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Dec. 21, 2022 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:31:45

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #550

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Time	Text
	Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen.
	Welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for Wednesday, the 21st of December 2021.
	I'm joined by Nick.
	How are you doing, Nick?
	Good afternoon.
	Good.
	And today we're going to be talking about the Twitter files.
	Finally, we have a smoking gun.
	Finally, we have direct concrete evidence that terrible things have been happening at Twitter.
	Everything before was just what I considered to be terrible, but this is just really bad.
	Then we're going to be asking what happened to the Christmas spirit when it came to homelessness over Christmas.
	And I thought then we'd finish off with just a bit of fun laughing at the SNP because they really hate the English.
	They just really do.
	Anyway.
	So, the Twitter files have finally produced something really, really interesting.
	Something that I would consider to be something of a smoking gun, because it turns out that Twitter is riddled with FBI agents, and that they actively lied to Twitter to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story.
	So, this has to be something.
	If the Republicans in America can't do anything with this, then they can't do anything.
	And the reason that this is important is because intelligence wins wars.
	Unsurprisingly, having good intelligence on something is a massively important thing.
	So when the intelligence agencies are lying to the American public, effectively, in order to sense people, in order to protect a political candidate, well, that's direct evidence of partisanship that surely there should be some accountability for.
	And it's also something the Americans have told us for generations now, that they're better than that.
	Oh, yeah.
	We're the country of the free.
	We don't have this kind of mob style, gangster style politics in America Turns out you do, actually.
	It's just all hidden.
	But anyway, before we begin, if you want to support us, go and check out the latest epochs that Bo and I did on the Battle of Kursk, which is the largest battle in human history.
	And the reason I bring this up is because this is another example of how intelligence wins wars.
	Because at the time, the British had cracked the German code, and the Germans didn't know, and so we could hear everything the Germans were saying, all their plans, and we were just telling the Russians, these are all their plans.
	And the Russians, of course, won.
	So that's a direct example, a pivotal example, of how these things are incredibly important.
	Now, one might say, well, this would also have been important for the 2020 election.
	And yes, that's true.
	The polling would have suggested that actually, if the public had known about the unbelievable corruption and malfeasance that was revealed from the Hunter Biden laptop, they wouldn't have voted for Biden.
	So this had direct political consequences.
	But anyway, let's get into it.
	So the other day we had Twitter Files No.
	6 from Matt Taibbi, where he explained that between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Trust and Safety Chief Joel Roth.
	But there was a surprisingly high number of requests from the FBI to take action on election misinformation, as in to censor people, involving even joke tweets from low-follower accounts.
	That's weird, isn't it?
	This guy's got five followers.
	Twelve people have seen this tweet.
	Oh, we need to get that pulled down.
	Why?
	We shall have dissent by nobody.
	Exactly.
	It's weird and totalitarian, isn't it?
	And so that I just thought was...
	The level of sensitivity on it is just remarkable.
	Who cares?
	Five people have seen that.
	Who cares?
	But the FBI had a social media task force known as FTIF that was created after 2016 to deal with election misinformation because they didn't want another Donald Trump happening.
	And that had 80 agents on it that had correspondents with Twitter to identify alleged foreign interference and election tampering of all kinds.
	We'll get to the alleged foreign interference in a minute.
	And so this is remarkable.
	As Tabi says, Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content.
	Free and fair democracy.
	Yep.
	Nothing to worry about.
	Absolutely.
	If you just told me this six months ago, I'd have said a bit of a conspiracy theory.
	I'm not having any of that really.
	No, no, no.
	I'd need some proof to see that the FBI are engineering the public opinion and elections.
	I wouldn't have believed it.
	No.
	But unfortunately, we have all of the evidence now.
	So we go to Twitter files number seven, which is Michael Schellenberger released these.
	So this is he and he does a really good job of characterizing what the problem is here as well.
	So I'm just going to quote extensively because I don't want to give you my spin on it or anything like that.
	How the FBI and intelligence community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden's foreign business dealing both before and after the New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on the 14th of October 2020.
	So before, that's interesting, isn't it?
	They had prior knowledge and prior warning, and so they took deliberate action to censor real information that would have been directly impactful to the election.
	So he says, So this is the deep state at work.
	It's wide awake and has a will of its own.
	It is actively protecting Biden himself, his family, and the sort of web of connections that are linked onto it, which is unbelievable.
	So you may remember that in 2019, a Delaware computer store owner named John Paul MacIsaac contacted the FBI about a laptop that Hunter Biden had left with him.
	And so on the 9th of December in 2019, the FBI issued a subpoena for and took the laptop.
	However, by August, he had not heard of anything back from the FBI, despite the fact that he was under the impression that he discovered evidence of criminal activity, which he had.
	I mean, despite all the backroom dealings, I mean, Hunter Biden smoking drugs, which Joe Biden had campaigned to criminalize.
	It was definitely evidence of criminality on that.
	So he emailed Rudy Giuliani, who was under FBI surveillance at the time, for some reason.
	And Giuliani gave it to the New York Post, because I believe this chap had taken mirrors or images of the hard drives.
	So he had all the information that was on them.
	Very clever man.
	Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
	And on October the 13th, Hunter Biden's lawyer, George Messias, emailed J.P. Mac Isaac, the computer store owner, computer shop owner, and he had learned, he had just learned that the New York Post, that its story about the laptop was to be published the next day.
	Very interesting.
	And so that day, later on that day, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sent 10 documents to Twitter's then Head of Site Integrity, Yol Roth, through an application called Teleporter, which is a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter.
	And the very next day, the New York Post, of course, ran its story revealing the business dealings.
	Every single fact in it was accurate, as the New York Post had posted.
	Yet within hours, Twitter and other social media companies censored the New York Post article, preventing it from spreading, and more importantly, undermining its credibility in the minds of many Americans.
	Why is that?
	Well, Matt Taibbi described the debate inside Twitter over the decision to censor the wholly accurate article, and since then we have discovered new info that points to an organized effort by the intelligence community to influence Twitter and other platforms.
	That's very interesting, isn't it?
	First, it's important to understand that Hunter Biden, and this is one of the revelations that we got from the Hunter Biden laptops, because his emails were all on there, in which we learned, directly from the horse's mouth, that tens of millions of dollars of Foreign contracts, contracts with foreign businesses, including ones linked to Chinese government, were given to Hunter Biden, and there's no particular reason we can see that Hunter Biden was providing them any actual value.
	He was, and it was his surname.
	Yes, exactly.
	He was the connection.
	10% went to the big guy, as in so he was a funnel towards Joe Biden.
	So Joe Biden would implement favorable policies towards these people.
	Obviously, that's the case.
	And so the intelligence agencies began priming Yoel Roth To expect hack and leak operations regarding Hunter Biden specifically from the Russians.
	So this was going to be framed in particular.
	And so they began this early, actually.
	So during 2020, again, after they have the laptop, so they're aware, oh, wait, this is all going to come out.
	This is going to look bad, right?
	And so they did the same for Facebook as well, if you can go to the next one, where...
	Mark Zuckerberg just told Joe Rogan this.
	I remember watching this, yep.
	Yeah.
	And so they would go to all of them and say, look, we're expecting, you know, all these fake and fraudulent dumps from, you know, fake Russian intelligence, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And so, right, so you're essentially poisoning the well before any of this comes out, right?
	Even though they knew that no new information had been hacked, They say, through our investigations, we did not see similar competing intrusions to what had happened in 2016, said Elvis Chan, the FBI agent who's orchestrating this, himself.
	He admits this when he's being interviewed.
	Twitter also reported no Russian activity of any significance.
	Very interesting.
	Time and time again, the FBI asks Twitter for evidence for foreign influence, and Twitter responds that they aren't finding anything worth reporting.
	We haven't yet identified activity we'd typically refer to you, or even flag as interesting in the context of foreign influence.
	That's very interesting.
	So the FBI basically prepares the leak.
	In July 2020, Elvis Chan, the FBI agent, arranges for temporary top security clearances for Twitter executives so the FBI can share information about threats to the upcoming elections.
	On August the 11th, 2020, Chan then shares information with Joel Roth relating to the Russian hacking organization APT28 through their one-way communications channel teleporter.
	So the FBI, Elvis Chan himself, is essentially Laying the groundwork so that Roth will think, ah, I'm well-educated on these matters.
	I recognize when APT28, the Russian hacking network, are at work.
	And so he will pick these things up.
	Now, on the face of it, you might think, well, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
	And on the face of it, it is.
	Which is presumably, I'm not going to even characterize your Roth as a bad guy.
	I'm sure that he was like, well, I'm just doing my duty.
	And Roth explained to us That he had, quote, been primed to think about this group when the news of the Hunter Biden laptop came out.
	Because, of course, they said, well, in the context of Hunter Biden, APT28, you need to know.
	And so let's watch this clip.
	We learn about DC leaks, and we learn about the intersection between APT-28, a unit of Russian military intelligence, a hacking group, and so the mourning of the Hunter Biden story in the New York Post happens, and it was weird, right?
	We didn't know what to believe.
	We didn't know what was true.
	There was smoke.
	Ultimately, for me, it didn't reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter.
	But it set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack and leak campaign alarms.
	Right, so it looked possibly problematic.
	Everything about it looked like a hack and leak.
	Imagine being that fooled, basically.
	So the FBI have primed him, they've trained him to look for a particular thing, and so when this thing has come out, he's been like, oh, well I've been trained to view that as Russian hacking, even though there is no evidence that this is Russian hacking, and we know, concretely, that this was not Russian hacking.
	There's also something else that the FBI would have done to him as well, and that would have been to stroke his ego.
	Yes.
	We're working with you.
	You're like an American James Bond.
	We're protecting the country from foreign powers.
	That works on a lot of people, that.
	Especially your Roth.
	Now, maybe it's just me, but he's obviously quite young.
	And he sounds like a naive Californian leftist.
	Yeah.
	And so he seems to me like an easily manipulatable person.
	Yeah.
	He doesn't seem to me like he's got any particular knowledge or insight.
	I mean, he wrote his PhD thesis on Grindr, the gay sex app.
	So it's not like this guy is someone I would consider, you know, worldly, knowledgeable about international affairs.
	Yeah.
	You know, this is not his area of expertise.
	And so he looks like the sort of person who is actually easily manipulated and But anyway, so then we'll come back to Joel Roth in a minute with that lead there.
	He seems to have been somewhat groomed by the FBI here to spot the thing that they wanted him to spot, being led by the nodes, as it were.
	And so let's get into how involved with Twitter the FBI is, because it turns out they're basically running it, which is a bit concerning, isn't it?
	So, Chan, in August 2020, Chan was curious about...
	Did the FBI have anyone at Twitter?
	It turns out, yes, they had a chap called Jim Baker there.
	Chan, in one set of emails, says, is there anyone there who has top secret clearance?
	And someone mentions Jim Baker and Chan responds, oh, I don't know how I forgot him.
	Hmm.
	Hmm.
	Of course, Jim Baker, ex-FBI, works at Twitter.
	Doy, how did I forget that?
	So who's Jim Baker?
	Well, he's the former general counsel of the FBI between 2014 and 2018, and one of the most powerful men in the US intel community.
	And he just works at Twitter, as you do.
	He moved in and out of government for 30 years, serving students at CNN, Bridgewater, and Brookings, which are asset firms.
	As General Counsel of the FBI, he played a central role in making the case internally for the investigation of Donald Trump.
	You know, that investigation of Donald Trump that turned up all that evidence of Russian collusion.
	I must have missed that.
	I didn't see any.
	Yeah, so did all the media as well.
	I mean, everyone missed that.
	Baker wasn't the only senior FBI executive involved in the Trump investigation that went to Twitter.
	We have Dawn Burton, a former deputy chief of staff, to James Coney, the head of the FBI, who initiated the investigation of Trump, who joined Twitter in 2019 as director of strategy.
	This is looking pretty bad, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	This is like a Black Ops?
	Yes.
	There's over a dozen of them by the end of it.
	And they've all got their own private communications that the other employees at Twitter, the 7,500 employees, don't know about.
	So it's kind of like, yeah, it's like a, I don't want to say conspiracy, but Puppet master.
	Yeah.
	There's actually a group of FBI agents working together within Twitter in order to censor information and try and affect the outcome of elections.
	Isn't that mental?
	In a government, we'd call that the deep state.
	Yeah.
	Let's go back to Roth then.
	They further primed Roth, right?
	By bringing him in, and not just Roth, but other people from the New York Times, the former head of news at Twitter, the former CEO of NPR, the chief digital officer of NBC News, and they included attendees of Facebook's head of security policy and top reporters for the New York Times and Washington Post.
	They brought them into what they call an Aspen Institute tabletop exercise on what a potential hack-and-dump operation relating to Hunter Biden was.
	Can we get that up, by the way, John, just so we can see it quickly?
	The one that's not shaping the media narrative with Roth.
	Don't worry if you haven't got it up exactly.
	But basically, in it, it's a kind of exercise.
	He's got four screenshots of the exercise.
	It's hypothetical.
	So it's like, well, this website called bidencrimes.info It gets picked up on the alternative media sphere, and then it ends up with Trump tweeting out, and then Trump banging his fist at a rally saying these people are corrupt and trying to actively infill the elections and steal the election and things like this.
	And that's a hypothetical that is probably something mirroring reality, to be honest.
	And they were all brought into this.
	And this was in September 2020.
	And so you can see how they're kind of getting them in the mindset to think, no, this is the sort of thing that's going to happen.
	And therefore, again, you're being primed.
	You know when these things are happening, so you know what you're supposed to do afterwards.
	Because the FBI are kind of stage managing this whole thing.
	So by mid-September 2020, Chan and Roth had set up an encrypted messaging network so employees from the FBI and Twitter could communicate.
	They also agreed to create a virtual wallroom for all of the internet industry plus the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
	So they have an encrypted private network where they're all just talking to each other about all these things.
	That's pretty crazy.
	And then we get to the FBI just coordinating with Twitter.
	On September 15th of 2020, the FBI's Laura Demlow, who heads up the Foreign Influence Task Force and Elvis Chan, requested to give a classified briefing for Jim Baker, remember the ex-FBI assistant, former deputy I think it was, without any other Twitter staff present.
	So the FBI is speaking to the FBI asset, the ex-FBI agent, in Twitter without any Twitter staff present.
	That's weird.
	I wonder why Twitter agreed to that.
	They probably see Jim Baker as one of them.
	Undoubtedly.
	Undoubtedly.
	I mean, they had the private site group for the ex-FBI people.
	Because, of course, you never really leave these intelligence agents, right?
	That's the point.
	They are company men, as it were.
	And this is all happening before the New York Post story drops.
	So they knew this was coming.
	They knew that they had to prime them to think, oh, Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinformation.
	They knew they had to get them in the narrative shaping exercises so they understand that this is what happens when these things happen.
	And then the New York Post story drops on the 14th of October.
	So shortly after the New York Post published their Hunter Biden laptop story, Roth, they're having a discussion.
	And we get to see the discussion.
	And Roth says, it isn't clearly violative of our hacked materials policy, nor is it clearly in violation of anything else.
	However, he does say this feels somewhat like a subtle leak operation.
	Why does he feel that it seems somewhat like a subtle leak operation?
	Because his last two months has been told by the FBI that there's a leak operation coming your way.
	Exactly.
	Roth thinks he's being clever, but in fact he's being manipulated by the FBI. And so Baker, Jim Baker, jumps in on this conversation and just says, no, no, no, these were definitely hacked, right?
	In response to Rolf, Baker repeatedly insisted that Hunter Biden materials were either faked, hacked, or both, and in violation of Twitter policy.
	So, and in fact, if you go to the, I think it's the last one on that, then you, no, sorry, go back, sorry, not the last one.
	There we go, this one, at the very bottom there, right?
	You can see Jim Baker, privileged and confidential.
	I support the conclusion that we need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked.
	At this stage, however, it is reasonable for us to assume that they may have been, and caution is warranted.
	There are some facts that indicate that the materials may have been hacked, While there are others that indicate that the computer was either abandoned and or the owner consented to allow the repair shop to access it for at least some purposes.
	We simply need more information.
	No, we don't.
	We have all the information, and we know the FBI had all the information.
	And so it's hard to believe that the FBI wouldn't have given the FBI agent who works at Twitter the information he would need to come to this conclusion.
	Because as Schellenberger points out, it's inconceivable that Baker believed that Hunter Biden emails are either fake or hacked.
	The New York Post had included a picture of the receipt signed by Hunter Biden and an FBI subpoena that showed the agency had taken direct possession of the laptop in December 2019.
	You knew, you lied, in order to continue the kind of fog of misunderstanding that Joel Roth and the rest of the Twitter team would have been in, even though they're looking at it and saying, well, this isn't a violation of the hacked materials policy because it wasn't hacked.
	And we also need to remember, this is the New York Post.
	Yeah.
	This isn't some website.
	This isn't Infowars.
	Yeah, no, this is the New York Post who, I would imagine, will do their due diligence and don't want to be sued and don't want to lose their reputation.
	Of course.
	It's the oldest newspaper in the United States.
	Yes.
	And this is how they're treating them.
	And it's unbelievable.
	And so the FBI is directly lying at this point.
	Just this is an open lie and they know it's a lie, right?
	But they believe the lie anyway.
	The Twitter executives, by 10 o'clock in the morning, this is all the beginning of that day, the Twitter executives had bought into a wild hack-and-dump story.
	The suggestions from experts, which rings true, is that there is a hack that happened separately, and they loaded the hack materials onto a laptop that magically appeared at the repair shop in Delaware.
	Yeah.
	There is no evidence for this whatsoever.
	None whatsoever.
	Where would this hack have happened magically?
	It's a plausible story.
	I mean, I'm sure things like that have happened previously.
	But maybe you have to go with the evidence you've got.
	The thing is, we've got a direct lineal connection.
	We know that Hunter Biden gave the laptop to the store owner because he signed for it.
	We know that the store owner gave it to the FBI because they subpoenaed him for it.
	And we know that the FBI have it.
	And so the only place is the store owner, who of course just took the image of the hard drive because he was allowed to.
	Yeah.
	So it's preposterous that they can have bought into this story.
	But of course, this worked.
	As Schellenberger carries on, in the end, the FBI's influence campaign aimed at the executives at news media, Twitter, and other social media companies worked.
	They censored and discredited the Hunter Biden laptop story, despite it all being true.
	And by December 2020, Baker and his colleagues even sent notes of thanks to the FBI for its work.
	This was done at the cost of millions of taxpayer dollars for the Joe Biden campaign.
	This cost nearly $3.5 million since 2019.
	They were thrilled with this as well.
	I am happy to report that we've collected $3.415 million since October 2019, reports one of Baker's associates.
	It's great.
	There's millions of dollars to cover this up and lie to the public.
	So the FBI were paying Twitter?
	Yeah.
	With public money to censor for Joe Biden's political reasons.
	Which then also puts Twitter in a very vulnerable position now, as in, we know Twitter makes no money, so now they can be bought.
	They were clearly.
	Not just clearly as well, this was a sort of multi-pronged, sophisticated campaign that was taking, again...
	Taking advantage of what I'm going to call naive idiots, like Joel Roth, who had no skepticism, because of course their own political leanings were in that direction anyway.
	So they didn't want to be skeptical.
	Is it weird that the FBI are giving us millions of dollars and training us on how to spot Russian disinformation like this?
	Is that weird?
	Is this suspicious?
	Could anything untoward happen there?
	What could happen could be that Trump could be re-elected, and that's going to be the end of the world.
	That's a great point.
	So the FBI have probably got a point here.
	Of all the people who are Russian assets, it's definitely Trump.
	Him.
	Even though we've spent a lot of money investigating it and found nothing.
	Yeah, but Trump is too clever.
	He hid it too well.
	He's too clever.
	He's more clever than the Feds.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Because the thing about the FBI, you know, for everything he said, but they're not stupid...
	But anyway, it turns out, as the New York Post carried on reporting, Twitter's top ranks were riddled with ex-FBI agents and executives, stitching the company even closer to the federal agency.
	More than a dozen Feds flocked to the company in the months and years prior to Elon Musk's purchase of the social network, and Elon began firing a few of the Feds when he took over.
	Good feeling.
	Probably couldn't help it, to be honest.
	I wonder what they've deleted before they went.
	Well, that's a great question.
	We'll probably never know.
	Anyway, this is not the first thing that the FBI did with the Hunter Biden laptop.
	They, of course, have been burying this laptop since 2019.
	This is a great thread that was done here that we'll link to in the show notes on the website.
	But just to give you the summary of this thread, this is what's on the laptop.
	I mean, it's obviously full of criminality.
	One investigation by the non-profit Marco Polo Which is a non-profit that's dedicated to exposing corruption.
	So, good idea.
	If you see the second tweet on this one, you can see they're crediting the Marco Polo Foundation.
	Just go give them a follow.
	After a 13-month investigation by Marco Polo, report fully documents 459 violations of state and federal laws found on the Biden laptop, including 140 business-related crimes, 191 sex-related offenses, and 128 drug-related crimes.
	Also, the Biden family made more than $30 million from officials linked to Chinese intelligence.
	Hunter, Jimmy and Sarah Biden partnered with the spy chief of China, quote Hunter's words, and the CEFC Energy to spread China's Belt and Road Initiative.
	Joe Biden probably knew everything.
	The real story is, of course, that Hunter Biden was getting rich from business with our enemies.
	They were selling access to the US government and Joe Biden was getting paid.
	Hunter text messages his daughter saying, unlike Pop, I won't make you give me half of your salary.
	And then shortly after, because apparently Joe Biden was, forcing Hunter Biden to give him half the money he's making.
	Well, I'm getting flashes now of a new film, Godfather 4.
	Actually, that's very much how this comes across.
	Yeah.
	With slightly worse optics when it comes to how he treats his children.
	Yeah, no, this is unbelievable, really.
	Or I'd say unbelievable if it actually wasn't so completely believable and unsurprising.
	You know, it's shocking but not surprising.
	And then the final thing, there was another sort of small Twitter files drop about Twitter aiding Pentagon psyops across the Middle East and the rest of the world, and Twitter was happily spreading Pentagon disinformation, probably because they were being paid to, because of course Twitter has never been profitable, and we've always wondered.
	How Twitter keeps themselves going?
	Well, lots of government money.
	So there we go.
	That appears to me to be a smoking gun that shows the FBI were literally paying Twitter and lied to Twitter to manipulate them to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.
	If the Republicans can't do anything with this, then they can't do anything.
	And it goes completely against, is it the First Amendment, freedom of speech?
	Oh, yeah.
	I mean, it's easier in their country to fight this because they have specific laws wrote down dealing with, well, we don't, we have case law.
	This is, I mean, I'm absolutely shocked.
	I'm one of these people who always puts down these sort of issues to incompetence as opposed to conspiracy theories.
	But this has proved me all wrong.
	Yes, they're not incompetent.
	No.
	Highly effective criminals.
	Yeah, they are highly effective and rapidly partisan.
	That's the thing.
	If this wasn't quite as nakedly partisan as it obviously is, then maybe it wouldn't be so bad.
	But come on.
	This is way out of control.
	Rogue agency, I would say.
	But then there'll be people who say, well, are they rogue or are they just serving the Democrat agenda and they are part of the machine?
	And that's a really fair point to push back on.
	It is, but surely in their, not terms of service, in their...
	In their constitutional oath to serve the Republic, maybe they shouldn't be directly involving themselves in partisan politics, helping to rig elections for one party over another.
	Well, you would think so.
	You would think so.
	But again, if the Republicans can't do anything with this, then they're done.
	Someone needs to be held accountable here.
	So they need to go to the FBI, find tooth comb, find out the people who made these decisions.
	And people need sacking.
	People need jail time, probably.
	Honestly, I would probably dissolve the FBI if I were in charge.
	Hmm.
	Anyway, let's move on.
	Right.
	My section.
	So, first of all, Happy Christmas in a couple of days.
	So, this is my Christmas photo.
	And just like me, you'll always find me on the backs of the small people.
	Every Christmas, people speak to me, other press outlets, and want to talk to me about rough sleeping at Christmas.
	What can people do about it?
	Why we've got a problem?
	And why do people only care about it at Christmas?
	And these are really, really good questions.
	I've spent nearly two decades working in homelessness.
	First, so many years I was with the council in Manchester where I chaired a multi-agency panel where we'd look at individual rough sleepers, trying to get them help, support, look at their bail conditions, look at what help they needed.
	And in Manchester City Centre at that time there were 17 people sleeping rough.
	Now there's hundreds.
	Slightly less than there was, but there's still a lot.
	Then I left the council and I set up a charity and I set up some homeless projects within that charity.
	So me and my staff spent years walking the streets of Manchester City Centre, like the photo here, speaking to people, trying to get help and support that they needed.
	Basically trying to get them off the streets and into accommodation.
	Then I set a homeless employment project up and we got 44 former rough sleepers jobs on building sites in one year.
	And that project cost 25 grand, which is absolutely amazing.
	And the last project I set up was one called Room 2 Read.
	Because when you're homeless as a child and you get moved about to different B&Bs, it ruins your education because you can't go back to the same school because you're now 15 miles away and you haven't got a car, you can't get a bus, so you're not in education for months and months.
	So I set a little project up to find these kids working with the council and we delivered them books.
	So they could read novels or science books or whatever, because we wanted them to try to keep up some sort of education.
	It wasn't great, but it's better than nothing.
	It's better than nothing.
	They're just being dumped 30 miles away with their mum, usually.
	And it'll take six months to get them to local primary school.
	Well, that's six months, a long time for a child with no education.
	So I talk about that really because I just want you to understand that I know what I'm talking about in this.
	And then in 2019, my charity won Homeless Projects of the Year in Greater Manchester.
	I take it that was before you were fired for being woke and not woke.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	So this was a couple of years or before, a year before my transgressions of the Black Lives Matter.
	This was a year before you were outed for being based.
	Yes.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	So the questions are, people ask me all the time, how can you help rough sleepers, especially at this time of year?
	What can you do?
	And why do you want to help?
	Is it to reduce your guilt?
	Is it to make that Christmas meal you're going to taste that little bit better knowing you've helped somebody?
	Is it to stop you feeling guilty that you're going to spend 70 pound on alcohol on Friday nights when you go out with your friends and you're going to walk past half a dozen of people sleeping in cardboard boxes around your city center?
	You need to work out why you want to help. - Surely because it's the right thing to do.
	That's what they will do.
	It's the right thing to do to help.
	There's different ways of helping.
	So the first question I say to people is, would you like me to tell you the one thing you can do now to help with sleepers?
	Okay, go on.
	The answer is nothing.
	Oh.
	Well, that makes my life easier.
	Yeah, there's nothing you can do because if you could help rough sleepers now with a mince pie or a woolly hat or a couple of quid in a paper cup, there'd be no rough sleepers in the UK. It's a complicated issue.
	It's basically a mental...
	It's great, but I never even thought about it that way.
	It's a mental health epidemic that we're letting people fall through the cracks in our society.
	But surely they'd appreciate a mince pie either way.
	They would.
	What they want, not what they want, the best thing you can do with somebody who's rough sleeping is give them some of your time.
	So instead of just ignoring them when they ask you for a couple of pounds, you stop, you say, hello, I'm sorry I've got no money on me.
	I'll talk about what not to give people, but I've got no money on me.
	How are you?
	Do you need some help?
	Find out where the local shelters are.
	Tell them where the shelters are.
	They all know where the shelters are, but tell them where the shelters are.
	Tell them to have a nice day and be on your way because it grinds people down and it makes them feel inhuman when you sit on a cold wet pavement and you're five foot below everybody else and most people don't even look at you as if you're a human and don't even make eye contact with you and that destroys you inside so much over time.
	It just chips away your self-worth and your self-confidence and in the end you are what you're portraying to be.
	You always say, as far as I'm aware, don't give money to the homeless people.
	But the thing is, that's really the only charity I do.
	But I always try to be nice about it.
	Here you go, mate.
	Just try to treat them like I treat anyone else.
	Well, I've been here a few times and you've never given me any money.
	You're not homeless.
	So, let's look at the...
	I do have to pay you and you say no!
	Let's look at the money side of things.
	So...
	You give them a fiver, a tenner.
	They were homeless yesterday.
	They were homeless before you gave them anything.
	You give them a tenner and the homeless again tomorrow.
	Have you solved anything?
	No, but they might at least be able to get a Big Mac or something.
	So the vast majority of the money given to homeless people on the streets is spent on drugs.
	In every city centre in town there's places where you can go get free food and you know the shelters, the community centres.
	I worked out in Manchester a couple of years ago that you could eat 17 hours a day for free every day of the week in Manchester.
	Can I? 17 hours a day.
	I do like the idea of eating for 17 hours a day for free.
	For free.
	So all that money is spent on drugs.
	Right.
	What that money does when it's spent on drugs is it breaks them a little more.
	They're then harder to get help and support because they don't want help and support because all they're thinking about next three hours I need more drugs.
	And the more money we give them the harder it is to help them and they're slowly dying on the streets.
	The worst thing you can do to people begging Is to give them cash.
	So people say, oh, I don't give them cash anymore.
	I now give him a meal deal.
	I buy him something to eat.
	That seems reasonable, but they're not hungry, aren't they?
	So what does a meal deal do?
	So they may eat the meal deal, but they're sat on a corner, so they're eating it on the floor like an animal.
	They're not sat at a table in chairs with a knife and fork.
	They're sat on a dirty, wet, cold floor eating like an animal.
	And now that they've had a sandwich, a Mars bar and a Coke, they now don't need to go to that community centre to get a nice hot meal because I've eaten now.
	It means I can sit here longer and beg for longer and earn more money.
	So they get more drugs when you feed them.
	And also it's only when we get them to go to the community centre that the social workers and support workers can start talking to them and start unpicking their lives and trying to work out the best way for them to move forward and get help and support.
	So every time you give someone a meal deal, you've just stopped them getting help that day.
	That's a good point.
	I mean, it's quite a harsh thing to say to someone, because obviously a regular person will be like, yeah, but I was just doing some good.
	I suppose the argument would be, we'll donate some money to the shelter then.
	That's my next point.
	So then people say, how do I help?
	Because I want people to help.
	You know, I want everybody to try to help.
	This shame on our country.
	Now we've got thousands of people living on the streets that we didn't have 15 years ago.
	You know, we solved it in the 80s and the 90s.
	We've just let it all come back.
	When I was a kid, it was shocking to see someone on the streets.
	Yeah.
	It was just shocking.
	But now it's really not that uncommon.
	Yeah.
	It isn't at all.
	So what do you need to do?
	So you can't help him now, at Christmas.
	You can't help him now.
	There's nothing you can do now.
	But this time next year, if you start helping today, there's something you can do.
	And what I advise is you find a small local charity, not one of the big ones, not Shelton, a waste of time, but a small local charity that does face-to-face work with the vulnerable.
	And you set up a direct debit, a couple of quid a month, a week.
	I'm not asking for lots of money, but a constant direct debit.
	You know you've done your bit.
	These small charities rely on these donations and they know they've got that coming in and they can help these people with that money.
	If you've got more time on your hands, then volunteer at a centre because you might think, well, I've got no skills.
	What can I do?
	Well, here's an example.
	If you help with breakfast, you can make the toast.
	Which means a support worker doesn't have to make the toast and that support worker can spend more time sat at the tables talking to the clients.
	So have you considered that perhaps young people today are totally incompetent and don't even know how to make toast?
	That wouldn't surprise me at all.
	Just teasing.
	I'm going to credit you with the ability to make toast.
	But love sleeping is extremely complicated.
	Let me give you a couple of examples.
	So I remember working with a man who told us he'd had 10 flats in the last 15 years.
	And every time he gets a flat, he fails, he ends up back on the street, and the cycle starts all over again.
	He'd had 10 flats in 15 years.
	Yeah, I've heard stories like that.
	So what we're doing, I mean, a lot of the services and the councils, a lot of it's incompetence.
	So we'll put somebody in a flat.
	Incompetence?
	A local council?
	Can you believe it?
	Yeah.
	We'll dump somebody in a one-bedroom flat in the middle of nowhere where they don't know anybody and we wonder why the walls close in.
	Get on.
	Good luck.
	You're on your own.
	We don't deal with the mental health.
	We don't deal with the drug issues.
	You end up back on the street and the cycle starts again.
	But then we also have to remember and realise that not everybody you see on the streets is homeless.
	No, I saw...
	If you've got the next link, please, John.
	Just to jump in here, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	There was one of these in Swindon, not so long ago, where some guy was making like 30 grand a year begging.
	I was like, my wife told me about it.
	I was like, what?
	That can't be true.
	And she's like, yeah, apparently he owns a house that he pays for with begging.
	I'm like, little git.
	Like, he comes up to you and he's like, oh, mate, I just need 50p for the bus.
	And you're like, okay, well, I'm pretty kind.
	Here's 50p.
	And I had given to this guy previously.
	And it turns out he was making more than me at the time.
	I was like, Some of the stories are actually urban myths.
	So when you hear the stories that he's got a BMW around the corner, he drives to the leafy suburbs, and he gets changed back into his Adidas tracksuit and goes home, they're all rubbish.
	But the majority of people sat on the streets begging and not homeless.
	My charity did a survey in Manchester Centre in 2019.
	It would have been 18-19.
	We found 65% of the people sat there begging and weren't homeless.
	65%.
	Most homeless people are not homeless.
	Are not rough sleeping.
	No, I know, I know.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	But the point is, the framing, when you see someone sat on the street taking money, the implication, the assumption is, oh, well, that's a homeless person.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	But actually, they're not.
	They're normally on full benefits.
	They're normally in a council house or in a B&B or something like that.
	They go begging every day because that's how they earn their money for drugs.
	Right.
	And I've seen so many times people who are not rough sleeping, pretending to rough sleep to earn money for drugs six months down the line, then be rough sleepers because the amount of drugs they took ruined them so much that then they became what they were pretending to be and that's quite a common thing you see.
	So that's why you should never give people on the streets money because the vast majority of times...
	You don't know.
	They don't need it because they're not homeless and it's all spent on drugs.
	It really is spent on drugs.
	And it's not like we don't have enough support systems in this country.
	You can go to the government.
	I don't have a house.
	I don't have any food.
	And they will get you food that day.
	Yep.
	They will get you food that day.
	I know, because when I was in my early 30s, I was unemployed for a bit.
	I was like, oh God, I haven't got anything out of the house.
	I went down there and they're like, is it an emergency thing?
	I was like, well, kind of.
	I'm not going to have dinner tonight.
	And later that day, I got a payment of like 30 quid or 40 quid or whatever it was into my bank account, which is, of course, enough to buy some food.
	And I was like, okay.
	I mean, you know, at the time, I was like, well, that's good.
	But it didn't occur to me there are going to be people who are going to be like, oh, that is good.
	I can take advantage of all of this.
	It's a job.
	Begging is a job.
	And they don't even pay taxes.
	They don't pay taxes on the money they earn.
	They're all in full benefits.
	So, you know, there's some urban myths let me explode here now.
	So people will say, well, if you're homeless, you can't get benefits, you haven't got an address.
	You do not need an address to claim benefits.
	That got stopped in the 80s.
	You don't need an address to register with a GP. You don't need an address to open a bank account.
	Really?
	So some of the services, some of the community centres have deals with the bank, like the co-op, that's the one we used to use in Manchester City Centre.
	So they can use their address.
	And they will use their address and do the checks, and you can have a bank account without having your own address.
	So all the problems, you think, have all been eradicated decades ago.
	Mm.
	And if you get someone saying to you, I'm saving up for a B&B and I got to save £13 every day and I've only got £9, I need £4 so I can get a bed tonight.
	Well, the answer is, have you heard of something called housing benefit?
	All the hostels are paid for by housing.
	Why wouldn't it be paid for by housing benefit?
	You are shining a light on a grift that I've encountered myself.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And these people are broken and all we do when we give them money and we enable them to live on the streets is we're helping them kill themselves.
	If somebody was sat outside a shop with a cardboard sign saying, I'm saving up to buy a knife to slice my viss, you won't give that person the money.
	But the same person without that sign sat in the street corner is killing themselves over years on drugs.
	But people give that person money.
	We're still killing people.
	We're enabling them to live on the streets.
	It's not the compassionate thing to do.
	No.
	Another example I can give you.
	I remember talking to a young 19-year-old lad in Manchester City Centre.
	If you're under 25, it's easier to get you into accommodation if you're sleeping rough.
	We can sort it that day, because you're under 25.
	We spoke to him, he said he was 19, and we thought, fantastic, this will be an easy win.
	Staff like it when we help somebody, so an easy win is like, well, it keeps me going for tomorrow.
	And we said, oh, we can get you accommodation.
	Right now, we went, oh, I don't want accommodation.
	But you're sleeping in this tent in the middle of Manchester City Centre.
	Why wouldn't you want accommodation?
	Well, if I wanted accommodation, I'd go home.
	I'm going to my bedroom at my mum's.
	Great point.
	So why are you sleeping here?
	He went, well, I was walking past here a couple of months ago and saw these tents.
	I got chatting with the guys and they were sharing their drugs.
	So I stayed and we shared drugs.
	And I started coming every day and going home every night.
	And then one night I thought to myself, Where am I going home?
	To get a bus or to come back again in the morning.
	I might as well stay here.
	So I started sleeping in this guy's tent and then one morning I was high as a kite and this car pulled up and this woman ran out and threw two black bin bags at me and went, there you go, love.
	And he said, in my high state, I opened one.
	Mum's a sleeping bag.
	I opened the other.
	It was a tent.
	So I put the tent up in the sleeping bag.
	I've not been home since.
	That's a woman who thought she was helping.
	Yeah.
	Enabled him to abandon his family home and his bedroom with his mum to live in Manchester City Centre for the drugs.
	Imagine how heartbroken his parents are.
	Yeah.
	And he was interested in helping support because he didn't want it and didn't need it.
	Yeah.
	And like I said, it's hard to solve.
	Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, was elected six years ago saying he's going to eradicate rough sleeping in three years.
	Is he a Labour?
	He's a Labour mayor.
	So he's made it worse?
	It's been nearly six years now.
	It's slightly better.
	Oh, well.
	But you wouldn't say it's eradicated.
	He said zero rough sleepers in three years.
	It's been nearly six.
	And it's slightly better than it was when he took over.
	Well, I mean, to be honest with you...
	Given the fact that he's left-wing, I would say, actually, you know, maybe he deserves a pat on the back because normally they just make it ten times worse.
	You know, so, you know, maybe...
	Yeah, I think he spent something like half a billion.
	Oh, my God!
	Half a billion.
	Okay.
	Like, he could have bought the mansion.
	Yes, exactly.
	He could have literally built new houses and forced them into them.
	So...
	Gimmicks don't work.
	So if you've got a picture, let me bring it.
	That's it.
	Oh, what a surprise.
	So this is the homeless Jesus outside a church in Manchester City Centre.
	Yeah.
	Made of bronze.
	It was put there in 2018, I believe.
	And surprisingly...
	Probably cost 10 grand.
	Nobody ever released how much that cost.
	Oh, really?
	The guesses were 80,000.
	80?
	The guesses were 80,000 pounds.
	God, I was only selling it with 10 grand.
	For the homeless Jesus, because...
	Jesus was allegedly a homeless man, and if people see Jesus sleeping on that bench, they may treat homeless people a bit better.
	But do you know what?
	You don't need to look at homeless Jesus.
	You just walk around the corner and there's homeless people everywhere.
	But this is a gimmick of making people, the church, feel better about themselves.
	And we get gimmicks all the time.
	I've seen gimmicks of vending machines with socks and soap, because homeless people can buy a pair of socks and buy soap.
	It's like...
	Oh yeah, that's what they're interested in spending their money on.
	Exactly.
	We've got coffee shops in Manchester City Centre who ask people to buy a homeless person a £5 coffee.
	And so if you buy it forward, when a homeless person comes in here, we will give him a coffee.
	Yeah.
	Do you know how many homeless people go into coffee shops?
	Probably not that many.
	I'd say hardly any because they'll get kicked out because they smell, and because they're drug addicts, and because the coffee shops are sick of them using their toilets and injecting in there.
	The homeless people don't go into coffee shops, so all the coffee shop does is double their profits.
	The coffee isn't even reduced.
	You're buying them a full-priced coffee.
	This is a problem that Starbucks in America had in Portland and California.
	Where they were like, oh yeah, we're going to have, you know, we're becoming homeless people, and suddenly it was just needles in the toilets.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It's just virtue signalling, hit your bottom line, you kick them all out.
	We could have the next picture.
	The biggest con we have in the UK... Is the big issue.
	And here's the future king.
	I didn't realise this was going to be an anti-monarchical rant.
	But the big issue have got such a great reputation that you can get the future king of England to sell the big issue for the day in London.
	The big issue is a con.
	The big issue may have started...
	Doing the right thing 30 years, 35 years ago.
	But since I've been involved, so I've got 15, 17 years, the big issue is legalised begging.
	That's all it is.
	The big issue doesn't even help rough sleepers.
	Okay, tell me about that.
	So, the big issue...
	Now.
	So for anyone who doesn't know, for anyone outside the UK, the big issue, you'll see who are presumably homeless people selling copies of this newspaper, which used to be like a pound.
	It's two pounds now.
	It's two pounds now, right.
	To purchase from them on the understanding that essentially you're helping this person work their way out of being homeless.
	Yeah.
	That's the way it's sold to you.
	So you can understand why it's persisted for such a long time.
	Yeah.
	So 10, 15 years ago, they changed because they were making no money.
	They changed their aim.
	And we're going to work with buff sleepers, homeless, people at risk of homeless, and people who are basically short of money.
	Right.
	In 15 years, I've never met one person, rough sleeping, who sells the big issue.
	Not one in 15 years.
	In Manchester City, it's not one.
	Okay.
	Because rough sleepers are too dysfunctional to be able to sell them.
	I suppose if they're mostly drug addicts...
	You've got to keep half the money back to buy tomorrow's stock of papers.
	So you keep 50%, you give 50% back and get some more papers.
	So they can't do that.
	A couple of years ago, they released some...
	Videos of people who work for the big issue.
	And we had one guy, English guy, who said the big issue is fantastic.
	I earn a wage out of this now.
	My job before was working on a building site, but I didn't like it.
	I didn't like the hours.
	So I left that.
	I now sell the big issue.
	I earn more money than working on the building site and it's better hours.
	Well, from a capitalist perspective, I don't mind.
	The big issue is encouraging people to leave full-time employment to sell a magazine on the street that's supposed to be helping rough sleepers.
	So people who spy the magazine think they're helping those homeless people across the city or town.
	But it's not.
	It's just a job.
	The big issue is just a magazine selling business.
	That's all it is.
	So please, stop buying the big issue.
	Complete waste of time.
	And you're doing no good with your money.
	Unless, of course, you're just a big fan of the things they write in there.
	I don't know, but everyone I know is about the big issue.
	I say to them, did you read it?
	No.
	Of course not.
	You're buying out a pity in charity.
	That's all you're doing.
	So, the next link.
	So, because this is...
	I can't get into all this in a 20-minute discussion.
	It's so complicated, rough sleeping, especially in the UK when we've got all our welfare systems and safety nets.
	It's just so complicated.
	Yeah.
	So I decided to write a book about it.
	So I've got a new book out called The Making of a Beggar.
	But it's more than just about rough sleeping.
	This book starts looking at us as a society.
	I see so many similarities between what we're doing as a nation and those people sat on those street corners broken on drugs and begging.
	And it's all about a lack of personal responsibility.
	It's always about Who's going to give me what I want?
	It's never, how can I earn what I want?
	And I'm trying to society now, look what happened at COVID with the lockdowns and paying people to stay at home and then people wanted to stay at home.
	Look at how we're all becoming this victim culture.
	And when you talk to people sat on the streets begging, they're victims and they'll tell you about how bad their life was and it was never their fault and their mum did this, their dad did that and the world's out to get to them.
	Social services took my kids off me.
	It was all a lie because of a neighbour.
	None of them ever take responsibility because they've got to cocoon themselves in this excuse that it wasn't their fault.
	Otherwise, it's a hard life to live.
	And that's what we're doing as a nation.
	And this book explores our politicians, the fact that they beg for our votes.
	We beg for favours of them.
	We look at some of the unintended consequences, such as we send all our...
	All the clothes we don't want.
	We sell them all to Africans to dress our poor Africans and the Africans don't want it.
	It destroys their textile industry.
	And we have African children being brought up in second-hand white people's clothes.
	That destroys the whole culture.
	And we're making problems all the time, but we stand up and go, I'm virtuous.
	Look at me doing this.
	I'm amazing.
	And this book explores all that.
	But it's so complicated that what you think you know about rough sleeping and homelessness, I can guarantee you're wrong on what you think you know.
	I'm definitely wrong about what I thought I knew, because I give money to rough sleepers, quote-unquote.
	Don't be doing it again.
	I know, I know.
	Find a support centre, direct debit.
	Yeah, I'll give them money instead.
	Fair point.
	Well, what's interesting about this is it goes against the ingrained...
	View of compassion that people have, right?
	Because they're like, yeah, but if I give them this, then that's me showing direct compassion.
	But this is a real sort of crutch that we've got to get past.
	Like, look, sometimes just giving, like, you know, if a morbidly obese person came up to say I'm really desperate for a cake, you wouldn't be like, okay, I'll give you the cake because, of course, that makes me feel, oh, I was such a good person.
	But no, it's obviously not in your interest, you know?
	Homeless person, roughly, said to me once, I was trying to talk to him, because I'm not interested, I'm too busy, I'm working.
	Working, he went, yeah, this is my job.
	My job is to make sure that everybody walks past, feels sorry for me, and realise their life's better.
	That's my job.
	It's like, you get this, don't you?
	You get how to pull on heartstrings.
	Yeah, that's how you earn money.
	So they'll give you a couple of quid, not because they care about you because they don't.
	Makes them feel better.
	A lot of things we do to help other people is really about making us feel better.
	Yeah, I mean, like you say, like a couple of quid, you can get one or two quid from each passer, you know, every 10 minutes or something.
	Suddenly you're making, you know, a fair amount of money every day.
	A good bag at Manchester City Centre earns £400 a day.
	What?
	A good one.
	An average one earns £100.
	I don't think, do I? I don't know.
	I don't think I learned that.
	So, okay, so practice being a beggar, right?
	And then how this damages people.
	So I remember talking to another beggar, Van Deansgate in Manchester, and he said the strangest thing to me, he said, well, I'm better than a rat.
	And I went, well, what do you mean by that?
	He went, well, rats have to crawl through those bins to find food to eat what people don't want.
	I'm lucky.
	People hand me the stuff they don't want.
	At least I'm better than a rat.
	And it's like, well, what have we done to that man?
	Well, I mean, that is genuinely tragic.
	But 400 quid a day.
	A good one.
	You've got to be good.
	A good one.
	I'd be the best.
	I'd be an amazing beggar if I was going to be a beggar.
	Anyway, let's move on and talk about some of my favourite people on Earth.
	Something a bit more light-hearted now.
	The Scottish National Party.
	Political beggars, if you will.
	They really just hate the English, and it's so prominent in Scotland now.
	And Vicky, our website editor, has provided me with a great deal of content for this, because she hates the Scottish National Party.
	Obviously, because she's Scottish.
	She likes Scotland, but hates what they're doing to the place.
	And it's become just overwhelmingly apparent to the Scottish themselves.
	But hang on a second.
	Do we just hate the English?
	And they're all looking at each other going, well, I mean, that is on our placards.
	That is official state policy.
	I mean, that is what the dear leader is saying.
	I think we might.
	I think it might just be deep-seated ethnic resentment that drives the entire thing forward.
	I think you can see that from the very beginning.
	Yes.
	And it makes perfect sense.
	If you want to separate yourself from someone else and you want people to go along with that, you've got to turn those other people into either the enemy or lesser than you or not deserving of you.
	That's the only way.
	You've got to put a wedge.
	That's the only way to do it.
	The sort of proto-genocidal sentiments that the Rwandans would be...
	Who-To, I think it was, with broadcasting on their radios.
	The sort of anti-Semitic things you saw in pre-Nazi Germany.
	Yes, it's genuinely something that the SNP have found.
	And again, if you're going to be an ethnic nationalist party, it's hard not to do that, I would suggest.
	But I thought we'd go through how the Scots are slowly dawning on themselves.
	Hang on, are we the baddies?
	Yeah.
	Because that's actually what's kind of happening.
	But before we begin, if you want to support us and you are interested in something I was very proud of doing, I did a book club on Hannah Pitkin's The Concept of Representation.
	This, I think, is deeply important because Hannah Pitkin was a 20th century philosopher who...
	Was thinking, well, hang on a second.
	Everyone keeps saying, we want representation.
	The American Revolution, no taxation on that representation.
	Everyone's constantly going on about ethnic representation, gender representation.
	What do they even mean when they say representation?
	And so she had done a really comprehensive study on the concept of representation.
	And actually, it's a lot more complex and multi-layered than you'd think.
	And this is why when the left say, we want representation, and then someone like Rishi Sunak, Sweller-Braveman, Priti Patel was a great example.
	We want a black woman or a woman of colour in charge.
	Okay, now Priti Patel's here to enforce their hardline conservative position.
	They're like, well, not like that.
	It's like, okay, but what did you really mean?
	You didn't really want representation in Thatcher.
	Exactly.
	They hate Thatcher.
	She's not the first female prime minister.
	She's the first satanic prime minister, as far as they're concerned.
	But that's the point.
	What's being represented?
	And in fact, Rishi Sunak is a great example of this, right?
	Because Rishi Sunak, everyone's like, oh, well, you know, Rishi Sunak's a perfectly normal chap.
	It's like, no, he's from a wealthy...
	He's from the imperial bureaucracy, the Indian imperial bureaucracy of the British Empire, lived in Southampton, got parachuted into North Yorkshire, where he doesn't really represent North Yorkshire, Also, he's married to the daughter of an Indian billionaire, and he himself is worth like £750 million.
	And now he is the representative MP for North Yorkshire, not the average North Yorkshireman, where the average salary is like £23,000 a year.
	And now, after ousting Liz Truss, he's been installed, despite the fact that no one voted for him.
	So who does he represent?
	And if we look at the Indians, they're all saying, yay, the first Indian Prime Minister.
	Well, there we go.
	Because the point of representation is what is re-presented.
	Something that is absent is being presented again.
	And that's what they're seeing.
	And so it's like, right, okay, I as an Englishman, we as Englishmen, how represented and how present do you feel in the British government at the moment?
	Not very.
	Hardly ever.
	You know, any of the policies, the new laws, I look at everything and go, I don't want that.
	Very rarely I see something I want or I think it would benefit me.
	And that's why the concept of representation is important.
	So obviously I expand on all of this throughout the book club.
	Definitely worth your time because I've got to say, Hannah Pitkin's work is very, very thorough, but also very dry.
	Not terribly exciting to read.
	So hopefully I've made it digestible.
	I genuinely mean it.
	For your own benefit, you'll want to watch this.
	My only point on representation would be...
	You have different groups and those groups can be split into subgroups.
	That can be split into subgroups.
	And it basically goes down to the individual.
	And that's what we try to do in this country, the individual.
	That's why we all have one vote each.
	That's the only true way of representation.
	Well, the issue isn't necessarily how you get the representative because you can have representation without elections.
	For example, I feel quite represented by Elon Musk at the moment.
	I didn't vote for him, but he does represent my attitudes and sentiments when approaching the current environment that we operate in.
	You get someone like Larry Elder, who's a very conservative black man in California.
	I feel quite represented, actually, by his opinions.
	But descriptively, I'm not representative.
	This is the thing.
	Pitkin does a great job.
	I won't go too far into it.
	But it's an important subject that the left has been leveraging a lot over the years.
	And it's actually on our shoulders to have never really thought this through.
	And so it's worth actually thinking this through.
	So anyway, let's begin in 2015 when my favourite historian, David Starkey, got in trouble by saying, well, they are basically the Nazi party for Scots, aren't they?
	And the Scots National Party were like, how could you, sir?
	You filthy Englishman.
	You filthy, disgusting...
	Rat-like Englishman!
	How could you say that?
	And so he was like, you should apologise.
	And he was like, no.
	These are basically the Nazi Party of Scotland.
	And he said that they were strikingly similar.
	He said that the Scottish flag was like the swastika and likened the SNP's view of the English to Adolf Hitler's hatred of Jewish people.
	Yep.
	Not wrong, actually.
	Because I found a great evidence of this.
	In 2019, there's an Irish blogger called John Kelly.
	Who just wrote this, saying anti-English rhetoric among Scottish nationalist circles on a Medium blog.
	He says, this is a research piece into observed anti-English rhetoric among Scottish nationalists.
	Using a number of examples, I will show that ethnic prejudice does indeed exist within Scottish nationalism.
	What a shock.
	The reason for this study is due to the claimed notion that Scottish nationalism differs from other forms of nationalism, in the sense that it doesn't include nationalistic prejudice.
	It even comes in the face of Nicola Sturgeon having to condemn her own politician for anti-English rhetoric in 2016.
	I, the author myself, am from Ireland.
	I have no dog in this fight and I am doing this study from an outsider's perspective.
	I'm not claiming every single Scotch nationalist is racially prejudiced against England.
	I'm simply pointing out that when it occurs, it isn't a one-off event and occurs with regularity.
	Yeah.
	If an Irishman's like, ooh, you guys really seem to hate the English, then you've probably got something wrong with you.
	I imagine there's quite a lot of anti-English prejudice in Irish nationalist circles as well.
	So, you know, the average Irishman not generally known for being biased in favour of England.
	But throughout this, if you just want to scroll down, you can see the actual comments.
	But basically, they're repeatedly referring to the English as being disgusting, dirty, and likening negative traits in themselves as having an English trait.
	As in, you know, you're deceptive or something like that.
	Oh, that's an English trait.
	Well, that's exactly the same way that the Nazis referred to Jews.
	Bo was telling me about a video that he...
	He'd seen a video clip.
	I think it was like Himmler or something, was being bothered by a fly.
	He was like, this fly is a Jewish nature.
	That's exactly what they're doing here.
	You know, it's like calling negative traits English traits is just remarkable.
	But anyway, come April 2021, you had someone like Jill Stevenson, who was a former professor of modern German history at the University of Edinburgh, so a professor, saying, why is there so much hatred in Scotland?
	Why has my country become just a hateful cesspool?
	It's like, well, probably the same question that, you know, a professor in Weimar Berlin was asking.
	Why are we such a hateful country all of a sudden?
	Oh, yeah.
	That virulent and public hatred became so noticeable.
	Scottish nationalists spew venom about UK, London, Westminster, England, and above all, Tories.
	Of course, there are always animosities, which in the Scots have long harboured grievances against the English.
	But there has been the kind of smaller country resentment that Portugal has with Spain and things like that.
	But such Scots express their resentment as a form of inferiority complex, claiming without the slightest...
	Still got a sore throat.
	Claiming without the slightest justification some kind of moral superiority.
	Certainly the volume of hatred, abuse, and insults leveled at the UK, London, Westminster, England, and above all Tories is an indication of moral turpitude rather than moral rectitude.
	Hardly the right thing to do, is it?
	Hmm.
	I look at people of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, not as my cousins, but as my brothers and sisters.
	I see all those one family, close families.
	That's why I don't even call them my cousins because they're not cousins.
	They're my brothers and sisters.
	I don't see any real difference between...
	I see them as one people.
	I think there's a very deep strain of thought in the English psyche.
	that views the Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish as basically, we've been here for such a long time.
	There's no particular...
	The differences are kind of cosmetic at this point.
	That's how the English view it.
	The thing is, I think a lot of the Celtic nations, they actually view it differently to that.
	This is what we're seeing.
	She's got a great ending passage on this one, right?
	The SNP Scotland has the feel of the last days of the Roman Empire.
	Good point.
	And when a regime is failing...
	What do you do?
	You find an enemy.
	So it's their fault that we're failing.
	Yep.
	We'd be brilliant if it wasn't for those pesky English.
	Yeah.
	So the former deputy leader of the SNP, James Sillars, in August 2021, had to come out into the time to say, look, this is all fueled by hatred of the English.
	He accused the SNP of manufacturing grudges and grievances against Westminster that fuels anti-Englishness and antagonises Unionists, which of course, if you're an independence voter and you're a separatist in Scotland, why wouldn't you?
	Yeah, exactly.
	He says, I don't think we should exaggerate the undertone of anti-Englishness that exists in Scotland, but there is, and the grudge and grievance tactic for the SNP leadership keeps it alive.
	Yeah.
	Moving on then, in September 2021, it was very much obvious that she was the one keeping this alive by one commentator in The Scotsman, and in fact it was the rot coming from the head, very much like when...
	And again, I hate to use David Starkey's comparison to the Nazis, but if Adolf Hitler is constantly using his podium to bang on about the Jews, well, there's probably going to be quite a lot of anti-Jewish sentiment around, isn't there?
	But yeah, he says it's in her power to lower the temperature, to condemn anti-English bile in her party or beyond, and she could start this week, but of course she doesn't, because the rot begins from the head.
	And there's no benefit for her to do that.
	Yeah, exactly.
	The only benefit comes from saying the English are evil and the source of all your problems.
	If only we could get rid of them.
	Exactly.
	You know, vote for me.
	No.
	I'll pass the Enabling Act.
	Yeah.
	Says Nicola Sturgeon.
	Anyway, so in March 2022, this was getting so bad, the one Scottish council was like, yeah, we're against phobias.
	Evil things, phobias.
	Being racist towards people is easy.
	We've done a little look into Islamophobia.
	Actually, in Scotland, there's not much of it.
	We've had a lot of Anglophobia.
	A lot of it.
	I used to date a woman from Liverpool, and she was like, oh yeah, I lived in Scotland, and people were always racist to me for being English.
	I'm like, oh, that's weird.
	Liverpudlian's English?
	Scouse.
	The self of the wall.
	We don't care how far self of the wall.
	That's exactly right, actually.
	I guess because there are a bunch of Scots who are conservative Scots who are being racially abused for being English.
	They're like, I'm not English.
	It's like, yeah, but you're a Tory.
	Yeah, but that doesn't make me English.
	Yeah.
	So anyway, this Moray Council of Northeast Scotland made the decision to pay special attention to Anglophobia in their district because of their plans to root out discrimination and harassment.
	The move came after the council adopted the widely used definition of Islamophobia used by the all-party parliamentary group on British Muslims.
	This definition, just to say, was nonsense.
	A form of racism that was rooted in racism and had racial expressions or something.
	And it's just like, what does that mean?
	Anyway, but apparently now it can be applied to Anglophobia, so now that I'm part of a victim group, I'm in favour of it.
	But yeah, one councillor said, I think we need to recognise along with Islamophobia, Anglophobia is a real problem.
	As a minority group in Moray, I get more emails and telephone calls from people who suffered from Anglophobia, and I'd like to drag that up.
	Anglophobia is there all the time.
	Numerous constituents over the last five years have come to me asking what we're going to do about this.
	Another councillor supported the appeal and said, even as a Scotsman, he'd been the victim of anti-English abuse?
	What?
	That's obviously because he's not got an accent.
	Maybe he does.
	So we presume you're English.
	I think he's just a conservative.
	And so the fact that he's wearing the rose out there, like, right, you're English.
	We hate you.
	Or you're an English stooge.
	Yes.
	Or being a Tory.
	Yeah, exactly.
	You're being paid by the Jews.
	Yeah.
	Being paid by the Anglos.
	Anyway, in March 2020, this was just being swept under the rug, according to Public, who are writing in to the Scottish Daily Express.
	One of the Scots said, it's been here forever.
	It's just the SNP and the independence campaign have really brought it to the fore.
	They and their supporters hate Scottish unionists as much as English people, because it's exactly as you say.
	They're just traitors.
	They're race traitors to the English and the union.
	That year, early this year, MP Jamie Halkrow had written to the First Minister asking her to condemn the anti-English hate-filled garbage that was shared by an SNP branch that had been leaked out of this SNP branch.
	And Sturgeon was told that her failure to publicly stand against it was her condoning overt anti-English hate speech.
	The last time she had actually condemned anti-English hate speech was in 2019.
	Where she spoke about it at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
	Because there was a man holding a photo on the march with a placard that said, England, get out of Scotland.
	It's like, the dual monarchy was a Scottish monarchy.
	James I was a Scottish monarch.
	You came to us!
	Because you were bankrupt!
	Dickheads!
	Go stop the damage!
	No, I'm not going to stop.
	Anyway...
	She said, oh, well, that kind of sentiment has no place in Scotland.
	Really?
	Very convincing.
	In August, she was accused of whipping up anti-English hatred, if you can believe it.
	Sturgeon herself was accused of whipping up anti-English hatred after a BBC journalist was called a traitor and Tory activists were pelted with eggs at the party's leadership postings in Perth.
	You couldn't do this to any other group?
	Nope.
	No other group in the world could you do this in the UK to?
	Possibly white Americans.
	Oh, in the UK? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Oh, no, not in the UK. God.
	Yeah.
	Northern group.
	God, can you even imagine?
	Yeah.
	Can you imagine if it was Tommy Robinson and his lads?
	Yeah.
	Going to a mosque or something, pelting with eggs.
	Jesus.
	Or even holding signs saying, you know, Islam has no place in the UK. Yeah.
	Muslims out of England.
	Yeah.
	God.
	I mean, that would literally...
	Jail time.
	Yeah.
	You would do jail time for that.
	And then you'd be getting the rough end of the stick in the jail as well.
	Yeah.
	Like that...
	Do you know what we need to send to Scotland?
	We need to send to Scotland the bill That organisation, I forget the name of it now, that looked at the Labour Party and said that they were racist.
	First time a political party.
	Oh, yes.
	Yeah, yeah.
	We need to send that organisation up there to have a look at the SNP. Have a look.
	We've got all the evidence.
	So, yeah, this was, again, Holly Mosscrop, typical English name, Mosscrop, right, was attacked because she's English?
	Or an English sympathizer?
	I don't know.
	But the protesters realized we were Tories and went crazy.
	They were screaming at us, calling me a Tory whore, Tory filth.
	Again, you could just replace Tory with English or Jewish.
	It was nasty.
	Someone grabbed my coat and tugged it, leaning over the barrier, screaming right in my face.
	Like, this is wild hysteria that the SNP are unleashing here, right?
	And one senior Scottish Tory member of the Scottish Parliament said that Sturgeon was attempting to inflame her base by suggesting Scotland was downtrodden and this contributed to the angry seniors.
	She's doing everything to inflame her base simply because, let's be honest, they're not delivering.
	So they're whipping up their base, they're whipping up anger and hatred.
	Look, it's racist.
	They hate the English.
	It's the definition of racism.
	And, yeah, and like we've seen from the other ones, being like, yeah, Tory, ooh, as in the evil Tories who now represent the English and the Scottish mind, well, they're all English sympathizers.
	They're all traitors to the SNP's glorious, pure racial cause.
	Yep.
	Bloody awful.
	Jim Sillers had to come out again this year.
	And accused Sturgeon again of being anti-English, but we'll carry on.
	And so the SNP were like, hmm, we need to do something about this.
	We need to do something about this.
	Everyone's accurately pointing out that we obviously hate the English because those bloody English keep pointing that out for them.
	And so they put out a new code of conduct.
	The code of conduct wasn't, don't be a racist.
	It was, don't tell everyone that you're a racist.
	Problem solved.
	You may hate the English, but don't say so.
	Scottish independence support has been told.
	Right.
	Good to know.
	I just think that's amazing.
	That's so funny.
	Cured racism overnight.
	Yeah.
	You know?
	Imagine the BNP. You can be a racist, but just don't say that you're a racist.
	It's just remarkable.
	It calls for secretaries to engage with those who are yet convinced of the positive case for Scottish independence, politely and positively, without rancor and bitterness.
	I refer you back to the way they were treating the Scottish Conservatives only a month before.
	I think she's worried.
	I think the reason why she won't have a go at these people who are doing this, I think she's probably afraid of a split in the SNP. They're her core supporters.
	And then you get the hardcore leaving the SNP, which is the one who do all the leafleting and all the work, and you're left with the middle-class SNP. You don't really want to do anything.
	And she's trying to hold a coalition together.
	Yeah.
	No, no, you're exactly right.
	The hardcore, deeply anglophobic supporters are the ones who are going to be...
	It's like Jeremy Corbyn with Momentum, right?
	It's like these are a bunch of thugs who want to be violent, are only being held in check by...
	The laws that we have.
	Were these alleviated, these would be the people who would be purging their political opposition.
	And they're the ones who are going to be closest to her.
	And you are exactly right.
	You're going to have sympathisers with the middle class people.
	Maybe they give £5 a month or whatever the thing is.
	But they're not going to do anything.
	These are the people who are actually doing anything.
	So she can't really just come out and be like, you're bad people.
	I had something that popped in my head.
	So not all S&P supporters are racists.
	But all racists and SNP supporters.
	Well, in Scotland.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, probably, yeah.
	But anyway, so again, you've got more public opinion coming into the newspapers, which I think is fascinating.
	Just looking through these letters, you know, the SNP is so politically antagonistic to England that it already governs as if Scotland has seceded from the United Kingdom.
	Imagine, if you will, if the Tory or England was replaced by a racial epithet, the Führer would be deafening.
	To a minority in Scotland, Tory English from Westminster is an oppressive Anglo-Hydra, and because of this they are fair game.
	Sometimes it's not difficult to see the obvious sentiment behind such incidents.
	You don't really belong here.
	Again, if Tommy Robinson or anyone like that was saying anything of the sort...
	Hell to pay.
	And you may remember that Nicola Sturgeon was trying to make it so that people from England couldn't travel to Scotland during the COVID lockdowns.
	She was also being like, oh, don't go to England, don't go to England.
	It's like, yeah, it's because of COVID. Yeah, that's the reason.
	Yeah.
	Apparently, in Matt Hancock's book, he said, in response to our Tier 4 announcement, Sturgeon announced the travel ban with the rest of the UK. I'm sure she's been yearning to do that for all of her life.
	I bet she has.
	I bet she has.
	I mean, I don't want to give Matt Hancock any blue props, but she probably has.
	Anyway, so it was...
	And the thing that sparked off this entire segment, right, was because Jeremy Clarkson wrote his...
	Vile and hateful, tirading against Meghan Markle and the Sun the other day.
	And this has really kicked off a giant firestorm.
	Now, Nick Dixon is going to be on tomorrow to discuss it, and he's like, don't cover it in psych, I won't cover it.
	But I had to kind of cover it a little bit, so I won't go into it.
	But basically, Jeremy Clarkson hates Meghan Markle.
	He was like, I really dislike Meghan Markle and the son.
	And everyone was like, you can't say that.
	And the son was like, good point, we'll take it down.
	But this got a very big endorsement for Jeremy Clarkson from a very, very pro-Scottish Nationalist Party newspaper.
	Right?
	Now, I say big endorsement.
	For them, it was a massive condemnation.
	But after reading it, I was like, oh, yeah, I knew I liked Jeremy Clarkson for a reason.
	They say that, sorry, the We Ginger Doug, who's the author of this piece, if you scroll down just a little bit, John, so you can see it.
	We Ginger Doug...
	Says, Jeremy Clarkson has a long history of making grossly offensive comments and of behaving like a petulant man-child.
	Good input, we ginger dug.
	Wouldn't want anyone behaving childishly, would we?
	We ginger dug.
	But he goes through in a bunch of, you know, lists Jeremy Clarkson's crimes against progressive nationalism.
	It says, Resounding endorsement.
	I hope he runs for Parliament.
	But again, you can feel the venom in the word English when he writes it like that.
	Yeah.
	You know, you say white heterosexual men and there was enough venom in that, but no, now we've got the English.
	And we're also using the words now of the woke as well.
	It has to be a heterosexual Englishman.
	Not just a white Englishman, you've also got to be heterosexual.
	And middle class.
	Yep.
	And Gammon.
	And a nationalist.
	Apparently that's bad, says the SNP's personal paper.
	The National.
	The paper is literally called The National.
	And it's like, oh, but it's your nationalism that we don't like.
	And so that was all remarkable and I found hilarious.
	But the crowning cherry on the cake.
	Was when Nicola Sturgeon herself came out and was like, he's distorted by hate, you know?
	Like, really, Nicola?
	Oh, really?
	The phenomenal irony of you saying that is not lost on me or anyone else, I presume.
	And I don't really think that anything Jeremy Clarkson said was terribly wrong.
	He doesn't like Meghan Markle.
	He doesn't have to.
	And his description was basically a scene from Game of Thrones.
	Yes.
	Yep.
	And now he's raised it, I can think of a few people who should probably be flogged through the streets.
	Yeah.
	With people shouting shame.
	Yeah.
	Grooming gang members, for example, before they go to prison, maybe they should be stripped naked, flogged through the streets, have X-Men thrown at them, and then they get taken off to jail.
	And do you remember when Joe Brandt made that poor joke about milkshaking Nigel Farage with patriarchy?
	It was a joke.
	I don't find it funny, and it wasn't even funny, but...
	I knew it was a joke.
	But even if it's not necessarily a joke, she's allowed to express her feelings on things, right?
	It would be incitement if she meant it.
	If she said someone should do this, fair enough.
	But if, as Jeremy Clark said, I wish that would happen, it's not the same thing.
	So a person should be able to express feelings, even if they're negative feelings.
	Yeah.
	I think.
	Because we all do.
	But yeah, anyway, she ends with this, and this is just the best bit, right?
	I think that possibly it gives an insight into Jeremy Clarkson and the kind of person he is.
	So maybe he just needs to take a step back from things and just think about life a little bit more.
	Oh, really, Nicola?
	If only she could take her own advice.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Exactly.
	It's just someone distorted by hate.
	Thanks.
	Thanks for that, Nicola.
	Let's go to the video comments.
	Hello again.
	Today I am introducing the Wendigo Cult, a twisted faction of celebrities and tech moguls who became obligate cannibals and terrorized the North American Ashlands after the End War.
	At least until a confederacy of survivalists, outcasts, and native tribes worked together to nuke their sorry asses to hell where they belong.
	If you would like to see more, consider supporting me over on Coffee.
	I'll see you guys next week.
	So I believe that's a game that he's producing that he's just showing us.
	I mean, don't go wrong, looks nice.
	Sorry, what did you want to say?
	I was going to say, have you heard about the 2015 MI5 files about the first leaders of the SNP? No.
	In the mid-30s.
	Yeah.
	Raided several times by MI5 because they were Nazi sympathizers.
	What a surprise.
	They used to quote Hitler.
	They supported Hitler.
	They were...
	Right.
	Some of them wanted Hitler to win the war because that's how they could see they could get independence within a greater German state.
	Oh, really?
	If you Google it...
	Yeah, no, I believe you.
	Google it.
	All MI5 files were released in 2015.
	Some fantastic reading there.
	I did not know about that.
	It was genuinely hilarious.
	Anyway, let's carry on.
	Teachers over here are kicking off and gobbling off about wanting more pay.
	Maybe they should learn how to use a fucking toaster first.
	The token manksman approves this message.
	I tell you, how do you feel about the nurses striking?
	Half my family work at the NHS. My sister's a nurse, my cousin, lots of people are nurses.
	No one's ever gone to a food bank, by the way.
	What I would do...
	I hate this narrative.
	What we need to do with the NHS, because we're not going to reform it or not yet until it collapses, we need to look at...
	Giving nurses and doctors pay rises based on the performance outcome of their department in a hospital.
	So that wouldn't be great, but then the internal pressure of nurses saying to administrators, look how crap this place is running.
	You're not getting me raised because we're not achieving this and you're spending money on woke managers.
	Turn it all internal.
	Good point.
	Divide and conquer.
	Divide and conquer.
	And make them fight the people inside the hospitals that are keeping performance poor.
	And that's how they need to get their raises.
	Raise their game.
	That's a great point.
	I mean, I was having this argument the other day with my wife.
	And I was like, well, the entry level, you know, she's like, oh, you know, she's just reading the news.
	The normal person reads the news.
	She's like, oh, they've got to go to food banks and stuff like that.
	I'm like, the entry level wage is 27 grand a year.
	The average wage in this country is like 23 grand a year.
	They do not need food banks.
	You know, if you need to go to a food bank, the problem is you.
	You know, you're the one pissing away your money on wine or whatever it is.
	Most of the food banks in the UK are not needed.
	Probably not.
	Some people are in need.
	Some people hit some bad times.
	Usually they're on making, but sometimes not.
	But I've got so many stories I could tell you about people who work in food banks who tell me stuff.
	Oh, really?
	Yeah.
	Okay, well, maybe we'll do that next time.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Although next time we're going to discuss the death penalty.
	Right, yeah.
	So that's how everyone's in favour of it.
	Anyway, Rue the Day says, Oh good, Nick's back.
	Always a good time.
	Thank you.
	Charlie says, Nick and Carl, to all the podcasters, wishing you a happy Christmas and a wonderful new year.
	Thank you.
	Rick says, There should be a slate of arrests over the Twitter files over this amount of evidence of wrongdoing.
	For everyone's sake, because if this goes unanswered, worse things may happen down the line.
	No, no, no, no.
	Worse things will happen down the line.
	Because if this is what they can get away with when it's revealed to the full light of public understanding, then they'll be like, oh, right, so there's no punishment.
	This is all we know about.
	Yeah, and this is so much worse than Watergate.
	Yeah.
	It's so much worse.
	Nixon, what, bugged the Democrat headquarters, wasn't it?
	Yeah, but he got into trouble for lying later that he hadn't done it.
	That's what got him into trouble was the lying to Congress going, we never did any of that.
	Yeah, exactly.
	So it's like, this is so much worse.
	On a long enough timeline, a population who have had to take things lying down will eventually stop doing so.
	Well, you say that, but I don't know if that's true.
	Alfred the base says people like your Roth explained in detail by Yuri Bezmanov stroking the ego is the correct framing treat them like they're somebody treat them like an insider privilege them with insider info brackets disinfo groom and us versus And that's exactly what bringing them into these, you know, the training sessions and giving them a temporary top-secret clearance and stuff like that.
	Imagine how you're off.
	I'm just some pleb.
	You know, some gay guy from California.
	Wow, I know.
	Who doesn't want it to be James Bond?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, now he's important.
	He's saving the world.
	Yeah.
	Sam says you'd have better luck convincing a young Earth creationist to believe in evolution than getting an NPC to acknowledge that the Feds are maliciously manipulating social media for political purposes.
	Yeah, it's quite crazy, isn't it, actually?
	Sophie says, yeah, this is not big tech censorship.
	It's legit Fed censorship.
	We need to change the language here.
	Well, that's the thing, isn't it, Sophie?
	Because, like, everything we'd learned up until now was the Feds going, like, could you take this down?
	Could you take this down?
	And Twitter being like, yeah, okay.
	And it's like, okay, but we can't really stop Twitter from just acceding to requests, you know?
	But this is completely different.
	So this is why I think this is the smoking gun.
	Fuzzy Toaster says, no one likes being lied to.
	No one likes being made a fool.
	The reaction on the left to this information is that of denial.
	Wait and see.
	We'll get through all the stages of loss in the coming weeks and months.
	At least I hope so.
	They never admit something this obvious.
	Yeah, well...
	Corrupting the FBI for the left in America at the moment is, for them, a good thing.
	But once you're corrupting an organisation, it's because you don't know what they're going to do next year when they've got a new head, and then all those eyes are turned on the left for some reason.
	Who knows why?
	Yeah, who knows why?
	You can't predict the future.
	That old guy says, Nick, thank you for your segment on the Homeless Problem.
	What an eye-opener.
	Robert says, my wife used to work at the charity shelter in the internal comms role.
	She felt compelled to leave when she figured out how much of the con the whole organisation was.
	I had no idea.
	I used to assume these things are good places.
	All these big charities are run like international corporations.
	Don't ever give money to huge charities.
	Matthew asks, when are we going to have a referendum to kick Scotland out of the union?
	And, you know what, until recently I was very much on that position.
	Then I realised that would be giving the SNP everything they wanted.
	I have come to the same conclusion.
	And, yeah, out of bitterness, spite, and a desire to see Nicola Sturgeon and everything else fail.
	Actually, now I think they shouldn't be allowed to leave the union.
	I put a tweet out a couple of years ago when I was on Twitter, and I'd had enough of the SNP, and I put a tweet out going, I'm really thinking we need Scotland out of the UK. Is there any Scots out there who could tell me different?
	I got hundreds of messages and tweets, all positive.
	Don't give up on us.
	They're a minority.
	They're hateful.
	We're all part of the state.
	I went, no, I've changed my mind now.
	I'm not letting those small proportion of nasty people They want me to break up my family.
	A little Scottish Nazi party.
	I actually don't want them to have what they want.
	Because I was leaning in favour of thinking, yeah, actually, why not?
	That's because we've spent years winding us up.
	And in the end we're going, do you know what?
	Just go!
	But when you're only hearing one side of the story, like I say, that tweet, I put out hundreds of messages back.
	Yeah.
	Oh, that's good.
	That's good.
	Anyway, that's all we've got time for today, folks.
	So, if you enjoyed the podcast, go and sign up for the website, support us so we can keep the lights on, and we'll be back tomorrow.

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