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Feb. 15, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

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The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #590

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	Music Hello and welcome to the podcast of Lotus Eases episode 590 for today, the 15th of February 2023.
	I am your host Connor, joined today by Stelios.
	Hello. And we'll be discussing how all of the churches have been intersectionally subverted from the inside, the woke propaganda trap for conservatives, and how modern dating is a disaster, fresh off the heels of Valentine's Day.
	Did you have a nice Valentine's Day, Stelios?
	Yeah. Yeah, mine was okay, actually, in the end.
	We've got some announcements at five o'clock today.
	We have Comics Corner episode four for all our premium subscribers coming out on Identity Crisis, Cry for Justice, and Action Comics 775.
	What's so funny about Truth, Justice, and the American Way?
	If you haven't subscribed yet, and you're curious about us arguing in favour of some of the most maligned comics in all of DC history, and in favour of capital punishment, then go ahead and pay £5 a month to watch that.
	Also, just a minor announcement that Michael has told me that applications for the web dev role close on Sunday.
	That is Sunday the 19th of February at midnight, so...
	If you are a web developer and you fancy living in or commuting to Swindon, you mad people, then get your applications in and we might be interviewing you.
	Without further ado, let's jump straight into the news.
	Nice church you had there.
	It'd be a shame if somebody subverted it, wasn't it?
	At a time where Christianity, and particularly in England, is dwindling into extinction, every church is being subverted from within to alienate the last few worshippers who actually care about those doddy old things like God or biblical morality.
	Let's look at some of the most egregious examples of how archbishops, priests and various sects are trying to lead the flock astray.
	Speaking of the destruction of the church, if you subscribe to LotusEaters.com you'll be able to get articles like this from Baudade about the spontaneous church combustion that's been happening all across various countries in Europe, particularly that weird Notre Dame fire which...
	Well, one man admitted to doing it, but it's still inconclusive.
	Just an accidental arson. And Beau narrates all of his articles as well, so if you want to hear Beau's dulcet tones, well, he really puts the effort in.
	Go and have a listen. So let's go over to the Anglicans.
	The Anglicans are at it again.
	Before you say this, I read somewhere recently that Gen Z is the first post-Christian generation.
	I don't know if you agree with this.
	I haven't made up my mind yet.
	I don't think so. I think that Gen Xers and Millennials were vaguely nihilistic and they allowed culture to displace Christianity.
	And Gen Z are either deliberately socialist or it's bifurcated into two where you see the trad revivalists.
	I know for some it's a skin suit online and it's especially something that women do to appear trad in order to net the highest value male.
	But some people are I'm not saying that there aren't.
	I do think that there are. But the institutions, particularly educational institutions, seem to have taken a post-Christian turn.
	And especially churches, as you have said, they have embraced some woke stuff.
	Yeah, they're signalling fealty to their new religion, which, as we'll go through, we'll see the sort of underpinnings of this new religion, particularly gender ideology, as a kind of Promethean ambition to usurp God as creator and have you revolve around yourself as one true son, as Karl Marx put it.
	So, the bishops in the Anglican Church are calling for meat-free Fridays.
	Why? To hit net-zero targets, because the climate change apocalypse has displaced the rapture, or judgment day, as the Bible would say, as the new end times prophecy.
	In February 2020, General Synod, the church's lawmaking body, voted for a new target to achieve net-zero carbon ambitions by 2030 in recognition that the global climate emergency is, quote, a crisis for God's creation and a fundamental injustice.
	So, how could a perfectly created unjust world imbued with the love of God wreak utter vengeance on mankind unless it was God's will?
	Are you accusing God of trying to destroy us?
	Very vain there. The fun thing, are they flying to spread this message across?
	I wouldn't be surprised.
	I wouldn't be shocked at all.
	It's like with Live Aid, many years ago, where they were talking about climate and they were flying all around.
	Well, COP every year.
	Biden had a 28-car motorcade blazing down the highways of Glasgow.
	He landed at the wrong airport.
	I think he landed at Edinburgh Airport and had to make it all the way to Glasgow by driving down.
	So... But the hypocrisy, the point of the hypocrisy is it's kind of annoying to point it out.
	I'm not saying to you specifically, but yeah, we know they're hypocrites.
	But hypocrisy only works if you consider each other human.
	They don't consider us human. They just consider themselves better than us.
	So they can fly around. Bill Gates can import sand to his own private beach at his house as much as he likes.
	It's we plebs that have to be reduced in order to reduce the carbon.
	It's anti-pollution. And anti has to be put in front of every word.
	Yes, yeah, like anti-fascists, they say, as they punch you straight in the face.
	However, amid concerns that achieving carbon neutrality may take longer than the current seven-year time frame, bishops suggested having a meat-free Friday during Lent could be a way for Christians to personally reduce their carbon footprint.
	The Bishop of Norwich, Right Reverend Graham Usher, who is also the church's lead bishop for the environment, endorsed the suggestion, saying it is, after all, entirely in line with the long-established Christian practice in many churches of avoiding meat on Fridays, and not only during Lent.
	Yep, sure. Absolutely.
	It's a Christian practice. But it's what you're doing it for that is different.
	It is not about denying yourself in order to express gratitude that God has provided abundance in all other areas of life.
	It's to genuflect the new climate religion.
	It's to ensure ESG compliance with all of your other globalist buddies.
	You're just another institution in the cathedral that's going along with the narrative that wants to reduce our way of life and make us very easily controlled.
	And they're manipulating you by using your own standards to push it through.
	It's very disingenuous. And I would say that this is a...
	Weird way of talking about the demandingness of religious ethics, because religious ethics are demanding on the one hand, but motive is really crucial.
	And I totally agree with you when you say that the motive here has nothing to do with religious sentiment.
	It has to do with pushing forward the woke agenda.
	It's also not the sort of kind of continent virtuous Christianity that saw Aristotle combined with St Thomas Aquinas.
	It's not you cultivating individual gratitude to deepen your relationship with God.
	It's you making personal sacrifices for the collectivist goal of perfecting the earth, going towards an end of history, which...
	Is a vain way of stewarding ourselves towards a perfectible history when the actual book of Revelation says you never know when the second coming is going to happen, so just be consonant and don't necessarily work towards collectivist goals, but work on yourself so that when comes the day you're unexpectedly judged, you will be judged accordingly.
	And also virtue signaling in the meantime, because this is something that they do for recognition, whereas in most traditions in virtue ethics, when you do something for the recognition and how people see you, that's not considered to be very virtuous.
	Exactly according to the Gospel of Matthew that says those that pray on street corners are not true Christians.
	Don't make a public spectacle of your religious frustrations.
	Actually be dedicated to it.
	It should be introspective, not Outwardly facing.
	On to the next one as well.
	Turns out that apparently MPs in Parliament are trying to strong-arm the Church of England into recognising same-sex marriages, and it turns out that they did it anyway.
	So the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, claimed he was threatened with parliamentary action in an attempt to force same-sex marriage into the Church of England.
	Speaking at Global Anglican Consultive Council, ACC, meeting in Ghana, so they were flying after all, Justin Welby said many members of the General Synod have dismissed his concerns about recent reforms.
	The Archbishop's comments came after the Church of England's Legislative Assembly, General Synod, passed a motion to allow the blessing of same-sex couples and civil partnerships earlier this month.
	In his presidential address to the 18th plenary of the ACC, Welby said rules about sexuality in the Church of England have been tabled for a discussion as a result of growing atheism in the UK. He told those at the meeting held in Garnon, capital Accra, that in the global north...
	As Callum has already debunked, putting China in the Global South is insane.
	They've got a much larger population than us.
	They've got far more natural resources, and we are impoverishing ourselves as the Chinese, despite their demographic collapse, are building themselves up.
	So Global North and Global South is an entirely false dichotomy, and it's a materialist one, which the Christians shouldn't be adopting.
	But there you go, Justin Welby's not much of a Christian.
	Definitely not. Christian values of community and mutual responsibility have been almost eliminated in favour of individualism.
	Well, the individual dignity of each person conferred to themselves by God is a Christian value.
	That's why Christianity was the bedrock of liberalism.
	I have my gripes of liberalism, don't get me wrong.
	But community and mutual responsibility.
	Yes, community is a British value.
	It's a Christian value. But somehow I think they're smuggling in Marxist precepts in that term.
	When people talk about individualism, I instantly get a bit frustrated because they have to qualify the kind of individualism that they're talking about.
	Are they talking about political individualism, social, moral individualism?
	Yes. Just by throwing the word individualism out there, they don't qualify the point.
	They're just saying you're now supposed to go boo.
	I agree. We're far too atomized and disconnected from community, but I don't understand how this rebuilds community, because communities only exist if they preserve the integrity of their moral ethos.
	That's how you attract people to specific areas.
	If every community is indistinguishable from each other, why should I belong to one over the other?
	If Christianity is indistinguishable from Islam, then I wouldn't like either religion, because I don't agree with Islam.
	Sorry, excuse me. So, it's interesting he actually says here that it's because of the rise of people who are not religious.
	And he actually says that there is no threat from Islam, or even if there are rising rates of Judaism, to Christianity.
	It's only that people don't care about Christianity anymore.
	That is the reason why we should table amendments to how the Christian church perceives same-sex marriages.
	No, you do not take the divine doctrine, which you have to believe if you are a Christian.
	If you're not a Christian, you can kind of just dismiss it out of hand, right?
	Even though quite a lot of our civilizational precepts are based on that and it's very valuable.
	But if you're a Christian, you have to treat the Bible itself as the received wisdom by the men who wrote it and compiled it from God or the Holy Spirit.
	And so you don't get to manipulate the moral axioms set forth in that For your own ends, for the contemporary concerns of the present, just to try and win friends.
	Because that might be Machiavellian and expedient, and it might get you more faith with the secular culture, but it will get you judged adversely by God at the end.
	And that's kind of the entire point.
	The entire woke sentiment revolves around changing words and manipulating definitions.
	It's the inversion of logocentrism.
	Rather than God speaking the world into being, you are erasing the role of God by trying to speak your own reality into being.
	And this is why they are miserable people because they are trying to go against reality and confect a consensus reality to soothe their consciences that are screaming at them from the inside.
	And eventually... The enforcement costs of running against reality will happen.
	And that's why you see a very high suicide rate among some very non-reality compliant communities.
	And that's all we can say for YouTube.
	Next, speaking of said communities, the Church of England has said God is gender neutral.
	No. No, it's kind of capital H, him, and he, and father, you know, that denotes some gender in there.
	Reverend Joanna Stobart from the Diocese of Bath and Wells argued what steps were taken to offer congregants alternatives to referring to God with male pronouns, and if there was any way to update, to develop more inclusive language in our authorised liturgy.
	She also asked bishops to provide more options for those who wish to use authorised liturgy and speak of God in a non-gendered way, particularly in authorised solutions where many of the prayers offered for use refer to God using male pronouns.
	So they literally want to get rid of the Lord's Prayer because it starts with Our Father.
	You're just not a Christian. Get out.
	Get out, you disgusting subversive.
	You are trying to wrestle away the preferred pronouns of God, the Father.
	And even if, again, even if you're a non-Christian, there's a lot of utility in conceptualizing of an ephemeral father that hangs over you.
	Because what keeps men accountable?
	The threat of violence.
	Okay, are you going to be afraid of your ephemeral mother?
	No, because she's not going to belt you one harder than your dad can belt you if you do the wrong thing.
	And so, in prayer, when you're meant to be talking aloud or thinking aloud in your head, you're meant to be completely honest and accountable, not just to yourself, but to the ephemeral father who can give you a clip around the ear if you say the wrong thing or if you're being untruthful, because he always knows if you're untruthful.
	So there is utility in the conception of God as an ephemeral father, even if you don't buy the biblical doctrine in and of itself.
	But as a Christian, you're meant to buy the biblical doctrine.
	And it starts off with, he.
	There's a reason that when he was incarnated, he became Christ and had to impregnate a woman for it.
	I'm willing to bet that those who are behind this, they're not going to think about what you said.
	They're not thinking of it in that term.
	They hate tradition.
	Yes. And they want to change it because it is tradition.
	Hmm. And they are making large sweeping generalizations about Western civilization and it's all an attempt to create chaos and to make us turn our back towards our own tradition and communal bonds.
	I like how you said chaos because the thing which preceded creation and God making order out of chaos was the formless void.
	And we're on a series of infinite linguistic regressions that turn us back to a nihilistic state.
	So we're basically destroying ourselves until we become that formless potential of chaos yet again.
	And that's actually very useful for the socialists, because if you start from year zero, if you start from total chaos, then you can reconstruct man in your particular image, and that's what they like.
	And you're right, I'm not speaking to these people.
	I'm speaking to the actual Christians in the audience.
	I know there's some priests that even watch us, apparently.
	Do not be afraid to gatekeep and stand up for the ethics of your religion, and don't be gaslit into thinking that inclusivity doctrine is within the Christian tradition, because they're obviously trying to use our own standards against us to make us hate our religion and crumble it from within.
	Because, like in Maccabees, for example, The only thing that stands between totalitarianism and people submitting to it is the fear that this is all we have.
	This is the only life. If you are so afraid of dying and not being judged for your ethics after you die, then you will go along with the regime.
	But if you have the faith that what matters is your personal integrity and you will be rewarded for it in the next life...
	Then you are not compliant with a dictator when he says he's going to threaten you for it.
	And they know that, and that's why Marx specifically called Christianity an opiate of the masses, and he wanted to raise critical consciousness by destroying Christianity and having Marxism take its place.
	So, the move has been criticised, obviously, by conservatives, hello, who have warned that male and female imagery is not interchangeable.
	However, liberal Christians have welcomed it, claiming that a theological misreading of God as exclusively male is the driver of much-continuing discrimination and sexism against women.
	I don't suppose you've read the letters of St.
	Paul, have you? It'll be taken out soon.
	Details of the plans emerged in a written question to the Liturgical Commission, which prepares and promotes forms of service and religious worship in the Church at General Synod.
	Professor Helen King, the Vice Chairman of Synod's Gender and Sexuality Group, get rid of it.
	Gone. Gone. Totally out.
	Questions around gendered language and God have been around for decades, if not centuries, but still have the power to bring out strong reactions.
	For some, God as Father is helpful because of their own positive experiences of a loving parent.
	For others, God as Father may reinforce a bad experience of a strict disciplinarian as their father.
	If we dig deeper, clearly God is not gendered, so why do we restrict our language to God in gendered ways?
	So it's projection. So it's because you didn't like your dad, you're trying to destroy the entire religion.
	There's kind of a verse in the commandments that says, honour thy mother and thy father.
	That doesn't mean always submit to them.
	It means treat them accordingly.
	So if your father and mother have done as God commanded, and loved each other and loved you, then of course you incorporate yourself in that family structure.
	If they have been sinful, if they have rejected you as their child, they've absconded the duty to take care of you, then you do one better.
	You improve from their immoral example and you embody the love of God as the Father and have your own children and break that cycle and ensure that you are doing the right thing out into the future.
	And I must say that there are people who have had troubled families, troubling families and bad parents and they did not react in this particular way.
	So there are many people who have had, let's say, bad fathers and bad mothers and they did not proceed to reject the entire institution of the family.
	And they are really happy about the fact that other people did not have the bad upbringing that they had.
	So I think that if the Church of England or whoever, I don't want to talk about the institution, I want to talk about the people who are behind this approach towards the woke movement.
	If they're trying to do this, they're actually trying to appeal to those who are, let's say, least virtues in that sense.
	They're not trying to appeal to the people who may have had a troubling past, but they do genuinely love other people.
	They are interested in talking to people who say, just because I didn't have a good upbringing, no one else should.
	I think Stefan Molyneux said something similar before, but child abuse can make either an implosive angel or an explosive demon.
	It either causes a cycle of abuse, like with single mothers you see as the leading predicate for sexual abuse, drug misuse, criminality, poverty.
	It either creates people who perpetuate that cycle because they were never given a successful model, or it creates people that were destroyed, very introspective, and afford to their children all that they were deprived.
	If you encounter wrong and evil, you may just fall into the habit or trap of following evil, or you could have a stronger consciousness being developed from very early on.
	Exactly. And that's what the church should be teaching, but unfortunately, they're not.
	It's not just exclusive to the Anglicans.
	I say this with great sigh.
	The Catholic Church are doing pretty badly as well, particularly in England and Wales.
	Apparently it's throughout the world, but I heard of this in my own church and they weren't going with it.
	My priest decided to do an anti-critical race theory homily on the day, so good on him.
	Well done, lad. Other churches, not so much, because it turns out they've made Mary and Jesus black.
	If we can just scroll down to the image, John...
	The Catholic Church has unveiled posters depicting Mary and Jesus' different ethnicities as part of an anti-racism drive launched in the wake of George Floyd's murder.
	That's not it, John. Just keep going down.
	There we go! The Saviour was born in Wakanda, I suppose.
	I guess there's a reason that Joseph disappeared halfway through the Gospels.
	He went out to Bethlehem to get cigarettes.
	The images showing biblical figures as capital B Black, Asian and Middle Eastern are to reflect the rich diversity of the church community.
	Do you want to scroll down to the Asian one as well, John, so you can feel represented?
	There you go. Don't laugh, John.
	It is the imperial costume of the Chinese, yeah.
	Yeah. Not great.
	Not fantastic, especially considering how the Chinese treats Catholics at the moment.
	The Catholic Bishop's Conference of England and Wales released the artwork as part of its newly launched Racial Justice Sunday event, created after George Floyd's death.
	You know what? Honestly, sorry.
	I mean, the woke movement, it's surprisingly boring.
	Yeah, it's very predictable. Not surprisingly.
	Yeah, it's very predictable and very boring.
	But this is the supplanting of Christ with the new Messiah, which is George Floyd.
	As Nancy Pelosi said, thank you, George Floyd, for dying for racial justice.
	Right. So you're just adopting and conscripting people after they've passed into your ideological cause as the martyrs, are you?
	And there's the idea that colour should not matter, but this brings us back to colour does matter.
	Yeah, but that's because critical race theorists have infiltrated most of these institutions and they do think colour matters because they want to raise critical consciousness to the point of where you can create a revolutionary constituency out of black people and Asian people who think they're hard done by.
	And they think that one cannot be racist towards white people, which is completely wrong.
	Yeah. On to the next one then.
	The Catholic League have also discovered that the FBI have got an internal memo targeting extreme Catholics.
	So a whistleblower leaked a report produced by the FBI's Richmond Field Office titled, Interest of racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists in radical traditionalist Catholic ideology almost certainly presents new mitigation opportunities.
	So, if you're against wokeness in the church, you'll be cracked down on by the feds.
	FBI whistleblower Kyle Serafin, who we've covered on the channel before, an FBI special agent for six years, revealed the report, analysed that Catholics who prefer Latin mass and pre-Vatican II teachings can amount to adherence to an anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT and white supremacist ideology.
	This is all just projection and all made up.
	That notoriously Latin language of white supremacists.
	I disagree that the Italians are white.
	And I'm sure that throughout history, Catholics who preferred Latin mass, they had anti-LGBTQ sentiments.
	Conscious ones. That's kind of called Christianity, I'm afraid.
	As if that's not an anachronism.
	Yeah, well, especially because the Q is a revolutionary constituency, thought up by Gail Rubin, who said we should destigmatise boy love, and also the T posits that God got creation wrong, and that you can remake yourself in your own image, which is...
	I don't think I can say what I think of that on YouTube.
	On to the next one. The FBI designated the Rosary as a hate symbol.
	This was after an Atlantic article came out, saying the Rosary is an extremist symbol.
	This is what Americans' taxpayer cash is going towards, so...
	Keep praying, Catholics.
	You're going to need it.
	Also, Pope Benedict released a posthumous book recently after passing away.
	He had to publish it posthumously.
	And if you want to read through the thread in your own time, there's some eye-opening revelations in here.
	But a couple of these are Pope Benedict, and this is from the translation.
	For my part in life, I no longer want to publish anything.
	The fury of the circles against me in Germany is so strong that the appearance of my every word immediately causes a murderous shouting from them.
	I want to spare myself and to Christendom this.
	He said there are gay clubs and ceremonies and that one bishop subjected priests to training to watch pornographic films.
	So the excuse was he was trying to test their faith.
	Oh, I'm just showing two men bumming.
	Do you feel stronger with God yet?
	Definitely isn't grooming whatsoever.
	Michael Knowles also in this thread pointed out that Amazon froze purchases of the book after the translation started coming out.
	So it's very inconvenient for the current Marxist occupying the Vatican that this is released.
	And then I'd just quite like to wrap up on one last story, and that is the Lutherans are not getting off the hook.
	Ryan Turnipseed, who yes, it is his actual name, and it's really funny because after this thread, lots of people were outraged that he had such an impact in exposing this catechism that was put out by the Lutheran Church.
	They said, why have the Lutherans fallen for an anonymous account?
	No, it's just his actual name.
	It's quite ridiculous, but it is quite funny, so well done to Ryan for reading through this.
	He's got a thread on the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, and they've changed some of the ethics in it that aren't quite biblical.
	So they put out a new edition of Luther's Large Catechism, one of the main books used to teach people about Christianity and what it means to be a Christian.
	First, we have the LCMS speaking for conservative Lutherans, entirely denying self-defense and bearing arms being moral.
	So if we can scroll down please, John, just as we talk through this.
	He just says there's no right to bear arms, so getting explicitly political and renouncing the American Constitution.
	They then try and draw a false equivalency between being gay and a pedophile.
	So if we can click on that image, John, if that's alright.
	I'll just read that out.
	Though some of us are burdened with homosexual lust, pornographic addiction, transgenderism, paedophilia and polyamory, destiny enraged, more often they are the speck in our neighbour's eye rather than the log in our own.
	Right. So he's actually saying that you can't judge paedophiles because you might have sworn at some point in your life.
	No, no.
	Read the Gospel of Matthew a little bit more and you'll find out the penalty for paedophilia is a millstone around the neck flung into the sea because you will not be judged favourably by God.
	He then says that gay and trans-Christianity is just as Christian as any other lifestyle.
	He says that Genesis is to be discarded because it conflicts with scientific theories.
	They also sort of see transgenderism as moral to bring your internal soul in line with your body.
	So they promote the Gnostic project of self-recreation.
	Again, thinking God got it wrong.
	It mentions economic and societal privilege.
	So more Marxist terms there.
	So all of this thread was posted on January the 21st, as you can see.
	On January the 23rd, the Lutheran Church put out a Facebook post saying the distribution of this catechism had been rescinded so they could reflect on feedback.
	So then all the leftists got upset and thought that Ryan had a fake name, so he had a bit of fun with that.
	And then on February 2nd, the president said that the new catechism is in line with the church's teachings and it's resumed its distribution.
	So nothing's changed. So the church is an entirely captured institution, unfortunately.
	I want to make a point about the rosary.
	Go for it. Because I think it is very important and it shows how the political spectrum has moved, in a way.
	One of the most influential doctrines in political philosophy of the last decades is John Rawls' political liberalism.
	I think I really disagree with it, I must say.
	But Rawls there, who has been taken by many people from the left as being someone who's He talks about market socialism and property owning democracy and he has given this idea that liberalism is closer to the left than it was traditionally understood to be.
	He says that the state should be neutral with respect to views about the good life and he talks about that with about religions predominantly and he says that for instance the state of secular countries should not be partial towards the religion of the people Yes, as a symbol of hatred.
	I think they cross even that line. - Yes, of course. - Which may not, I'm not convinced by what Rawls says, but this goes a step further, and it tries to, you could say, demonize.
	It just shows you that the...
	That's not neutrality.
	That's what I mean. Take your religion out of my politics argument, and politics should be separate from religion, was never sincere.
	It was always a practical tool to get Christianity out of the institution so they could replace it with woke socialism.
	That's all it is. So you're going to serve one God one way or another.
	I don't think it's possible to separate theological precepts from political precepts all of the time.
	I'm not saying I want a Catholic theocracy, but I am saying that if you operate off of Christian precepts, then you can have a much better society than an Islamic or a woke socialist one.
	So just onto the last bit, if you don't believe that intersectionality is a satanic project, I'd like to read a little bit from the first article I actually did for the website, back before I even worked here, urging Americans to abandon the concept of equality even though it's written in the Constitution.
	So, in unsettling the coloniality of being true freedom, one of the founding CRT writers, Sylvia Winter, charged the Enlightenment thinkers with defining men in a fashion which excludes non-white people.
	She contested that scientific inquiry and appeals to biblical scripture were used to justify the transatlantic slave trade.
	The epochal rupture that was set in motion by Western intellectuals led to the gradual development of the physical sciences by the no less epochal reinvention of Western Europe's matrix Judeo-Christian genre of the human.
	So to translate from the gobbledygook, the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution displaced man's understanding of himself as made imago Dei in the image of God with defining his nature through reason and empirical inquiry.
	This shift in epistemology facilitated a new form of exclusion, predominantly excluding black and native people from the category of men in America, whose rights were recognised by the Constitution but not technically extended to them for some period of time.
	Non-whites were, according to Winter, considered, quote,"...irrational, sub-rational others, and accordingly deprived of rights." And then Winter obviously immediately and conveniently omits the amount of Christians that were involved in the abolition movement during the writing of the Constitution itself, like Ben Franklin.
	This definition emboldened their consolidation of power, truth, and freedom among their Western bourgeois ethnocloss.
	They want to get rid of Christianity because it's the only thing stopping them seizing power.
	And so this is my message to Christians, right?
	I know you're not in the institutions that are controlling this stuff, but do kick up a fuss against the churches that are doing it because it's not for inclusion.
	It's to deliberately subvert your religion from within to make you nihilistic and miserable and easily ideologically captured by their counter-religion of intersectional socialism, where God is not at the top, man is.
	Which man? The person telling you that you're a racist and they're going to take all your stuff.
	Don't stand for it. Because, as William Ralph Inge argued, if you marry the spirit of your generation, you'll be a widow in the next.
	And I suggest that widowing the church itself is the goal.
	Okay, so the left is very aggressive in a conceptual way.
	They are really interested in subverting a language and the concepts that we use when we try to communicate.
	And especially, this creates a trap for conservatives and those who are not part of the woke movement.
	Now, very frequently, when we look people who belong to the woke side, we see people who are not engaging in debates, they are shouting, they constantly try to victimize themselves.
	That's not a proper conduct for, you know, a meaningful debate.
	And there is a tendency that conservatives and classical liberals alike have to try to argue against these people, engage in a rational debate with them, On terms that they set.
	And I think that this is a trap because When we give the conceptual tool to the other side or we recognize that the other side puts forward the concepts and they give the meaning to the concepts that we use and we want to win them in their own game, we are not going to see the fact that they are not addressing us.
	They seem to be addressing conservatives and classical liberals, but in fact they are addressing the undecided voters.
	The voters who are really going to sway the vote in one or another direction in the next and every other general election.
	Now, before we say more about this, visit the website.
	LotusEaters.com, where for only £5 a month you can have access to our premium content, such as this discussion on George Orwell's Animal Farm, where Connor and Beau talk about George Orwell's short masterpiece.
	Yeah, it's the shortest book we've ever done for a book club, but we discussed so much of it, we ended up spontaneously making it into two parts.
	And one of the core focuses of this is obviously the manipulation of language, because they try to rationally construct an animal-only commune with the seven commandments and the axiom that all animals are equal, and then it eventually, over time, moves because those at the top seek power, and they bend the ideological precepts to what they want to do.
	So, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
	Exactly. And this is an interesting use of the notion of equality because it's unqualified.
	We're not told whether we are talking about equality of outcome, equality of opportunity, equality of rights before the law that classical liberals were about.
	It's just a term that has been used out because it seems as if those who are undecided, those who form the, let's say, a sizable part of the population, they're interested in that notion and they think that the person who uses it has a sort of moral advantage.
	Now, let's dig a bit deeper into it.
	Our not-so-favorite, Owen Jones, published an article in Guardian this Monday.
	The title is The Tories Have Revealed Their Battle Plan for a New Kind of Class War – Subtitle, the promotion of Lee Anderson reveals a lot about who is and who isn't considered working class in Britain.
	Now, two things just about the title and the subtitle.
	We have again an emphasis on something new.
	We constantly live in unprecedented circumstances according to the woke left and this implies that we constantly need to conceptualize them and we go to them to conceptualize it for us.
	So we have a new kind of class war.
	The notion of a class war is really Marxist.
	It has Marxist connotations.
	So he is trying to supplant a Marxist framework through which to understand current events.
	And just by the subtitle, it's magnificent.
	What the hell does the promotion of any person has to do with who is and who isn't considered working class in Britain?
	Well, so Lee actually grew up from a working class household and he was a single dad for quite a while.
	But he's saying inconvenient things like not everyone needs a food bank and maybe you should be better at budgeting and take some personal responsibility.
	And that's really inconvenient for the Marxist narrative that wants to blame all inequality on a capitalist superstructure.
	I read also that his father was a coal miner and he was a coal miner himself.
	So, I mean, it seems he has worked more than Owen Jones.
	Yeah, just a tad. Just a tad than the priestly class who have done nothing but wine.
	Okay, so I read from Owen Jones' text.
	Boris Johnson's Brexit has been a dismal failure, heralding only falling investment and stagnant growth.
	If you want an admission of this truth, look no further than Saturday's revelation of a secretive two-day cross-party summit of Remainers and Leavers that took place last week in a Grand Oxfordshire retreat to address this national fiasco.
	But let's not forget who the victims are here.
	As in all crises, it is the working class who suffer the most from our politicians' malice.
	The same people Tory Brexiteers deceitfully claim to champion but know nothing about.
	I suspect Owen Jones knows everything about the working class.
	Yeah, well, not just that.
	It's the Brexiteers.
	Brexit was not the problem.
	The lockdown that you supported, the mass money printing that you supported, because it's the backdoor mechanism by which we can have a universal basic income, is the problem.
	Because the inflation-based monetary system is definitely not free marketeer.
	It's not the individual sovereignty idea that Brexit was founded upon.
	It's explicitly socialist.
	So I'd quite let you get out under the boot heel of that.
	But no, you'd rather take the reins and tyrannise me instead.
	That's cherry picking and the issue is, and that is what I want to put forward, is that Owen Jones is basically addressing the undecided.
	He's not addressing conservatives and classical liberals with his piece.
	And he's presenting a version of the story, a particular interpretation that includes some factors and singles out other factors in order for that to take sway of the public mind, capture public imagination.
	It's a linguistic war of attrition for the peanut gallery versus lots of conservatives are busy trying to refute their terms because we're engaging, we think interpersonally, we're engaging in good faith.
	They just want to own us and then colonise the minds of the undecided.
	I continue. Indeed, in his younger years, our current Prime Minister was honest about the gilded circles he inhabited.
	I have friends who are aristocrats.
	I have friends who are upper class, said a youthful Rishi Sunak in a BBC documentary recorded in 2001.
	I have friends who are working class.
	Well, not working class.
	He splattered it out as though the very notion was absurd.
	In an unequal society profoundly segregated by class, privileged people see the lives of most of the population as exotic and alien.
	Stereotypes emerge, after all, because supposed fellow citizens inhabit different worlds.
	This brings us to the recent appointment of Tory MP Lee Anderson as the party's vice chair.
	Anderson has made his name by making crude and provocative public interventions, such as saying he would boycott watching the England football team because of the anti-racist gesture taken by its players or supporting the return of the death penalty.
	In recent years, media outlets and politicians have treated the likes of Anderson as emblematic of working-class voters, a category they often see as, to be blunt, a white man in his 50s or 60s with a Midlands accent and reactionary opinions.
	Rishi Sunak, who enjoys a family fortune twice that of the King, presumably believes that Anderson represents a direct hotline to working-class England.
	But the new Tory vice-chair also serves another function, to portray opponents of right-wing dogma as out-of-touch metropolitan elitists.
	So it seems to me that this is a strawman argument.
	Did you expect better from Owen Jones?
	No. And he is basically putting forward the idea that, well, conservatives don't know working class people.
	They think that Lee Anderson is a representative of the working class people and they put him in order to, which he isn't according to Jones, and they put him in order to appeal to working class people.
	A bunch of working-class Brexiteers were following Owen Jones down the street quite a while ago, and he decided to film himself and call them gammons.
	Owen Jones have nothing but reactive contempt for the working class.
	He wants to be the vanguard that rules over them.
	I think this is a persistent theme in the left, that they are trying to portray themselves as being the only one who care for the wider population.
	And, okay, yes, there are people like Rishi Sunak who...
	I don't know of his upbringing and frankly I don't care.
	He's a rich globalist. Yeah, I don't care much about his personal relationships but there are also champagne socialists.
	There is such a thing.
	There are also cocaine conservatives.
	I won't name any for legal reasons.
	Right-wingers masquerading as tribunes of the people are nothing new, but as it is revealed that Tory ministers are splashing public cash on luxury hotels, show fare and travel, it looks increasingly beyond parody.
	Wait, wait, that luxury cash, hotels and travel is for the migrants, right?
	The migrants that Owen Jones supports all of my salary going on.
	That's what you mean. It's not themselves, right?
	Or is it Angela Rayner having the £200 personalised AirPods?
	Or is that okay? Because she's working class and kind of brash and on the labour front benches and ugly as hell.
	I think in his mind the ends justify the means.
	Right, okay. So we're not working with any consistency here whatsoever.
	Thank you for establishing that. Okay.
	There has been in recent times a deliberate attempt to muddy public understanding of what social class means.
	For instance, it's notable that commentators often seem to consider Anderson as some kind of authentic voice of ordinary people, but not, say, the RMT's Mick Lynch.
	Another white man of a similar age.
	Why? Because Lynch has a subversive conception of class, whereby those without wealth or power can pursue their interests through collective action.
	Anderson's status, on the other hand, is the product of a redefinition of class, on cultural rather than economic lines.
	For the new right to be working class doesn't mean having nothing but your labour to sell, but being opposed to rootless urban progressives who favour immigration, multiculturalism and wokery.
	Yes, it's a fundamental, it's like I know you Carl were talking about Oakeshaw.
	It's a fundamental understanding that you cannot receive wisdom from an ideology and map it onto the world.
	It's about having enough life experience and then speak from a place of practical experience.
	And all of these metropolitan elitists might have grown up poor, but if they've been hand-picked for their ESG-compliant personality traits, like Owen Joes has, dropped into a university and churned out as an ideological acolyte, you can't claim to be working class.
	Instead, if you are substantively representing the working class by trying to give them a leg up and also being a patriot, Like Lee Anderson, you're going to be far more an accurate representative of working class interests than Mick Lynch, who means that because of his communist dogma, they can't get to work because the trains aren't running.
	And I want to say that this is an interesting thing because they're trying to – if anyone is engaged in conceptual engineering here, it's the left, traditionally.
	So what they're doing is that they're trying to give a completely new redefinition of class and they're blaming the other side for it.
	It's again projection. That is why they constantly put the anti in front of everything.
	It's anti-imperialism, anti-violence, anti-whatever.
	So this is actually where they're trying to...
	Again, conservatives know this, but they're not appealing to conservatives.
	They are appealing to the undecided.
	And they say it is the conservatives that are trying to create linguistic chaos.
	And I really don't understand why...
	This should be an issue because it seems to me that this just projects the ideology of Owen Jones.
	He wants to fit this Marxist paradigm into anything he talks about and he says, well, these people are trying to conceive of the working class in different lines and they're having a cultural input in their definition of the working class and this is something bad because it disagrees with a Marxist narrative.
	Well, it makes your narrative far harder to inflict on the people you'd most like to control, raise consciousness in and lead a revolution using which appoints you the master of them.
	And he says, the result is that younger generations have been effectively excluded from the category of working class.
	So, it's not the working class.
	He said two sentences ago that they are introducing a new concept, one of which is cultural and not economic.
	And now he's switching into the economic.
	It's complete confusion.
	This is even though they have a very good claim to it.
	After all, many are in low paid and insecure jobs.
	Because of immigration. They own precious little capital.
	Because of immigration. Home ownership has collapsed among younger adults.
	Because of immigration. And have been at the sharp end of austerity.
	What austerity all the budgets keep endlessly going up to meet the demand placed on it by immigration.
	And here is where he's trying to say something that I think we should challenge.
	He says, at the same time, they are more socially progressive than any previous generation, from immigration to LGBTQ rights.
	And far more likely than their grandparents to have grown up with migrants, people of color, or gay or transgender children.
	It is notable that most of those judged to be working class by pollsters and then aged under 35 voted for remain in 2016.
	Yet they are rarely portrayed in Britain as members of the working class.
	Why? A right-wing media ecosystem has much to do with it.
	Many newspapers barely conceal their contempt for younger people, denouncing them as entitled snowflakes.
	Which newspapers? Like, The Telegraph?
	Maybe. Definitely not The Times.
	The Times is milquetoast, middle-class, midwittery.
	Daily Mail on occasion, but it's incredibly schizophrenic, and it has literal pornography down the sidebar.
	So, which of those is socially conservative?
	Seriously. The Telegraph?
	Maybe. Us? Sure.
	The message here though is that Owen Jones tries to put forward is that the younger people right now are irrevocably woke.
	That is the message he's trying to put forward.
	And I must say, I don't agree with this.
	And I think that this should be challenged.
	Maybe we do have tendencies to embrace woke ideology more than before, but I think that that should definitely be challenged.
	The generation isn't lost. Unless we do this, we will become fatalists.
	And I think that fatalism is not the best way forward.
	And we can have amazingly bright people who have really interesting and wise things to say, for instance, like Peter Hitchens, Yeah, absolutely.
	Yes. So I think, you know, everyone can finish the article.
	Yeah, in their own time so you don't get an aneurysm.
	I want to say though that there is an interesting thing that we should remember.
	Politics is a comparative science.
	It's not enough to just say that the opposition or the position of the other side is problematic.
	You have to at least bring forward an alternative that is at least less problematic.
	Just by saying, That, you know, the other side is not perfect does not mean that you have something to offer.
	So I was trying to think, what does Owen Jones has to offer?
	I mean, that's no secret.
	If we look at his webpage, it just says, first word is socialist.
	So he is putting forward socialism.
	But his notion of socialism is really interesting because it's, as we will see, it's not a worked out thing.
	Understanding. He does not have something to offer.
	And we should see here, the Labour press had this tweet, and they say, which minister's department spent almost £60,000 buying stationery at Banner from 22nd of February to the 2nd April of 2021, despite only spending about £1,500 at the same company for the other 325 days of the year?
	I would say that it's refreshing sometimes to see people from the left, the Labour Party, talk about government spending as being sometimes too high.
	And Owen Jones has to ruin the day.
	He comes back and says, I think Labour should spend more time fleshing out a positive vision for the country rather than launching really boring attacks on bulk buying stationery.
	Now, there are many things we can say here that, first of all, Details are beneath him.
	He's not interested in having a layout plan.
	And also he has no alternative personally to offer.
	That is why he constantly talks about, he outsources the task of devising an alternative.
	He does what Marx urged, which is the unrelenting criticism of all that exists.
	So the thing is that if he has no formulated alternative, why is he so vocal?
	I think it has to be with being prominent and selling books.
	Yeah, he just wants money and then, oh, it just so happens that if my revolution that I prescribe comes to pass, I get to be at the top of the tower.
	But that is not serious in terms of politics because, as we said, politics is a comparative discipline, at least in its theoretical aspect, and if there is nothing to be offered as an alternative, well, You're not actually saying anything.
	So I want to say though that this shows another theme.
	It shows the deceitfulness of woke propaganda.
	That we shouldn't fall into their trap.
	There are actually two audiences that people like Owen Jones appeal to.
	It is the wokery, the woke audiences, and the undecided voters.
	So the thing is that if we try to win them in their own game, At their own terms, without focusing on the concepts that we are using, we are going to be let down a trap.
	And this trap is going to be that we are going to be portrayed into the undecided voters in terms that are traditionally not the ones that we would accept.
	So I want to say that there are three functions First, when woke people virtue signal, they are sustaining the belief among the woke that they do possess moral superiority.
	This is the way they bring together parts of the voting population that are, let's say, really woke and this is how they keep that alive.
	But second, it force feeds a message to the undecided.
	Those who are not going to participate to the debate, but they are going to, let's say, occasionally observe it.
	So I want to say that this lures conservatives to accept a mistaken way in which to portray conservatives.
	The debate. And I want to say that traditionally, the left had a problem with notions such as reason, liberalism, democracy, community, autonomy, and care for the people.
	And especially in the last three decades after, let's say, the Cold War, we had, let's say, the sort of victory, even if it was a momentary victory, of liberal parliamentary democracies.
	And this is where the left lost.
	But the point is that the undecided in such In such political regimes, they do have a bias towards the ideals of liberty and constitutional democracy.
	The left hates the constitution.
	We know that. They just can't hide it.
	But that is why they try to subvert our understanding of the notion of liberalism and the notion of democracy and the notion of talking as well as notions such as the community, autonomy and also care for the people.
	So I want to say that when they seem to address conservatives and classical liberals, they're actually addressing the undecided.
	When the conservatives and classical liberals are trying to respond to the woke on woke terms, instead of challenging those notions, we're actually falling into their trap.
	And we are appearing to the undecided as having no ideals.
	And they also gain the momentum that these ideals have in the societies we live in in the last three decades.
	I think that wraps it up well.
	So, last article, it's one by Keir Starmer.
	I don't think we should look at much of it.
	He says, My Labour Party is patriotic, a party of equality, not protest.
	And let us read the last two paragraphs.
	He says, The changes we have made aren't just fiddling around the edges or temporary fixes.
	They are permanent, fundamental, irrevocable.
	The Labour Party I lead today is unrecognizable from 2019.
	There are those who don't like that change, who still refuse to see the reality of what had gone on under the previous leadership.
	To them I say in all candor, we're never going back.
	If you don't like it, nobody is forcing you to stay.
	But to those who are reassured by what we have done, Who think we are going in the right direction, who want to see more, I say, I share your hunger.
	We need you. Let's keep changing labor.
	Then let's change the country.
	See, so I was about to say, it's actually useful political messaging there to gatekeep very strongly about your personal ideals.
	But there's two problems.
	Number one, the ideals are acid to English traditionalism because socialism is a foreign German import, which Does not respect every man as king in his own castle.
	And then the other thing is, if you're trying to say you're patriotic, fundamentally revolutionary change of the country, which is required to strip back Blairism, but To revolutionally change something is not to respect its traditions, and if you're going to parrot Blairite talking points, nobody's going to believe you that you are the effective administrative antidote to all of the Blairism that's come before.
	Unfortunately, plenty of people are because they're just swapping to labour, but anyone who's plugged in knows that you're just lying.
	And I want to say that this shows a final step of aggressive conceptual strategy because Keir Starmer is addressing the undecided voters.
	Those who are leftists are going to vote for him.
	And he continues, the Labour Party I lead is patriotic.
	It is a party of public service, not protest.
	It is a party of equality, justice and fairness.
	One that proudly puts the needs of working people above any fringe interest.
	All three of those concepts are antithetical.
	That is my point, that he is throwing away concepts without qualifying it.
	And this shows that actually he understands that the undecided voters who are a sizable population, they are in favor of, for instance, patriotism.
	And by heading along these lines, he's trying to subvert the concept.
	Maybe he's not doing it consciously.
	He's absolutely doing it consciously.
	I try to be sometimes, you know...
	He ran a Marxist newspaper that wanted to abolish the monarchy in university.
	Maybe you're right. Maybe I'm being too diplomatic here.
	But that is the issue.
	They're trying to throw away...
	Notions like that. And unless we try to have a conceptual answer to conceptual threats, we are going to be led into the trap of fighting in a game whose rules are not set by us.
	Yeah, we'll be tilting at windmills.
	Yes. That is why I think that those who are on the conservative and the classical liberal side, we have work to do in a sense and we have conceptual work to do as well.
	And we need to counter these tendencies.
	Absolutely. Alright, I'm actually going to bring a white pill segment today.
	Sorry, just clean my throat. That's good to hear.
	Yeah, well, we're smuggled in.
	Valentine's Day just came and went.
	I hope you all had a lovely evening in the arms of your lover, or sobbing into a tub of Ben& Jerry's to console your existential loneliness.
	Whichever was applicable. Did you do much yesterday, Stelios?
	My lady is in York, so we were Skyping.
	Oh, that's wholesome. There you go.
	We spend time together.
	Yeah, that's good. That's good. I mean, it's just a day.
	But it's always nice to at least have a reminder to express the love.
	And also, for me, it's not just a day because it's a Catholic feast day and it's been conscripted by the marketing departments into making it very vapid.
	But I think we should reclaim a bit of that sentiment.
	Unfortunately, the modern dating landscape is absolutely awful, so let's examine some newly released data on what Zoomers want in the desert of eligible candidates.
	To paraphrase a wise man in dating, you get what you effing deserve, and this is your symposium, which you can watch if you...
	To pay £5 a month on Aristotle and Justice and Merit.
	I don't know if anyone saw Todd Phillips posted a photo as well of Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix playing Joker and Harley Quinn.
	None of us deserve that.
	Absolutely not. It's horrible.
	But this was a really good discussion, so go over and watch it and find out to be a better man.
	Speaking of how to be a better person, I suppose, we'll go to our favourite place, TikTok.
	I'm going to do what you subject everyone else to, and we're going to watch a dating coach articulate...
	Why do you have to reveal my secrets?
	Well, because...
	Reciprocal torture, Stelius.
	Come on. The dating coach has given us the formula for inevitable loneliness.
	Let's watch, please, John. I went on a third date a couple weeks ago, and after the date, I told my sister, this guy is so, so, so sweet, but he's not the one for me, and I feel so bad.
	And I told her this story how when he picked me up for the third date, he had this wrapped up bagel.
	I'm gonna put a picture right here. He had this wrapped up bagel because he had told me beforehand that he's from the East Coast, and there's this amazing bagel shop, and they have the best bagels in the world, and like, On and on and on about, and I was like, oh my god, I gotta try this bagel.
	His mom had sent him a dozen bagels, and he froze one for me to save for our next date so I could try one.
	And just a couple days before that, I was in Vegas for New Year's Eve with my friend, and he asked for my Venmo so he could send me money for a drink, and he sent me this Venmo that said, you're cute, can I buy you a drink?
	Which is, oh my god, the sweetest thing ever.
	And then when we're out at this third date, we're sitting at the restaurant and he's sitting across from me.
	He's like, oh my God, you are so pretty.
	You are just so beautiful.
	I'm like, thank you.
	He's so sweet. And so I'm telling my sister all of this and she's like, oh my God, that is so rare.
	Like this guy is so great.
	And my response, I was not trying to be bitchy in any kind of way, but I'm like, no, it's not rare.
	Like also I'm a dating coach, so I have a different mindset around it, but I'm like, this isn't rare.
	I'm like, Honestly, this stuff happens for me a lot.
	Like I only date guys who treat me this well.
	I only date guys who are that level of sweet or like complimentary towards me or loving or thoughtful.
	Like that's the, that is not rare for me.
	But when she said that, it hit me like, this is one of the reasons why women stick with people who aren't the right fit because they see these behaviors as rare.
	And maybe right now you're listening to like, it is rare.
	I've never had a guy do that. I've only had one guy do that.
	Guys aren't like that. Think about your standards.
	Think about what you allow and what you accept.
	Because I know when I had different standards, standards is another word for expectations, when I had lower expectations, I got lower effort.
	Now my standards are up here and now this is typical shit where I know for other reasons this is not my person, but I am not in a scarcity mindset where I'm like, I have to stick with this guy because no one else is going to be this sweet to me.
	No one else is going to be this thoughtful.
	No one else is going to treat me that right.
	I 100% know that that is false because I only date guys who treat me that well.
	And it is only as rare as you allow it to be.
	Based on what you are willing to put up with.
	Based on what you are willing to stick around for.
	And based on who you are available for.
	And yes, I did end up ending things with this guy.
	He was super sweet about it.
	Very understanding. Very kind.
	And I hope the best for him.
	I'm sorry for that intolerable vapidness, but I just had to illustrate how the grass is greener, fear of missing out mentality of hypergamy is a road to nowhere.
	Like, she is going to be alone for the rest of her life.
	And any woman that takes this advice will be.
	Because yes, you should have very high standards about how your partner treats you.
	But you've got to pick one.
	Like, the guy's bending over backwards to do stuff for you, and you clearly don't deserve it because you're an incredibly narcissistic person.
	And what this does is it leaves people emotionally vagrant because they're constantly worrying about trading up, and so they can never commit to someone.
	And you're just going to be lonely.
	You're going to run out the biological clock.
	It's horrible. I mean, the word sweet, whenever guys are described as sweet, that's a red flag.
	That's the death knell. Your testicles retract back.
	No, it means basically that she's not into you.
	Yeah, she looks like you look a pet.
	You should still be romantic.
	That's slightly different.
	Yeah, but it's how they use it.
	Yes, exactly. I mean, sweet is like, you know, As John just said, sweet is a misnomer for weak in the minds of quite a few women.
	The only thing is though, sure, you should also get it of where a woman doesn't scorn your romantic gestures.
	They should have the appropriate attunement for knowing what is sentimental, the effort that goes into things.
	They shouldn't just dismiss things as cringeworthy.
	You need the appropriate understanding.
	And this woman isn't dealing that out.
	She's constantly saying, women, you should always be looking for your next best upgrade.
	Well, you're just going to be alone.
	I don't know if this anticipates stuff, but it seems to me that the whole social media thing leads men and women to think that basically they have way more choices than they actually have.
	Absolutely.
	Because they have more choices with respect to browsing images.
	Yeah, dating apps just induce paralysis by analysis because you're getting a cultivated image of a person's best life, and so you collect them.
	And then it also incentivizes noncommittalness because if there's a delay in responding, if you aren't meeting up for quite a while, you can just ditch that person and dismiss their concerns and never know whether or not they're actually interested.
	And I want to say something.
	It won't take long, but I want to say that this way of viewing things is completely abstract.
	Because if we talk about persons, that's one thing.
	You could always say that there is someone that is somehow...
	At some point, a better match.
	But the point is that it's not just – we don't live in a platonic heaven where we have souls meeting each other.
	We have flesh and blood human beings in particular cities, particular towns.
	It's not just that you can go throughout the whole globe for a date.
	Yeah. Well, lots of guys are.
	Have you heard about the passport bros, by any chance, that have given up on Western women and so they're flying out to Asia and Eastern Europe to basically pick up traditional brides?
	That basically destroys my brain.
	Sorry, that really made me laugh.
	Right. John, can we skip the next one, please, and just go straight on to this info dump recently?
	Now, this was really interesting, and it's made me really happy to be back dating now, I can tell you.
	The January 2023 American Perspective Survey of more than 5,000 adults aged 18 or older, including nearly 800 single adults, finds Americans have strong dating preferences when it comes to living at home, being unemployed, and smoking.
	These are especially salient considerations for women.
	Now, women's dating preferences are kind of the selection mechanism by which men select and compete for markers of competence.
	So women are meant to be holding men to account all throughout civilization, right?
	Men posit the values, women enforce them.
	So that's a really healthy way of doing it.
	When we look at the values that women are looking for, it's largely discouraging.
	There are a few encouraging markers for some of you single lads out there looking to meet women.
	Right, so today's Americans spend a greater time of their live single.
	The rise in divorce and delay of marriage mean that dating occurs later in life and our dating lives last much longer than they once did.
	So, a period of arrested development.
	Not only are Americans spending more time dating, the goals for dating, which at one point primarily served as an avenue to marriage, are less clear than they once were.
	In 2021, only about half of Americans, slightly more men than women, report being married.
	The US Census Bureau reports a steady decline in marriage rates going back 50 years, and that's particularly economically determined.
	Most people getting married, the income bracket's going up, so most people aren't getting married.
	It's at the lower end of the ladder, whereas marriage is one of the main ways that if you don't have a baby out of wedlock, you get married and you get a job, that's the trifecta of how to get started in social mobility, and you're just taking that away from the people who have the least at the bottom.
	One in three Americans have never been married.
	Only 25% of younger adults, 18 to 34, are currently married.
	In 1978, younger adults were almost twice as likely to be married at 59%.
	So we've suffered a complete death blow to the marriage rates.
	The number of Americans cohabiting with their non-marital romantic partner has more than doubled over the past three decades.
	Nearly six in ten younger Americans report having cohabited with a romantic partner.
	Now this is one of the reasons that marriage is going down the pan.
	Because you're basically playing house.
	You're playing at being married. Because it is more economically expedient to share rent with a partner.
	And that way you never get a house deposit and you never actually have a reason to settle down.
	You're essentially saying, yeah, you're alright for now, but as soon as I decide that we're going to break our contractual agreement, I'll scarper off.
	And it's not like you're doing that. You're engaged to your missus.
	It's not like Harry's doing that. He's engaged to his.
	But I've definitely, I've lived with a couple of girlfriends a couple of times.
	I can tell you now, fellas, never do it.
	Because all that ends up happening is, she gets comfortable at this particular living standard.
	If there's any kind of disruption in the living standard, she thinks, where can I trade up from here?
	Because this is my new normal, and she'll just scarper with half your money.
	If she thinks this way, and if people think this way, because it's men and women who think this way, and they live together and they cohabitate, then at some point, you know, marriage becomes a cost because they become habituated into living together.
	It's just a piece of paper, right?
	And they say, yeah, okay, it's just a piece of paper.
	Why should we pay so many thousand pounds or dollars or euros, whatever, to do it?
	Let's just be here and chill.
	Yeah, it's very flippant because people don't realise that marriage is about the children and lots of people don't realise that as we'll get on to much later because there just really aren't any children for most people anymore.
	More than 3 in 10, 35% of Americans, have never been married but only about 1 in 5 are currently single.
	Over half, 53%, have never been married and are currently living with their partner have been in a relationship for at least 5 years.
	Why aren't you married? Nearly 1 in 3, 32% of Americans living with their partner have been together for at least 10 years.
	So a third of Americans living with their partner have been with them for 10 years and have never tied the knot.
	Marriage has become a defunct institution.
	Again, we'll figure out why later.
	Nearly 6 in 10 young men, compared to 38% of young women, reported being single during the pandemic.
	At the end of 2022, male relationship status was largely the same as it was more than two years later.
	Today, a majority, 57% of young men, are single.
	Young women appear to have experienced a modest increase in single status, close to 45%.
	So, we are approaching the Rousseauian conception of savages in a general-will state, where we're getting increasing abundance, we're getting, like, AI art that caters to our unique experiences.
	We don't share anything anymore, but absolutely no one has a relationship.
	So we're just all atomized pod people, eternally consuming.
	I hope that's not true.
	Whenever you hear someone saying, I hope I'm wrong, that's where you're in deep trouble.
	Rousseau wasn't the best of fathers.
	No, he was horrible, just like Marx.
	Yeah. Well, luckily, not many people are mothers and fathers nowadays, to be horrible to them, but also, not luckily, not many people are mothers and fathers.
	We kind of need you. Only about 1 in 10 single Americans report they're currently dating one person, 11%, or more than one person, 2%.
	42% report they are not currently dating anyone, but remain open to the possibility.
	42% of people don't have a date lined up, but are desperately longing for connectivity.
	Okay, I have to interject here, and maybe you will disagree with this, but I think it's an interesting point.
	Aren't we a bit obsessed with people dating or not?
	Because it seems to me that this is part of the problem, that when we feel that we constantly have to be out on dates and we constantly have to be on relationships.
	Because they're not dating for a purpose, because marriage as an institution and children as a life goal has been defunct.
	So you're going out and dating for an experience and constantly looking to trade up.
	You're getting the dopamine high of increasing the people that you're constantly with.
	Exactly. And because, as you said, that marriage can be seen in teleological terms, it could also have a first stage, which involves some self-mastery and self-development.
	Absolutely. So I don't think that it's a problem if people...
	At some points don't go out on dates and they don't have partners.
	It's what you're trying to do with your time.
	If you are using your time to be, to, let's say, focus on a journey, a spiritual inner journey of self-development, then I think that's a good thing.
	Yes, John's also pointed out the disparate rates between young men and young women dating.
	It just says that they might be dating older men, if not the men, or each other, John, as well.
	Increasingly, women are just dating women because that lesbian domestic violence rate's got to go up, apparently.
	Nearly half, 47% of single men, report being open to dating, compared to only 36% of single women.
	Loads of female incels.
	They just checked out the dating market, apparently.
	The gender gap in dating is even wider among young singles.
	More than half, 52% of young single men say they're open to dating, compared to only 36% of young single women.
	Young adults aged 18 to 29 are far more likely to have used an online dating service than seniors, 33% versus 9%.
	But Gen Zedders are actually less likely to have used dating apps than Millennials are.
	So why is Gen Z just checking out dating?
	36% of single adults say having more important priorities is a major reason they're not dating.
	Single women are much more likely than single men to say this is a major reason.
	45% versus 29%.
	An identical number, 36%, of single Americans say difficulty meeting people is a major reason that they're not dating.
	Roughly equal numbers of single men and women, 35% and 38%, say this is the major fact.
	You know, I think that's the funnier thing.
	Difficulty in meeting people because this is where I think social media comes into it and it gives a completely mistaken idea of having, you know, many choices.
	And I think this affects people in all sorts of ways.
	And I have a theory that I want you to tell me.
	It's not very well worked up, but I think, you know, it's fun to put it forward.
	I can see the impish grin, so I'm waiting for it.
	Yes. So I think, okay, I saw where you were talking about it.
	It spoke of, you know, Democrats and Republican traits.
	I don't think that's the issue there so much.
	I think we should see it in terms of players and non-players.
	What do I mean by that?
	So I think that what social media have done is that they have...
	Increased the perceived reach of players.
	And women see this and they suddenly think, well, I could have this guy.
	And they progressively move, they do not date people who do not fit particular criteria.
	And I would say that it is these people who are not afraid of commitment But I would say it's more that how social media is taking many young women away from people who may not have let's say the best looks or the best body or physical physique or something.
	I wouldn't know about that. I know the OkCupid data came out and said that 0% of women rated the men that they were presented with as 10 out of 10, and 80% of women were going for the top 20% of men in terms of earning and looks.
	So lots of women's perceptions are askew.
	And there's actually testimonies in this article, which speaks to the phenomenon you're talking about.
	There's one woman that says people think they just have a million options.
	It's like when you want to watch a show and you put on Netflix and, like, you literally find yourself not being able to decide for like an hour and then you wind up not watching anything.
	Anytime a person, man or woman has limitless options all of the time, there's this perception, and most of the time it's a false perception, that who they're with now is not good enough.
	That's why no one has the patience with each other anymore, because they could always get something better.
	We're trading up on the grounds of hypotheticals and it's just running out your ability to actually meet a mate in time to have children.
	I think if they think this way, the game is already lost.
	Because love is not a...
	I don't see as...
	Transactional? No. Yeah, it's not transactional and it doesn't follow logically.
	You don't say, okay, let me put in some input and calculate the data, therefore I should love this person.
	There's no formulaic way to ensure relationship success.
	It's something we'll be talking about on Symposium this week when we record.
	Stay tuned. There's also a rise in insuldom.
	More than one in four, 27% of single Americans, say a major reason they're not dating is they simply enjoy being single.
	One in five Americans who are not currently dating anyone say that nobody being interested in them is a major factor.
	So it's not that they're self-improving.
	It's not that they're at that level there.
	There's not that continent stage of reaching the teleology of marriage by going from self-improvement to courtship to marriage to children.
	It's just that they're existing as a consumer and they're not doing active things to better themselves.
	And because they're not doing that, they're caught in the cycle of depression, of low self-esteem, which thinks nobody likes me and I don't deserve it anyway, so I might as well just give up.
	It's the eating Doritos in your basement mentality that quite a lot of guys have.
	And it's also the mentality of women on the other side of, well, I'm not going to settle for anything less than having a Bugatti.
	It's ridiculous. Obviously, women's expectations are...
	Have you seen the fake photos that they occasionally have with really, you know, they're posing on a Bugatti or something?
	Oh, God almighty.
	It's just unbearably cringeworthy.
	That's all right. Women's expectations are pretty askew on what women demand versus what the men themselves expect.
	So they're saying...
	I don't want to be in a relationship where someone isn't open-minded about things that I want to do.
	Like, if they have their point of view on something and I have a different point of view, I'd like to have a conversation about it.
	Or, pretty much my biggest thing is respect.
	If we're in a relationship, you shouldn't have any dating apps on your phone at all.
	Or, we ask for simple things, you know?
	Remembering things that we talked about in conversations.
	Flowers occasionally. Date nights.
	Every once in a while just to have that reassurance that our relationship is worthwhile and feeling like we can really spend great quality time together.
	Now, that seems perfectly reasonable.
	Right? Yeah.
	But then... I mean, we could interpret some of those statements in a particularly uncharitable way.
	Well, we don't know how that plays out with the individual women, because women say one thing and then act out another, because women will say, I just want a bit of reassurance, and then act like vultures on your self-esteem, going, rah, love me!
	You know what? I don't think that these accounts are reliable.
	Both for men and women because I think love is not a rationalistic demonstration.
	It arises spontaneously.
	It seems to me that this is paralysis by analysis.
	And it's also signaling a particular image.
	It's like some women, for instance, or men who constantly say, I would date a celebrity.
	A celebrity is my type because they want to appeal cool.
	Yeah. But that's not the way to go forward.
	Actually, that's borne out in the reveal preferences of what actually happens between what they say versus behave because there's another testimony that says, a lot of women I've met, a lot of my own peers are on the same age or unmarried.
	They're out there looking for Mr.
	Perfect. He's got to be six feet.
	He's got to make so much money each year.
	His family has to be perfect. He has to agree with all my personal beliefs.
	And you know, men are human too.
	They're not going to meet all of those expectations.
	I think men are still looking for a type of woman that doesn't really exist anymore.
	They're looking for a 1950s housewife type woman.
	And that's just not the type of girls I think are out there today.
	A lot of girls want to go to college, have a career, make a name for themselves in the world, and they don't want to settle.
	Right. So you want to be a man, and the high-value men that you are chasing and making demands of, six-foot, really rich, competent family, wants a family, wants a woman.
	So be a woman! Don't go out and make yourself voluntarily unattracted to the type of men who are saying, I want a traditional wife.
	And you're like, no, I want to be a boss girl, but you should accept me anyway.
	Yeah, because they think that they're going to change that guy.
	Yeah, I can fix him. Yeah.
	Yeah. Save your mentality.
	Never leads to anything, fellas. That's the issue that if they do this, they're suddenly not attracted to that person anymore.
	Yep. Yep. Well, no woman's also attracted to a man that she could basically mother.
	Like, every woman wants a man that's better than her.
	Difficult truths are spoken here.
	Eh, exactly. Well, you need it if you're going to try and save the West and have a relationship.
	81% of women, compared to 56% of men, said they'd be less likely to date someone who didn't have a job.
	That is the key thing.
	Men mostly, mostly, don't care about what you do necessarily for a career.
	As long as it doesn't make you an actively horrible person, and if you're in a bad financial strait, you can kind of pull your weight a little bit.
	But most men want to out-earn their women, and most women want their men to out-earn them.
	The rates of divorce for women that out-earn their men are astronomically higher.
	Because a woman wants to look up to you.
	She wants to be protected and be provided for.
	It's a biological drive and it's totally respectable.
	So women, if you want a competent man, don't compete with him.
	We don't find it attractive.
	Like, we're quite simple.
	We like pretty, nice, listens to our stories, right?
	Thinks we're funny. That's it.
	We're kind of still cavemen deep down.
	So don't try and be a bloke because we just don't like it.
	So here's what men want.
	55% of Americans rate the attractiveness of their partner about the same as themselves.
	About 1 in 4 Americans believe they're the more attractive person, while 17% believe their partner is more attractive.
	And the outstripping of men, of women, is by a factor of about 10 points.
	So men want a partner who is far more attractive visually than they are, but they want to earn more.
	And women are going, right, but I want to be super attractive, and I want him to be six foot, and I want his family to be more intact than mine most of the time, and I want to make similar money, but I want him to have more.
	Do you understand how infinitesimally small that pool is?
	Like, if a guy is sweet, and he's got good money, and he's got good ethics...
	Settle down with him, especially because married men actually make more money because you are the driving motivator for him to go and earn more.
	I've heard this idea that men are more image-oriented and women are more story-oriented.
	I'm not entirely sold on this, but I do think that it has something.
	It's the people versus things dichotomy.
	Yeah, because I think that also women are really prone to image, especially from TikTok and the dating apps.
	But I do think that there is something in the story account, the narrative bit, because they very frequently find good people, in a traditional sense, boring.
	And I think that this plays into a narrative that may go on into their minds, that for some reason they want to see themselves as taming someone.
	Yeah, that's the beauty and the beast, Stark.
	There's also the relative level of investment before you start dating someone.
	So most guys, if you are attracted to a girl, if she's made herself known to you, or if you're just approaching her in a bar, I guess if people still do that these days, most guys will go, oh, she looks pretty, she sounds nice, I'll buy her a drink.
	Whereas most women will go, do I accept the offer of a date from this guy unless I have already concocted a fantasy of will I end up with his kids, or will we end up travelling the world and I'll be a child of spinster, or whatever it is.
	Unless the women have the narrative already playing out in their heads, they won't say yes to your date.
	So she has to have an investment level in you way higher than you before she'll even say yes.
	I'm looking at the area that...
	Yeah, this is what women and men want, which is really interesting.
	If you want to find out how to find a compatible partner, and of course we don't have any leftists in our audience, politics are okay, but the strongest indicator for leftist women is politics, right?
	That's 24% of women are far more likely to date you if you're a Democrat and they're a Democrat.
	4 in 10, 42% of Americans, say they'd be less likely to date someone who's very religious.
	That's interesting. Because 20% say they would make them more interested in dating someone who is very religious of the same religion as them.
	So... There's a large cohort of atheists who really don't like it, but a very small, strong cohort of people who share your religious convictions who are dating for that.
	And so if you have a religious conviction, then you are dating specifically for marriage within that religious tradition.
	And so if that's the case, you actually have a decent chance of meeting someone who lines up with your values.
	69% of liberals say they'd be less inclined to date a very religious person compared to 24% of conservatives.
	There we go. So that means there is a larger cohort of conservatives that are actively seeking religious compatibility.
	This is a good pathway for you to find someone.
	Three quarters of conservative women, 75%, say they'd be less likely to date someone who doesn't believe in God.
	75% of conservative women want Christian men.
	I'm telling you boys, the church is the new tinder.
	There's also height. So women are very discriminatory based on height.
	Because of course they were. 92% of women want a taller man.
	So sorry to all the short kings out there.
	Nick Dixon will find someone eventually, I'm sure.
	56% of women rule out dating men shorter than them.
	Almost entirely. So, men kind of don't mind.
	Actually, there's 32% of men that are open to dating a woman taller than them.
	I guess they want to just get stepped on.
	So, either go to mass or buy some stilts, fellas.
	Politics is really interesting. Roughly two-thirds, 65% of Democrats, say they'd be less likely to date a Republican.
	More than six in ten self-identified Republicans say they'd be less likely to date a Democrat.
	So, the dating market is bifurcating.
	More than 9 in 10, 91% of liberal women, say they'd be less likely to date a Trump supporter.
	Conservative men express the greatest objection to dating feminists, with 70% reporting they'd be less inclined.
	Because they know it's cancer.
	For liberal women, abortion is especially salient during consideration.
	6 in 10 say it would be impossible for them to date someone with a different view on abortion.
	Just an indication, boys.
	Don't ever marry a woman that's confident to killing your kids.
	You'll have no lineage left.
	The interesting thing, though, is the Conservative men are happiest in marriage, right?
	Republican men report being most satisfied in their relationships, while Democratic women report being the least.
	Because the Democratic women are sleeping with feminist men.
	Nearly half, 48% of Republican married men say they're completely satisfied with a spouse.
	42% of Republican married women say they're completely satisfied.
	36% of Democratic married men and 29% of Democratic women report being satisfied with their relationship.
	So the Republican relationship satisfaction holds after accounting for differences in education, race, ethnicity, age and religion.
	So it just seems that being conservative, no matter your religious tradition, background, ethnicity, or earnings level, means that you're much more continent in your relationships, and it's going to go the distance.
	I must say here, because we did a symposium with Carl, which will be released two weeks from now.
	Michael Oakshott has this brilliant line where he says that the conservative does not...
	Part with unknown good for unknown better.
	Yes. And it seems to me that this is behind all of this because the whole idea behind the social media thing is that we are so much bombarded with images And the Gen Z people, they have this idea that there is a better somewhere out there.
	And they are so much infatuated with this idea that they don't look at the good things in front of them.
	They sacrifice the tangible wall for the hypothetical and end up getting nothing.
	Don't do that. You won't be very happy.
	Then just onto cheating briefly before we wrap up.
	Black women have the highest rates of partner infidelity?
	Moving on. Open relationships.
	Only 7% of Americans have ever been in an open relationship.
	28% of gay or lesbians and 22% of Americans who identify as bisexual have been in open relationships.
	So it's a very niche community which they all want to swap fluids.
	And then lastly, children.
	Children's the most important one, because that's what marriage is for, right?
	Roughly 4 in 10 Americans say they'd be less likely to date someone who does not want children.
	44% say this would not matter to them, and 14% say that this would be more likely to date them.
	14% of people never want children for the rest of their lives.
	So they're merely having a companion throughout their lives who services their basic needs.
	Which means that those people are probably far more likely to be narcissistic.
	So if a woman doesn't want children, fellas, run a mile.
	Unfortunately, that's lots of them.
	Because we go to this data recently released by the ONS. Half of women in the UK are now childless above 31 for the first time ever.
	So, this has been since records began in 1920.
	A third of women born in that decade had not mothered a child by the age of 30.
	Women born in the 1940s were the most likely to have had at least one child by that milestone, 82%.
	The most common age to have a child now is 31, the ONS estimates on the latest data, compared to 22 among the baby boomers in the 40s.
	Well, that's a demographic bump.
	Yeah, that's it. We're just actively destroying our country.
	So we are living in Simone de Beauvoir's world.
	If we go to just the last link, please.
	This is what Carl and I spoke about in The Evil Origins of Feminism.
	This woman is so sexually repressed and self-hating that she prescribed women rebel against their biology, completely discontinue from reproduction, deny themselves the pleasures of motherhood, enter the workforce en masse, have female-only Marxism, And that results in the complete depopulation of the earth and the subsummation of orderliness back into the chaos before creation, devoured by the great dragon Tiamat, who sends forth her waves of feminism.
	Let's not do the bidding of antinatalists for them.
	Go out. Hit the gym.
	Go to church. Volunteer in your community.
	Just become an outspoken Christian man.
	Online as well, because Twitter is also quite useful for meeting people.
	Good luck, kings and queens.
	We're going to need you. On to the video comments.
	Okay. I did a podcast segment on it last week.
	Yes, you did. It was very good, actually.
	This one. You think this is a humorous occasion?
	You are mistaken. From now on, there's going to be discipline on the ship.
	We're going to have order, and we're going to be like seamen.
	Borrowing certain aesthetics from Space Marines, James Crake knits together aspects of The Expanse, back when it was good, and Mutiny on the Bounty to weave a story where mistakes are made and consequences must be accepted.
	I enjoyed the plot twists and the consistent pacing of the story.
	Okay, there we go. 30-second book review.
	Saying seaman made me chuckle because it reminded me of a time that when I was about 14, I was sitting out front in a restaurant in Turkey, and a 5'5 ship's captain in all white, dressed like a character from Officer and a gentleman, walks along with about six Thai brides on his arm, and my dad decided to say, they like seaman.
	Anyway, onto the website comments.
	This has been put at the top by Pete.
	David Winder, angry Christian Connor is my favourite.
	The last few months you've made me look into religion a bit more.
	Well, hey, if you're single, hope it gets you a girlfriend, mate.
	Well done. Lord Nerevar, I'm a historian by trade and I can confidently say that subversion of Christianity is on a level unseen since the days of the persecution of Rome.
	We're at a point where not even the average Christians themselves can organise enough of a pushback to save their faith from total dismantling.
	This is the sort of situation the Muslim Caliphs or the Rogan Pagan holdouts could only dream of.
	If the Christians don't defend their faith now, it will be forever lost.
	Absolutely. We need some more intestinal fortitude.
	Dean Parker. How would you advise people who are contemplating attending church for the first time but apprehensive about the prevalence of wokeness in their local churches?
	Just a sample of Sunday service.
	One of the main things as well that you can use...
	Someone's asked me this before, and I said, if they hand out the little...
	Like, weekly notice pamphlets along with their hymn sheets or hymn books or whatever.
	Look for the charities that they donate to and look for the coded language when you listen to the homily because some of them will throw social justice terms in there and run a mile.
	Also, if there's ever a pride flag anywhere near a church, then...
	It's just inexcusable.
	It's already a den of demons.
	Do you want to go on to your website comments?
	Yes. Okay. Lord Nerevar, I think it's quite interesting how Labour has been slowly trying to pivot back to being a patriotic party.
	It seems obvious that a political party which aims to run a country should like the country they want to run.
	Presumably. Labour was radical under Corbyn in taking the opposite line and paid a heavy price for it.
	I can see the problem that Starmer is facing, given that a huge amount of the party membership got there because of Corbyn.
	He has to root them out if he wants to stabilize his party.
	But how can he when there are so many?
	Propagandising like this seems to be a way to put on a brave face for the electorate at large, while also nudging the Corbynistas further out of the framework.
	Smart, but will it be effective?
	I think it will be effective by default because the British public are probably going to vote Labour.
	But I am not certain that...
	I don't know the degree to which Starmer is against the Corbynites of the party because he says he is, but this frequently happens in politics.
	But they are trying to basically address as many people as possible to vote for them.
	It's just that the Corbynites are appealing to a different segment of the population, one that is...
	More ideological, Starmer has a face that is a bit more welcoming to the, let's say, wider public.
	He's a pragmatist. X, Y and Z. Lee should leave the Tories and become the first reclaim MP. Sophie Leve Patterson.
	No young people in the working class.
	That couldn't possibly have anything to do with you people utterly destroying that class, could it?
	And Bald Eagle 1787.
	The propaganda trap isn't a trap when everyone knows it's a trap.
	Conservatives that walk into that trap know what they're doing, and they're intentionally trying to sabotage any conservative message they can.
	It's easy for leftists to infiltrate conservative circles and then sabotage within, much like the Cold War when the Soviet Union had thoroughly infiltrated the West due to the ease of it.
	I don't know to what extent they know it or, I mean, it's an issue of numbers here, of percentages.
	There is some controlled opposition. There's also perverse financial incentives to keep letting the left in and the Overton window remaining where it is.
	And Omar Awad, the real trap for conservatives was letting the left gain administrative control.
	Doesn't matter how good your arguments are, if the opposition can ban you from anywhere others will hear it.
	People are also influenced by crowds, like the manufactured opinion of question time audiences.
	Yep, absolutely. Hence why we've built our own institution.
	We'll do a couple more from the last segment and then we'll give John a break, shall we?
	Alpha of the Betas. Dating while billing yourself as a dating coach is an absurdity.
	It's like a fitness trainer who can never reach peak fitness or a climbing coach who has never reached the summit.
	Is there a goal at the end of this dating besides stroking your vanity?
	Yeah, it's like the academics in universities who teach business.
	You ever open to business? No.
	Otherwise you'd be running it and you'd be much richer than an academic.
	David Winder. Valentine's came and went.
	Double entendre on purpose.
	No, mine's out the gutter.
	Also wasn't for me. Got dumped a few weeks ago, but I'm doing alright now.
	Fine. Free Will 2112.
	The thing that has destroyed most of the social fabric, including dating, is the modern habit of living one's life in the public glare of social media, and using social media as a guide to life's problems, as if these narcissistic influences are the modern fount of wisdom.
	In the old days, most people relied on the garnered wisdom of the older members of their families to provide them with the navigating the tribulations of life.
	Now that source of wisdom is drying up.
	Yeah, I would say that a woman who has a strong relationship with her parents and her grandparents if they're still around and doesn't have a TikTok account or an active Instagram account is probably a good sign.
	And that's the thing. They're presenting dating as if it is a skill.
	I mean, you could say that it is, but there is more to it than that.
	Yeah, it's not just the process that's spinning its wheels for the purpose of it.
	It's a stepping stone to a lifelong, meaningful relationship.
	And frankly, dating for a lifelong, meaningful relationship is actually the way to go.
	Still trying, but Stelios has got it on lock.
	Anyway, thank you very much for a good show, Stelios.
	Always a pleasure. Comics Corner comes out at 5 today.
	We're back tomorrow at 1 o'clock.
	Until then, thank you and goodbye.

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