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Feb. 21, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:34:52

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #594

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	Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
	Welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for Tuesday, the 21st of February, 2023.
	I forget what year it is.
	I'm joined by Helen Dale.
	How are you doing, Helen? Very well, Carl.
	How are you? I'm really hungover, so I'll struggle through this with you.
	Oh, you poor lad.
	You poor lad.
	I very rarely drink, so it's...
	Oh dear. Yes. So you've turned into the world's cheapest drunk, have you?
	You know what? Actually, yes.
	But I've always been a bit of a lightweight, so anyway...
	But anyway, right, so today we're going to be talking about how wokeism is losing ground in Scotland, unfortunately, for me, because I like making content about the SNP, and how the far right has suddenly gained control of all the prestigious cultural institutions.
	They've just been handed to the far right.
	And Roald Dahl is a good example of this because they're busy desecrating his corpus, which I don't really like, because I actually really like Roald Dahl, like most people.
	So let's begin. Scotland has been an interesting case study in what happens when a woke cult takes over.
	Yes. How do you feel about Nicola Sturgeon's resignation?
	This is a classic example.
	What happened with Nicola Sturgeon is, in a sense, she planted a landmine for Rishi Sunak.
	And then made the mistake of stomping on it herself to see if it would work.
	Blew herself up.
	Because the rationale behind what she was doing with the gender recognition Gender Recognition Reform Bill that Rishi Sunak stood in the way of using Section 35 of the Scotland Act was that she thought she could build that into a conflict between Westminster and Holyrood and say and argue,
	as she has done in the past and as before her, Alex Salmond used to do this as well, that Westminster was stymieing the democratic will of the people of Scotland.
	And the explosion has been generated by the fact that once people in Scotland found out what the substantive content of the gender recognition reform bill actually was, they decided they didn't like it very much.
	Thank God for Westminster. Save the Scots.
	Say the Scots, basically.
	But it's not only that.
	UnHerd, the organisation that publishes the online magazine, which frankly must have more money than God to have done this, actually commissioned attitudes to trans people.
	And they didn't just do a national poll, which is relatively inexpensive.
	Which is what YouGov or Panelbase or Servation typically do.
	And they save their MRP polls, which is a special kind of constituency-based poll that Unherd have done.
	The other polling companies save those MRP polls for just before elections because they're so expensive.
	Because what an MRP poll does is it doesn't give you just a nationally representative picture or, in the case of an election, swing.
	It gives you a constituency by constituency-based picture.
	And what Unherd's polling, MRP polling, means that stands for multiple regression poll, by the way.
	What that means in context is that nine out of ten of the most anti-trans constituencies in the United Kingdom are in Scotland.
	They have all just gone...
	We are the landmine.
	We are the landmine.
	Or get to, as people in Glasgow will say.
	But it's a really peculiar hill to die on though, isn't it?
	It is. Why this?
	Why do you have to put the transgender rapist in the woman's prison?
	It's just extraordinary.
	I mean, my piece that I wrote for Law& Liberty, which came out yesterday...
	We'll get onto that in a second, actually.
	But before we begin, if you want to support us, go to merch.loses.com and buy some of our merch, because we've got great merch.
	Like the They Are Lying t-shirt.
	This is kind of a crib of a quote that's ascribed to Solzhenitsyn, but it's actually not his.
	I actually looked into this, but I do like it.
	They're lying. We know they're lying.
	They know. We know they're lying.
	And yet they are still lying.
	Because this is just how I feel about the wokest every single day of the week.
	This is a woman. It's like, oh, come on.
	Come on. You know I don't think that, and I know you know.
	So why are you saying it still?
	You know? Have some respect.
	Anyway, let's go on to your Law Liberty article.
	So I'll let you just explain it rather than going through it.
	Well, The Virtue of Law and Liberty, which is the think tank that I work for, it's an American think tank and I have a fractional appointment there that involves various things, one of which is writing a monthly feature for their legally focused magazine.
	Because it's a think tank, what Americans call a non-profit, it will never be paywalled.
	I understand Karl is going to put a link to my author profile underneath this once it goes out.
	I'm on YouTube so you can just read everything I've written there going back to the middle of 2019.
	Although I used to be just a freelancer.
	They hired me in January 2021.
	You can just read all of that.
	But the virtue of it is the audience is...
	Largely American, significantly American lawyers.
	And it's bipartisan, the lawyers who read it, it's the American Bar Association and the Federalist Society and they cover the law.
	In a broad way, and I'm one of their British writers.
	One of their other British writers is Theodore Dalrymple, who many of you will no doubt have read his books and read his articles as well.
	So what I had to do was try to explain how this has happened, how this extraordinary explosion has managed to happen.
	And I have to explain it in a way that makes sense to Americans.
	So I first had to explain the difference between devolution and federalism, because Americans are used to federalism, Australians are used to federalism.
	And so I did that at the beginning.
	And then I went through exactly what the SNP had done in Scotland and why they had chosen this piece of legislation as the hill to die on, to use your expression.
	And then I just went through the facts of how it just blew up all over Nicola Sturgeon And this extraordinary scene, which, and I've linked to Hansard, where she refused to call Adam Graham, aka Isla Bryson, either male or female, and just said, this individual, this person, a rapist.
	And the only way you could read this in context, and even when you listen to her, and I've put a link into the extraordinary tongue-tied interview she did with ITV, Where Scotland suddenly had three sexes, male, female and rapist.
	And there's no other way you can dress this up.
	It's completely bonkers.
	It's just...
	It is bonkers.
	It is bonkers. And the thing is, this is a...
	Yes, you're allowed to snigger.
	It's very funny. I can't help it.
	It's just ridiculous. And I made a decision.
	I ran the piece past a couple of lawyer friends.
	You tend to do this if you're a solicitor because it's a little bit like writing a complicated advice.
	You don't know if you have access to truth, basically, that you're going to get it right.
	And a friend of mine read it, another Scots lawyer, and she said, Helen, that's very funny, but we are talking about a rapist.
	A double rapist who finished up in a women's prison.
	I mean, it sounds like a Monty Python skit.
	Yes, it does. That's why it's funny.
	That is why it's funny. I'm not laughing at the fact that they're an evil criminal, and, you know, I'm all for the death penalty, but, like, come on, the organisation around what is happening is just...
	So what I did is I then shared the piece with some other friends before I filed and took the three weakest jokes out and left the funniest ones in on the basis that you just can't have a piece about a double rapist finishing up in a women's prison in the female estate that reads like a gag reel because I'm a lawyer.
	I'm not Monty Python, basically.
	Fair. But, like, this is what happened, as we were saying, before we started.
	It's Joe Swinson, just the meltdown over the definition of woman.
	It's amazing that this is just what's destroying them.
	But I thought we'd move on a little bit from this, see what the impact on the polling was.
	Servation have told us that, actually, this hasn't damaged, the resignation of Sturgeon hasn't damaged the SMP significantly.
	I thought it was going to, actually.
	I thought that she was kind of, like, she's generally the only person in the SNP anyone can name.
	Yes. Apart from Ian Blackford.
	But by the same token, Ian Blackford, I would genuinely suggest, is better known in Westminster because of PMQs.
	He's less well known in Scotland.
	I mean, the problem for the SNP, I think, will come when Sturgeon actually goes, because I don't know whether...
	Servatio are very good, but YouGov did one where they showed who's favourite to be the next leader of the SNP, the next First Minister, basically.
	We'll get to that in a minute.
	And don't know, was winning at a canter on 69%!
	We'll get to that in a second, yeah.
	So, weirdly, the SNP went up by one point in Servatio's polling.
	People were more inclined to like the SNP if Nicola Sturgeon goes, it seems.
	I thought it was going to damage them.
	But yeah, so let's go to the poll you were talking about, that the Spectator published an article on.
	Oh, it was the Spectator, wasn't it?
	Yeah. So, if you can scroll down on this one, John.
	There's a graph.
	There we go. So yes, who should lead the SNP? And it's broken down to SNP voters and all voters.
	And 45% of Scottish...
	Sorry, 50% of Scottish voters were just like, I don't know.
	That's an improvement on 69%, I have to say.
	That is an improvement on 69%.
	So maybe by the time...
	The SNP has its conference.
	They've got this conference coming up.
	It'll have narrowed down to maybe three people, and one of them will clearly pull ahead and be better known.
	Yeah, but as you can see from the others, I mean, it's quite close, really, from the other frontrunners.
	So, yeah, 34% of SNP voters are like...
	None of the above, I guess.
	I don't know. What's extraordinary is how low Swinney is.
	Because, I mean, Swinney is a fixture in Scottish politics.
	I left Scotland in 2014 to go and work for Senator Lionhelm in Australia.
	But before that, I'd been a solicitor in private practice at a commercial law firm in Edinburgh.
	And all of these other names were just unknowns.
	They probably weren't even MSPs at that point.
	But Swinney was...
	A fixture. I met him.
	I used to work in the Scottish Parliament, in the office of the solicitor to the Scottish Parliament, and he was really quite a well-known figure.
	Did Swinney not say he wasn't putting himself forward?
	My understanding is that he had, and this is sort of Bush Telegraph rumours, I don't know how much store to set by it, but I have been told by Scottish friends, including Scottish friends who are still on the inside basically, saying that when he was deputy leader of the SNP, Deputy First Minister, he had an absolutely awful time.
	He just had a dreadful time and he hated every minute of it.
	I'm sure I saw a tweet going around that was from him saying, I'm not putting myself forward so I endorse someone else.
	Yeah. And if that, yeah, that would line up then.
	Yeah, this was a poll for the Scotsman that asked a thousand people who they'd like to see and it was Kate Forbes who came out at the head with 18% and 14% among all voters.
	And then at the other end of the scale, Hamza Yusuf at 7%.
	So Kate Forbes seems to be leading the charge here.
	So who's Kate Forbes? I'd never heard of her.
	If you're a Unionist, and I mean, I know a little bit about Kate Forbes and a little bit about her religious background, One of the reasons why Scotland went woke is because wokery is a religion.
	I think the chap who wrote this book, which I recommend you read, I'm in the process of reviewing it for the spectator at the moment, but he makes the argument in here very compellingly.
	And he's also done it on a trigonometry interview as well.
	His name is Nigel Bigar.
	He's actually not just a historian, he's a theologian.
	So he knows a lot about the The theological history of both Christianity and Islam.
	They're his specialist areas. I think he's an Arabist as well.
	He speaks Arabic. Very, very clever fellow.
	And one of the reasons why Scotland went like this is because wokery is a religion and it carries over many aspects of religious belief.
	And Scotland historically has two strands to its intellectual history.
	Bonkers religion and the Scottish Enlightenment.
	And a lot of people get it into their head.
	They forget because they think of David Hume and Adam Smith and Ferguson and all of the brilliant figures of the Scottish Enlightenment.
	They forget that the other tradition in Scotland is a very, very strange and quite mad form of Christianity.
	Bible bashing. Yeah, the worst sort of Bible bashing, basically.
	I mean, the expression I used in my piece for Law and Liberty is I talked about, you know, a fire-breathing minister of the Scottish Kirk, because Alex Salmond can mug at that very well.
	Aren't they like some weird strain of Calvinism?
	Yes. Yeah, which is an extremely strict view on Christianity.
	Well, the thing with Calvinism is that the ones that believe in predestination...
	Are theologically closer to Sunni Islam than they are to any other version of Christianity, whether it's Catholic, Protestant or Unitarian or Seventh-day Adventist or whatever.
	They are actually because they believe in this idea that Allah or God knows all and knows your future and knows whether you're good or bad.
	Predestination, that's much, much closer.
	That's why you hear in Arabic, you hear Sunnis but not Shia because they're a bit different.
	You hear them say, Inchalla, God willing, all the time.
	And that's predestination.
	It's a particular theological position.
	Nigel Bigar explains it better than me.
	And the thing is, the reason Scotland got sucked into all this weird wokery is because they have that weird religious tradition and they can get sucked into weird religious views, both left and right.
	And this is a left-wing one, but historically...
	Dreadful right-wing ones.
	The last person executed in the United Kingdom for blasphemy was Thomas Aitkenhead, and he was a student at the University of Edinburgh.
	And the thing is, his life, short though it was because he was like 19 or something when he was executed, overlapped with the lives of many of the people.
	Right. And if you want to compare in terms of Scotland going mad, and you can compare it to another home nation, the witch crazes in Scotland were completely crackers.
	And if you get one of those maps where they show using circles the number of people killed in the witch crazes per head of population, And you compare Scotland and England.
	The circle for England is like this, and the circle for Scotland is like that.
	So basically, England hardly killed any witches.
	What was it, Matthew Hopkins?
	Yes. He didn't get that many and he got stopped because everyone realised he was doing it for profit.
	Yes. So Scotland, per head of population, burnt many more witches than England did.
	So this is what I mean about Scots going right up their own bums with completely mad religious beliefs.
	I can't wait to send this segment to Dankula.
	Sorry, carry on. Scots completely mad, can't be trusted on their own.
	Well, to be fair, to be fair...
	Part of the rationale for the Acts of Union, and I don't want to go down the Acts of Union rabbit hole history because I'll explain Kate Forbes after this.
	Part of the rationale for the Acts of Union in 1707 was, we need help from Westminster to control our loonies.
	I believe it. That's the short history.
	I believe it. Because they really did have rolled gold loonies.
	They were very impressive. I mean, England had loonies as well.
	Sure. We've always had loonies.
	Our loonies have got softer edges.
	Scotland had completely bonkers loonies, and so there are those two traditions.
	Yes. The reason she poses a great danger to the union is she is from the conservative end of the SNP. Can I lay out a few things that we've got about her?
	So she graduated from the University of Cambridge with a Bachelor of Arts in History in 2011, before graduating from the University of Edinburgh with a Master's Degree in Emigration and Diaspora History.
	She became a Chartered Accountant in 2013, And worked for a local member of the Scottish Parliament, Dave Thompson, and then worked for Barclays two and a half years, and so she's only 32 and would be the youngest SNP leader if she wins.
	And she's mildly controversial for the SNP because, as you say, she comes from what we can just call the conservative wing of the SNP, if anyone knew that they had that.
	We can go to the next one. A former SNP minister spoke out against her because apparently her previous comments on LGBT rights were not acceptable.
	Oh dear. Well, okay, what I should explain here is the SNP is known in England as a nationalist party and that is a true and fair assessment of them.
	However, when it first got its foundation, when it first formed properly and started to win, initially as all of these parties do, they win at the local council level and then they gradually, this happened with the Lib Dems and it also happened with UKIP. They gradually climb up until they start winning seats at the county level and now at the devolved level and then in Westminster.
	So the SNP followed this pattern in quite a standard way.
	But if you go back to the 70s, the SNP was originally...
	A grouping that formed out of a group of right wing nationalists and a group of left wing nationalists.
	And there's always been a conflict at the heart of the organisation, which Nicola Sturgeon obscured for eight years.
	So this is just something, this history is just not widely known outside of Scotland, but Scottish people who pay attention to politics are aware of it.
	And this meant for quite a long time and basically before Nicola Sturgeon and even while Alex Salmond was First Minister, the SNP used to be described as the Tartan Tories because their defining trait was their nationalism and it didn't really have much of an effect on the rest of their politics and they were always very, very careful to acknowledge that a lot of people in Scotland, particularly from the Highlands and Islands, Are religiously conservative, like Kate Forbes.
	Kate Forbes is what is known in Scotland as a wee free.
	They're associated historically with support for rangers, if you're interested in the old firm, rather than Celtic.
	And am I allowed to swear on here?
	You can, but you shouldn't.
	Right. I will tell this joke in such a way that it isn't too vulgar.
	The old firm joke in Scotland is, why does Rangers have more supporters than Celtic?
	Because it's much easier to say F the Pope from the stands than it is to say F the moderator of the Free Church of Scotland.
	Okay, so that is the classic old firm joke about the we freeze.
	They are socially conservative.
	They do have roots in historic Calvinism, but they also have an extraordinary history.
	One of the reasons why historically both Jews and Scots have dominated intellectual life in so many different countries, not just in their own, is because they had religious traditions that demanded that everybody had to learn how to read and write, including daughters.
	And both boys and girls from very young were pushed to learn to read and write, and the rationale in both cases was so they could read the scriptures.
	The Hebrew scriptures obviously for Jews, and the Christian scriptures, the Bible for covenanters who were the ancestors of the modern we frees.
	And so one of the reasons why People like Kate Forbes and people like the Wee Frees and the Covenanters could later produce Enlightenment figures is precisely because they had this tradition of everyone in Scotland, because of it, could read and write.
	And they were very, very good at finding talented people of both sexes from very, very early in their history.
	I do always wonder why they punched above their weight.
	That is why, I mean, what it does, it produces, I mean, there is an enormous amount of research being done on both Scots and Jews by a chap called Mark Koyama, who's now at George Mason University, but used to be at Oxford, who's an economic historian.
	And what happens is these kind of religious traditions, which existed in both Judaism and amongst Scottish Protestantism, produce a selection effect where basically the kids that can read and write finish up living longer, having more kids and doing better.
	And basically their values propagate, just snowballs through the population.
	Just to get back onto this, the reason that Mrs Forbes is so controversial is of course because she doesn't support gay marriage.
	No. And it's not only that, she's pro-life.
	We freeze our pro-life.
	And the thing is, she will be quite like someone like Jacob Rees-Mogg.
	She won't vote against a pro-choice bill in the Scottish Parliament, but what she will do is she will reliably abstain.
	Because what they can't do, this is part of this theological tradition, What they can't do is vote against their conscience.
	They can sit out, and that's fine, but they can't vote against their conscience because that's effectively telling God a lie, lying in the face of God.
	And these are traditions like Sunni Islam that say, God rains down lightning upon liars.
	Pretty much. God, I wish you would.
	Anyway, so that summarizes pretty much everything I was going to cover with her, because she's controversial with the progressive wing of the SNP. She doesn't think trans rapists are women, if we can go to the next one.
	Oh, sorry, if you can go back, I must have put an extra link in, but the Telegraph have reported that she thinks the, what was the name of the trans rapist?
	Adam Graham is his actual name, the dead name, and Isla Bryson is the adopted, the assumed name.
	Well, whichever one we're going to use, she was like, no, I think that's a man.
	And I'm not putting that in a woman's prison because she's mad.
	The danger for the union is not only that she's very clever, but she could well be a unifying figure in a way that none of the others will be.
	To her credit, this is one thing Sturgeon did recognise, is that she'd become divisive.
	She was never, ever going to get support for Scottish independence over 50%, basically.
	I totally agree.
	And this is the problem with the progressive wing of the Scottish Nationalists.
	I mean, this... Sorry, can you look on this chap's profile?
	I was meant to take a note of it, but I can't remember.
	Alex Brown. I can't remember what it was he does now.
	That's right. Westminster Correspondent for the Scotsman.
	Sorry, this...
	Can't have these views in a modern progressive party.
	Oh. I guess you're going to have to change, aren't you?
	Because what they do is they force someone like Hamza Yusuf, who probably has privately socially conservative views as well, because he's Muslim.
	But the thing is, they just say, oh no, you can't be a public Muslim.
	That's what they tend to do to these people.
	We'll talk about Hamza in a second.
	Also, you have the owner, the CEO of Pink News, Benjamin Cohen, coming out and saying, well, what about me and my gay Jewish husband?
	Well, I mean, if you're going to force the issue, she's probably going to say, I'm not really in favour.
	Because that's what she believes, Benjamin.
	And to be fair on the context of Judaism, always remember, I mean, obviously, a Jewish marriage is not in the synagogue.
	This is really important. It's not a sacrament to Jews.
	And it's outside the synagogue, even though they may do some, they'll break a light bulb or something to do the symbolism about the destruction of the temple by the Romans and all of that kind of thing.
	But there are three broad traditions of Judaism, Orthodox, Conservative and Reform.
	This is only okay what you're seeing on the screen there in Reform.
	The other two, the Conservatives will be going, and the Orthodox will just be going, you know, take a long walk off a short pier, basically.
	The Orthodox, rather.
	I've come to the conclusion that for the SNP, there is only one truly progressive choice, which is, as you mentioned, Hamza Yusuf, which this is the man I fully support for the leadership of the SNP. Machiavellian.
	He's Machiavellian. It's not Machiavellian.
	You have to understand, right? What this is, is 800 years of unfulfilled English history that is coming back to bite the Scots, right?
	So let's watch Hamza Youssef's opening bit, or a part of it.
	Let's watch. I'm also putting myself forward because, let's be honest, there is far too much division in our society.
	There's far too much division.
	And our political discourse.
	And I believe I have the skills to reach across the divide and bring people together, be that in our own party that ought indeed across the country.
	So please get in touch with me if you have questions, if you want to hear more about the campaign.
	But I hope you'll also support me as Scotland's next First Minister.
	I mean, he's just a uniter, old Hamza.
	He brings people together.
	Rishi Sunak.
	Oh, Hindus don't have prayer mats.
	He'll be lighting a candle.
	Hindus light candles. A scented candle saying, please let it be Humza.
	Yes, he will. Please, please, please let it be Humza.
	Because remember, Humza is...
	He's right that Scotland has problems.
	There's too many Scots.
	Let's watch. Most senior positions in Scotland are filled almost exclusively by those who are white.
	Take my portfolio alone.
	The Lord President? White.
	The Lord Justice Clerk? White.
	Every High Court Judge?
	White. The Lord Advocate?
	White. The Solicitor General?
	White. The Chief Constable?
	White. Every Deputy Chief Constable?
	White. Every Assistant Chief Constable?
	White. The Head of the Law Society?
	White. The head of the Faculty of Advocates, White.
	Every Prison Governor, White.
	And not just Justice. The Chief Medical Officer, White.
	The Chief Nursing Officer, White.
	The Chief Veterinary Officer, White.
	The Chief Social Work Advisor, White.
	Almost every trade union in this country headed by people who are white.
	In the Scottish Government, every Director General is white.
	Every Chair of every public body is white.
	When he says white, I mean, they're not just any old white people, are they?
	They're Scottish. And there's another thing you have to remember.
	One of the reasons why, until Nicola Sturgeon came along, there was the whole thing that Scotland works.
	It tended to be historically better governed than England.
	It had better schools than the NHS. The Scottish NHS worked better.
	I wonder who paid for that. It wasn't just the Barnett formula.
	They did have a genuine reputation for competent governance.
	One of the reasons why, and this is one of those things that is...
	I talk about the third rail of politics in my piece for Law and Liberty, and this is one of those third rails of politics.
	Small, homogenous countries tend to be...
	Well-governed. Yep.
	It's just one of those things.
	So it's a combination of small size that does seem to help.
	So you get the same phenomenon in Denmark and that kind of thing.
	But it is also the homogenous.
	The reason all those people are white in Scotland is because it's Scotland and there are hardly any immigrants.
	The immigrants are in England.
	Well, speaking of that, this is why Humza Longshanks is my personal choice for a leader of the SNP. Because he's going to fulfil Edward Longshank's 800 year teleology.
	Let's watch this. The trouble with Scotland is that it's full of Scots.
	Humza's right. He's got a great point.
	We are going to clear out those Scots.
	Finally, Scotland will not be full of Scots.
	We've been waiting a long time for this.
	But just to quickly round off what Hamza's plan is going to be, he's literally kind of declaring himself like, I'll be the minority ruler.
	Equality and protection of rights are at the very core of my being.
	I've lived my entire life in Scotland as a minority, often having to fight for my rights.
	Yeah, sure. I want there to be no doubt that in anyone's mind, whoever you are, I'll fight for all of your rights.
	And what that means is not letting people protest abortion clinics.
	And putting trans rapists in women's prisons.
	I mean, literally, no, no, we're not going to let Westminster block the gender reform bill.
	We're getting those trans rapists in those women's prisons.
	That's the progressive thing to do.
	Well, if he wants to blow up Scottish independence, Rishi Sunak can sit there and go, I may be defeated in 2024, but I shall take Scottish independence down with me.
	Bye! It's just interesting how things are working out.
	But anyway, let's move on.
	Because it turns out that the far right now owns almost all of Western cultural capital.
	This is news to me, I have to say.
	Yeah, for years, I thought the far right owned nothing.
	And, you know, when they were like, oh, you're far right, I said, okay, okay, what does that mean?
	Well, that means now that I enjoy things, I live a wholesome life, and I work hard, and I try to raise my children in a good and noble way, and I make sure that they've got food on the table.
	And that all makes me far right.
	And so the far right, I'm just thinking, well, why are people so down on the far right?
	It seems that... It seems it has everything that's good.
	Well, I mean, I often joke about myself, you know, classic liberal Tory.
	I think taxes are a bit too high.
	I think 15-minute cities are a load of cobblers.
	I think net zero is bonkers.
	Welcome to the far right, Helen.
	I think that, you know, we need to build more houses so that young people can afford to live in well.
	I mean, this makes me far right, apparently.
	Do you occasionally enjoy reading Shakespeare?
	Oh, I do. Did you like Sharp?
	Apparently, oh, goodness me, I watched Ken Clarke's Civilisation twice on the BBC and on the ABC in Australia.
	Those two organisations must also be far right.
	Actually, that's exactly what Preventive declared.
	Yeah. So, before we start, I just want to go through the work we have done on Lotuses.com, talking about traditionalism and fascism, because I think this is important, because the term far-right is, of course, wildly nebulous.
	What it is, is not progressive.
	That's what they're aiming for. And so we've done a lot of work.
	Here's the latest piece, the Symposium, in which Stelios and Harry talked about Carl Schmitt, who's of course the sort of Nazi philosopher, and his view of anti-liberalism.
	I did a piece on the origin and doctrine of fascism.
	I read Zeev Sternhel's Neither Left Nor Right, talking about the genealogy of fascism.
	Sorry, you can go along, John. Yeah, so that's Giovanni Gentili's Origin and Doctrine of Fascism.
	I do recommend, if you're going to read a Nazi...
	Read Schmitt. Don't try to read Heidegger.
	Heidegger is just incomprehensible.
	Schmitt was not a boring general sort of philosopher.
	He was a legal philosopher. And like the critical race theorists, as you discovered, we had this chat on Twitter the other day, as you discovered, because he was trained as a lawyer, lawyers have to write clearly.
	Because we're all trained, everybody who does an undergraduate law degree, you're trained to write a client advice.
	And the basis for client advice is that this person is not a lawyer.
	so they have to be able to understand it which is why from the left the critical race theorists write perfectly clear prose so you know exactly what they mean and from the right Carl Schmitt writes perfectly clear prose and if you read him you will know what he says you will understand exactly what he's getting at and then you are in a position to disagree Yes But the origins and doctrine of fascism is actually from a philosophical point of view it's coherent It's just bonkers. This is where the term totalitarianism comes from.
	I've talked about this quite a lot.
	I made a video a while ago in which I argue that fascism is the inevitable conclusion of socialism, frankly, because I think it is.
	And I think there's a reason that all the fascists were socialists first.
	We can get to the next one, John. Sorry, yes, I covered Zeev Sternhel's Neither Left Not Right, which he talks about the intellectual genealogy of fascism, where it came from, Italian syndicalism and French socialism, which seems to be something that you can't really contest.
	It's obviously come from there.
	And so this is what have we got to do with the right wing at this point?
	And by comparison, I've done a lot of work on Scruton and Burke.
	If you can go to the next ones, John.
	Sorry, go to the next one.
	So Rod Scruton is just one of the many things that we've done on him.
	And Burke's Reflections on the Revolution of France, which of course is one of those texts that you read if you want to get a good sort of overview of what this sort of...
	Old wig, liberal Toryism, basically.
	The old wig. How traditionalism is valuable.
	Right. And so after reading and studying all of this, I've come to the conclusion that fascism and traditionalism are not just not the same thing, they are in fact opposite things.
	They operate in totally separate and different ways.
	Fascism is a form of revolutionary socialism in one nation.
	Traditionalism is the organic accumulation of cultural goods over time.
	Fascism is happy to restructure society for an a priori goal.
	Revolutionary. It's got the chaise revolutionary quality.
	Exactly. Whereas traditionalism is, of course, the opposite of that.
	It can't be revolutionary. It can make small adjustments, but never revolutionary changes.
	And so the method is totally different, even if the aesthetics are similar.
	So they're totally different things.
	So calling both of these things far-right means that the term far-right actually has very little real work.
	It empties out...
	It's the same problem with collapsing, and I have to say it happens on the left as well, wokery into Marxism.
	Yes, they have aesthetic similarities, and yes, they both use that oppressor-oppressed dyad.
	But one of the reasons why some of the loudest complaints about wokery is coming from people who are actually historically had genuine roots in Marxism is because...
	No, you don't.
	You are literally...
	Imagine me picking up the glass of water and taking our politics and just tipping it out on the carpet.
	It's the same thing. Oh yeah.
	One of the main complaints I see from actual modern Marxists is that essentially what woke does is gives cover to the bourgeoisie to claim they're a part of an oppressed proletariat by saying, well look, I may be... I'm an owner of the means of production, but I'm also transgender and therefore I'm part of the oppression.
	And it's actually a fair point.
	It is actually a fair point, actually.
	It's a fair point, because the one thing, I mean, Marxism is full of a litany of errors, but the very, very basic early point, which was really...
	It's not just Marx. I mean, you get this in Polanyi and Engels and other sort of Proudhon and other proto-socialist writers, is that life is actually pretty shit if you don't have any money.
	Well, you get that from conservative writers as well.
	As well, yes. Well, that's the whole Disraeli, the cloth cap and top hat alliance against the liberals.
	That's the beginning of One Nation Toryism.
	Yeah. And so, you know, there's, ironically, more in common with the conservatives on that issue with the Marxists than there is with the fascists, I suppose we'll just call them.
	But this is a fairly worthless term that I feel is being bandied around far too much, especially as I found this from 2019, an overview of the far right.
	Guess who's in here? Me.
	Oh, you're in there? Yeah, if you can do a quick search for my name, John.
	Oh, dear Lord. Everyone's in here.
	It associates people with us, who I just don't think are interesting or worthy of being associated with us.
	So, Paul Joseph Watson, yes.
	Me, Milo, Dankula, Tommy Robinson.
	Then you've got other people like Paul Golding from Britain First and things like that.
	But these people have wildly divergent views.
	Anne-Marie Waters is actually an old socialist.
	This is the thing. She's kind of the spiked type crew.
	I mean, now this is someone who cannot tell the difference between different political traditions.
	I mean, honestly, one of the things that I say in my piece for Law and Liberty on Nicola Sturgeon is I make a reference to the intellectual swamp that is the modern university.
	And the thing is, When I was a child, I'm long in the tooth now, this is what happens when you get old, but my first year at university was in 1990 and one of the subjects I did, because I did arts law, as you call it in Australia, and I did the liberal arts qualification, which is literally just there so that you can provide good conversation at parties.
	No one's ever going to, if you study law, no one's ever going to do political science.
	You go off and become a lawyer and make money.
	But I did a subject called Modern Political Ideologies where great care was taught In the teaching of this subject to make sure that you didn't mix up socialists with syndicalists or anarchists with communists.
	This kind of thing.
	This is like very, very basic political science that is not hard.
	You can learn it in a few months and you don't even need to read whole books by Marx or Mill or any of these people.
	You can just read extracts and you won't make these kind of stupid errors.
	You know, Bertrand Russell has a small book called Proposed Roads to Freedom, in which he very deftly, and it's only about 30 pages long, it's a very, very small little book, but he just goes through the early 20th century strains of these ideologies, and just explains clearly what the difference between a fascist and socialist and an anarchist and syndicalist is.
	He's just very clear about it, and says, look, you know, he's not really in favour of any of them, if I recall correctly, because he's like...
	A bit flawed. Weird, yeah.
	But he just explains it in relatively clear terms.
	And it's a very small book, and it would explain all of these things to the people writing this.
	But apparently Dr. Benjamin Lee has no idea.
	He hasn't got an adequate definition of fire.
	I'm sorry, there's a joke in there because he's got a PhD.
	But I've got a mental image of bog roll, I'm afraid.
	And Rip, please take one with PhD written on it.
	Anyway, so I thought we'd just then go and find out what the far right actually consists in, then.
	And our good friends at The Guardian have told us that actually, well, being clean, that's a right-wing view.
	Do you like being clean? You're definitely right-wing.
	But to be honest with you, considering what we've seen from the left, I'm inclined to agree with them.
	I think they might be right.
	What they're trying to do is use Jonathan Haidt's research.
	Yes, in part. Yeah, they're trying to use his research to draw distinctions between conservatives and progressives.
	Actually, this came from Jonas Olofsson, the co-author of the research from Stockholm University.
	And he said, we think authoritarian attitudes might, at least in part, be rooted in biology.
	Okay. I mean, that's fine.
	I'll take it. I'm right-wing because I don't want to be disgusting.
	Yes? Okay. Next is fitness, of course.
	Oh goodness, yes.
	This has come up recently.
	I've got some friends who are into this.
	They call it tonic masculinity or tonic.
	I don't know how they say it because they're Americans and I've not spoken to them verbally.
	But one of the things they advocate, and they've got various sub stacks and blogs and things like that, is that people should go to the gym and people should get healthy and fit and so on and so forth.
	They do coordinate to a degree, although also one of them is a personal trainer, one of the ones that I subscribe to his substack anyway.
	And so he mainly puts up personal training type advice.
	And they all linked to this extraordinary article, supposedly from a conservative in America, although American conservatism I do find very, very strange because they're trying to defend what is a liberal project.
	Yes, they are. And it's not liberal in the sense of old Whig, Burkean liberalism.
	It's a genuine revolutionary project, so it doesn't kind of work.
	But anyway, from this magazine, criticising people for going to the gym.
	And then during the course of the article, this bloke actually disclosed that he runs four times a week and is actually quite fit.
	And so it was all a load of cobblers, really.
	But he was just, it was this whole thing of No, don't bother doing this.
	It's fine to be fat, basically.
	And I'm going, that was in a conservative publication.
	No, it's not fine to be fat.
	I mean, I got overweight during lockdown and I then realised I'd got overweight during lockdown and I went and did something about it and lost a lot of weight.
	You could have converted to left-wing beliefs and been like, no, I'm going to be a beached whale.
	And can I tell you that it's much, much more pleasant to live life when you're 20 kilos lighter.
	I know it personally.
	Yes, it's just much, and I'm not saying that, I mean, I'm too old to sort of be some kind of catwalk model or anything like this, but it's just much better to be physically capable and not fat and to fit in train seats and all of those things.
	Just honestly. It's just better for you.
	Go to the gym! Lift!
	Well, researchers from Hope Not Hate have detected that that makes you part of an online network of fascist fitness groups.
	I must tell my personal trainer this.
	He's probably already in them.
	He's Spanish and he votes for Podimos!
	I mean, this is the thing, it's ridiculous!
	Anyway, the next thing that's part of the far right is universities.
	Apparently it's ascendant on college campuses.
	I am mildly skeptical about that.
	I think a pig just flew past my window.
	Yes. They say, over time, the work of student movements has been folded into the corporate structure of the institution.
	This is well known. Yet most are likely unaware of a new phenomenon occurring across college campuses in which far-right organisers have sought to use them as a place for contestation, recruitment and protest and counter-protest.
	Ooh. Well, that sounds scary.
	They don't... I mean, this is...
	Obviously, I don't pay as much attention to the United States, but they're just furious about Chris Ruffo being put on the board in one of the Florida universities.
	And I'm sorry, this is...
	Look, one of the things with the way...
	One of the few ways that conservatives can stop O'Sullivan's law from happening, or conquest law, which is that if an organisation isn't explicitly conservative, it will become left-wing over time.
	One of the few ways you can arrest this is just to point Tories to boards.
	And Rishi Sunak's done this a bit, Boris did it a bit, and now obviously DeSantis is doing the same thing.
	And I'm sorry, as far as I'm concerned, if Tony Blair and all the Labor people could happily appoint all their Blairite friends to run the National Trust or whoever it is, then the Conservatives can do exactly the same thing while they're in office and you can just go and cry about it as far as I'm concerned.
	The Conservatives should do it.
	Oh, absolutely. They should.
	In fact, it's an imperative. So God bless Chris Rufo and good.
	Ron DeSantis for doing this.
	Absolutely. Legislate harder.
	Anyway, so moving on, they also have the intellectual dark web, Jordan Peterson, that Rolling Stone was complaining about.
	Oh, look at these figures.
	Far right Ben Shapiro.
	Right. Oh, and there's the little green frog again.
	I mean, dear Lord. So, okay, that's fine.
	So what are the worldviews of Jordan Pearson and Ben Shapiro?
	Well, self-help, look after yourself, clean your room bucko, take responsibility.
	That's where meaning in life is found.
	Ben Shapiro and Jordan Pearson, obviously both being parents.
	Pearson's probably a grandparent at this point.
	Very famous, successful, well-known for promoting hard work and diligence.
	Terrible. Absolutely terrible.
	So what else does the far right care about?
	Well, as far as the CBC is concerned, freedom.
	The concept of freedom is a far right rallying cry.
	I've just not been paying attention to this, but it is absolutely bonkers.
	Freedom from government oppression is the far right at this point.
	Oh, that gets all the libertarians as well then.
	It does, yes. And libertarians are kind of weird because they're neither right nor left.
	They're sort of all over the place.
	All right, so you're far right as well, libertarians.
	Sorry about that. Yeah, because you don't want to be locked down in perpetuity by the government arbitrarily.
	Fair enough. The next thing is protecting children from rapey migrants.
	Which, I mean, Liverpool is...
	Well, it's okay. I called them nonces on national television, I'm afraid.
	And I stand by it, even though poor Mike Graham had to apologise afterwards because apparently that's a boo word with Ofcom.
	Oh, is it? Yes, it is.
	I didn't... Mike told me afterwards and we were talking about it.
	And there's a very, very witty...
	You'll have to get it off his YouTube channel from the entertainer from Dominic Frisbee.
	Yes. That is actually a song and I think it's called the Ofcom song or something like that.
	You can get it off of his YouTube channel anyway and it goes through in an amusing and quite systematic way all the words that you can't say before the watershed on national television or national radio and nonce is one of them.
	Yes. So making sure that children don't get nonced by migrants is certainly one of them.
	This is, of course, Liverpool joining the ranks of the far right.
	80% Labour voting Liverpool.
	Yes, Tories are an endangered species in Liverpool.
	Yeah. I don't think there are many Tories up there.
	No, but there are lots of far-right people in Liverpool because they don't think the migrants should rape kids.
	Moving on, there are other far-right protesters at the Tate Modern protesting Drag Queen's story out because they don't think children should be perverted either.
	That's another far-right canard.
	Oh dear, a lot of those people will be feminists.
	Yes. That would be a very interesting definition of far-right.
	Far-right TERFs. Far-right feminists, interesting.
	Yeah, JK Rowling, Liverpool, literally everyone, a joining patriotic alternative.
	According to Hope Not Hate.
	But the most interesting thing about this, I thought, was the list of cultural items that are far right now.
	This was a fascinating report that Douglas Murray got hold of from PREVENT, the counter-terror scheme, which usually spends its time worrying about Islamic terrorism because, of course, almost all terrorism that happens in Britain is Islamic terrorism.
	But this was fascinating. Helen, culturally, you are absolutely far right.
	You're probably the furthest right.
	I bet you enjoy Lord of the Rings, don't you?
	Yes. I bet you watched Sharp, didn't you?
	Yes. Have you read George Orwell?
	Yes, all of them. Yes.
	And I watched Yes Minister, and I watched The Thick of It.
	Sharp. Have you read Chaucer, Milton, Tennyson, Kipling?
	Maybe a bit of Shakespeare.
	All of these have been declared far-right pieces of media.
	Inexplicably, the Daily Mail tell us, it said the BBC's Great British Railway Journeys, presented by Michael Portillo, was far-right.
	I'm just visualising a cell conversation between a bloke saying, well, I got 20 years for murder.
	What are you in for? Well, I got 10 years for owning a copy of Great British Railway Journeys.
	Sorry, the joke's right themselves.
	There's great quotes in here.
	It includes some of the greatest works of the Western canon, and in such cases, such as Joseph Comrade's The Secret Agents, powerful critiques of terrorism, Burke, Huxley, Orwell and Tolkien were all anti-totalitarian writers.
	So the reason that I explained that we are well aware of the difference between traditionalism and fascism is because fascism is, of course, totalitarian.
	Explicitly, it coined the term.
	So to say that these things are far right is to say these things are not fascist.
	So when they say far right, they can't be talking about fascism.
	Which is because fascism is far left.
	Anyway, the far right love Lord of the Rings.
	This is an article that was produced last week.
	Like, you would think this was something that was produced in 2013.
	Nope. This is a brand new article from Salon.com.
	They think that the far right wants to spend their time being a portly little person living in the Shire, smoking pipe weed, singing songs and drinking ale, and not being interfered with by the government.
	That's a very appealing framework for the far right.
	I'm afraid that list is unironically a good list of things to read or watch, to be fair.
	It's a great weekend, isn't it?
	Well, more than a weekend because Tolkien's not short and Norris Chaucer and the complete works of Shakespeare aren't either.
	I mean, this is... This is a great literary canon of the West.
	There's another thing though, particularly when you're dealing with the comedies like The Thick of It and Yes Minister and probably I'm amazed Father Ted and the It crowd aren't in there now.
	The IT crowd. Because it's Graham Minahan who's a TERF. You're not allowed to enjoy things.
	Whatever that cultural product is, and I don't particularly care because people do Like different things.
	But it's this whole thing of you are not allowed to enjoy things.
	It's like those bizarre Guardian articles about you shouldn't own pets because it oppresses them or this kind of thing.
	You are not allowed to enjoy the thing.
	You're not allowed to enjoy football and just have it be football.
	It has to be some other weird thing in addition to football, which of course is that the whole point of it is to drain the enjoyment out of it.
	These are people who want politics to colonise everything and it just drives me bonkers.
	So they say, what do conservative libertarians find so appealing about Tolkien's fancy world?
	Well, the answer is no government to tell the free people what to do.
	There isn't really much government at all.
	Instead of bureaucratic committee, an independent coalition correctly decides to send a fellowship to destroy the One Ring and stop Sauron from establishing a dictatorship over Middle Earth.
	That's great advertisement for being far right.
	You want to be a fat hobbit and happy in the Shire, drinking and smoking, with the government not commanding every moment of your life with a bureaucratic committee?
	Join the far right. Join the far right, become a hobbit.
	That's not a tagline I had on my bingo card.
	It sells though, doesn't it?
	I become a hobbit.
	The only problem for becoming a hobbit for me, because I'm six foot wide, is you need to chop me off at the waist.
	You can be an honorary hobbit.
	The worst part about all of this, though, is of course that the far right control Twitter now, because Elon Musk bought Twitter, and he's put every lost young man on Twitter in the crosshairs of the far right.
	So the young men may be taught to be clean, to be healthy, to be upwardly mobile, to be personally responsible, to enjoy great literary works and go to university.
	To lift. The far right, ladies and gentlemen.
	The Guardian is paranoid that the far right is going to do all of these horrific things to young men.
	How could they? Awful.
	So the question is, she says, what can we do to protect young men from their influence?
	For those who have bartered their twenties for far right approval, all we can do is hope that they get the much needed support that it will take to improve their lives.
	So nothing. They have nothing.
	What are you going to do about the young men joining the far right?
	Nothing. We hate young men.
	Screw them. They're often white, cisgendered, straight.
	They work hard. We hate the young men.
	The young men have always been the problem.
	That's why we're stigmatizing them.
	It's any wonder they're joining the far right.
	Anyway, let's leave that there and move on to The Desecration of Roald Dahl.
	Again, another far right literary work that, of course, everyone on the far right probably has read.
	Reading Roald Dahl makes you far right these days.
	Before we start on this one, if you want to support us, go to www.loadstudies.com and sign up and check out our contemplation series that Josh does.
	This one's about Tao Te Ching, which is essentially an exploration into Chinese wisdom and philosophy.
	I haven't read it, I haven't watched this one yet because I just haven't had the time.
	But honestly, I think this is going to be very interesting because there's a lot of value in ancient Chinese wisdom, as John is constantly lecturing me on.
	And I really should start listening.
	But anyway, let's begin with perennial truths.
	This is why I like Roald Dahl.
	This is from the Twits.
	If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face.
	When that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets so ugly you can hardly bear to look at it.
	A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.
	You can have a wonky nose and crooked mouth and a double chin and stick out teeth, but if you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.
	That is a perennial truth.
	I've known so many people of both kinds like this.
	And this is what I thought was always amazing about Roald Dahl.
	He had a great way of capturing the spirit of the thing.
	It's a version of the old quip, beauty may only be skin deep, but ugliness goes all the way to the bone.
	Because in that line, which is ancient, it goes back to stoicism, the idea is that the ugliness is the ugliness of your personality, your character.
	Yeah. And this is, I think, one of the reasons why Meghan Markle is kind of hated.
	There's clearly an ugliness in her soul.
	Underneath the superficial attractiveness.
	So Roald Dahl, I take it you read Roald Dahl when you were young?
	I read a lot of Roald Dahl.
	Same here. I didn't realise how much I'd read until this all blew up recently.
	And then I started thinking about it, it's like, when I was about 10 years old, I must have read the Twits like three or four times.
	I really enjoyed that book.
	I found it fascinating. James and the Giant Peach, the BFG, Matilda, particularly I really enjoyed when I was, I think I was about 13 when I read that.
	And Miss Trunchbull is just one of those iconic characters that everyone knows the kind of like big bully woman who will, you know, Overbear over people.
	Of course, she probably doesn't actually throw young girls over the fence.
	No, well, it's a fantasy. That's the point.
	Well, it's exaggerated from the kid's point of view, right?
	That's the thing. It looks...
	Because this one of the talents that Roald Dahl had was writing in a way that a preteen or a teenager could really relate to.
	You know, the sort of exaggeration of it is like, oh.
	But also there's a kind of empathy there because it's like, look, these are all things you can't really change.
	You know, you're going to have to just suffer through certain things like Trunchbull putting people in the spiked chamber or whatever it was.
	Yes. Yeah, the torch chamber or whatever.
	It's like, you know, it sounds ridiculous, but you know there's a kind of, you know, there's a kind of truth in it, you know, when you're being punished for being late at school or Oh, I'm not even a parent, and I read Matilda to my little nieces and nephews, so there you go.
	Well, this actually inspired me to go and buy The Complete Words of Roald Dahl before they vandalised them.
	I mean, this is...
	Boutlerisation. I mean, I can just remember it.
	You're younger than me. I don't know whether you can remember this, but I can only just remember it from when I was a little girl.
	It was something that conservative Christians used to do, particularly in the United States, where they would try to change the...
	Stop children from reading books because they had swear words in them.
	I did not live through this.
	And it was fading in the 70s and 80s.
	It was fading away. And Thomas Bowdler was a real person.
	B-O-W-D-L-E-R. It was a real person.
	And what they would do is they would rewrite books.
	Children's classics with different words.
	And, I mean, the targets were things like the Brothers Grimm, you know, the original Grimm's fairy tales.
	I mean, fairy tales... Which were brutal if anyone hasn't read them.
	Yeah, or Struvelpeter, which is, you know, the shock-headed Peter, where the kid gets the thumb cut off and all of this kind of thing.
	A lot of fairy stories in a lot of traditions going back to classical antiquity, and even in the Bible, because they serve the same purpose.
	Are really quite meanatory.
	They're designed to try to scare you because the world is a dangerous place.
	We live in a very safe world because of modernity and so we don't have to deal with dangerous animals that might kick you or people that might trick you or people who are so hungry they might try to kidnap children and eat them and all of this kind of thing.
	I mean, that's why fairy stories are the way they are and that is also why they have resonance.
	The most effective cartoon on the whole Adam Graham, Isla Bryson thing It was the one by Matt in the Toregraph that used Little Red Riding Hood.
	And so there was the wolf in the grandmother's costume and saying to Little Red Riding Hood, well, now I can be in a women's prison.
	And of course, anybody who has read that fairy story instantly got the joke.
	I think, you know, thousands of retweets because it...
	We understand that the point of that fairy story is to warn us about people who say one thing and pretend to be another.
	That's what the warning is about.
	Yeah, the deception is not to your advantage.
	There's danger in it. So this is what Roald Dahl does.
	I mean, this is what great children's literature is supposed to do.
	But it is also why bowlerisation, this as well as the historic stuff, is a joke.
	See, you make a great point because I remember reading the BFG when I was young and the giants are terrifying.
	I mean, they're called, like, bone grinder.
	And, you know, when you're eight years old, you're like, oh, God, you know, meat crusher or something like this.
	It's genuinely, like, scary framing for the giants.
	And that's why the BFG himself is so different to the other ones.
	But anyway, so, yeah, this comes on the heels of the world learning that actually...
	Roald Dahl is going to be rewritten to fit PC sensitivities.
	Apparently sensitivity readers were hired to scrutinise the text with parts to be rewritten for a modern audience.
	Puffin have decided to make hundreds of changes to the original text, removing many of Dahl's colourful descriptions and making his characters less grotesque.
	That's awful!
	The grotesqueness of the characters was what made them good.
	That's why kids read them.
	That's why the twits were so brilliant.
	Because children have...
	I don't have children.
	I have been a child.
	Yes. I have children and you're right on this.
	If you have ever been a child, surely.
	I mean, I sometimes wonder, were they never children?
	That's the expression that comes to mind.
	Were they never children? There is a reason why children pick their noses.
	There is a reason why children...
	You know, roll in dirt and do all the things that little kids do.
	Because children are disgusting.
	They're little savages and they have to be civilised.
	That's correct. And that is one of the reasons why you use fairy stories, not just the ancient ones, the ones that we don't know who wrote them or we only know a particular version of them, like Think of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
	I mean, yes, we've got the great poem by the Roman poet, but none of those stories were original to him, or maybe one or two of them.
	Nearly all of them were just things that his mother probably told him when he was little, and he had artistic talents, so he turned them into an epic poem.
	So the reason we tell these kind of stories to children is part of that civilizational process, and you can't pretend that children are something other than what they are.
	And it's our obligation to do it.
	We're depriving them of something if we don't craft them in this way.
	You know, you've got an obligation to make sure they are actually not completely naive to the world and the fact that there could be wolves in grandma's clothing in the bed, you know.
	Yes. You've got to make them slightly canny because there's going to be a time where you're not there to help them.
	That's the point of all of this.
	But this is, honestly, I find this grotesque, absolutely grotesque.
	The review of Dahl's language was undertaken to ensure the books can continue to be enjoyed by all today.
	And so what they're saying is, oh, well, it's not suitable for modern audiences.
	So, well, then modern audiences are the problem, aren't they?
	And this is the thing.
	I mean, okay, I'm going to sound a little bit arrogant here because I'm a novelist and have written three successful novels, although I'm nothing like the success of Roald Dahl.
	Very few people are, though. But the thing is, Roald Dahl's like J.K. Rowling.
	You need to think of it. He's dead now, obviously, but he died in 1998.
	He was the JK Rowling of the 70s and 80s, basically.
	This is something...
	So for Carl's and my generation, Roald Dahl was like JK Rowling for the people who are listening or watching this now who are under 35.
	So for people who are in their 40s and 50s now, for Gen X, and also for some of the younger boomers, so the people who are a bit older than Carl and I... Roald Dahl was the equivalent to J.K. Rowling.
	And in his lifetime, he sold 50 million copies of his books.
	Since his death, he's sold another 200 million, apparently.
	That's the figures that I read.
	And I think a point needs to be made here.
	People are really getting stuck into Puffin, which is the children's imprint of Penguin Books, by the way.
	Puffin is not the reason for this.
	And I've had a lot of people, and I'm going to explain a little bit of lore here, I've had a lot of people asking me in the last week or so since this story broke, how is it possible to change the words of Roald Dahl's story?
	Novels. Bearing in mind, they will be changed in every format.
	This is not just the electronic format.
	The ones that he originally wrote will no longer be published, which is why you've had to be very quick to get the old edition.
	Amazon normally, it was on Prime, and normally they'll get to you the next day, but they're like, yeah, it's going to be with you on the 1st of March.
	It's like, oh, really? So what they've done is caused a kind of run on Roald Dahl books.
	Books, so that people can get what he actually wrote rather than the bowdlerized.
	And I'm going to say bowdlerized because that's what it is.
	Oh, it absolutely is. What happened with, so people have asked me, how is it possible to change the words of someone's The text that they wrote when it's still within the copyright period.
	Now you need to understand how intellectual property works.
	There are four main areas of intellectual property.
	Things that protect things.
	Intellectual things that aren't a physical object like this desk or that cup or whatever.
	There are trademarks which protect brands.
	There are patents which protect inventions and innovation.
	There are designs which protect a style.
	So think of a Chippendale chair with the curved back, that kind of thing.
	And then there is copyright which protects artistic expression.
	Now these boundaries are not perfectly clear.
	One of the things protected under the copyright head, for example, is software.
	So that means Windows 95 is still in copyright, which is completely mad, I realise.
	So it was basically allocated to the wrong head by lawyers back in the day, and it's never been really dealt with this.
	So artistic expression is copyright, and it has been acknowledged for many years by many lawyers, including me, and I used to practice in this area, that copyright terms are too long.
	In the United States, it is currently the author's life plus 75 years.
	In the UK and Commonwealth and in other countries, it's the author's life plus 50 years.
	It's often referred to by American lawyers as the Mickey Mouse extension.
	I was going to say, I realise this keeps going.
	Basically, it keeps getting extended in America because they get fed up because Disney wants to continue to make money out of Mickey and Minnie Mouse.
	The time keeps approaching and they're like, well, we'll kick it ahead 50 years or something like that.
	Or 25 years or that kind of thing.
	Yeah. Just so Disney can keep Mickey Mouse.
	So much so that I was actually involved in Australia in litigation, acting for a daycare centre, which got sued by Disney for having paintings on its roof of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse.
	This gives you an idea of how deranged Disney...
	This is why I wanted to run out.
	The derangement of Disney now is just an aspect of the ongoing derangement of Disney over probably decades.
	They did something similar with the...
	Disney owns all the Marvel movies, and...
	I think it was Child Wanted Spider-Man.
	The parents wanted Spider-Man on a dead child's headstone.
	And the child had died. And Disney were like, no, you can't do that.
	Yes, this is what I mean.
	What the hell's wrong with you? So, and one of the...
	Most people are aware that one of the characteristics of copyright...
	It makes it very, very hard to change what the author has done, even after the author is dead.
	So people are going, how is it possible for Puffin to have changed the words when this is still in the copyright period?
	Now, what has happened?
	Copyright, and this is a sort of a general principle with property law anyway, in both the Roman system and in the common law, but especially in the common law, is that property law is a bundle of rights.
	It's not just one thing.
	And one of the things that you own, as if you own the copyright in something, is the ability to change the thing in which you own copyright in some way.
	Now, as a general rule, if you, with a book, for example, If you sign a publication contract for a novel, and I've signed three in my life, is that one of the things the publisher undertakes not to do is to not change your words.
	But the point is that has to be written into the contract as a contractual term.
	Now, what happened is that...
	After Dahl's death, and he left this enormously valuable literary estate, and you need to understand that literary estates, when they are big and when they are valuable, tend to be enormously complex because they can be expressed in so many different ways.
	You know, a radio play can be made, a theatrical performance can be made, a musical...
	Tolkien being a great example.
	A musical can be made, television shows, movies, all of these things.
	This is very, very difficult to get right with a large, valuable estate.
	Even in my own case, with a relatively small estate, I have had to tie up Kingdom of the Wicked, which many of Carl's...
	Viewers have bought and read as a result of me appearing some years ago before Lotus Eaters on your show.
	I have had to tie that up quite tightly because it's the kind of thing that somebody could decide to make into a film one day and it's really quite difficult to do.
	I'm a lawyer and I know how to do these things and I have had to get external advice to be able to do that.
	So one of the things, one of those, imagine a bundle of straws, one of the straws in that bundle of rights is the ability to change the work.
	Now, after Dahl's death in 1990, a company was formed, the Roald Dahl Story Company, to manage this very large, complex literary estate with all these rights embedded in it.
	And clearly it became, I think I can say this with a fair degree of confidence, it became too much for the family, for the Dahl family, for his kids and his widow and perhaps other people, the lawyers.
	It's entirely possible that he may have been only represented by some village solicitor or that kind of thing.
	So it's just too much. So it was turned into a corporate vehicle.
	And in 2021, not widely reported, there was only one article about it on the BBC, That Roald Dahl story company was sold entire, the whole company, to Netflix.
	That must have been expensive.
	It was about £650 million.
	So when you're talking about a large, complex, valuable literary estate, I work for a very well-endowed company.
	Think tank in the United States that's worth over half a billion US dollars.
	So Roald Dahl's estate was sold to Netflix for something similar at the height of the pandemic.
	And what has clearly happened in that purchase, when they have purchased The estate, they have had assigned to them, this is a process known as assignation, all the rights, including the rights to modify works that are still within the copyright period.
	What's dreadful is that copyright hasn't protected artistic expression, which is what it was designed to do, going back to the Statute of Anne in this country.
	And had the copyright period expired, It would have been very easy for Project Gutenberg, say, just a hypothetical, I'm just picking one, to get the original Roald Dahl works and say, okay, if you don't like the Puffin ones that have been bowlerised, you can read the original ones here for free on Project Gutenberg.
	But because of the Mickey Mouse extension, Project Gutenberg, or whoever it is, is not in a position to do this.
	So copywriters actually failed to do that.
	What it's supposed to do, which is protect artistic expression, and Netflix are evil.
	Well, I agree, and unfortunately when things get sold to progressive Americans, they get changed, and not in good ways.
	In fact, let's have a look at some of the changes, shall we?
	So the word fat has been removed from every book.
	Sorry, I'm still on that article, John.
	The word fat has been removed from every book.
	Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory may still look like a ball of dough, but now can only be described as enormous.
	Can't call him fat, you see.
	In the same story, the Oompa Loompas are no longer tiny, titchy, or no higher than my knee, but merely small.
	Once there were small men, now they're small people.
	There have also been passages not written by Dahl that have been added.
	In The Witches, a paragraph explains that the witches are bald beneath their wigs and ends with the line, There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that.
	This is just classic balderisation.
	It's saying strivel, Peter, can't have the thumb cut.
	Oh, God. It's like what the...
	It's woke balderisation.
	It's what the God-botherers did to Grims.
	Yeah. I'm sorry, I'm old enough to remember that.
	I don't know how many of your viewers, Carl, are my age, but it's just...
	It is bowdlerisation and you will go and Google bowdlerisation and discover what used to be done to books in the name of this.
	It is a left-wing version of something.
	Oh, Christ.
	I'm sounding like my mother when she got cranky.
	No, no, but this is exactly what they've done.
	And they go through, and it's literally all of them as well.
	In James and the Giant Peach, the centipede sings, Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat and tremendously flabby at that.
	And Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire and dry as a bone, only drier.
	Both births had been removed and replaced with, Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute and deserved to be squashed by the fruit.
	And Aunt Spiker was much of the same and deserves half the blame.
	It's like... Well see, part of the problem here, and this is the arrogance of the novelist that's going to come out, is all these sensitivity readers, which is just an awful modern name for senses as far as I'm concerned, they think that they can do what the author did.
	Yes. And Roald Dahl is a very great author.
	Nobody likes to acknowledge greatness in the arts anymore, but it is nonetheless true that some people...
	Are better than others at doing this.
	That's very true. And we're not just talking about, okay, here's the kid in your class who was girly swat brains trust who came top of English or whatever.
	We are talking about the very best of all the girly swat brains trusts who came top of English in Britain for however many years, and that person was Roald Dahl.
	So you're just... He's good at this.
	Yes. And everyone else who tries to do the same thing is a pale imitation.
	Mm. Of Roald Dahl.
	Well, the line from the Twits that I read out at the beginning, if you have a wonky nose and crooked mouth and double chin and stick out teeth, you can have good thoughts and they'll shine out of your face like sunbeats.
	They've edited that to remove the double chin.
	Why? What would be the point?
	It's like a woke Soviet Union rewriting these books.
	It's unbelievable. It's just...
	It's some sort of cultural vandalism.
	If you go to the next one, Andrew Doyle posted a bunch of the rewrites.
	And it's just... You can just see there's just...
	Like, in this one from The Witches, don't be foolish, my grandmother said, you can't go around pulling the hair of every lady you meet.
	Even if she was wearing gloves, just try it and you'll see what happens.
	And they changed to, don't be foolish, my grandmother said, beside there are plenty of other reasons why women might mow wigs and there's nothing wrong with that.
	That's just... The thing is, the first one, and this goes to a very famous essay of George Orwell's called Politics in the English Language, which I strongly recommend you read.
	It's free on the internet. There's multiple copies of it.
	Just read it. And it's basically a writing guide.
	So if you're into writing, read Politics in the English Language.
	It'll give you very sound advice about how to write a clear sentence in English.
	But one of the core pieces of advice that Orwell gives is talking about concrete, clear images which tend to, in English, tend to be words that have Anglo-Saxon roots rather than Latin or French roots.
	Now that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with words that are...
	it's an attempt to get across to people that English has two linguistic traditions feeding into it in a way that most other foreign languages that you might study at university or at school don't.
	So there's nearly always two words for something in English.
	And the classic one that is used to teach people is the animal is a sheep, which is derived from Anglo-Saxon, but what you eat is lamb, which is derived from Norman French.
	Well, Churchill's Will Fight Them on the Beaches is a great example of that.
	There's only one word in that, and that's surrender.
	Yes, I know, that's a classic example of it.
	So what Dahl's original prose does there?
	Yeah, it's pulling the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves.
	Just you try it and see what happens.
	So there's lovely, clear, concrete image of kids being silly fools and pulling an adult's hair.
	And yes, of course, you will get a clip around the ear if you do that.
	And so besides, so the words, as Orwell says, they fall like snow, soft snow.
	Besides, there are plenty of other reasons.
	Latin root. While women, okay, that's the un-Anglo-Saxon word, might wear wigs, and there is certainly Latin root.
	Nothing wrong with that.
	You see how it softens it using the Latinate?
	It's more fluid, right?
	It's more fluid. I mean, the danger is there is an easy rhetoric you can produce in English if you go and use lots of words with Norman French or Latin at roots.
	Now, there's a time and a place for that, but if you want to be direct, you use words of Anglo-Saxon origin.
	Yes. Because they're much earthier, I find.
	Well, they're the bedrock language.
	The structure of English is still Anglo-Saxon.
	It's not French. Even though you get that weird sense, if you're an educated person, but you've not learned French, that you read a French newspaper and you can work about half of it out.
	And there's a reason for that.
	It's because of the influence of Norman French.
	But the actual content is different as well.
	Because what's being transmitted in The Witches here is a warning, right?
	This is a lesson.
	Try it and see what happens.
	That's barbed. Yes, it is.
	That's to tell a child, no, no, you go on then and you'll find out.
	It's a version of Elon Musk's F around and find out joke.
	Yes, but that's the thing.
	This next one removes the barb.
	It doesn't teach the child the lesson.
	Instead, it lectures to the child and says, no, there's nothing wrong with that.
	It's like, well, Another flaw.
	Here's an example. You're told as a novelist, you're given novelistic advice when you're first starting to write fiction, to show, not tell.
	The first passage is a good example of show, whereas the second passage, the bowlerized version, is an example of tell.
	Telling is always far less effective if you're writing fiction.
	Yes, and it doesn't treat the person that you're talking to as an agent.
	That's the problem. The first one respects the agency of the person that they're dealing with.
	The second one is just a lecture.
	And this is the thing.
	It's not just that they've modified the language.
	It's a different message is being transmitted.
	And so Andrew Doyle is absolutely right to say, look, these aren't Dahl's books.
	And he's right. I completely agree.
	Why should you put Roald Dahl on the cover?
	Although once again, Matt from the Toregraph got it very well.
	There's a little child in front of the window display of a bookshop.
	And in the window is, New Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Quinoa Factory.
	And I'm sorry, I saw that and I did the snort laugh thing and the coffee very nearly went over the iPad.
	So let's move on to see who's for and against this.
	Well, not very many people have been for this, actually.
	Yes, this is unified both left and right because a lot of people like Roald Dahl.
	There have been some bad takes such as Philip Pullman saying they should just go out of print.
	No. Philip, why would we let them go out of print?
	Well, he's also assuming that they will go out of print.
	And if an author sold 50 million books in his lifetime and has sold another 200 million cents, this is about as, you know, this is not likely, shall we say.
	Yes. It seems just...
	Why would we capitulate to this kind of woke bowlerism?
	Why would we capitulate to that?
	I don't want to go out of print. I want to buy them for my kids, which I have actually done now.
	Lots of people, though, have come out against another easy win for Rishi Sunak.
	Do you remember the other day he was interviewed by Piers Morgan?
	Piers Morgan was like, what's a woman, Rishi?
	And he's like, oh, that's easy. An adult human female?
	Yeah, easy win. You know, here's another one.
	No, we shouldn't change Roald Dahl.
	Oh, brilliant. Thanks, Rishi.
	You know, risky. Please make Hamza Yusuf, the leader of the SNP. Please, please, I will light all the scented candles.
	By all the power of Shiva, compel you.
	But you know, the most interesting one for me was James O'Brien.
	You know James O'Brien.
	Everyone loves James O'Brien.
	Normally, he's an insufferable woke scold, trying to push everything to be as woke as possible.
	But of all people, even James O'Brien was like, well, hang on a second.
	Isn't this going a bit too far?
	Let's watch this. I presume that the thinking is we don't want to normalize abusive language, right?
	So if you're reading a story about a fat kid today, you might turn to the fat kid in the playground tomorrow and call the fat kid in the playground fat.
	And that's not great.
	You know, I'd like to live in a world where gratuitous rudeness...
	was in retreat rather than in advance.
	And by gratuitous rudeness, I mean rudeness that serves no purpose.
	Or even if it's accurate, it's just unkind.
	But hey, I mean, crikey, let him who is without sin throw the first stone.
	Lee Anderson, thick as mince.
	I can't help it. It just comes out.
	I say two words, the next three follow.
	So, you know, I'm certainly not squeaky clean on this.
	I do think it's important to try to understand why people are doing something that you can't understand.
	And I think that must be the reason, don't you?
	They must simply be trying to engineer social interactions.
	Almost as if, if we remove these words from these books, then we will reduce the amount of insult and abuse that children engage in with themselves.
	And I just think it's daft.
	I really do think it's daft.
	And as soon as I think it's daft, I worry that I'm beginning to change.
	I worry that my 51-year-old pendulum is now swinging in the other direction because normally I'm at the vanguard of defending these sort of things.
	The irony of him calling Lee Anderson thick as mince when he is himself thicker than mince is amazing.
	This is a man who wrote a book called How To Be Right when he has a worse record for forecasting than the Bank of England.
	Yes, but I mean, they're trying to engineer social interactions.
	Oh, really, James? Really?
	Really? The left are trying to engineer social interactions.
	Have you just woken up to that fact?
	Like, every day, James O'Brien's like, no, it's fine for them to do this.
	It's fine for them to do this. What, they're changing the thing I like?
	Oh, well, has this gone too far?
	Yeah, they do this every day, James.
	Like, it's amazing how he's only just...
	Well, it's finally happened to something that he likes.
	It's a vindication of the point that conservative thinkers have been making since Edmund Burke, which is that everyone is conservative about the things he or she knows best.
	Precisely. That's Conquest's third law, isn't it?
	Yes, I think it's Conquest. But, I mean, the insight goes back to Burke.
	It's totally true. And it's in Adam Smith as well.
	It is absolutely true.
	And this, again, normally I'm at the vanguard of defending these things.
	It's just like... The irony, James.
	Now it's touching something I care about.
	Well, hang on, has wokeness gone too far?
	At one point, he's like, where's the line on this?
	And it's like, that's the point that everyone's been making, James.
	There is no line. Exactly.
	There's no line. It will just roll over.
	And you're like, well, hang on, am I changing?
	No, you're not changing. That's the problem.
	You know, it's the constant, you know, mulch of wokeness going through everything.
	You didn't care about any of those things that got mulched up until this point, and now they've come from Roald Dahl, something you personally enjoy.
	Well, that's too bad, isn't it, James?
	You know, and he's been, I mean, there's just so many examples.
	Let's just go to the next one, just so you can see, like, you know, him mocking people about having the Argos made their delivery driver, like, label gender neutral.
	And he's like, oh, why do you care about that?
	It's like, well, I don't know, James, but they do care about that.
	And you're mocking it. And now, oh, well, why do you care about Roald Dahl, James?
	You know, can somebody who doesn't care about that start mocking you?
	And the arrogance of him, oh, Lee Anderson's thick as minutes.
	James, you're just the same.
	You know, I don't think Lee Anderson is thick as minutes, actually.
	He's just a working class conservative.
	Yeah, exactly. James O'Brien is just a classist, frankly.
	But anyway, let's leave that there.
	I just like seeing a very, so close to a moment of revelation at James O'Brien.
	Just look at himself and go, hang on, normally I'm the vanguard of this.
	Is the problem me?
	No. The problem's everyone else.
	He's the principal Skinner meme.
	Let's get to the comments.
	California has had another mass shooting you won't hear much about.
	The left can't grift it and looters can't take advantage of fake outrage.
	Again, we have an Asian shooter.
	This time an immigrant from China and none of his victims were black, only Asian or Hispanic, likely also immigrants, perhaps even some illegal.
	So this will be buried and leftoids will just be languishing, voracious for a bullied white teen on SSRIs to shoot up a school or for another white cop to shoot a black criminal.
	I say may the families mourn their loss and for this man to be hanged by the neck in public.
	I mean, I agree with that sentiment.
	I mean, this is just Americans.
	America's a failed state at this point, as far as I'm concerned.
	I mean, this is what causes...
	The grief that, I mean, Australians tend to, why there's been some really awful internet fights and Australians tend to win them because they've got a mastery of the blue and they're like Scots in this case.
	Australians have become very familiar with living in a country that's very well governed and that's why they tend to win Victoria notoriously with the longest lockdowns in the developed world in Melbourne.
	It's one of the reasons why they knuckled under and Americans found it mystifying.
	Although of course that - I found it mystifying to be honest.
	And the thing is of course it did have this - it was worse in parts of the United States.
	America is a large advantage.
	It contains multitudes.
	California, New York. Compared to, say, Texas or Florida.
	You know, that kind of thing.
	But, I mean, and I do know, when I first went to the United States as a teenager, I was shocked at how crappy everything was.
	You know, and I just...
	And I understood intuitively, I might have only been 15 years of age, but I understood why Americans didn't like their government because it wasn't very good.
	And I'd had that Australian experience of having a very competent government.
	And that's two edged because it means in Australia, you will let the government get away with things because you're used to it being good at its job.
	But that's the negative, the downside.
	The positive thing is that Australians just look at this kind of thing in the US where nothing works, where the streets are full of homeless people and that kind of thing.
	And they make the failed state comment.
	I've made it myself. I've made the failed state comment on trigonometry once.
	Because that was how I just responded to it.
	And I just remember my father in his Scottish accent going, well, they're just not very good at running things.
	But I mean, in Britain, we've got the worst of all worlds where we've got an overbearing government that's incompetent.
	Yes. Brilliant. Let's go to the next one.
	I just wanted to show you guys something fun.
	This weekend I was at a local little town church and they had these chalk drawings and I asked the priest where they were from and they are from the 1400.
	These things are over 600 years old and this is just a small tiny town church that you can get married in and go to a funeral at and stuff like that so this is just so cool.
	Where? Yeah.
	Where? Which country?
	Which country? Denmark. Denmark.
	Right. Okay. Whereabouts in Denmark?
	I'd be interested to know. Yeah.
	That's excellent. Right.
	Okay. Let's have a couple of comments.
	So Baystate says, the thing about us Scots is we're bipolar by nature.
	My favorite fact about Scotland is that we were declared the friendliest nation on earth and murder capital of Europe in the same year.
	Yep. Amazing.
	We have a famous joke that people fall into one of two categories.
	You're either a good guy or a wanker and there's no in between.
	One extreme or the other. I think this is why wokeism is so successful in Scotland.
	No one wants to be viewed as a wanker.
	You know, I've been to Scotland many times.
	I've never had an interaction with a Scottish person that wasn't positive.
	All Scots I've ever met have been really nice to me.
	Friendly. Yeah. Funny.
	Yeah. Generous.
	Generous. And this is the thing, it's one of those, I mean, what it is, the stereotype of Scots being tight and that kind of thing is to do with the fact that they take a little bit longer to warm up.
	But once they warm up, you're absolutely fine.
	And you just have to accept that They live in this small, cold, northern place, and so that means they take a little while to warm up.
	Yeah, but even strangers, there was one time I went and climbed Ben Nevis, and we were in the street, and I was trying to light a cigarette.
	I didn't have a lighter, and I turned to my friend and said, have you got a lighter?
	And this guy walking past goes, oh, here you go, pal.
	Yeah, pal, that's the classic Scots thing.
	They call you pal and they come up and they give you the light.
	And it was just like, oh, thanks mate. But it was just like, everyone was really friendly and that was not really what I was expecting in Scotland, being English and obviously English.
	I expected someone to take my voice and be like, oh, you prat.
	But no, everyone was really nice.
	Brian says, if the SNP don't vote for Hamza, they are racist.
	Great point. That's a great point and we should emphasise that to them.
	I spoke to Dank about this. He's like, yeah, I'm kind of in favour of Hams Yusuf because it'll destroy the SNP. It'll ruin them.
	The thing is, I feel sorry for those people who were sincerely in favour of Scottish independence.
	Dank used to be one of them.
	I know, he still is.
	I just feel really sorry for those people because their ideals, and to be fair, as Alex Salmon said, that they've worked for over 30 years, are just being shat on, excuse my French, from a great height.
	No, no, absolutely. But the thing is, the SNP aren't really promising independence anyway.
	They call it independence in Europe.
	Yeah. And it's like, okay, that's not independence, is it?
	What you're saying is you want to be a vassal state of Brussels.
	Okay, fine. Put that on your messaging.
	Don't use the word independence.
	I'm not against Scottish independence, but I don't really want to see Scotland become a vassal state of the EU. And I don't have an investment either way.
	If the Scots want to eject themselves, fine.
	It's your choice, your country.
	But just as a concerned onlooker, don't be idiots.
	It's obviously idiotic.
	Well, there's also the thing that the EU is probably not in the mood for a tartan grease.
	That's a great way of framing it, actually.
	But on that note, I'm afraid we aren't out of time.
	Sorry I didn't get to more comments. There were quite a lot.
	But we've had a Packed podcast today, apparently.
	But Helen, where can people find you?
	That's on Twitter if you are on the Hell site.
	I mean, more people will be on Twitter on the Hell site now.
	So I'm there and I'm actually, I'm occasionally, I don't just put the funny comments in journalism.
	I put them on my Twitter account as well.
	And I do that now because you're just less likely to be banned.
	It's great, isn't it? It is highly entertaining to be able to make a funny comment and not be banned.
	It's bloody strange being back.
	It's bloody strange.
	How long were you banned for?
	Five years. My lord.
	I mean, I've known people who've not been on for several years, but I think you're the longest.
	I mean, in the government report of Who the Far Right, they've got me listed on there in 2019 as having 140,000 Twitter followers.
	It's like, no, I didn't.
	You were not even on the site?
	No, I wasn't on the site, so I don't know where Benjamin Lee was getting his numbers.
	But yeah, no, I wasn't on the site, so weird.
	But anyway, so yes, folks, go follow Helen, obviously.
	And the other places is you can go to Law& Liberty.
	Mm-hmm. Oh, no, that's my Substack, which is just a boring, normal Substack thing.
	It's just helendale.substack.com.
	I haven't bought my own domain.
	I may do eventually, but at the moment it's just on Substack.
	My Substack is free in the sense that I will never put up paywalls.
	You can subscribe, but if you do subscribe, what you will be doing is you won't be paying me because I don't need the money.
	I'm a retired corporate lawyer, but I'm not rich enough to run a publishing company.
	So my writers, and at the moment I've hired one, Lorenzo Warby, and some essays, very good essays of his, are being published on a weekly basis.
	So any money that you either put in the tip jar or you subscribe, We'll go to pay him.
	And if enough of you do this, then I can hire other writers.
	I've got her in my back pocket.
	If you're familiar with the evolutionary biologist Paula Wright, I would like to buy some copy from her.
	I would like to buy some copy from other people.
	I've only bought copy from Lorenzo at the moment, and initially it was just out of my pocket.
	But now people are starting to pay Then it's not out of my pocket.
	I'm happy to do the editing and run the sort of effectively as a small publishing company and I don't need to be paid because I'm retired and I have a pension and all of those things.
	But I'm not rich enough to just pay people what they are worth.
	And I think Lorenzo's really excellent essays are worth more than the US $250 I could just pay him out of per essay.
	I could just pay him. And now people are starting to pay.
	That means he's getting paid what he's worth.
	And they're very good analysis.
	He is one of these people who is, instead of just whinging about wokery, he's very much one of these people who is, how do we defeat it?
	Where did it come from?
	Why did it get such claws into people?
	And how do we defeat it?
	And there's only seven of the essays up so far, and there's actually about 35 altogether.
	And I think what he has done is really quite important, and this is not the kind of thing I say lightly.
	I've liked other books that criticised aspects of wokeness.
	I like Stuart Ritchie's Science Fictions, which dealt with the problems in I liked Replications Crisis and in Science.
	I liked Cynical Theories of James Lindsay and Helen Cluckrose.
	But ultimately, I thought all of them were lacking in that they didn't give you solutions.
	And Constantine Kisen's been talking quite a lot lately about we need to have solutions to this.
	We can't just be whingers or spoil sports.
	You actually have to have a positive vision.
	And Lorenzo has a positive vision.
	And that's why I think what he says should be added to the mix that other people are talking about.
	Right, well, go and follow Helen then and Law& Liberty as well.
	Law& Liberty, that's just my author profile.
	You just go to lawliberty.org and because I'm on staff, if you go there, you just go to the staff and scroll down and you can find every piece I've ever written for Law& Liberty going back to 2019, which was before they hired me.
	They hired me as senior writer as this fractional appointment for the think tank, not until January 2021.
	I'd already been writing for them for a couple of years before that point.
	Well, Helen, thank you so much for coming down.
	It's always a pleasure to have you on. Thank you very much.
	And I'm sorry for being a stranger.
	That's all right. Thanks for joining us, folks.

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