump University as a story is worse than anything that could be in Hunter Biden's laptop.
	Now that doesn't answer the people who say it's still completely unfair To not have looked at the laptop in a timely way and to have shut down the New York Post's Twitter account.
	That's a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump.
	Absolutely it was.
	Absolutely.
	But I think it was warranted.
	And again, it's a coin toss as to whether or not...
	Sam, I'm sorry.
	I'm really sorry.
	I was the one that said we should move on, but you've just said something I really struggled with there, which is you support...
	The kids in the basement?
	No, no.
	F*** the kids in the basement.
	I'm interested in democracy.
	You're saying you are content with a left-wing conspiracy to prevent somebody being democratically re-elected as president.
	Well, no, I'm content.
	But the thing is, it's just not left-wing, right?
	So Liz Cheney is not left-wing.
	You called it left-wing.
	Liz Cheney is doing everything in her power.
	You're content with a conspiracy to prevent somebody being democratic.
	No, but there's nothing...
	Conspiracy, it's not...
	It was a conspiracy out in the open.
	You called it a conspiracy.
	But it doesn't matter if it was...
	It doesn't matter what part's conspiracy, what part's out in the open.
	I mean, I think it's like...
	If people get together and talk about what should we do about this phenomenon, you know, it's like...
	If there was an asteroid hurtling toward Earth...
	And we got in a room together with all of our friends and had a conversation about what we could do to deflect its course, right?
	Is that a conspiracy?
	He called it a left-wing conspiracy, and he said it was justified.
	And then when Constantine challenged him on it, he walked it back and said, well, it's not a conspiracy, it's not left-wing.
	I've never seen a man back himself into a corner so quickly and so spectacularly.
	The idea that Hunter Biden's pretty demonstrable corruption, political corruption, on behalf of his father, is nowhere near as bad as Donald Trump potentially defrauding some people.
	I mean, which isn't a good thing either.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It's not a good thing, right?
	I mean, the Trump University thing, I had to look into it.
	And it wasn't really a university, but it was essentially like a series of seminars in which Trump would promise people, I'll make you a successful, you know, I'll teach you how to be a successful property developer like I am.
	And a bunch of people signed up to it.
	It was like 7,000 people signed up to it.
	They paid a bunch of money.
	Then there was some lawsuits because they felt that they won't get one.
	And Trump ended up settling just after his presidential election.
	So he did settle in the end anyway.
	Not good.
	Not good, but he did clear it up, whereas Hunter Biden and the Biden laptop story and Joe Biden's involvement in all of that was immediately swept up.
	I mean, it's still a raw wound.
	Yeah, it was immediately swept up, and we still get stuff released from that even today, quite recently.
	We know that Joe Biden's being paid by Chinese business interests, which means he's connected to the Chinese government and various other places, like definitely in Ukraine as well.
	So it's just like...
	Okay, Sam, that Trump you is really not that important.
	I think he sums it up just by saying, you know, he could have dead kids in his basement.
	I still wouldn't care.
	Okay, then everything else you have to say related to this is completely disregarded because you're not thinking straight about this.
	But it is good that he's gone on and said this stuff, because he said the quiet part out loud.
	I think everybody over the past few years who has been just completely irrationally hating Trump thinks that same way, and they just are too...
	Well, I don't even know if they're too smart to say it, because Sam Harris is a very intelligent man.
	Maybe they just know to keep shut, but...
	At least he's honest, you know.
	It is very honest of him.
	It does remind me, given Twitter's involvement in the covering up of the Hunter Biden laptop story, of the interview that you did with Jason Miller that was on our website that you did last week, I think it was, where you were talking about such things and also getting his perspective on Elon buying Twitter.
	So if you're interested in that online, you can check that out on the website.
	I believe that's a free video that you can watch as well, but you can find plenty more fantastic premium content if you're interested in signing up.
	But I did also manage to find another clip that somebody sent through to me, which I can only describe as Sam Harris in miniature, if you will play this for me.
	Is this unprecedented to arrest a former president for not turning into a former president that had committed this many provable criminal acts?
	What are the provable criminal acts, I guess?
	Provable criminal acts.
	Well, I'm just...
	I'm done talking.
	That summarizes everything, doesn't it?
	Because Trump has to be the most investigated man in the world.
	Five solid years of everything, the muckraking.
	And they've got people near him on tax evasion or whatever it is.
	But Trump, and again, I can't believe...
	That would just make me support him more personally.
	I can't believe I'm going to say it, but Trump appears to actually be the cleanest man in all of America at this point.
	Certainly politics.
	Yeah, I mean, of all the people, Donald Trump, not having any dirt on him, that's actually shocking, isn't it?
	That's not what I saw coming.
	No, that's the most shocking aspect of this story to me, is that Donald Trump actually isn't wildly corrupt.
	But didn't you hear that he ripped the steering wheel out of his aide's hands and drove directly into the Capitol so that he could lead them storming it?
	Yeah, yeah.
	The mind boggles.
	The mind boggles.
	Yes, but of course, all of this has led to some quite severe backlash against Sam Harris, even amongst those who like and respect him.
	Like Gad Saad put out a statement saying he's always liked him, he's got no personal beef with him, but his Trump hatred is off-putting because it...
	Perfectly captures what happens to a parasitised mind infected with blind hatred.
	Absolutely it does.
	Japa Sobek has been sharing the clips as well, just making it very clear.
	And I do think it's important to share these clips, as they have been doing, just because, once again, it just shows what the TDS... How the mind rot can affect a person.
	Oron McIntyre as well pointed out that it looks like all hands on deck as Twitter staff were called in for damage control when they all started to highlight this.
	Sam Harris himself, he's clarified the comments that he made.
	They're not saying walks back the comments, he's clarifying the comments because he's actually got a very deep and meaningful reason for believing this.
	So what was his clarification?
	Well, his clarification, if we move on, is he says there is a podcast clip circulating that seems to be confusing many people about my views on Trump's, which is understandable because I wasn't speaking very clearly.
	So here's what I've got to say.
	I was arguing essentially for a principle of self-defense.
	What?
	You've lost me immediately there, Sam.
	I've always viewed Trump as a very dangerous person to elect as president of a fake university.
	Let alone the US. Right.
	Okay.
	You're still not clarifying any of these comments.
	But he actually did a good job.
	His actual track record was excellent.
	Best president in my lifetime.
	Relatively speaking, I suppose.
	But I've never been under any illusion that he's orange Hitler.
	I mean, you could have fooled me.
	You compared him to an asteroid about to destroy the Earth, Sam.
	No, no, that is actually fair, because Sam Harris has never actually said that he's going to commit a genocide or anything like that.
	He just thinks, for some reason, that Trump is just the worst thing to happen to the United States.
	But the last bit he says here is, nothing I said on that podcast was meant to suggest that the Democrats would have been right to commit election fraud or to take other illegal measures to deny Trump the presidency.
	Nor do I think that they did that.
	Except for those multiple parts that...
	No, no, no.
	It's fine.
	It's fine.
	He's walked that by completely, right?
	We'll accept that.
	He has walked that back completely.
	It's just a shame that if you watch the video, that's actually what he says, though.
	It is actually what he says.
	It is actually what he said.
	So, Sam, you know...
	But on reflection, maybe, my irrational elephant had gotten away with me.
	And actually, maybe on reflection, it's not good to have a left-wing conspiracy to oust a sitting president.
	Not that that happened, of course, YouTube.
	No, not at all.
	But I'm glad that after all of this furor, after all of the hubbub, that Sam Harris has been able to come to that conclusion, if anything.
	So, Sam and everybody else with TDS, please, please, calm down and just start to think a bit more straight about this, okay?
	Look at the results.
	Look at the results.
	The results were good.
	Anyway, so I keep asking myself just how much worse can things get?
	And then it seems that every week something new happens that makes me realize, oh, actually, it can get way worse.
	You know, we thought it was bad now.
	And when we go through this, you're going to be like, wow, that's really bad.
	And yes, but remember, next week is another week and it'll get worse.
	Before we begin, though, if you want to support us and understand the end direction to which we are heading, go to Loses.com and go and sign up and check out my Deep Think on Russo's Savage.
	I've recorded, well, no, Jonathan Crowe recorded an audio track for this, but that's fine because he's got a better voice than I do.
	But this is the world in which we live and the philosophical underpinnings of it.
	Is to essentially, and this just as a quick spoiler, to make everyone dependent on the state and free from any kind of physical constraints of their own.
	So their wills can be perfectly free in order to do anything.
	And that's the driving goal that underpins everything that is happening now.
	Anyway, so let's begin.
	In the UK, you're actually not allowed to discriminate against people on the basis of their race, or sex, or actually even personal beliefs.
	So you can't refuse to hire a Nazi, even if he turns up with a swastika, like, ah, I don't like Nazis.
	But he did really well on the aptitude test.
	He could sue you, if he was the one who came top of that aptitude test, for not hiring him, even though he's got a giant sponsor on his face.
	Like Charles Manson style, just carve it in there.
	Weirdly, you can't discriminate on beliefs either, so there's just no discrimination at all on the Just to clarify my position, I think this is ridiculously stupid.
	As an employer, you should be able to say, Nazi Nick, maybe not.
	Sorry, Nick.
	I actually don't want to tell you.
	But he could see you, potentially.
	And so race and sex, though, are probably the most common ways to approach this, because, you know, to be fair, it's not nice or fair to say, well, I would hire you, but you're black, or I would hire you, but you're a woman, and therefore I'm not going to hire you because I just don't feel like it.
	I can understand why we would have discrimination protections against that, right?
	So that's fine, reasonable, okay.
	And so let's come to the institutional corruption of, oh, what institution this week?
	I mean, it's every other institution, so we may as well get to, oh, the Royal Air Force.
	You know, those heroes who saved us in the Battle of Britain from the Nazis.
	Well, now they're not hiring white men anymore.
	Well, they're just putting a temporary pause on it.
	Just a temporary pause.
	Everything recently, over the past few years, has always been temporary, hasn't it?
	I guess that means that I can just put a temporary pause on hiring black women.
	What's the moral difference?
	I mean, we could just put temporary pause on hiring women altogether.
	But again, we would be in trouble if we did that.
	The government would probably come and knock on our door and say, excuse me, we have rules about that.
	But for some reason, when the RAF decide, oh, we've got diversity targets, and we're not going to hire any white men to hit those diversity targets, everyone's like, well, I guess the law doesn't apply.
	Well, that's the thing.
	We know that, in practice, what those laws have turned out to be is a way to force companies to hire people that they wouldn't otherwise, and force them to get into these diversity quotas, etc., when really it never goes both ways.
	The bias in it is implicit, but it's very, very clear.
	Demonstrable.
	I mean, so they tell us that the group captain who is responsible for recruiting has just resigned over this because, you know, I mean, it seems to be racist and sexist.
	And I guess he's like, maybe I don't want to be involved in racist policies.
	I mean, we're just putting a pause on recruiting Jews.
	Sorry.
	You'd be like, that's a bit of a Nazi policy, isn't it?
	Like, weird.
	Okay, fine.
	But anyway, so Sky News reported that a senior female officer had imposed a temporary freeze on the recruitment.
	But the move has caused widespread backlash from officers who claims that the move puts the UK security at risk by prioritizing diversity over recruiting the right candidate for the job.
	Yeah, it obviously does.
	It obviously does.
	I mean, it's not like our armed forces are overwhelmed with applicants at the moment.
	We struggle to meet recruitment targets anyway.
	And of course, most of those people are probably going to be white men who are like, oh, I'll protect my country.
	I'll do my part.
	Well, yeah, this is a point that I brought up the other day, and I think it got a little bit of pushback from some, but I do stand by it, which is that if you're prioritising diversity, you're inherently, unless you're just going purely for, you know, white women, you're going to be recruiting from a pool of people who don't have a history in the UK, in all likelihood.
	So when push comes to shove, how likely, if, say, somebody attacked us, are they going to be willing to pull down their lives, as opposed to just going, bye guys!
	I'm going home.
	Which is what happened in Ukraine.
	An RAF spokesman, however, came out and told us, no, this is all a pack of lies and that guy who resigned is just a liar, by the way.
	But also, it's happening and it's a good thing.
	But we'll get to that in a second.
	They say, As with the Royal Navy and British Army, we're doing everything we can to encourage recruiting from underrepresented groups and ensure we have a diverse workforce.
	Right, so it's just woke BS. A woke lie.
	We're not doing it, but we are doing it, and it's a good thing.
	Yeah, and I mean, literally, it's a good thing.
	If you go to the next one, the woman in charge, an Air Vice Marshal Maria Byford, is like, yeah, it's not happening, but it is a good thing, and we're going to continue doing it.
	We're not ashamed of this, actually.
	It's like, brilliant.
	Absolutely brilliant.
	Just incredible.
	So she said that discussions are going to carry out next month with the RAF board, which would look at ways to use positive action legally, quote-unquote, so recruits could be selected on their merit, their gender, or their ethnicity.
	So normally it's on merit, but then, oh, what about their gender and ethnicity, though?
	Well, yeah, that's the thing.
	The gender and ethnicity cancels out the merit path, and we know that, whether they're saying it or not.
	It's just been the case.
	If you don't do merit recruiting, you will get people of subpar performance.
	That's just the way it is.
	Because at present, candidates are put forward to training as soon as they meet the requirements in a first-past-the-post system, rather than based on how well they did at certain stages.
	So she's like, if I can include more women and people from different backgrounds in that, I think I have a better service in the long run, but not a more meritorious service.
	And it's not that these people are necessarily worse either.
	It's just the impetus to become as good as you can become is reduced because you've lowered the standards.
	If they had to meet the same targets that the white men had to meet, then they would have to become as good as the white men.
	And so it would be an upward momentum to the improvement of the skills of women in other communities, which is why white men are good at anything.
	I mean, something...
	No, it is.
	No one gives a white man a break in anything.
	No, I agree with you entirely.
	The other thing that's interesting in this, if you're not going by merit, I mean, purely on the basis of you're flying something that's very dangerous to be flying, it's something purely for the basis of safety for the people flying in the first place.
	If it was picking strawberries, then maybe I'd be like, well, it's not so important.
	Yeah, it's like, how hard can it be, you know, picking strawberries?
	But flying attack, like, flying these military...
	Fighter jets.
	Yeah, fighter jets.
	I forgot the term for it for a second there.
	Flying fighter jets.
	I want to know that I've been chosen because I have the potential to be able to do this properly.
	Yeah.
	Because otherwise I don't want to be flying into a mountain by accident.
	And add to that, you may have to go to war.
	Like, this is a military, a branch of the military.
	Like, you're going to be actively trying to kill people who are trying to kill you.
	And failing to defend my country in this situation involves me getting blown up.
	But she's like, well, look, you know, anyone who thinks that this is going to reduce the fighting effectiveness of the armed forces is just a bigger, really.
	I would never do anything that impacted on that.
	Our role is to protect and defend the nation.
	But the RAF does have an ambition to make women 40% of new recruits by 2030.
	And I think minorities 20%.
	Good luck.
	Best of luck.
	I'm sure it's going to work.
	I'm sure it's not going to reduce the fighting effectiveness of the RAF at all.
	Anyway, let's go to the NHS, which of course have been long captured by wokeism, because they've decided, oh, we're going to put out jobs.
	They just say, yeah, you know what?
	If you're a woman, apply for this.
	I'd like the definition of a woman, to be honest, but no men allowed, actually, because they have diversity targets too.
	They have this role, it's £100,000 a year, Bart's Health NHS Trust in London.
	The job ad was posted on LinkedIn, and they say, we are particularly interested in receiving applicants from candidates who identify as female.
	And of course, various men's rights groups are like, well, that's a bit discriminatory, isn't it?
	That's illegal.
	And they're like, yeah, fuck.
	Don't care.
	Not a problem.
	Anyway, I mean, it's probably an issue because lots of people from the NHS are apparently quitting and going to OnlyFans.
	Okay.
	It's such an easy out for so many women.
	But at the same time, a lot of women who go on OnlyFans, they're not going to be the ones making 50 grand a month.
	No, they're not.
	They're going to have a few pervy friends from where they used to work giving them a tenner a month.
	And they'll get like 50 quid extra a month and they'll go, oh joy.
	Yeah.
	Adult worker support charity Beyond the Street said it is deeply concerned by the rise in care workers turning to the website.
	I'm not going to go into that anymore.
	So anyway, it gets worse, of course.
	Gays Against Groomers got temporarily suspended from Twitter because Twitter was like, hey, you can't call people who are trying to groom children.
	In sexual acts, groomers and gays against groomers are like, what?
	Why?
	And they were like, well, it's homophobic.
	What are you saying?
	I was hoping that we'd come to that.
	No, it's not actually homophobic for a bunch of gay people to say, maybe we shouldn't let people groom children.
	Anti-nonce gays confirmed homophobic.
	Yes.
	Why do you hate yourselves?
	Is what they're saying, which is remarkable because that implies that all gays are pro-grooming.
	Well, yeah, it's implying that it's an intrinsic part of the lifestyle.
	Which has always been the accusation from the far-right religious types against the gay community.
	And Twitter's like, well, actually, they may have had a point, but it's a good thing, and it's...
	And so, like...
	Literally, every, like, I don't know, Christian conservative conspiracy from the 70s, 80s, and 90s...
	And Twitter's like, yes.
	Yes, and it's a good thing.
	Exactly.
	It's unbelievable, right?
	So...
	And this account grew really quickly because, of course, people were like, well, I'm gay and I don't approve of you grooming children.
	What are you doing?
	And so they got a lot of traction very quickly.
	They got targeted, obviously, and they got suspended.
	But they did get their account back under a new name, if you can go to the next one.
	Gays Against Broomers.
	I had not seen this.
	That's amazing.
	Okay, fine.
	I'll give him a quick follow now.
	But anyway, moving on to a completely unrelated subject, it turns out that monkeypox was actually primarily spread through sex and not skin-to-skin contact.
	According to the World Health Organization, who have come out as a homophobic organization this week, the virus is spread through close contact with people, animals, or material infected with the virus.
	It enters the body through broken skin, the respiratory tract, the eyes, nose, and mouth.
	And what's being left unsaid there is it's mucous membranes, basically.
	And this is the primary reason that people get it.
	In, again, totally unrelated news, the ninth child in the United States has been confirmed to have monkeypox.
	They're not telling us how they got monkeypox.
	I was going to wonder what the background of this diagnosis was, but I'm sure it's being kept perfectly private.
	Health officials are not disclosing the child's sex, age, county of residence, or how the child is connected to the previously diagnosed case.
	So it's a good thing that there's no grooming going on there at all.
	And we don't need to know anything more about it.
	But we do have some details on the dog with monkeypox.
	I thought it was mainly women who did this sort of thing.
	Yeah, you thought.
	Well, again...
	I was about to say I hoped, but no, I wish no one did any of this sort of thing with dogs.
	Leave dogs alone!
	You would think, but...
	I mean, I've heard of dog groomers before, but seriously...
	We have got no video evidence of that.
	We are making merely an inference, which I think is unfair.
	So we will not make that inference.
	We will just read this report and realise that there's no connection between anything involved.
	A dog in France contracted monkeypox from its owners.
	A four-year-old Italian greyhound tested positive for the virus after developing lesions which included abdomen pustules and a thin anal ulceration.
	According to the Lancet...
	I'm sure just a complete coincidence that that's where it manifested.
	Totally.
	Total coincidence.
	The dog is owned by two men who live together and have sex with men, including sexual partners outside of their relationship.
	Could you imagine that?
	The men had visited a hospital in Paris.
	They'd both developed anal ulcerations six days after sex with other partners.
	Ah, yes.
	And the dog just got random anal ulcerations.
	And my experiences living in Manchester told me that the gay community are often monogamous.
	The owners told health officials that a dog sleeps in the same bed as them.
	But why are the ulcers on its anus?
	Well, on its own, you know, dog owners, letting a dog sleep on the bed with them, pretty innocent, you know?
	Yep.
	Pretty innocent under normal circumstances.
	There's just...
	When every single person on that bed has anal ulcers, including the dog...
	I'm just slightly more skeptical.
	That's all I have to say.
	I just have got a level of disbelief I can't resist.
	Okay, whatever.
	But I mean, it could be worse because we could be in Germany.
	And in fact, these chaps could just nip across the border to Germany and go to the Zophilia Pride March.
	I played the clip, but it's all in German.
	But it's, unironically, equal rights for zoo files.
	Zoo files, rights, day.
	Yes.
	So they're claiming a full day.
	Make love, not meat.
	Make love to what?
	Dogs.
	I mean, literally dogs.
	Like, you can see them.
	If you scroll down a bit, you can...
	Oh, no.
	There's one part of the clip where you can see them standing around with their dogs.
	I mean, the opening of the clip showed someone holding onto a German Shepherd.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	The German Shepherd is definitely one of those dogs.
	And so it's like, right, okay, so this is just the modern world now.
	This is just what happens.
	This is just...
	The institutions are totally captured by wokeness, and they're completely unrepentant about it in the face of the law.
	People are...
	Oh, that poor dog.
	Utterly, yeah, utterly degenerate and disgusting in every way.
	And now we have Zoo Pride marches, which are probably protected by the same equality and diversity laws that are being flouted when white men are not allowed to apply...
	Oh, look at the expression, though.
	It says it all.
	But they're being flouted when white men are not allowed to apply for certain jobs.
	How much worse can it actually get?
	I guess the only way down is just an open nonce pride march through the streets of a city.
	That's got to be the only thing that's worse than all of this.
	That will be the next thing.
	That will be the next thing.
	The only way down is that way.
	It's like, no, we're already heading down.
	That will happen soon enough.
	I think they already had that sort of stuff back in the 1970s in the UK and the US. They had the, what was it, Mambler in the US, and we had Pi over here, and we had a number of high-profile British Labour politicians, interestingly enough, supporting Pi.
	Harriet Harman.
	Yes, who has, as far as I'm aware, maybe thrown out a little apology here or there, but not faced consequences for her support of noncery, but...
	I mean, God, a complete societal collapse, that's what I'm seeing.
	Just that poor doggo, man.
	I know.
	Just, like, you're at the Zoo File Pride Parade, and you're the dog.
	You know that meme of Ralph Wiggum just saying, I'm in danger?
	Yeah.
	That's what this dog is doing right now.
	But, let's move on to cheerier pastures, shall we?
	Oh yeah, the next segment's just so much more cheerful.
	Much cheerier pastors, like how the IRS will be knocking down your door soon as the wheelchair enforcers roll in, quite literally, to take your money.
	Because the IRS is expanding their workforce very soon to be able to employ, I think, in total 87,000 new agents.
	But there are some caveats to that.
	So that they can commit to more audits of private individuals and large corporations.
	They say mainly private corporations and such, but it will mainly be private individuals.
	Harry, as a libertarian, how do you feel about this?
	Not great.
	Not great.
	Literally though, 87,000, that's literally a vast army of tax collectors.
	It is, but remember, only about 2,000 of those will be enforcers.
	Oh, really?
	And the rest of them will just be monitoring every transaction that you make and monitoring...
	Putting their hand out and going, mine!
	Yes, and if you don't get mine right now, then we'll bring in the enforcement officers.
	So, just to point out that we have spoken about this before, Carl and Callum did this, our Cyberpunk Dystopia No.
	2, and I'm sure we'll follow it up with many a sequel...
	I've got number three in the works.
	It's actually coming together really quickly because this sort of stuff...
	Whenever something that is obviously cyberpunk dystopia comes across my timeline, I just save it in a dock.
	And man, this third one has come together worryingly quickly.
	I feel like the process is accelerating.
	The first one took ages.
	The second one took a while.
	And this one's nearly done.
	And this was very recent as well.
	Yeah, this was only a couple of weeks ago.
	So, you know, it's going to become a weekly series at this point, as far as I'm concerned.
	So if you want to catch up before it gets too out of hand, you know, I'd say go back and watch this one and watch the first one as well, because they do really have some less than cheery stuff in it.
	What I loved in it, though, the first one, like...
	I sat down with Callum and I was like, look, this is going to be quite bad.
	He's like, it can't be that bad.
	And people in the chat were like, oh, this isn't so bad.
	And by the end they're like, oh my god, we have to destroy the machines.
	We did also have the offshoot that you did with Josh, which was the man-made horrors beyond our comprehension.
	Well, that was the precursor to this.
	Yeah, we want to be plugged into the AI metaverse where we're just floating consciousness, cooming into infinity.
	Yeah, that's literally where we're going.
	Cooming to our zoophile porn.
	Oh, fantastic.
	But no, the IRS is basically part of what I can only imagine is the Democrats' attempt to develop a police state.
	And the IRS has always been a looming threat over American liberty and freedom, along with the implementation of the income tax that was put in about 100 or so years ago in the US. I was going to say that.
	You remember Americans 200 years ago, you didn't pay any tax.
	In fact, you had a revolution over paying taxes, just so you know.
	And now you've got literally an army of IRS agents.
	Just so you know.
	The founding fathers would not be pleased.
	They'd be up in arms!
	I'm not a protectionist.
	I'm not in favour too hard of protectionist tariffs or anything like that.
	But I would much rather there just be a mild revenue tariff on imports and exports rather than just the government taking out my pocket every single time I get paid.
	I hate it.
	And in America, it's only going to get worse because this was a part of the Inflation Reduction Act, which I've already seen people in the Democratic Party change the name or start referring to it as, I think, the Climate, Energy and Tax Bill.
	What happened to inflation?
	Oh, that's out of control.
	Yeah, to be fair, it's way more honest.
	Well, we're printing more money, so we don't think the inflation is going to go away.
	Yeah, now that we've passed it, we can be honest about it, but the Manchin-Schumer Inflation Reduction Act was passed, and it was adding an extra $80 billion to the IRS budget and hiring as many as 80,000, and I think that number has been updated now to 87,000 more auditors and agents.
	And I do believe as well, I looked into it, the IRS budget currently, the annual budget, is about...
	$12 billion.
	So this is a gargantuan increase in the budget.
	It's ridiculous to pump that much more money into the agency that basically spies on and targets your own citizens for the great crime of wanting to keep hold of the money that they earned.
	If anyone came along and was like, do you want to increase the size of state bureaucracy by 80,000 people?
	I'd be like, no.
	It'd be the worst thing I can imagine.
	And it's like, right, okay, we're doing it to 87,000.
	Oh, fantastic.
	The plan is estimated to double the number of Americans audited each year.
	Look forward to that, guys.
	Small business owners and upper-middle-class income workers will likely be the targets.
	The woman who runs an accounting firm or a restaurant won't have the resources to fight the government in the tax court, whereas the large corporations that they are saying that they are going to be targeting will have a much easier time throwing backhanded fistfuls of cash.
	To all of their pals in Congress to make this sort of thing go away.
	And they're the people who can afford to keep their money offshore and whatnot.
	So they're the people who can afford to escape through the loopholes.
	I can't open a Swiss bank account.
	It's not particularly easy for me.
	And conservatives, they note, should be especially worried.
	No one should forget that targeting of conservatives was precisely what happened in the Obama-era Lois Lerner affair.
	The agency cherry-picked for extra scrutiny the tax returns of conservative organizations and donors who happened to oppose President Barack Obama's policies.
	Very interesting.
	And this is something that's actually quite a bipartisan thing that happens on both sides when people get into power, because Richard Nixon also, back in the 70s, admitted to using the IRS as a weapon to bully his political opponents.
	And that's really why this sort of thing gets introduced in the first place.
	It's not to help the government provide infrastructure or anything like that.
	No, it's a weapon, and that's all it ever has been.
	And then there's another article that I got that was examining it a bit more...
	Clearly, from MarketWatch, will the Inflation Reduction Act help middle-class taxpayers?
	So this is the cardinal rule of journalism.
	If the headline ends with a question mark, the answer is no.
	Pretty much, yes.
	Because they say here, they're going to get about $80 billion extra to their budget.
	Out of that, only $3.2 billion, only this unfathomable amount of money, will be directed towards taxpayer services, like helping you out on the phone when you have questions or a problem.
	From reading up on this, it does seem that if you call up the IRS, if you've got a problem with paying your tax, it can be a bit difficult.
	They don't often pick up.
	So maybe that is something that needs to be But the other 76.4 billion is going to be directed at persecuting you.
	Well, no, no, because some 4.8 billion will be directed towards business system modernisation, because once again, I've heard that it's very, very clear that their technology is all quite outdated.
	But 45.6 billion will be directed towards enforcement of corporations and wealthy individuals, which means more audits.
	Which means that concerns lie, doesn't it?
	Yes.
	Jesus Christ.
	And it calls for the 87,000 over 10 years, and they're saying that it's because of the fact that there's attrition.
	You'll be losing staff members over the years as well, so they're trying to just make sure that we've got enough money to be able to make up for those numbers lost with change, with a considerable amount of change, it seems.
	And the White House says the Inflation Reduction Act, as a result of all these new audits...
	We'll result in $124 billion savings over 10 years, generating from collected taxes already owed by wealthy people and large corporations.
	And no family making less than $400,000 will see their taxes go up a penny.
	Heard that before.
	Yeah, we've all heard that before.
	The agency said its full-time headcount last year was almost 79,000, a roughly 13% decrease from its size in 2012, while the US population increased by roughly 8%.
	And all I can say to that is that tax agencies being understaffed and beginning to shrink can only be a good thing.
	It's only a good thing when this thing happens, but no, Biden's come in and decided that we've all been very naughty.
	You in America have all been very, very naughty.
	You've been keeping a bit too tight a hold on your purse strings there, and daddy government needs a little bit more.
	And one of the things that really raised eyebrows was this job description that went out on the IRS website for the Internal Criminal Investigation Branch looking for enforcement officers.
	It's The listing said, according to an IRS job listing, carrying a firearm and being willing to use deadly force if necessary is one of the major duties.
	The posting also asserts that no matter what the source, all incomes earned, both legal and illegal, has the potential of becoming involved in crimes which fall within the investigative jurisdiction of the IRS criminal investigation.
	So even if you're someone just completely tangential to an investigation that they're doing, if you've never done anything illegal in your entire life, you could get a knock on your door from these guys, and they do have the ability to use deadly force.
	But you can't tax someone who's dead.
	So what would be the point in that?
	Yeah, but you can seize all of their financial assets.
	I suppose so.
	Yeah, which is not something that the government in America is above doing.
	But it's literally the Ben Shapiro meme of, well, it's at the point of a gun, barrel of a gun.
	Well, it literally is, actually.
	It literally is.
	Once again, libertarians vindicated, as always.
	And this posting seems to come at a time when the IRS allegedly has already stockpiled a huge amount of ammo in 2022 as part of a trend that has encompassed years.
	No, no, it's true.
	It's ridiculous.
	How much?
	Well, I don't know just how much ammo, but I know how much they've spent on it, because Matt Gaetz spoke about it on Fox News in June, where he said, Call me old-fashioned, but I thought the heaviest artillery an IRS agent would need was a calculator and not $725,000 of ammunition.
	There's got to be a fair number of rounds.
	That is a fair number of rounds.
	And the following month, Gates introduced the Disarm the IRS Act that would stop any further ammo buys if it was enacted.
	Because, yeah, I don't like the idea...
	Disarm the IRS Act?
	It just sounds comical.
	It does.
	I don't like...
	I mean, how about Abolish the IRS Act?
	That would be a nice start.
	Disarm them!
	Like they're in a castle!
	We need to send troops to the IRS! We need to arm guards!
	But they are!
	Some would say that obviously they might be involved in criminal enterprises and such, so we need to make sure the IRS has a way of enforcing these things.
	We've got the police for that sort of thing.
	Why does the IRS specifically need its own private army?
	It's very strange.
	I would also say that people who are likely to be tax frauds, one, it's not always intentional.
	Because in America, from what I've been reading...
	You've got to file your own taxes every year.
	You've got to file your own taxes.
	It can be very confusing with all the codes.
	So it could just be the grandma who's like a landlady.
	You know, she saved up her money and she's settled down with her husband in their old age.
	The grandkids are off doing their own thing.
	So, oh, we've just got a little property that we own.
	You know, she files her taxes wrong by accident.
	All of a sudden, you've got the FBI bursting through the door.
	The IRS Enforcement Division has arrived with a siege engine.
	Yeah, and even then, people who are committing tax fraud are probably not hardened criminals, probably not the sort of, like, mafioso Al Capone types that they might have been a hundred years ago.
	Don't they call it, like, white-collar crime or something?
	Oh, it absolutely is.
	These are not generally violent people.
	And the only way that I can think to explain all of this, have you heard of Sam Francis' concept of anarcho-tyranny?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	For those of you unfamiliar with it, anarcho-tyranny is when the state loses the willpower or just decides to no longer enforce laws that maintain, you know, stability, order in the streets.
	Think the BLM riots of 2020, for instance.
	And instead just starts policing people's minor behavioural infractures.
	Just so that they can make sure it looks like they're doing something.
	So they tyrannise you in the most petty ways imaginable while allowing anarchy out in the streets.
	And, you know, as far as I can tell...
	Pretty evil.
	Yeah, it's pretty evil, but it's pretty much what's going on.
	Yeah, well, for the most part...
	It's not an inaccurate description of what happened in 2020.
	But don't worry, guys.
	Don't worry, guys.
	I know, Carl, this all sounds a bit dystopian.
	It sounds a little bit worrying.
	It sounds like we might be falling into the matrix.
	But Reuters and AP... Oh, the fact-checkers have debunked it.
	Reuters and the Associated Press, yes, have managed to debunk this with a fact-check that the IRS is not hiring thousands of armed agents.
	I mean, strictly speaking, yes, they are, because they need about...
	I think they need about 2,000.
	Oh, they say only about 2,100 special agents carry firearms.
	So that is actually thousands.
	Yes, and also that $45 billion on enforcement is going to someone for some reason.
	It's just going for the ammo stockade, is it?
	Yeah, potentially.
	We just need to get our recreational nukes stockpiled for the IRS. How many tanks does 400 billion or 40 billion, whatever it was, how much was it?
	$45.6 billion.
	That's got to be a fair few tanks.
	That's got to be a fair bit of artillery that you can buy yourself there.
	Lots of rocket launchers.
	That's about half of what Joe Biden left to the Taliban, isn't it?
	Yeah, roughly speaking.
	So the IRS is now half as deadly as the Taliban.
	I was thinking to buy the gear back from the Taliban with this money.
	And AP News, Associated Press basically just said the same thing.
	Sam, is this really better than when Donald Trump was in charge?
	I'm laughing because this is all comically bad.
	Sam Harris is going to be in basically the Soviet Union in his tiny little state-provided flat, police state style.
	The IRS marches outside.
	Yeah, he's going to hear the IRS kick in the door of his next-door neighbour, and he's going to be sat there going, well, but imagine if it was Trump, though.
	Yeah, imagine if it was Trump not tyrannising us.
	Yeah, and of course, people like you and I were just misrepresenting this advertisement because immediately after it got pointed out that, hold up, this is a bit strange that the IRS needs deadly force to enforce taxes.
	They immediately took it down and put it back up and reworded it without that clause in it right there.
	Even though it's still actually going to be the case.
	Now, that's the best thing.
	When someone gets caught and they just take it down and put it back up without the thing that you objected to.
	That really...
	It calms my concerns.
	It lays my fears.
	It's just honest.
	It's just honest.
	Oh, actually, we don't want them for that anymore.
	It's like, really, don't you?
	Okay.
	Oh, alright, if you say so.
	And I found this amazing co-particle from a website called Mother Jones.
	Mother Jones used to be a women's magazine.
	I thought it sounded like that, given the name.
	I'd never really heard of them, but they say that, you know, they're one of those ones like The Guardian who say that, oh, we're just funded by our readers so that we can do our hard-hitting journalism, speak truth to power.
	And this man, Michael Mechanic, goes through all of this.
	He says, no, it's not hiring 87,000 new agents to go after ordinary taxpayers.
	And he kind of sums up the attitude that I see as being prevailing among leftists with taxes, where he's saying, he goes on about, oh, the poor, The poor feel pity for them.
	The cash-strapped IRS from 2010 to 2018, the IRS received 9% more tax returns, but despite that, its annual budget was slashed by almost $3 billion from less than $15 billion...
	Sorry, just again, just look at the perverse incentives.
	Right, so what are we going to do?
	Are we going to increase the IRS's funding for the amount of tax they bring back?
	Like, that's how Roman tax collectors used to work.
	Oh, the fantastic thing as well is they keep saying, oh, well, if we, you know, once the IRS is in place, once we get all of this in place, we'll be able to make up $700 billion on the deficit, and then you go, how much does the Inflation Act spend?
	$760 billion.
	So it doesn't even cover its own costs.
	But the thing is, you're completely missing the point.
	This guy's missing the point.
	It's not good if the IRS is being successful and earning money, like a profitable endeavor.
	That's not good.
	That's what tax farming is.
	It's good for me, the citizen, to pay as little tax as possible.
	And so minimizing the amount of budget the IRS gets, regardless of how much it brings in, is what's actually good.
	What a totally backward set of incentives.
	Yeah, and he also, in a tweet that he posted on Twitter, if you go to the next one, Michael, he kind of sums it all up here and he's like, oh, look at how evil it is that all of these tax audits went down from between when it was Obama in charge to when it was Trump in charge in 2017.
	Oh no!
	And I just see this and I go, fantastic!
	Brilliant!
	And he focuses on, oh, look at how $10 million or more positive income got slashed ridiculous amounts on the amount of audits.
	Good!
	But so did everyone.
	Yeah, everybody did.
	So I don't see the problem.
	Minus 60% for $25,000 to $50,000.
	That's brilliant.
	Yeah, it is brilliant.
	But it shows that the point of this whole, the way the leftists look at tax, it's not to raise revenue for the government.
	It's not to be able to, you know, like, it's not even to redistribute wealth, really, at the end of the day.
	It's just to punish rich people.
	It's just purely motivated by envy.
	Because he's saying like, oh, it's just evil that it's $10 million or more got slashed so much.
	But I'm sorry, all the leftists that I've met, if you were earning like $75,000 to $100,000, they hate you and think you're an evil person.
	If it's $50,000 to $75,000, they hate you and think you're an evil person.
	If it's anything that escapes the poverty line, They think you're an evil person and should have all of your money confiscated and redistributed by the state.
	Yes, another feather in Trump's cap here.
	Yeah, this is only a good thing, and the fact that Biden is looking to reverse this is only a bad thing.
	And then people have looked into it and said, the New York Post looked into it and were like, yeah, if you analyse it, it looks like the Inflation Reduction Act will actually probably end up costing the middle class $20 billion in new taxes.
	Shock and surprise.
	I know.
	Big surprise right there.
	And then somebody released this footage, Luke Radowski.
	Oh, Luke's a good lad.
	Yeah, he found this footage of what I can only imagine is going to be the new batch of enforcement officers, the kinds of people who are going into the IRS to do this sort of thing.
	They're going to be very diverse, aren't they?
	Oh, very diverse.
	And not entirely able, either.
	Who knew stealing money from poor people was going to be this fun?
	Look at all of them, big smiles on their faces.
	Can you wait to persecute people who filed their taxes wrong this year?
	Ooh, can't wait.
	Well, I'll tell you what you need, like the ump-a-lumper music play.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	But there is something I do...
	I know.
	For the interests of journalistic integrity, I do need to point out that having looked into it, the clip is from 2017, so it's not the recent recruits they've been doing.
	They were a bunch of accounting students.
	Reading through it, the point was, though, that these are accounting students and the IRS was, well, you could just go into normal accounting, or you could work for us where we'll give you guns and let you chase down criminals who've been evading their taxes.
	So who knows who it is exactly that they're hiring right this moment, but the IRS, I've looked into it, they've got all their diversity requirements, all their diversity commitments, etc., etc.
	So if their commitment to diversity hiring has probably only got worse...
	Since when this got out.
	I wouldn't expect the people who are going to be joining the IRS to be much better.
	So as much as the dystopian IRS police state is looming over America right now, at the very least you can hope that you might be able to outrun these people.
	We'll expect a hiring freeze on white men coming anytime soon.
	Oh, absolutely.
	To hit their diversity targets.
	But yes, you've also got to remember that whether or not these sorts of people look pathetic, whether or not these are the sorts of people they end up hiring, they still have the power of state-backed coercion behind them, and that will only ever hurt the little guy.
	Okay, let's go to the video comments.
	Despite heavy protests, the Norwegian government in 2019 signed the Acer deal connecting us to the EU power grid.
	The reason was to secure availability through the year, a solution to a non-existing problem.
	Critics who said this would increase the price was dismissed out of hand.
	Last summer we were able to buy electricity at a rate of less than 3 pence per hour.
	Since last November the price has only been going up.
	Yesterday the price was 66 pence, and that's a 2100% increase over one year.
	God damn.
	You've got to remember though, they're doing this on purpose.
	Oh yeah.
	They're doing it on purpose.
	They know what they're doing.
	They're ruining you on purpose.
	And if electricity, if all the prices of everything goes up, most people who don't know anything about what they're talking about will end up going, why hasn't the government solved this problem?
	We need to give more power to the government so they can solve these problems.
	And then the government gets more power and screws you over even more.
	They will.
	And I can't believe, like, in Norway, they can't have enough hydroelectric power.
	Like, there must be so many rivers pouring off the fjords into the sea.
	Oh, absolutely.
	Is Akwa Hirsch a foreign invading imperialist, or is she a British traitor?
	Is it one or the other?
	Well, it's a good question.
	I know.
	I think I'd be more kind and call her a traitor.
	I didn't watch the segment from yesterday.
	Right, okay.
	Well, basically, I know that she hates Britain and hates everyone in it.
	And hates the Empire.
	Hates everything about it.
	But fundamentally, she is actually a product of it.
	Because both of her grandparents were refugees to Britain.
	And she was born...
	So they were treated very well by Britain, then.
	And she's just showing her immense gratitude.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Her dad's English.
	Her mum is, like, gone and half Jewish.
	So it's just like, you know, she is a product of Britain.
	She's just deeply ungrateful.
	I would feel horrible to be a dad of someone like that and just think to myself, like, oh, you hate me.
	Just ever so slightly.
	For everything that I represent, despite being your dad, you still hate me.
	Yeah, and the thing is, as well, there's a bit about her grandparents.
	Both of her grandfathers had to flee their respective countries because of tyranny, and they fled to England.
	And they were deeply grateful to Britain for not being a tyranny.
	And she's like, yeah, but it's kind of crap.
	It's like, oh, piss off back to Nazi Germany then.
	You know, obviously the granddads would have just been like, no, this is great.
	What are you talking about?
	But anyway...
	The great thing about Skydance hiring John Lasseter is that John Lasseter took all the Pixar seniors with him and what remained of the Disney seniors.
	He even took Brad Bird and Alan Menken.
	Alan Menken who wrote all the songs you remember from the Disney renaissance.
	And now the Daily Wire posts a former Disney CEO. Disney is just bleeding talent, and honestly, it couldn't happen to a more deserving company.
	So Daily Wire poached all of them?
	Apparently, I don't know anything about it.
	Because I heard that Daily Wire was poaching former Disney superstars, but I didn't realise that they were even able to poach people like Brad Bird.
	I know, it's not that.
	Oh, another animation studio.
	Oh, okay.
	Fair play.
	I don't know, but I kind of hate what Disney has become, so I'm happy to sit back.
	Well, absolutely.
	I mean, John Lasseter, Brad Bird, all of those sorts of people were all involved in, I think, Pixar.
	Michael might correct me.
	They were involved in Pixar when Pixar was still making, you know, that run of absolutely fantastic films they did from Toy Story up to about WALL-E. Yeah.
	You know, so the fact that they don't have that talent in the company anymore.
	Good.
	Have a nice big brain drain from Disney so they can continue failing.
	When Pixar...
	Yeah, they've gone to another company.
	Yeah, yeah.
	When Pixar began, though, it was actually quite an amazing run, wasn't it?
	Like, they had hit after hit, and every film was genuinely an amazing story.
	And they had real hard-line morality embedded in them as well.
	The idea of growing up that goes throughout all the Toy Story films up until three.
	You know, The Incredibles being a story of family and personal responsibility.
	Every one a hit, they couldn't miss, apparently, for a while.
	WALL-E even has, like, dangers of modernity where it goes up to the space station and everyone's a fat, disgusting slob.
	We will have to.
	I watched it.
	I only watched it for the first time the other day, actually.
	Oh, it's fantastic.
	Yeah, exactly.
	We should do a breakdown of it at some point because there's so much in there that it's genuinely prescient.
	And it is very conservative, actually.
	Oh, yeah.
	I mean, I find that kids' stories, when they have good morals to them, often end up being really conservative more than anything.
	Let's go to the next one.
	I wouldn't go so far as to compare Tavistock to the Nazi eugenics programs, what with the Nazis considering an overt punishment of their enemies, but it does very much remind me of the Tuskegee experiments in America where they were deliberately giving black people syphilis in studies while pretending that they were helping their patients.
	All the doctors signed up on this.
	This has been used to, like, justify why black people don't take vaccinations, but we do tend to ignore the fact that such experiments have been done to white people all the time, and those just kind of get ignored.
	I've never heard of The Last Church, I'm afraid.
	No, neither have I. Lord Nerevar says,
	Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm more than happy to say, okay, well, we disagree, but that doesn't mean we have to be enemies or we can't, you know, be cordial or whatever, you know, and it's fine for you to have that opinion, you know, like, he doesn't demand that I have that opinion.
	I mean, if anything, to go almost the John Stuart Mill approach to this, the fact that he was able to disagree with you and you were able to put your positions forward, sort of escaping the echo chamber for a moment, gives you a way to refine your own thoughts on the subject.
	Absolutely.
	But yeah, exactly.
	They had to defend Trump against Sam Harris, because Sam Harris' position was just not really connected to reality, I felt.
	Colin says, sorry, maybe I've missed something, but what corruption has Trump been accused of?
	Yeah, well, I mean, he's been accused of lots of things.
	He's been investigated for lots of things.
	And there's been evidence of absolutely zero things that has come to light.
	And Colin, in fact, follows up saying Donald Trump is the most investigated, impeached and acquitted president ever.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it's exactly right.
	Omar says, Yeah, it's definitely, definitely true.
	S.H. Civil says, I'll push back a bit, Carl.
	Sorry, what, in my echo chamber?
	I don't think so now.
	The world was not more peaceful under Trump, as his mere existence caused a proportion of the population to grow more violent and insane, throwing away all standards and ethics just to own the orange meaning in his fans.
	I meant, to be fair, I meant international relations.
	Yeah, geopolitics.
	When I said the world, I was talking about international relations.
	You are right.
	Domestically, the left did go quite mental, you know, give you your due there.
	That's correct.
	But that was to their deficit.
	They shouldn't have done that, and they know they shouldn't have done that.
	Well, once again, I mean, he was, more than anything, one of the greatest insults I've noticed that the left likes to throw at right-wingers is the accusation of isolationism, as if it's a bad thing.
	Sorry, I don't want to go and imperially colonize other countries and introduce democracy to them.
	Woodrow Wilson was a terrible person, and you should feel bad.
	The modern imperialism, is it?
	Right, okay.
	Oh, you're a little Englander.
	Yeah, based.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I don't really care about what happens overseas.
	Baron Von Warhawk said, Not to mention all the feds who were friends with Epstein.
	Perfectly put.
	That is normal politics.
	And what was the thing we were talking about before?
	Whereas the entire civilization is utopian, but it runs on a child being tortured or something.
	Oh, you mentioned that.
	I think you brought it up.
	Did I? No, I thought you brought it up.
	Did Michael bring it up?
	Oh, yeah.
	Ursula Le Guin novel, apparently, where apparently we've got a premium podcast.
	Yeah, John and Connor spoke about it.
	But the premise is the entire world's utopian, except for its run on the suffering of a child.
	And it seems that Sam Harris is basically like, well, yeah.
	Yeah, who cares?
	You know, it's just the one kid.
	It's not my kid, so why should I care?
	Yeah, exactly, which is just...
	Oh, come on, man.
	But the thing is, we've got that world where, yeah, there are basically children being offered up as sacrifices.
	They're not just random other people's children because they could end up as anybody else's children.
	So we've not got a utopia either.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So where's the big trade-off coming?
	We've just got all the worst parts.
	Our world is running on Epstein's non-trafficking ring and we don't even have perfection.
	Free Will says, Harris does not exactly explain what corruption we're talking about with regards to Trump.
	He says, we know Trump is corrupt but does not define it.
	Or Trump University.
	That's the closest to corruption.
	But the thing is that A, he had to settle all of that out of court and pay something like $25 million.
	So he definitely had to pay his dues on that.
	And B, it's not government corruption because he didn't in like 2011.
	It was when he was a private individual.
	Yeah, exactly.
	So it's just, okay, it's a bit of a shady business deal.
	Okay, fair enough.
	It's not taking money from the Chinese government.
	I think there's different levels of corruption.
	It's not cavorting with child prostitutes either.
	No.
	Yeah, well, that's a great point, isn't it?
	Like, Trump...
	I did an interview with Sebastian Gorky yesterday, which I think goes out today, in which I was just explaining, look, Trump was promising the story of America to be restored.
	America's a great country, and it goes forward boldly into the future, doing the hard work, taking the risks, and reaping the rewards.
	And the Democrats are like, oh God, risk, reward, success.
	Are we sure?
	That sounds scary.
	Why don't we just drain your civilization of confidence?
	And Trump just comes back, like again, just from the gut.
	And it's just like, no, I don't care.
	We're here and we're going to win.
	You're going to get tired of winning, famously.
	And man, you know, I was tired of winning until Joe Biden came in.
	I mean, just to point out the irrational reasoning thing, just to go a bit more on the rationality aspect, I think it's way, way, way, way, way easier for people to be rational about the individual actions they're taking in the day-to-day.
	It's way easier if it's just really small scale.
	How am I going to organize my day-to-day to be the most efficient?
	I'll go get the shopping done now, and then I'll have some food, then do the washing up, blah, blah, blah.
	But then all of a sudden, when people are asked to vote, On these gigantic consequential issues like immigration and such.
	People have no ability to be rational in those because we've just got so few data points that we can actually look at.
	So people just go off their gut feeling.
	They don't know enough about the system.
	And the thing is, Trump was saying the right things and he was also appealing to that gut feeling that people go for.
	And again, I really do think it came down to who's on my side.
	And Trump was very obviously on the side of America.
	And so these allegations of, oh, it's treason, he's a traitor, it's like, No one, even you, saying it, believes that Donald Trump would be a traitor to the United States.
	No one believes it.
	Also, surely the Democrats tend to celebrate people who hate the US anyway?
	Yeah.
	What do you care about, treason?
	Yeah, exactly.
	Yeah, exactly.
	You don't care about treason, and no one thinks it would be Trump.
	You know, you could accuse him of almost anything else, and he's been investigated for all those things, and those things weren't true either.
	But the treason thing is just stupid, and it's dumb on the face of it.
	Matthew says, do you think that the new atheists do not like Trump simply because he is unable to break down, oh sorry, because he is able to break down complex topics into simple and understandable ideas?
	This destroys their business model of keeping the complex mysterious, and you must pay me to understand it.
	I don't think it's about their business model, because they all do very well.
	I think it's about a kind of emotional position they hold towards the concept of enlightenment, rationality, and reason.
	Trump is actually a repudiation of it.
	Actually, irrationality can be successful as long as you just have good intentions.
	And despite the good intentions, they're like, well, no, I refuse to accept a model of irrationality, even though Sam Harris is showing himself to be rather irrational on this point.
	Yeah.
	I'm not going to put it down to, like, insincerity on their part.
	No, no, it's totally sincere.
	That would be less honest, you know?
	Yeah, no, I think they're sincere.
	I just think it's not rational, and that's the problem, because it refutes the premise of their claim that, oh, well, we represent scientific rationality.
	It's like, Not being very rational about it, though.
	So it's kind of self-defeating, which is why I think people are surprised at Sam Harris.
	S.H. Silver again says, normal politicians is the problem, Sam.
	The neoliberal paradigm we've been trapped in for 40 years is a blight on the West that needs to be broken up, and Trump gave the U.S. that opportunity.
	Kevin says, I can't wait for Trump to get back in, and his first executive order is to send the FBI to dig up Hunter's basement where they find the bodies.
	What will Sam say then?
	Colin says, quote, default to expert opinion across the board.
	In other words, just be a figurehead for the political elite and the deep state.
	Yes, exactly.
	Robert says, regarding the trigonometry boys, Francis caught quite a lot of S when he played on the show the other day for being pretty soft.
	Pretty silly, in my opinion, although I would say that with Constantine Kissin as a buddy, he's in good company.
	Constantine is pretty damn good at routing out others' ideas and calling them on their BS statements and therefore getting to the truth of other people's opinions.
	Yeah, he is, you know, and they're both...
	They're both moderates.
	Yeah, they're both moderates.
	That's the thing.
	And I think it's important that, you know, okay, so if we're going to be the conservatives and we're going to be like, you know, based conservatives and we're going to be honest about things...
	We're not going to be in the Blairite paradigm.
	We have to maintain the connection with the center.
	Otherwise, we're going to drift off into the same position that Sam Harris is in, in the rational echo chamber.
	I don't want that.
	So I think it's important.
	Also, yeah, just to say once again, to compliment them, even though, like you say, they can be moderates, and they get a bit of flack from that, especially from people like our audience.
	They did a great job in the interview itself.
	They did a really good job asking him the good questions and sort of pressing him on things.
	To be fair, though, they didn't really need to press him that much when they were like, right, let's change the subject.
	He's like, actually, just one more thing, just in case.
	I really hate Trump.
	I just really need you to know that I don't care about Hunter murdering children.
	Yeah.
	Kobe says, name three irrational positions held by Trump.
	Well, almost all of them, frankly.
	His belief in America is not necessarily rational.
	In fact, it's a belief.
	It's his conviction that America is a good and great country.
	It's a value.
	And that comes from the gut instinct.
	It's a prejudice that he has.
	And that's fine.
	We all have our prejudices.
	We all have irrational positions.
	We actually have to get out of the position of thinking that it's wrong to be irrational.
	So it doesn't mean wrong.
	It doesn't mean that you're not accurately representing the world.
	It just means you haven't, from first principles, constructed this position.
	You don't have to.
	Trump has been habituated into his love of America.
	That's an irrational position.
	Going across the border in North Korea, that was pretty irrational.
	If you wrote that down on paper, prior to any kind of experience, you would be like, I'm not going to do that.
	The strike into Syria as well was actually a really well-received maneuver that clearly wouldn't have come from first principles either.
	Because anyone would have said, no, if you launch a missile strike into Syria, you might hit the Russians.
	You're going to blow up a Syrian airbase.
	The Russians are going to freak out.
	You know, our allies are going to freak out.
	It could escalate.
	Exactly.
	It could escalate.
	So it's not a rational thing to do.
	However, it showed that actually the lizard brain of a human being matters.
	And everyone on Earth is a human.
	and therefore they have lizard brains too.
	And so when Trump's like, boom, right, blown this up, now who's going to do something?
	The Russians are like, no.
	The Chinese are like, no, no.
	The Syrians are like, what, us?
	No, don't be silly.
	Our allies are like, oh God, the rationalists in Europe are freaking out.
	But it's like, okay, but the dust is cleared and everyone's quiet and the problem's over.
	So it was actually like, that was genuinely one of the most brilliant uses of Trump's intuition that I've ever seen.
	Because it was just like, no, I'm sure this is the right thing to do.
	I'm going to go for it.
	And Trump ran his entire presidency that way.
	And he had good instincts.
	You know, there's nothing wrong with Trump using his instincts.
	Yeah, I mean, you can come to a rational conclusion through less than rational means of getting there.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And often rationality is post hoc anyway.
	Which is what David Hume is saying.
	Reason is always the servant of the passions.
	And this is what Jonathan Haidt, as you said earlier, has concluded with scientific research.
	So she's like, okay, well, that seems to be true.
	Let Trump go, baby!
	Risto says, new atheism lost its rationality and became the new creationism of the next era.
	Alpha of the Beta says, Sam Harris is the exhibit A of so-called smart people talking outside of their limited area of expertise.
	I knew Sam was a massive anti-Trumper, and I knew he was a massive coward because he wouldn't talk to anyone on his podcast with a whiff of controversy.
	Even Jordan Peterson was beyond the pale, but this demented rant is quite telling.
	The level of circular logic hubis and irrationality that enlightenment rationalists such as Harris bring to the table is their massive blind spot, all while waving the flag of logic, rationality, and humility.
	Yes, that is the problem.
	It's the desire for certainty.
	He's looking, oh, there's a potential small sliver of improbability.
	Like, I can't calculate what's going to happen there.
	Therefore, it's bad.
	And it's like, yeah, but you've got like 90% chance it's going to be good.
	Yeah, but that 10%, I need 100%.
	It's like, well, he's not going to get it.
	Live with it.
	Spring Valley Itland says, The absolute state of Harris.
	I draw the comments on that episode on YouTube.
	Man, is he in for a rough awakening about going woke and going broke, judging from the comments.
	I wouldn't even say he's woke.
	I'd more just say that he's just got massive Trump derangements.
	Because even in there, in the podcast itself, when I listen to it, he goes on about how, you know, he thinks that wokeism is bad and really bad for society, leads to worse results for everybody.
	So he's not woke.
	He just hates Trump.
	That's the problem.
	Yeah.
	Colin says, I wonder what Peter's position is on Zophilia.
	Peter's a pretty woke organization.
	Oh, it always has been.
	Yeah, so they're probably pro.
	They're probably like, well, as long as the animal consents, Liam says, not going to lie, guys, I'm feeling pretty demoralized.
	Honestly, mate, you and me both.
	But this is actually what the Skildings event is about.
	The Witan, which is going to be held in the Midlands next week, next weekend.
	I'm the final speaker on the Sunday.
	And my talk will be called The Word and the Shire.
	I'll be drawing on quite a lot of things.
	But the point, one of the main points, I think John...
	Sorry, Michael.
	Michael.
	John's off this week.
	Michael's going to get up just so you can see it.
	Don't worry, Michael.
	I remember your name.
	I appreciate you.
	But one of the principal things is I actually spend quite a lot of time reading Anglo-Saxon poetry, right?
	And if you think it's bad now, we can look back and see that it was way worse in certain periods of time.
	We have been here before.
	And after the Anglo-Saxons, though, you get into the Middle Ages, where actually the perspective that the English have has changed.
	It's actually very positive.
	You've got the King Arthur mythos, you've got the Robin Hood legends, and it's all about merry old England, the merry men, and how King Arthur is going to go beat up the Romans.
	And it's all very positive.
	No, no, no.
	It's all very positive.
	And so you can see that, you know, we have peaks and troughs throughout our history of, like, you know, how good things are going and how bad things are going.
	And at the moment we're going into a trough, but we've been much lower before.
	We have been much lower before.
	We will be fine.
	We will be fine.
	I'm not allowing us to fall into this demoralization nonsense.
	Yes, it's bad, but we will make it better.
	Anyway, Ewan says, if it weren't for those nasty white men in World War II, our RAF would be called the Luftwaffe.
	That's a good point.
	Maybe we should point that out to her.
	Callum says, stupid question, a rhetorical one at that.
	How would the mobile infantry be if they focused on diversity recruitment rather than merit?
	Well, they'd be terrible, obviously.
	I heard the U.S. Marines lowered their standards in order to induct more females into their ranks.
	The effing Marines, the one military force in the United States of America that gets stuff done, not cluster eff it.
	Well, incidentally, there are no females in the Marines.
	I had to check this for the politics of one of 40,000, because none of them passed the entry exams.
	Not even, like, because you've got stages of exams as well, none of them got past the first hurdle.
	I was going to say good, but it's not good or anything.
	It's just like, well, that's...
	What did you expect?
	Yeah, typical.
	Andrew says, Good question.
	That's a really great question.
	General Hyping says, Well, I thought it was revealing that more British Muslims joined ISIS than the army.
	I mean, you know, people can push back against it, but there's evidence of that just being the general mentality.
	Just because over in the West, people have tried for decades at this point to eliminate the idea of tribal bias, even though it still exists.
	It's not even that.
	We assume that they are going to be nationalists like we are, and they're not nationalists.
	Well, that's obviously true, but also the idea of, like, we've seen it for years, it's why you're not allowed to be proud that you're English or anything like that.
	We want to just eliminate all these barriers and pretend like everybody's the exact same and that they don't have some predominant culture that they identify with and originate from.
	And this is not true.
	You know, just because there are plenty of university students who are English in England being taught to hate their own heritage who fall for it, Doesn't mean that, say, somebody from Saudi Arabia is going to feel the same way about his country.
	No, not at all.
	Like, more of them would rather fight for Islam than Britain.
	It's like, what did you expect?
	They're not nationalists.
	And did you see the black students fleeing from Ukraine?
	No, I didn't actually.
	There was a clip of a bunch of black students fleeing from Ukraine when the Russians invaded.
	And someone at the border is like, okay, no, you're an adult man.
	You have to go and fight.
	He's like, I can't fight.
	I'm black.
	I'm not fighting for Ukraine.
	I'm black.
	He's like, well, there we go.
	You're a mercenary.
	You were here to exploit.
	And now things have gone south.
	You're like, I'm going to get out.
	Because you are in no way invested in the nation of Ukraine.
	And so you expect Ukrainians to die in order for you to profit.
	Yeah, I mean, to an extent, that's understandable.
	Why should they if they've got no connection?
	If I was living in France...
	Yeah, don't blame them.
	If I was living in France, and all of a sudden France broke out into a war with someone, I'd be on the next boat over back to Blighty.
	Well, exactly.
	Last thing, I don't even blame them.
	But we have to remember that they are, as General Haiping says, mercenaries.
	They're not here.
	If they'd moved to the country, bought a house, married a local woman...
	And had kids.
	Okay, now I would expect you to fight for the country.
	If you're just a student who's there for working or whatever, and of course you're just going to hop.
	Of course you are.
	Kevin says this is just the latest of many backward steps in recruitment.
	When I was in the forces, being caught in a drug test was an immediate discharge from the colours.
	Having a criminal record was a bar to enlistment.
	Then the military, due to budget restraints, began handing out brown envelopes and booting service personnel.
	Initially it was voluntary, then it became compulsory discharge.
	This meant experienced soldiers were lost and recruitment figures became untenable.
	Now, drug history, no problem.
	Did five years for GBH, no problem.
	So this is just an extension of the task of destroying the armed forces.
	Yeah, it clearly is.
	Tomo says, That's what it's going to be.
	Bob Slade, I think I know that name, says the London Mayor Sadiq Khan blames the heatwave for the rise of violent crime in the city.
	Well, that's alright then.
	No need to address the problem as the British weather will sort it out.
	That's true.
	The crime wave should already have finished by now.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Now the heatwave's over, surely the crime wave is off.
	Omar says, Carla's going to have to restart his series on This Week in Stupid, accelerating our descent into hell.
	To be fair, that's been sort of the Lotus East podcast as a deception.
	Twice Daily Podcast went.
	Yeah, don't even get me started, honestly.
	Don't start encouraging double podcasts every day.
	God, could you imagine?
	It's comical.
	It's genuinely comical.
	Mr.
	Tucker says, We just need to tax your income directly for the duration of the Great War.
	It was one of the biggest lies told to the people by the US government in the last 200 years.
	But as the saying goes, nothing is more permanent than a temporary government program.
	Who was that?
	I think that was Ronald Reagan who said that.
	I thought it was Friedman.
	It might have been.
	It sounds like something Milton Friedman would say.
	But then again, Reagan was like, I think he knew Milton Friedman and was friends with him.
	Disciple of his.
	Yeah.
	Colin says, so again, an attack on the middle classes.
	Their first target would be to increase tax collection enough to pay for increased spending.
	Yeah, that's definitely why they're doing this.
	Supreme Duck says, what are they planning to do?
	Are they going to kill tax avoiders?
	I understand the lefties want less people, but I don't think this is the way.
	And Joe, just to end with, says, the green energy agenda has been the biggest fraud scheme ever.
	Yeah.
	And you notice that once they got knocked back on it, they would say, okay, we'll do it piecemeal then.
	In fact, Andrew says, killing people and seizing their assets seem the Democrats are harking back to ancient roots with the prescriptions.
	Well, honestly, they're just following their socialist intuitions.
	I mean, the Democrats were the one who stole everyone's gold for the New Deal, after all.
	Oh, sorry, you've got gold.
	Only the government's allowed to hoard gold.
	Give it here.
	Yeah.
	Maria says, Well, good, you know, and always be aware that you need to look to yourself and your personal situation first.
	But anyway, right, so we're out of time there.
	Thank you very much, folks, for joining us.
	We'll be back on Monday, or you can join me in about an hour for a discussion on Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, which I'm sure will be very, very interesting.
	Have a good weekend, folks.

▲