All Episodes
Previous Next
March 30, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:30:24
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #621
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello and welcome to the podcast of Lotus Eaters episode 621 on today, the 30th of March 2023.
I'm your host Harry, joined today by Carl.
Hello!
And today we're going to be talking about a worldwide change that is coming, how Israel is literally the Handmaid's Tale, and also, we aren't bloody having it with this GB News.
Is that what we're... No, it's about slavery.
It's about slavery, oh alright.
And how Britain needs to whip itself, and we're not having it.
Not having it.
Yeah, no, absolutely not.
And let's get straight into the news then.
Well, before we start, quick thing.
Thanks to McLeod2486 for the Texan care package of interesting books and loads and loads of Texan spices.
Literally bottles of them.
Thanks very much.
It was a nice little surprise this morning.
I was glad when we received the box that wasn't ticking.
Well, yeah.
And just for anyone who's wondering why none of this will go up on YouTube, we received a strike For a video we put up at the beginning of February?
About the Grammys?
For harassment and bullying?
Of the Grammys?
Um... Sorry?
Grammys?
When somebody think of the poor Grammys, Simpsons is going to have to come out and retroactively give an apology for that one joke they made.
I didn't realise we were punching down.
Um... But I mean, I suppose, look at them.
You know.
I mean, obvious mental illness.
Yeah, but anyway, so, let's begin.
It looks like a massive shift in the global order is coming, and it seems that if we look at the chess board, all of the pieces are basically in place, and we'll go through that in this segment.
It's really, really concerning, because it seems that the people in charge of the United States don't seem to notice or care that the wolves are massing at their borders and are doing nothing about it.
And it's really concerning to me.
And if it wasn't for Dan's Brokenomics lectures, I probably wouldn't be able to put the pieces of this together in the way that we're about to go through.
So if you want to support us, go to locities.com, sign up and watch Dan's brilliant Brokenomics series.
There are 14 episodes of this now and it's all gold.
And if you want an indication as well, this first episode is free to view.
Oh yeah, and if you want to get a feel for the tone of the description of the world that Dan brings us, definitely go and watch it.
It's totally worth your time.
So let's begin.
In July 2021, when Biden withdraws from Afghanistan in total chaos.
He left behind $60 billion of military hardware, if you get the next one, John, that the Taliban have been posting.
But look at everything you left us.
So yep, They posted this recently as well, just to show the complete incompetence.
Nice little gift package to say goodbye with.
It's incredible.
The Taliban are like the fifth largest military in the world now.
It's like when you leave a party and they give you the little gift bags on the way out.
Yeah, but it's just mental.
But this just sets the scene for the retreat of American influence.
And it's really, I think, one of those key moments where World leaders, who do not like the United States in particular, will be looking at this and going, right, this is a very clear signal of America's profound weakness on the global stage at the moment, and that's not good.
Next thing to look at is the banking crisis, because America's economic system is in a moment of profound weakness.
Dan covered this on the podcast the other day, and so I'm just going to reference some of the things he went through, right?
The American banking system has a problem, because the average bank in America is sitting on a loss of 10%.
And so if there was an accounting done tomorrow, then a lot of banks would fail.
Literally hundreds of banks are basically on the verge of failure.
Small banks also have a looming debt crisis that's coming up in the next few years, if nothing bad happens.
See, I have heard, obviously, all that that's going on is terrible, but I have heard that some people are suggesting that it might be at least partially intentional so that there are going to be some places, so that all of the small banks can close down and then all of the larger centralised banks, because I think there are like four very large centralised banks, you know, like Goldman Sachs and places like that, can buy up all their assets, take on all of the debt, and then you can have Four centralized places wherein all of finance can be controlled within the US.
So if you live in the hegemonic system, you won't be able to escape it.
If you say the wrong thing on social media, then your bank will just shut you down the same way as we saw with the Canadian truckers.
It's very obviously some kind of power consolidation, which is not to the benefit of regular people.
But even if that does happen that way, you're still making yourself incredibly weak.
The more centralized the system is, just one big shot will take the whole thing down.
The more singular point of failure you have, yeah.
And we add to this, of course, the massive inflation crisis and supply chain issues, That the United States has been scrambling to get under control for the past six months now.
These were essentially self-inflicted because of Covid lockdowns and money printing, and of course the interruptions to the supply chains that the lockdowns caused, and the problems that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused, which we'll get to in a minute.
In episode 12 of Broken Omics, me and Dan went through this in detail, and I tell you, this is not looking pretty.
This whole thing is genuinely quite concerning, and Dan was basically like, You might want to buy some gold, because at least that's a physical asset that has real value that you can sell after the collapse and will be exchanged for something.
And that's precisely what China and Russia have been doing.
Here's an article from 2019, pre-Covid, during the Trump administration.
This is very interesting.
On Market Watch, watch out, China and Russia are stockpiling gold.
Now remember, this is under the golden era of Trump, where everything's going really, really well.
There's no COVID, there's no...
Lockdowns, there's no supply chain issues, there's no finance issues.
And they're saying this could be the start of these countries' attack on the dollar.
And at the time, there was no inflation, there's no obvious economic distress, and there's no financial panic.
Which is really, again, just four years ago now.
How amazing Trump's America was, and everything was going brilliantly, and you can't say any of these things now.
Obviously, there's massive economic distress, there's massive inflation, there's massive financial panic.
Everyone is worried about this, and China and Russia, for many years now, have been like, okay, we're just going to start buying up gold, buying up gold, buying up gold.
And if you want to know why gold matters, go and check out another episode of Brokernomics, which is episode number 5, Gold.
Why gold matters.
Gold is basically always desirable and non-perishable.
It will always be a thing of value.
And they know that the currency is no longer backed by gold, it's backed merely by the US dollar's status as the world reserve currency.
So it's like, right, okay, what happens if something happens to that?
Well, China also has some of the largest gold mines in the entire world.
Well, let's get to that actually, because China might well own more gold than the United States.
As Dominic Frisby, a friend of the show, wrote, is this the article, if we can go back up to the top?
I believe so, yeah.
He noted in a 2022 article that Russia is the fifth largest gold owner in the world, and China was slightly below that.
The UK, if you're wondering, has less gold than Kazakhstan.
Is that real?
Yeah, we've got less gold than Uzbekistan.
Great.
We're 17th on the list, right?
At least we're on the list, I suppose, in the first place.
Yeah, I guess we've got more gold than Tanzania.
But anyway, since the year 2000, China has mined roughly 6,830 tonnes of gold.
So actually, if you can scroll down, there's a graph in here.
There's a chart, sorry.
No, if you scroll back up then.
Sorry, it's above this.
Sorry, the next one.
No, okay, you don't have the Dominic Frisbee article, but that's fine.
But basically, this 6,830 tons would make China have possession of more gold than the United States, which is not good.
And so, yeah, if you can see the No, no, if you go down, there's a chart.
There we go.
So, yep, that's the one.
Alright.
So you can see the US apparently has 8,000 tonnes of gold, but China has 2,000 tonnes, but if it's mined 6,830, of course that means it's got more gold than the United States.
So that's very interesting.
And so then, going on to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, of course, everyone knows that the Russian invasion caused massive amounts of price increases because of shortages of things like fertilizer and other raw materials, because Russia is basically a giant country full of raw materials.
And it has an extraction economy that sends these raw materials around the world.
US sanctions, Western sanctions, were designed to make the Russian economy basically collapse but that didn't happen.
No, we basically just shot ourselves in the foot with that one.
That's correct.
Everything became more expensive for us and Russia The ruble rebounded and everything's actually not going terribly badly.
But the black markets are doing brilliantly.
I bet they're doing brilliantly.
And so, as a consequence of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, America tried to put together a coalition to say, look, we're going to resist Russia.
And one interesting Her respondent, or lack of response, was from the Saudi Arabian monarch, who basically just refused to take Biden's calls back in March 2022, when he was trying to put together this coalition to deal with the Ukraine crisis.
They were like, we're not going to listen to you.
That's really weird.
Right?
That's really weird.
You'd think that the Saudis, having been in bed with the Americans for decades now, would be at their beck and call because, of course, they get loads and loads of money from the United States because of oil, right?
And so in September 2022, people started to notice, like Bloomberg here being like, hang on, China, Russia and Iran are slowly ganging up on the US.
Maybe we should be concerned about this?
Yeah Dan covered this on one of his first segments actually that I did with him where he was talking about there were lots of back, seemingly lots of behind the scenes moves going on between the two of them.
So, this was in September 2022, and as Bloomberg say, Washington doesn't yet face a full-fledged alliance of hostile powers, but that's the wrong way to think about the convergence between these three countries that are increasingly united in their hostility to the US.
What happens when they do have a full-fledged alliance of hostile powers?
Because, of course, the other day, there was the famous image of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping shaking hands and smiling and saying, we have a no-limits alliance.
No limits.
And that previous article stated, "Doesn't yet face a fully-fledged alliance." So yeah, that's taken about five months to spring into existence.
Turns out, hatred of America really puts everything on the fast track, doesn't it?
Yeah.
But what's interesting is that they frame this in a very clever way.
Because in 2001, Vladimir Putin himself said, if someone thinks that Russia can again become an enemy of the United States, they don't understand what's going on.
But of course, 20 years later, things have changed dramatically.
And now, Putin and Xi Jinping are Obviously, under the understanding that, look, Russia has loads of resources, China has been building and is consolidating, and we are both opposed to the United States hedge money of the world.
We can work together on this, right?
And so they clearly are.
Both Putin and Xi Jinping have said that their governments, quote, remain highly vigilant about the negative impact on the United States' Indo-Pacific strategy on peace and stability in the region.
So Putin, they say, has gone from an ostensibly pro-Western leader to one of China's closest geopolitical partners.
And as Sergei Karangov, the head of Russia's Council on Foreign Defence Policy and long-time Kremlin advisor says, China is our strategic cushion.
We know that in any difficult situation we can lean on it for military, political and economic support.
Okay, so where's that going to come from?
Well, I mean, apart from containing almost all of Western manufacturing at this point.
Just the single worst economic decision ever.
Well, we needed all of that cheap plastic tap.
Apparently we did, right?
But China has been building what's called the Belt and Road Initiative.
We can go to that.
This is from the Council of Foreign Relations.
So again, people who should be keeping an eye on this sort of thing.
This is one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects ever conceived.
It was launched in 2013 by President Xi Jinping and is a vast collection of development and investment initiatives, which is originally devised to link East Asia and Europe through physical infrastructure, but is expanded to Africa, Oceania and Latin America.
And so China is basically building up a series of Chinese-owned ports and other ways of moving goods across the world to get them to China.
So China, once again, becomes sort of the world centre of the world repository for goods manufactured or extracted.
Well, if you're going through Africa as well, and that's where a lot of these raw resources are coming from that do things like, you know, power Teslas and such.
I mean, they say some analysts see the project as an unsettling extension of China's rising power, and the costs of many of the projects have skyrocketed, and opposition has grown in some countries, but the United States has actually done nothing about it.
Okay, fair enough.
Joe Biden has maintained his predecessor's sceptical stance towards Beijing's actions, but Washington has struggled to offer participating governments a more appealing economic vision.
So we're like, yeah, we don't like it, but we're not going to do anything about it.
Okay.
I mean, let's look at what China's been doing in Africa.
Massive amounts of investment.
If you scroll to the bottom of this, there's a map of Africa that you can just see.
China is creating essentially a neo-colonial empire in Africa, just doing it in the American way, where it's like, look, we don't need to control the governments.
What we'll do is we'll control essentially the money of your country by just being the thing that gives you the money.
You give us the resources, we give you the money, and then you're not going to do anything to upset the apple cart here, because that's how you can afford to do anything, right?
Well, if you control the means by which people trade, that's a lot of power that you have in your back pocket.
And we've known for a long time that China has been doing a lot of stuff in Africa.
I think there's that classic meme that Callum shares and I've shared about where it's the Chinese man going, it's all so tiresome.
Yes, that's from Chinese investment in Africa, yeah.
And literally, since many African countries lack the indigenous engineering capacity to construct these large-scale projects or the capital to undertake them, African governments with limited resources welcome Chinese investments enthusiastically.
These foreign investment projects are also a boon to Beijing, since China needs African resources to sustain its domestic economy, and the projects in Africa provide a destination for excess Chinese labour.
So it's a kind of neo-colonial empire from the Chinese.
Fair enough.
I mean, why shouldn't they?
Why wouldn't they use the money that America gives them to make plastic crap to then build their own empire in Africa?
When we talk about neo-colonialism, a lot of scholars and such in the West would start to clutch their pills at the suggestion of such a thing, but the fact of the matter is, it's an incredibly effective tactic if you want to consolidate power in yourself.
That's why everybody was into colonialism back in the day.
I mean, this is what the Belt and Road Initiative is designed to facilitate, as far as I can see.
And then you've got the BRICS investment strategy, which is Brazil, Russia, India and China, getting together literally just for...
Wide scale investments, it seems.
As Wikipedia tells us, the BRICS were originally identified for the purpose of highlighting investment opportunities and had not been an informal governmental, a formal intergovernmental organization.
But since 2009, they've increasingly formed into a more cohesive geopolitical bloc, with their governments meeting annually at formal summits and coordinating multilateral policies.
China hosted the most recent BRICS summit on the 24th of July last year.
I'm sure they'll have another one this year.
And so this is just a sort of way of making sure they can organize how money is spent.
Okay, fair enough.
And so going back to Saudi Arabia, they're not giving Biden a call, but they will have a chat with Xi Jinping and a chat with Iran.
Now, when I was a lad, the idea of Saudi Arabia and Iran getting down together and having a quick friendly chat seemed preposterous.
But here we are, right?
So Xi Jinping apparently recently helped broker a surprise deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which they call Middle East rivals according to Reuters, which I think is understating it somewhat.
But this is to restore diplomatic ties in a display of China's growing influence in the region, which is being watched warily by the United States.
That can't be good.
If all of the walls are getting together and burying the hatchet against the United States, it can't be very useful.
You remember in March 2022 when Russia invaded and after a while they were like, well, you know what we're going to do is we're going to make you pay in rubles for gas and oil.
Wait a minute.
I thought we paid for gas and oil in dollars.
I thought that's why Saddam had to go.
I thought that's why Gaddafi had to go.
I thought this threat to the dollar hegemony was the issue.
Well, it turns out you can't just knock off the rulers of Russia and China and wherever, and they've realised this.
They've realised that the United States probably isn't going to be able to do it, and even if they were able to do it, I don't think they've got the balls to do it.
And so Putin was just like, yeah, you know what?
No, screw you.
You're going to have to pay for our resources in rubles.
Well, that's good for Russia.
It's not good for us.
But recently, the thing that sparked this entire segment was China and Brazil have recently reached a trade deal in their own currencies, ditching the US dollar as an intermediary.
This is worth literally hundreds of billions of dollars.
The trade between China and Brazil is $150 billion last year.
And this is something that, for the people who pay attention to this sort of thing, has really raised eyebrows.
If we go to one Bloomberg... So that $150 billion, poof, gone.
Well, it's not dollars anymore.
Well, exactly.
It's 150 billion-somethings.
But as one Bloomberg commenter noted, if you go to the next one, sorry, John, they were like, well, hang on a second, the US dollar is losing its reserve currency status.
Well, it's not underpinned by anything else.
The US dollar has massive value because everyone uses the US dollar.
But if it was like, you know, we're not going to, and you're not going to make us use it.
You're not going to go to war with us.
Well, that was always the problem with places like Gaddafi, people like Gaddafi as well.
If you created a foreign currency that could oppose the dollar that did have some kind of backing to it, then that will inherently be more desirable to other people because, well, it's just safer to use.
You don't need to rely on the Federal Reserve of America deciding to print its way into massive inflation.
This is what Dan explained in Episode 1 and various other episodes of Brokenomics as to why this system exists after the Bretton Woods Agreement and why it's made America so rich and powerful.
And this is the undermining of that wealth and power.
Now, I'm sure that the dollar isn't going to collapse overnight, American power isn't going to evaporate.
Into nothing.
But it's not good, right?
This is the signal, the herald of worldwide change, and the WEF's prophecy of a multipolar world that's been realigned, well, it seems to be coming true.
But it's not because of physical weakness on the United States' part.
I think it's down to weakness in leadership.
I mean, they've been planning this for a long time, but notice how they didn't do a damn thing under Trump.
Didn't do a damn thing.
But of course, if you go to Biden, Just have a look at what's Biden doing.
Oh yeah, Biden is being marched around by his handlers.
They're literally saying, look, just stay here, Mr. Biden.
Come and stand on the blue spot, Mr. Biden.
He's out to lunch.
And he just looks so clearly lost whenever you see him in any public setting.
In fact, there's a sort of hot mic on here.
Can we put the volume on just so people can hear how his handlers speak to him?
And we have people lined up on the left over here.
some union leaders and workers.
Hey rising, ladies.
Your mark is going to be the blue one to the left.
How y'all doing?
You've got a blue mark and that's okay.
I'll stay in my blue mark and then I'm going to say hello to each one of you.
Yes sir, I'll help you get started.
Dementia patient.
Clearly.
Right?
This is what the world leaders at the moment, Putin and Xi Jinping, who, I mean, if I were to describe them as sharks, like circling, scenting blood and circling around the United States, I would be understating the danger, right?
A shark is, you know, these people are more dangerous than sharks.
But Biden's just toasting out to lunch.
I mean, there was another video of him, but there are loads of, again, put the sound on for this second, just so you can hear it, right?
Just loads of reporters trying to get his attention.
And he's just...
Stop him.
Okay.
This does really remind me of...
My granddad never had dementia before he passed away, but he did have a brain hemorrhage that meant he basically had dementia symptoms.
And it does remind me of those last few weeks going to visit him in the hospital before he passed away.
It's terrible, right?
But this is the person that is ostensibly in charge of the United States, and then if we look at other important areas of the United States, like California, they've decided, ah, you know what we're going to do, is we're going to pour 800 billion into reparations, which is two and a half times the state's annual budget.
For capital B Black Americans, or Californians.
Californians, yeah, exactly.
I mean, just, this is what the American politicians, the American states, are worrying about.
It's like, oh my god, you are about to, you're about to get overturned by a bunch of very hungry wolves, and you're not, you don't seem to be paying attention to this at all.
Priorities are completely upside down.
Yeah, this really matters, and so I think that I mean, do you remember the Project for the New American Century?
No, I do not.
Wolfowitz's doctrine where they were going to essentially create an American world?
Well, I think that's over.
It only took 23 years for that to not happen.
Anyway, this is pretty crazy, in my opinion, and I don't think it's going to end well.
Yes.
At least for us.
Moving on, we were just talking about Saudi Arabia, now let's take a look at the potentially imminent collapse or certainly destabilisation of the US's greatest and longest ally that they have in the Middle East, that being Israel, which is being portrayed by some in the West and in Israel itself as being literally the Handmaid's Tale, because this is the constant and clear example that they always jump to.
And it's funny how it always seems to recur everywhere that things like this happen.
I'll get into what is actually happening over there.
I was always quite ambivalent towards Israel, but now I'm leaning pro.
I know, right?
But it is funny because there are remarkable recurring themes and motifs that are showing up in anywhere that protests are occurring across the world.
And there are protests occurring all across the West at the moment.
Last week we covered some of what was going on in Paris, but what's happening in Israel seems to be much more likely to make effective change.
And it seems to be because of the fact that, unlike in Paris where it seems to be mainly unions, who are backing all of the protesters.
Israel doesn't just have unions backing the protesters.
It also has people within the government.
It has people within the military.
It has foreign organizations.
It almost certainly has foreign NGOs that operate within Israel, funding all of this as well.
So very interesting.
And we do have some excellent content on the website as well.
You did this one yesterday afternoon.
This is great.
Premium Hangout talking about our cyberpunk dystopia number six, and I'm shocked that we're already at number six, but should I?
They come together really, really easily.
So all I do is I create a document, and then when something that is obviously dystopian comes across my timeline, I just save it in this document, and it's remarkable how quickly these come together.
Well, you must just have an overflow of content to work with at this point.
It's kind of concerning.
Should I be shocked that we've already hit 6, or shocked that we've not yet hit 10?
No, like, I try not to get too hung up on it, but it just keeps happening.
All right.
But they are good, though.
But we, as you know, we have memberships on the website that start from as little as £5 a month, and that'll give you access to all of our premium content.
We have other tiers for extra benefits, but if you just want to watch the content, of which there is reams thousands of hours of content at this point that you can go through, £5 a month, and you'll be supporting us, which we would really appreciate, especially at the moment, given that we're being attacked at all sides.
Yeah, it's weird, isn't it?
It is fun how that is happening, but... I don't even know what we've done wrong.
Well, they've not given us a reason.
We bullied celebrities in the Grammys, and we were affiliated with Naughty Nono channels, so they won't tell us which ones are the Naughty Nono channels, so... Interesting, but let's get into the news.
This is what's going on in Israel at the moment.
I've taken information from a lot of different sources and I just want to be clear as well when it comes to Israel, people get bogged down in Israel versus Palestine.
I have no horse in that race and I have no particularly strong feelings on Israel as a state in the first place.
I'm not pro, not anti... No, I don't care.
I'm just reporting on what's going on because it's very interesting how what we're seeing here seems to repeat all across the West whenever anything that is anti-liberal democracy, aka anti-progressive, seems to pop up.
Benjamin Netanyahu, who is the Prime Minister, has been facing some massive protests recently because what's been going on is they have a Supreme Court in Israel.
This Supreme Court seems to have an outsourced and outsized amount of power to it, and I'll get into explaining exactly that in a moment.
There has been legislation tried to be introduced into the Israeli parliament and they've been tried to forced through because Netanyahu at the moment has a majority through a coalition government where he's taken his party which I believe is the uh let me just get the name of it here it's some Israeli name shockingly enough Likud or Lippard uh Likud
And he's got a coalition with other parties that are being described by the media in the West as far-right, which I don't know what that actually means anymore, so I'll take that with a little bit of a pinch of salt.
And he's been trying to push it through with the aid of those parties to try and add some reforms to how the Supreme Court over there works.
And this is also going on, just to be clear about what's happening, in the midst of he's having an ongoing trial facing charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three cases and a witness testimony on that began since the 5th of April.
So there is also murmurings that this might be too new to the power of the Supreme Court to prevent himself from getting impeached or having legal charges put against him because he's going through this trial.
What it is, is basically they're saying that he paid off some media organizations to give him positive coverage.
Oh wow.
Just like Jacinda Ardern?
Big shock!
He denies any wrongdoing and claims that he's the victim of a witch hunt.
After winning Israel's elections for a second time, Netanyahu decided to pass a judicial reform plan.
This was, according to those who have taken to the streets, a plan to protect himself from a possible court judgment, which would end his term as Prime Minister.
The plan announced on the 4th of January, and ever since the 4th of January, these protests have been going on.
They've been going on for about 10 weeks right now.
And if I do get anything mixed up or wrong as part of this, please feel free to correct me down in the comments.
We're not perfect.
over here so uh you know we're always happy to be corrected but it says the reforms would give the parliament authority to override supreme court decisions with a basic majority they would also make it very difficult to declare a prime minister unfit for office and remove them for power netanyahu says the courts are overreaching their powers and the reforms would restore a balance between judiciary and executive branches the government would have a decisive say over who becomes a judge including in the supreme court by increasing its representation on the committee which appoints them so unlike america where
The executive can have direct say over who gets on to the Supreme Court.
So they get to appoint it and then it's ratified by the Senate?
Yes.
This has a different process.
So Israel has a prime minister who seems to be the top dog and then has a president as well.
The president gets to choose who gets on the Supreme Court but first it's from a short list of names that are decided by a committee which chooses which these are.
So it means that in actuality the government that's in charge outside of this committee has very little say other than the final deciding say of Because they could stack a shortlist full of one-sided candidates.
From what I have read, that seems to be what has been standard procedure for a long time over there.
Is this a similar case to Brazil's Supreme Court as well, where it's got wildly disproportionate constitutional powers?
It seems so.
I'll get into a bit more of that as we carry on.
So the ministers would not be required to obey the advice of their legal advisors either, guided by the Attorney General, which they currently have to in law.
And when you have to obey it to the law, to the word of what they're saying, the less advisors and more just your handlers at that point, let's be honest.
I also got some extra information and context from a Guardian article, which I've not included in this, but I'll just take the information from here.
You can trust me that everything I'm reading is true.
So the changes were not spearheaded by Netanyahu himself, but were instead by his Likud, I don't know how you pronounce it, so it could be Likud or Likud, I'm just going to keep saying Likud, colleague Yarev Levin, the Justice Minister, and the religious Zionist M.K. Simcha Rothman, who chairs the Nessets Law and Justice Committee.
Both men have a long-standing hatred of Israel's Supreme Court, which they see is too powerful and is biased against the settler movement.
The settler movement, I believe, is what's going on in the West Bank at the moment, where they've got Israeli settlements that they want to annex part of the West Bank of Jordan so that they can get You know, complete Israeli rule over there, from the Palestinian population over there.
They were also biased against Israel's ultra-religious community, the Mizrahi population, Jewish people of Middle Eastern origin.
In particular, many on the Israeli right have never forgiven the court for decisions related to Israel's unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
After five elections in 2019, in which politicians on both sides failed to form stable governments, a bloc of extremist and religious parties, extremist and religious parties, this is coming from The Guardian again, headed by Netanyahu's Lekud, were a clear majority in elections last November and went on to form the most right-wing administration in Israeli history.
And what they want to do... Is that bad, is it?
It is bad if you're the Guardian.
What they want to do, and also probably bad if you're Palestinian as well, let's be honest, they want full annexation of the occupied West Bank, a rollback of pro-LGBTQ plus legislation, axing laws protecting women's rights and minority rights, and a loosening of the rules of engagement for Israeli police and soldiers, all on the coalition's agenda.
So you can be pretty certain, reading that, that if it was just a case of action against Palestine, you would get lots of lefty Scholars and such making a stink about this.
But you would not get the same level of protests that have been going on.
You can see this.
This is just an image taken from some of the protests that have been going on in the past 10 weeks.
Just thousands and thousands of Israeli flags.
These people, and also a pride flag.
These people are not in support of the Palestinian people.
These people are in support of progressive policies.
And that's what I can see here.
And I also took this from an eye iNewspaper article saying demonstrations may be of an unheard of size but the demonstrators are very largely and stop me if this sounds very shocking white ashkenazi secular and middle class middle class lefty ponces they are opposed to israelis often religious orthodoxy sapati and ultra-nationalists who feel that they have long been denied real power despite their growing numbers and like i say it's like californians have moved to texas
it is pretty much and it's all going on in the big metropolitan liberal centers like tel aviv and other cities across israel whereas most of the country don't seem to really care that much the the The general population of a country is right-wing and the cities are left-wing, even in Israel.
Stop me if you've heard this one before.
And like I mentioned as well, there's a lot of anti-Israeli imperialism, which basically means they don't want Palestine being annexed and such.
NGOs that operate within the area that have almost certainly had a lot of funding into this, because you look at a situation like this and you go, these are just normal people, they're lefty middle class types, but where do they get all of these flags from?
Where do they get all the- Amazon?
I don't know.
Where do they- Well, we'll see some of the other things that they have access to, where it's just like, okay, no normal person is just going to have a Handmaid's Tale uniform waiting in the wardrobe for an occasion just like this.
Somebody is giving these things out.
Quite possibly, yeah.
But carrying on with the information of what's been going on over the past few days, this Saturday just passed, thousands of protesters were pouring to the Neset, which is the Israeli parliament, and also to Netanyahu's house, which once again is just a big reminder of last year when Roe v. Wade got overturned and we had people outside of Kavanaugh's house.
Galant went live on TV and called for a halt to the plans until after next month's Independence Day holidays.
And even McDonald's said that they would be closing all its Israel branches in Israel from noon local time, the fast food chain said in a local tweet.
You've got trade unions who decided to strike.
The two main ports in Israel got shut down.
Hospitals said they would only be providing emergency services and not fully operating.
And the military said they didn't support the move either.
And then McDonald's as well.
And McDonald's, just like in Russia.
Yeah, just like in Russia.
It's interesting how as soon as it's progressive policies that are being threatened in these sort of liberal democracy, Western-style nations, everyone just moves in lockstep towards the same goals.
And notice how it's exactly the same.
Rollback of pro-LGBTQ plus legislation and women's rights and minority rights and all the sorts.
It's exactly the same stuff.
every single time this is exactly what they were what america was trying to implement in afghanistan and they yeah those policies were very popular over there what was it callum found in the bins oh and this has all caused a massive rift through the israeli government as well in the last few hours and this is from the BBC article again.
The country's president, Isaac Herzog, called on the government to halt the plans, warning ministers that the eyes of all the people of Israel are on you.
More protests are planned across the coming week.
Yoav Gallant, who was the Minister of Defence, had also spoken out against the controversial plans to overhaul the justice.
So what happened was Netanyahu, last week, was on a trip to Britain.
He came and... Excuse me.
Had a meeting with Sunak and Suella Braveman and all those sorts of people.
And while he was gone, the Minister of Defence came out and basically denounced him.
So what happened after that was Netanyahu got back, had a meeting with him and said, you're fired.
Good for him.
The first thing he did.
You're undermining my rule.
You're fired.
Good for him, yeah.
Yeah, which is probably the best way to do these things.
But then, of course, immediately after that, tens of thousands of demonstrators who really just cared about the job security of the Minister of Defence, Yoav Gallant, decided this is the final straw.
We're taking to the streets again, because this is, as always, a completely spontaneous organisation.
This is completely from the ground up, ground-swelling movement.
There is going to be some groundswell here, because I think that the left-wing progressive activists are very power-conscious, and they will be aware that actually Netanyahu is on a kind of knife-edge here, and if they push hard enough, they can get him to topple.
And so there will be sort of like a kind of organic grassroots support for that among the progressive lefty Insufferable.
Yeah there will be the progressive ground swelling of some people but a lot of this seems very calculated to me.
I mean a lot of it probably is.
Yes and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will delay this after all of these protests he came out and just said that he will be delaying the move to push this legislation through and they're going to be waiting until after Passover which I think will mean a month or so and so it's not going to weigh
But he will be doing a more democratic reading of what's going on and decide more democratically whether or not this is all going to go through, which means that he will probably just be shouted down and all of this legislation and reforms will not be going through, I would expect.
And I found this wonderful tweet thread That's quite long and I won't go through all of it but it explains in nice detail what's been going on with the Supreme Court and why people within the Israeli Parliament might want to pull back on some of the powers that it has.
So it started, the actual Supreme Court itself started in 1953 I believe it says, and from that point it was supposed to be the same as a Supreme Court in the US where it's a check and balance on power to prevent too much despotic oversight of government being able to just run roughshed and do whatever it wants.
and for a time it was full of people who were dedicated to a kind of impartiality as you would kind of hope from a situation like that people who are going to put an actual backstop of power but he says in here all this began to change in 1977 when for the first time a right-wing more religiously minded government replaced the long reigning center-left it's always funny how it's whenever the right wing comes up all of a sudden then democracy is in danger right
A wave of ongoing metastasizing panic washed over the still very secular and increasingly cosmopolitan professional elite.
A rising second generation of Israeli jurists, led by people such as Aaron Barak, a fan of Ronald Dworkin and Earl Warren, spotted opportunity.
Barak was first AG, then a justice, then president of the court.
Through careful rhetoric, cajoling and playing on the fears of secular legal Israelis, Yeah.
that the public could not be trusted to govern itself, he expanded the court's power more and more.
One of Barak's most powerful tools was the aforementioned committee, the one that I mentioned earlier that gives the shortlist to the president.
Once designed to ensure a majority in Israel didn't stack the court with party members, he used it to ensure only people who agreed with him and his views got on the court at all levels.
We ended up with a system where every step of the way the court was immune from any oversight even with the appointments.
Many on the right and even on the center left were increasingly uncomfortable with this and the growing tendency of the court to give the AG and state attorney power to veto legislation or government decisions simply because they didn't like it.
The fact that the court and legal academia now operate in a closed shop where they keep radicalizing and think the court should essentially be able to do whatever it wants has only made things worse.
This sounds very similar to Brazil.
It sounds very similar to lots of places.
And the United States, actually, as well.
But yeah, the interesting undetermined nature of what a Supreme Court is actually supposed to do and its interaction with the democratic process.
Like, these people are appointed, they're not elected.
So why do they get the authority and power to overrule elected representatives?
Well, that's the funny thing.
If you want to be crying out against this in protest in the name of democracy, I don't see much democracy going on in here.
This is autocratic.
Yes, it's autocratic liberal elites deciding what gets passed through and what doesn't.
That's exactly right.
But, as I mentioned, dissent has been coming all across from the West as well as within the walls of Israel itself, so you had President Biden talking about this.
The liberal elite reach out to their own and say, well hang on a second, they're fulfilling the agenda we would like to fulfil here, we're in support of them.
Brilliant.
Yeah, so Netanyahu won't be invited to the White House barbecue this year by the Sands Bank.
Oh, really?
Maybe he'll join the China-Iran axis.
Perhaps.
Asked if he'll invite Netanyahu to Washington, Joe Biden, looking as confused as ever, replies with a sharp no, not in the near term.
It's probably after he's been directed to his post.
That's a remarkable statement.
I know, it's very strange when the rest of the world seems to be suddenly allying itself against America.
America is, for the sake of its own liberal democratic principles, is more than happy to spit in the face of its one major ally that it has in the Middle East.
The elected Prime Minister of is taking umbrage with an unelected body taking excessive power away from the elected government.
Amazing.
Well, I can understand why Biden would be on the side of the Supreme Court in this situation.
Yeah, fair.
Yeah, and even when he went to London, like I mentioned, he was in London last week speaking to Sunak, he got there and there was just Just happened to be protests waiting for him there as well.
Very interesting.
Met by protesters who were shouting shame at him in Hebrew.
And some women, if we scroll down we can see the image, were dressed in red robes and white caps, inspired by The Handmaid's Tale.
Every single time.
Every single time.
Once again, for me, it's just very interesting that these people just have these at a moment's notice, on hand, for whenever they need it.
I've got my Handmaid's Tale outfits all queued up.
Do you?
But also, remarkable, if they're like, oh, Netanyahu wants to abolish women's rights.
It's like, okay, so what are you doing?
Well, I'm dressing like he's abolished women's rights.
Well, that's not a deterrent.
I'm not going to count out the idea that there might be just something a bit fetishistic about this whole thing.
There is definitely a subset of women who almost dress up like this because they're like, oh, bet you don't want to step on my rights, do you?
Oh, that'd be so terrible if you just destroyed my rights, oppressed me.
Feminist fetishization here.
But it's just weird how it's like they dress like they're in compliance.
That's weird.
It is funny.
And we can go and see some of the footage that was coming from the streets of Israel.
So scroll down for me here.
So this is just the amount of people on the streets.
And this is one of the major bridges running through Tel Aviv.
And they just completely blocked it off.
So you know the way that we complain when Extinction Rebellion, who are obviously also being run by other shady figures in the background and funded by The daughters of oil moguls, for instance, when they go into the streets of London and we complain, well, the likelihood is if you're blocking major bridges and all of this infrastructure, you're going to ruin people's ability to get ambulances and such.
No one can get anywhere.
Yeah, no one can get anywhere.
I think the next one also is basically the same video.
Yeah, this is the same footage actually.
So if we go to the next one, I found this one funny, which is...
Organised regiments of handmaid's tales.
Oppressed women.
Women in Tel Aviv, Israel are marching in silent protest against Netanyahu's planned murder of democracy.
That's amazing.
I love the rhetoric that they employ whenever it's anything like this, because I hear murder of democracy, and I think that just sounds kind of cool.
Netanyahu is an elected leader, and he's like, look, maybe the unelected courts shouldn't have as much power as necessary to overrule the government, and they're like, no, that's against democracy.
I'm sure that people like Netanyahu, and it seems from what I read through that thread that we went through a moment ago, that the reason that it got so bad, even after the right wing got into power in Israel, is because the right wing in Israel did what the moderate right wing in every country does, and just gave far too much of a benefit of the doubt.
Oh, you need more power?
Well, that's alright then.
I'm sure you won't do anything wrong with that.
I'm sure you won't try and use this against us in the future sometime.
Because, oftentimes, the moderate right-wing that are in politics are always far too naive to understand where these things will go.
And we've got more good footage in the next one, which is from Al Jazeera.
So, got this footage of protesters talking about... Scroll down so we can see the image nicely.
So, for those who are listening, there is these... See what I mean?
These gigantic flags.
Thousands and thousands of people with gigantic Israel flags, gigantic flag with a fist on it, and then a circle, a circle surrounding a fire of Handmaid's Tale women.
Again, circling around like witches in the coven.
It's very strange.
I'd like to hear what the ultra-orthodox Judaism view is on the handmaid's tale, because they're probably in favour, right?
I would imagine so.
Once again, the ultra-conservative orthodox ones are the ones trying to push through legislation to repeal the progressive legislation that already exists within, and it's only within the big cities that these sorts of people... But it's every single time.
Literally the handmaid's tale.
Read another book!
Please!
Please, just read something else.
Even if you're dressed as house elves from Harry Potter or something.
Oh, look at this.
He's not the Prime Minister, he's the Crime Minister.
Got him.
Got him.
And once again, this is a completely organic movement, because in the next one we can see some of the other banners and such that they have.
They just happen to have a gigantic banner.
This is a real image, by the way.
Thousands of people, once again for those not watching but listening, thousands of people.
We've got a nice aerial shot of the crowd and they're holding up a gigantic banner which is the image of Donald Trump, Netanyahu and Putin in orange jumpsuits.
In mug shots.
I mean, this banner looks like it's, like, 30 metres wide.
It does.
It's massive.
That's what I mean.
Somebody produced this.
Yeah, yeah.
This cost a lot of money.
The Western media would like... Oh, yeah, and we've got some pride flags dotted about there as well.
The Western media would like you to believe that this is just a completely normal thing where protesters go out... No, the normal thing that we expect is France, where people go out and they smash stuff.
They're not organised like this.
They go out and they set fire to things.
They don't have gigantic banners.
This is very obviously ideological.
Yes, very clearly.
You don't have to make it... This is not about protecting democracy, because if these people, if the government were trying to add reforms in to limit the power of the Supreme Court, because the Supreme Court in Israel was really conservative and blocking liberal, progressive... Oh, they'd be totally in favour of the reforms.
Yeah, absolutely they would.
And there's just this last article that I found which is giving the three major likelihoods of what could happen.
The three options for Israel going forward.
Which is, number one, Netanyahu gives up his reforms, secures some more time in power.
Scenario that this article, which is also featured in The Nation, said is unlikely to offer the country much stability since far-right parties who are wholly committed to the judicial coup.
Ooh, scary.
Judicial coup?
Might leave the government- Judiciary is cooing the government!
I know.
Causing it to collapse.
Meanwhile, the protest movement is likely to keep up the fight for a constitution, because that's what they're also asking for.
And my main question- Constitution's not a bad idea.
Yeah, but my main question, if they have a constitution, is who will be writing it and what will it say?
Because I doubt it'll be there to protect the general freedoms of everybody and make sure that freedom of speech and other such things- No, it'll be the freedom of speech of leftists.
Yeah, it'll be a minoritarian constitution.
Yes, or at least another round of elections.
A far more likely scenario that this one goes through is that the centre and the right form a renewed alliance, possibly without Netanyahu, which will try to stabilise the country, a security apparatus, economy and international standing.
Or a third scenario is that Netanyahu doubles down on the reforms, perpetuating the current unrest.
Either way, with any of those, Israel is not looking like it's in a particularly stable or great position right now when there is all of this going on, obvious interference going on from different high-level sectors of society, and it's just very clear to me that none of this would be happening if it wasn't going against progressive legislation.
Fair enough.
Right, let's move on.
and discuss the latest progressive jihad against Britain.
Now, what's interesting about the current state of the progressive argument against the United Kingdom is actually their arguments have been growing weaker and weaker and weaker.
And this shows us, this is what we'll discuss now, shows us just how weak the argument's getting to the point where we can just say, no, we're not having it, not engaging with it.
No, you're wrong.
And that's always been the best answer, but I'm glad we're finally getting to the point where everybody's recognising it.
We are actually winning this argument, and the weakness and tenuousness of their arguments show it.
You'll see how far back we've actually pushed them on this.
But before we begin, go to lodeseers.com and enjoy this particular epoch of Gordon of Khartoum.
which is a British general who went around doing amazing things.
I love one of my favorite types of epochs that Bo and I do, when he tells me about some hero of the British Empire who went around doing something incredible.
And Gordon is one of those people.
So speaking of Khartoum, which is in Sudan, let's talk about Nezrin Malik, who's a Guardian columnist.
Must we?
Yes, we must.
She was born in Khartoum, in Sudan, and raised in Kenya, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
She attended the American University in Cairo and the University of Khartoum as an undergraduate, and completed her postgraduate study at the University of London, and now she's come here to tell you how being British is bad.
Aren't all Guardian journalists employed to do that?
Yes, but we're not bloody having it.
That's the point.
So this is the latest slew of articles.
It begins with Nesrin here.
If we can't speak honestly about Britain's links to slavery, we turn our backs on change.
I believe it's probably Nesrin who's going to be speaking dishonestly.
That's absolutely correct.
But okay, good.
I don't want your change.
I don't want what you're interested in doing.
Go back to Sudan if you don't like it.
No.
I'm not accepting it, right?
At this point I have become completely just numbed to any accusation like this.
Even if we did have the worst history of slavery in the world, even if we were as bad as Brazil or the Middle East was, I don't care anymore.
We have the history of Mongolia.
Contemporary debates about British history are distinguished by their lack of historical content.
Instead, they are merely a new way of posing an old question.
Does Britain need to change, or is it great the way it is?
Well, I mean, the way it was, was pretty great, and the changes that you and your type have wrought, the progressives, have been all negative.
It does need to change, but we need to go back.
Yes.
We've got to go back, Martin.
She says, this is why attempts to revise and update conventional accounts of British history are so fiercely and reflexively rejected.
Now that's interesting, isn't it?
It's like, look, I just want to revise and update conventional accounts and you just shut me down at the word go.
So yeah.
And so they're not trying to do that anymore.
Now they're like, okay, we need to get, we need to step back and try and find an opening.
So you'll even listen to the revised and updated account.
I mean, Now, historical revisionism, if done in the purpose of finding the truth if history has been misrepresented in the past, can be a very good thing.
But you must always recognise that historical revisionism is done with a particular perspective in mind.
Yes, and the intent behind the revisionism is the important thing.
She just tells us, is that right?
Well, I want Britain to change.
It's like, I don't care what a Sudanese immigrant thinks of the state of Britain, I don't really want to change it.
It annoys me at this point that people cared for so long for what a Sudanese immigrant had to say.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't understand why you would think that we would care, right?
She says, Britain's past, or a glorious version of it, is so central to maintaining the status quo that to question our history is to invite dramatic charges of vandalism and erasure.
From those who seem to believe the past is like an antique vase that might shatter if too many people lay their hands on it.
That's great!
Look how beaten back they are.
It's like, look, we're not even going to talk about the subject.
We're going to talk about your unwillingness to talk about the subject.
And that's great, because I'm not going to talk about my unwillingness to talk about the subject.
No.
Just going to sit back in my relaxing rocking chair.
Exactly, no!
Reading a book, don't care.
She has had to retreat very substantially.
These are not the arguments we were having 10 years ago.
And okay, so even if we were, we can explain very very briefly, just why we don't care about this, what's the transatlantic slave trade got to do with Sudan?
Sudan's on the east coast of Africa, transatlantic slave trade is on the west coast of Africa.
What's it got to do with you?
Nothing.
What's the Arabic slave trade got to do with Britain?
Other than the fact that we ended it, nothing.
So, there's nothing to discuss.
This is why we're not interested in this kind of historical revisionism.
Well, is she going to be asking for reparations from the Arabs?
That's a great question.
I very much doubt it.
We'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute, right?
She says, if we cannot speak about Britain's past and the violations within it, we cannot speak about Britain's present and the violations that persist now, and therefore can make no case to reshape it.
Good.
I don't want you to make a case to reshape it.
I want you to go away.
I don't want to hear that me and my ancestry is bad just because you don't like it.
It's just not my problem.
I mean, throughout... I mean, I just... I hate the really narrow framing of the whole thing, because it's like... I'm sorry.
Empire building has been the name of the game throughout the globe for thousands of years.
And we, if anything, were the nicest ones to ever do it.
Sudan exists as a trade port for Arab empires, for slaves.
That's why Sudan exists.
We'll get into slavery in Sudan in a minute, right?
But she says, it's meant to shut down conversations of the past, and its larger purpose is to constrict the definition of British identity and make it impossible for new voices to contribute to that definition.
I don't care what Sudanese immigrants' definition of a British identity is.
Not my problem.
I didn't ask.
No one is interested in redefining what it means for us to be British.
Sorry.
I don't know why you think that would be appropriate in any way, shape or form.
I don't go to Sudan and say you need to rethink what Sudanese identity is.
Why would I?
Why would I expect them to listen?
No, not having it.
Not having it.
The campaign to protect our history, in other words, is about protecting the past from historians and protecting the present from dangerous new ideas and how we got here.
No, it's to prevent you from simply lying and to try and portray us as the villains of history when in fact we were the heroes of history.
That's what it is.
Well, I mean, we have a phenomenon that we call nowadays, which is the court historians.
Yeah.
Who are the mainstream.
Oh, we've always had that.
Yeah, often.
Well, yeah, true.
But now they are the mainstream lefty historians who are only employed people like David Olusoga, who showed up in the Harry and Meghan Netflix program to basically just show up and go, well, the British Empire was evil.
And then after the British Empire left, we also had the Commonwealth.
And because they're basically the same thing, As if they are the same thing at all.
It means the Commonwealth is also evil.
Hmm.
But she makes sure that she knows that you should be afraid.
Because you'll notice how far she's retreated.
You won't even have the conversation with me.
No, I won't.
I won't even have that conversation.
Now, go away.
And she's like, well, time is really beginning to run out for those who are scared of a modern, increasingly diverse and informed Britain.
Ah, here we go.
Right, here we go.
This is very interesting barb, isn't it?
Don't you know that Britain's becoming more diverse?
What's that supposed to mean?
Sounds like a threat, doesn't it?
Well, Connor and I spoke about this on a premium podcast.
It's not out yet, but we were speaking about this phenomenon, which is whenever these conversations are brought up, they always refer to these ethereal, untouchable forces that are working in there.
Diversity just will end up in Britain, so we best just open the floodgates already.
If you don't want unlimited brown people flooding into your country, well, it's going to happen one of these days.
My wife went to the register for babies today, To go and register my daughter, and she's like, everyone in here is speaking Polish.
Oh yeah, we also get a lot from Eastern Europe.
It's literally just millions of foreigners.
Yeah, if you don't want millions of foreigners in your country while the forces of history are moving, you'd best catch up.
Exactly.
She says, if a country has owned, traded in and profited from slavery and colonialism, it cannot escape or outrun the legacies of those foundational exploitations.
Denker didn't ask, what about the situation in Sudan, which we'll look at in a minute, in fact.
Have you considered that, in fact, maybe Sudan has owned, traded in and profited from slavery?
Have we considered that?
Do we take moral lectures as British people who go around abolishing slavery around the world from Sudanese people who don't do that, but do train in slavery?
I'm just thinking, can you think of a single country, historically, that couldn't be said to have been involved in the slave trade?
Iceland?
No, there are going to have been slaves that the Vikings took there, of course there are.
And that's stupid.
I mean, they took Christian slaves.
Irish slaves went to Iceland.
I can't think of a single one.
Finland?
Maybe some Inuit tribes in the Arctic?
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, I guess.
Maybe, but maybe they were enslaving each other.
Who knows?
But the thing is, why does any of this matter to Nezrin Malik?
Well, because it's morally right to make amends for stealing people's lives and labour.
Oh my God, Sudan has such a huge weight of guilt on its shoulders then.
We know why it matters to her.
It's because of Gibbs.
Well, it's because of communism, right?
She's like, change, I want change.
Why?
You're a communist.
Well, then you want communist change.
Piss off.
I simplify it even further just to Gibbs.
It is, but it's for communism.
But anyway, so this condemns all of Africa to moral oblivion.
I mean, one of my favourite quotes is from King Gezo, who was on West Africa.
He was a king of Benin.
Carl's always quoting King Gezo in the office.
No, no, I am actually, because it's a great quote, because when the British rocked up and said, you know what, this slavery thing, we think it's over.
We're not into it actually, and we shouldn't have done it really, and we're going to stop.
And he, in the 1840s, said that, quote, he would do anything the British wanted him to do apart from giving up the slave trade.
Quote, the slave trade is the ruling principle of my people.
It is the source and the glory of their wealth.
The mother lulls the child's sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.
Don't care, didn't ask, the slavery will end.
That's what the British said.
And so if we go to the other side of Africa and have a look at, say, Sudan, Well if we go to the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust's website, they have an article from 2020.
So this isn't exactly ancient history.
South Sudan and Sudan, like many African nations, have a history of slavery and traditions which have promoted and normalized slavery in many communities today.
Inter-tribe rivalries and conflicts have often resulted in the abduction of people, women and children in particular.
Slavery was discouraged under colonial rule, and whilst it continued, it did not pervade South Sudanese and Sudanese societies as it has since the 1980s.
Oh, sorry, was that 19 or 1880s?
19.
Oh, okay, all right, interesting.
So, European turns up, Not having any of this slavery.
The Sudanese are like, yeah, but this is the ruling principle of our people, because we've always had slavery.
It's just, we have a history of slavery and traditions which have promoted and normalized these.
And we're like, no.
And eventually it's like, oh, decolonize, decolonize.
And eventually then it just comes back.
When we go, slavery comes back to Sudan.
I guess they weren't lying about it just being foundational to society, though.
No, they're not, right?
Well, these places, they have very rigid hierarchies, and generally, if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy, you're a slave.
But somehow, Nesrine Malik thinks that we have to criticise Britain over this?
She's from Sudan.
Her home country is riddled with slavery, and for some reason, our Our 150 year period of the transatlantic slavery, which of course didn't affect Sudan, is somehow the main concern that she has.
There are real people alive now in slavery in Sudan and we're meant to be guilty.
Get stuffed!
Absolutely not, right?
She's like, well, no, sorry.
They're like, even though slavery in Saddam was initially abolished in 1924, a rise in 1924?
It's a bit late.
A bit late to the party.
Better than Saudi Arabia, which was 1924.
There's video footage of Saudi Arabian slave markets, right?
A rise in slavery in South Sudan and Sudan coincided with the ascent of power of the National Islamic Front and the encouragement of the use of slavery as a weapon of war after a successful military coup in 1989.
Between 1989 and 2011, the NIF continually applied a strategy of enslaving black ethnically African Sudanese and Southern Sudanese people, regardless of their religious beliefs, because of an ingrained notion of second-class status to the Arab population.
Right, so racial slavery of blacks in Sudan by Arabs and the British are somehow the villains because 150 years ago we abolished slavery.
Nearly 200 years ago, actually, we abolished slavery.
Well, we just had the misfortune to feel bad about it.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
There's no point.
Like, this is why I'm not like, oh, the Arabs had slavery until 1962.
Who cares?
They don't care.
When the country split in 2011, it was estimated there were 35,000 South Sudanese people who were enslaved in Sudan, and it's impossible to know how many remain enslaved today.
It is funny, I know some people, like liberal young women who I'm friends with, who have had a lot of their ideas about the world shattered when they went and did some charity work over in Africa for a few months.
And they just go over and they come back and they go, The place I was staying in, next door neighbour had a slave.
And it was like, yeah.
Did you not know?
No, I thought slavery was... No.
No, only in the West.
Their countries are built on traditions like this.
We have to have a moral reckoning for Sudan, okay?
So anyway, moving on, the next one is Gary Young.
How we buried our history.
Quote, slavery is a central and indisputable fact of the nation's past.
It's a central fact.
Who is Gary Young?
Gary Young is a Guardian columnist.
He's the guy who got owned by Richard Spencer a while ago.
Impressive.
But the point being, he's saying slavery is a central and indisputable fact of Britain's past.
If it wasn't for slavery, there'd be no Britain, Harry.
Like, imagine Britain without slavery.
It's impossible.
I know, it's absolutely mad, isn't it?
It's totally mad.
The complete reverse of Britain's actual interaction with slavery, which was to be one of the few places on Earth that were like, no, we're going to abolish it, and then we're going to police the entire world and make you abolish it.
I mean, didn't we only really start to get involved in slavery in the 16th century, which was hundreds of years after everybody else did?
It was the end of the 1600s.
And it was until 1806 where we found the trade.
Was it King James?
King James I was the one who, or II?
I didn't have to check.
I think, I read about it recently.
It was very recent in comparison to everywhere else.
Portugal and Spain were a lot earlier than we were, and we sort of piggybacked on it because everyone was doing it, and we were like, hell, now that's bad.
And we'd already managed by that point to build England as a country.
But he says, our failure to remember what really happened is more than mere forgetfulness.
And you know what?
I think Gary's actually right on this.
We need to be much louder and much more annoying to the colonials about this.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
You're welcome, Gary.
You are welcome for Britain's interaction with the slave trade.
For ending it.
You're welcome.
Wasn't going to happen in Saddam, was it?
King Gezo wasn't going to do it, was he?
No, we did it.
You're welcome.
And I say, we.
We, the British.
You're welcome.
We were only involved in it for about 200 years before we went, you know what?
Don't like this.
Yeah.
Not for us.
I mean, it's only a couple of thousand years that it's been happening in that area.
You know, don't worry about Gary.
But he talks about how in Lincoln and in the north of England, there are various places, Liverpool and stuff like that, where there was cotton arriving from the American South during the American Civil War in 1862, right?
And this was a part of the economy.
And so it was difficult for people to be like, well, hang on a second.
Actually, maybe we shouldn't be in support of a slave state because, of course, we'd abolished slavery ourselves 30 years earlier.
Well, I have read about this recently.
Most of the North of England was supportive of the Confederate side at the time because they're like, well, our job's kind of important with this.
But there was a massive public meeting at the Free Trade Hall in which the Manchester workers resolved to endear the privations of the blockade and lend their weight in the fight against slavery.
So the men of Manchester were like, hang on a second.
Yeah.
Okay.
Fair enough.
It'll suck.
But we're against slavery.
We've been here before.
We're still fighting.
At this point, the British fleet was patrolling Arabia to stop the Arabs trading slaves.
We'd already stopped the West African slave trade.
Now we were stopping the East African slave trade.
And this is another example that Gary is trying to use to beat us with of us opposing slavery.
No, Gary, it's not on.
We're not having it.
Do you know what's interesting?
Do you know the newspaper from the North that really was still really banging the slavery drum hard?
Was it The Guardian?
It might have been The Guardian.
It is remarkable, isn't it?
And the thing is, I saw a lot of people in his replies on Twitter posting that, and I'm sure he responded going, I know, but I don't care.
And it's like, okay, that's fine.
Listen guys, they said sorry, my wages and my reparations.
But he says, you know, this uncomfortable truth does not detract one iota from the bravery of the laborers who put the principle of abolition for their immediate well-being, but it does contextualize it.
And that context illustrates how a history of collusion with racism can find itself erased within a more noble story of collective sacrifice to produce a more comforting memory of our past.
It's like, Gary, we're the abolitionists.
Every British person you know will say that they are an abolitionist.
They're not on the side of the Guardian in 1862 being like, yeah, I know, if only we'd won.
No, we're the abolitionists.
We won.
We're the good guys on that argument, Gary.
And we'll have been descended from the abolitionists.
We're not going to be beaten with that stick.
I'm sorry?
Like, if you can trace an English person's history back to a slave owner, a generation or two after, you'll be able to find an abolitionist.
Yes.
And so he finishes his, and this is a really long piece as well.
Today, people will say, we won the war, even if they didn't fight and they weren't born.
They will say, we won the World Cup, even if they didn't play or weren't born.
Nobody takes we literally.
It's like, actually Gary, and again, you can see how far back The argument has had to withdraw, right?
He's no longer really arguing about the merits or demerits of Britain and slavery.
Now he's like, well, how can you say it's you?
You weren't involved.
And it's like, yeah, I know.
But collectively, we are a continuum that moves through time and space.
And it's called Britain.
It's a country.
It's an inheritance.
We've inherited the legacy of abolishing slavery, which is why we hold the opinions on slavery that we do now, which is why we don't hold Sudanese opinions on slavery, Gary.
Right?
So he's like, it signifies a collective identity that can span centuries and experiences.
Yeah, that's my identity.
It's our collective identity, right?
But when you mention slavery or colonialism, the same people will say, I am not responsible.
I wasn't alive.
I wasn't there.
It's like, yeah, I'm not saying that at all.
No, no, no, no.
We stopped it, Gary.
That was us.
We did that, right?
We did it.
Let's go to the next one, right?
This is possibly my favourite example.
How Zanzibar was forced to abolish slavery in less than an hour.
Oh, alright, okay.
This sounds exciting.
No, no, no, no.
We are going to have this done by lunchtime.
Now that's the colonial spirit we need.
Exactly, that's why I recommend Gordon of Khartoum.
This is exactly the reason I think the British Empire was great.
So this is face2faceafrica.com.
This is not some sort of pro-British propaganda, but Zanzibar's Arab and South Asian minority held dominion over the island of Zanzibar, which is just off the coast of East Africa.
And the natives served as slaves under the control.
People were sold as slaves and shipped to Arabia, India, and the Americas.
But since Africa was not only a slave exporter, it imported slaves as well.
So there's a massive slave trade going through Zanzibar.
And then by the late 1800s, the British arrived.
And people in Zanzibar are like, oh dear.
They knew what that meant.
Yes.
Right?
Zanzibar was benefitting so much from the slave trade, it boosted its economy as thousands of enslaved people passed through each slave market each year.
And therefore it was not ready to abandon the inhumane practice, even when the British asked it to.
Yes, we ask first, because we're polite.
And then the British resorted to force, leading to the shortest war in recorded history in 1896 that ended the slave trade in Zanzibar.
We did this, Gary.
We.
The collective we.
Not you, because you clearly don't feel like, for some reason, you're the inheritor of this civilization.
You feel like an outsider, I guess, and you're looking at it going, ah, how can I tear this down?
So 3,000 Zanzibari people and 700 soldiers rallied support to Khalid, who was the sultan of Zanzibar.
But the British Empire did not want him to be the new sultan, because, of course, they wanted a sultan who was going to be pro-British and end slavery.
And they say, what's more, they wanted Zanzibar to put an end to slavery.
Subsequently, they gave Khalid an ultimatum to cede the throne by 9am local time on August 27th, or prepare himself for an attack.
He didn't, and so their warships destroyed the entire palace.
Within a few minutes, he fled to the German consulate for asylum, and about 38 minutes after the war began, the Sultan's flag was pulled down, putting an end to the shortest war in recorded history, and the end of slavery in Zanzibar.
38 minutes.
Then, presumably, we had a cup of tea after all the slaves were set free.
Gary.
I doubt we even broke a sweat.
No, we had gumboats, so, you know, it was pretty good.
But anyway, so, in 2014, YouGov were like, well, how do people feel about the British Empire?
And 59% said, yeah, we're proud of that, actually.
I'm disappointed that it's only 59%.
It needs to be higher.
But you notice that only 19% in 2014 were like, oh, well, this is something to be ashamed of.
However, A decade of non-stop left-wing propaganda has reduced that to only 32% being in favour of the British Empire now, which is very disappointing.
But 37% saying, well, we shouldn't be ashamed or proud of it.
So to be either ambivalent or in favour of is still 69% of British people.
With, again, only 19% saying it's something to be ashamed of.
I mean, that still has grown, but that's disappointing.
But it can be reversed.
Exactly.
This is the process of demoralisation that Gary has been engaged in.
But you notice how weak Gary's argument is now?
Because actually, when you do tell the real history of what actually happened, yes, slavery is a bad thing, and that's why British people decided, yeah, we're going to stop that.
For everyone.
Everywhere.
Including the Sultan of Zanzibar, and Nazrin Malik's ancestors in Sudan, and Gary's ancestors in West Africa.
We're not having it, Gary.
End of story.
All right, let's get into the video comments then.
Good to see Carl taking an interest in the Alamo and Texas history.
You should watch the movie from the early 2000s.
It's a good, non-paused depiction of events, and treats the Mexicans with actually a great deal of respect, although Santa Ana's pretty scummy, but, you know, that's kind of what it was like in real life.
Yeah, Santa Ana was pretty scummy.
Always have a soft spot for these period pieces.
Also, it basically matches your Epochs video, beat for beat, up until the final battle where the Mexicans get massacred.
Pretty somberly portrayed, actually.
Yeah.
Well, that does look great, doesn't it?
I did recently start watching, and I'm only about halfway through the first episode, but I've not watched it before.
I started watching Sharp.
Oh yeah, it's good.
With Sean Bean.
Oh yeah, it's fantastic.
It's actually fun.
Yeah, it has been quite fun.
I do like that the first thing that happens to him is he just gets sliced bloodily across the back, and then he's just fine.
He's just okay.
But that's just TV back then.
No, but it's really fun, and it's nice to encounter a show where one of the first line of dialogues that stood out to me was, bloody Irish scum.
Bloody Irish scum!
Sean Bean's great.
In my sister's LGBTQ plus book cafe, which is still running by the way, Conor, they have a whole section of Pride, Marvel and DC, and you guessed it, they are selling none of it.
None.
Their greatest income are from coffee and pens that people stuff in their fedoras.
Even the LGBTQ people are not buying any of these comic books.
Comic book art used to be so pretty, didn't it?
I mean...
That's a beauty standard right there, that's what I want to look like, oof.
I'm not really surprised, because even insufferable ideologue gays still have some kind of standards, I'd imagine, when it comes to what media they can choose.
I just think they just never cared about comics.
Oh yeah.
They were just never interested in the subject.
They just wanted to know that they had control over it.
Exactly.
As they do with everything.
Exactly, it was something outside of the imperial dominion.
As Sophie actually says, the addition of Dan to the team is a godsend.
I'm an economic moron, as in legit, I'm dysfunctional when it comes to the numbers of any kind, so you can explain to me so I can actually understand, it's worth every penny.
I've paid to you guys so far, where have you found Dan?
Good job.
Yeah, I know, I'm really pleased that he... Yeah, he's fantastic.
I love the brokenomics man, it's really good.
SH Silver says, it's not just America, but the whole neoliberal status quo that Western nations have taken part in is not just hurting their citizens, but burning too many other nations and aligning them against the West.
Yeah, when we say the international community, what we mean is Canada, America, Europe, Japan, and a couple of other small places.
That's the international community.
Is Japan really involved in that?
Are they kind of not just the red-headed stepchild?
They kind of stick it to themselves?
Well, yeah, I suppose so.
But Trump knew this sort of change was coming and tried to make the US self-sufficient as well as defrosting relations with these adversarial states.
Yeah, he did.
And this is something I didn't really have time to go through.
I saw some lefty commentators on Twitter going, what would Trump have done?
He had brought peace across the Middle East.
And it's like, he actually did, though.
He got a bunch of them to recognise Jerusalem and whatnot.
I mean, he would have done something useful.
But he actually did!
He actually did!
He was actually good at international relations!
I think places in the West are starting, well, they should start to remember, you hope that they start to remember, the importance of being self-sufficient in manufacturing and resource capabilities.
You want to be able to grow your own food, manufacture your own goods.
I mean, it just sounds like a good idea, doesn't it?
I know, but it's shocking that people forgot this for so long.
Yeah, but Harry, why don't we just give China control of our manufacturing?
Oh yeah, I forgot, I mean... How could that go wrong?
Dan's done a great job with brokenomics, and economics is really important, but I do think it was a real mistake for people back in the day to listen to Adam Smith's one bit where he talks about, well, you know, if we can get it cheaper elsewhere in the world, we should just do that!
Because it turns out just being able to get stuff cheaper from elsewhere in the world sounds nice on paper, but actually leaves you geopolitically very weak.
Le French says, it's fine to buy some gold coins to diversify your assets, but in the event of a collapse, nothing is better than buying land.
Gold won't buy you food when everyone's starving, with land you can grow food yourself.
Very good point.
Matthew says, if you want even less reason to trust the Labour government, Gordon Brown sold off more than half the UK's gold reserve between 1999 and 2002, much of it to China.
Yeah, much of it during a collapse in the price of gold as well.
No, no, honestly, you should look at it.
When you see the graphs and where Gordon Brown sold the gold, it's like, what are you doing?
What are you doing?
I thought the point was buy low, sell high.
Yeah, you would think so, wouldn't you?
Well, he's a part of Labour, so... Yeah, yeah.
X, Y and Z says, the BRICS countries aren't the most stable either socially or politically.
Too many centralised authoritarian strongmen, many have strong internal social issues and high rates of inequality.
It may not take too much to perturb their balance and bring down House of Cards.
I mean, yeah, that's true.
That's completely true, obviously.
Possibly, but I think if, with any of these, if they have enough of a military stronghold on them, as long as the authoritarian strongmen stay in place and they're able to keep resources and manufacturing going, then they can hold out.
Maybe.
But the thing is, it would require competence and strength on the part of the West to be able to do that, and I don't think that we have that.
That's the point I was trying to make with it.
So look, we are not in a position to start really pushing back on these things, I think.
Omar says, well, the US claims it has 8,000 tons of gold.
They've lied about much worse stuff before, and probably currently.
That's a great point as well.
And you hear rumours that Fort Knox just has nothing in it, and stuff like that.
Would you be surprised if you got a tour of Fort Knox, if you just got invited there and it'd be like a North Korea situation?
No, I wouldn't be surprised.
Where it's just like a cardboard facade that they've put up.
Yeah, I would not be shocked.
Somebody opens the door, a breeze comes in, blows it over.
X, Y and Z again, makes a good point.
The thing we need to keep an eye on with Bricks is that the two of the major players are centralised authoritarian regimes, fronted by a strongman.
Putin won't live forever, then what?
Will there be a smooth transition?
To be honest with you, I think that Putin and Z are actually smart enough actors whether you like them or not, to have a contingency plan in place, actually.
I think that they will view this as being their legacy of making their civilisations great civilisations again.
Remember, the Chinese view the last hundred years as a century of humiliation.
The Western powers have been dunking on them, whereas China is the great land of prosperity that should be dunking on everyone else.
The Chinese view China as the centre of the universe, basically.
And I don't blame them.
I mean, I view England as the centre of the universe.
So, it's not good or bad, but it's I don't think they're stupid, and so I think they'll have their ducks in a row.
As much as an outlet like the Guardian would want you to believe, Putin's not insane, Xi is not stupid, these are very intelligent people.
That's what makes them dangerous.
That's why them getting together is a bit scary.
Yeah, and the thing is as well, social pressures are mitigated when there is a national effort, there's a reason that the nation should be united, and if it looks like people stand to gain something.
So if they're like, look, we can essentially overthrow the American control of this, that, and the other, and everyone's going to make lots of money, then, well, it's entirely possible that these social pressures will just be allayed for a long enough period of time.
Sophie again, in fact, says, how can I convince a friend of mine that the media is lying?
Russia is collapsing, they'll crumble any day.
Dude, the quality of life has not changed.
I've been talking to actual Russians, they have felt no changes, unlike us who feel all the changes.
I mean, a random Russian guy had a stream going for like weeks or months, was it?
Just burning his hob.
Just because, why not?
I can burn the gas, it's cheap enough for me to do so.
Yeah, yeah, it's mad.
I think you got de-platformed from Twitch because we were like, listen, our gas prices, you arsehole.
Guys, that hurts my feelings.
Like, our gas prices are through the roof.
You know, this isn't on, but yeah, we don't realise, man.
We really don't realise.
Anyway, moving on.
Someone online says, the Jewish country wants to live according to Jewish law.
Madness!
The next thing you're going to tell me is that Muslim countries want to live according to Sharia.
Which they do, actually, if you read any of the polls.
Pure or anyone to go by.
They're like, most Muslims agree with Sharia law.
What a surprise.
Brandon says, Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia have more in common with each other than they have with the United States.
Yeah, but Israel has been receiving billions of dollars from the U.S.
for decades, but if the U.S.
now is turning around and go, I don't know, if you're not accepting the Rainbow Coalition, that money might just get cut off.
Very interesting how there's a conservative majority in Israel, isn't it?
Very interesting.
Alexander says, I see all this Israel protest stuff and I just wonder how much my money is funding all of this?
Come on, we all know some American alphabet agency is behind these protests, they always are.
Yep.
Yeah, they probably are.
Small L Libertarian says, proof that far-right is a stupid label.
Far-right party of Israel.
Ah yes, the big Jewish Himmler did nothing wrong crowd.
No, no, what that proves is that far-right doesn't mean Nazi.
That's what that proves.
If the Jewish government is far-right, then that's not a Nazi government.
No, absolutely not.
By its own qualifying title, it can't be.
Yeah, exactly.
Omar's like, well, the neo-Nazis are going to be confused because they're going to have to come to the conclusion that the Jews are subverting Israel.
On the other hand, this makes total sense.
Are they going to kick themselves out of Israel next?
Exactly.
I hate the online discourse from the online Nazis, where it's just like, oh, Jews, this explains everything.
It doesn't explain anything.
You know, it's ideological.
You know, this is definitely ideology.
Bleach Demon says, I remember clearly Obama's 2011 speech about managing the American decline in regards to the sluggish economy in the wake of the 2008 banking crisis.
He and the meat puppet Biden are the embodiment of decades of American leftist thought that have wanted to reign in American power and influence.
This new equitable world will wallow in mediocrity like a pig in filth.
That's a great comment.
I mean, if America wanted to use its global power to make a based world, if we as a client state of the US... Can you even imagine how great that would be?
That would be great!
I wouldn't even care that America was in charge if we're just being allowed to live good lives.
It's the fact that we're a client state of the US and being told... I know, I suck.
Yeah, you need to live in the gay world, you need to live in the poor world, you need to be humiliated in every way imaginable.
No, that's not what I want.
Yeah, yeah.
George says, if the COVID restrictions are anything to go by, Israel is indeed an authoritarian state.
Then again, the feminists are just as nasty and destructive all over the world, so I have no dog in this fight.
Yeah, exactly.
But the thing is, Why could the Israeli Supreme Court not have vetoed the lockdowns and mandates for the vaccine?
I mean, they absolutely could have.
Should you buy the power?
Exactly, but they were in favour of it, so you know.
There we go.
The letter M says, speaking of Belt and Road Initiative, Victoria Premier Dan Andrews is visiting China over the past four days for something.
Who knows?
Yeah, well the Chinese have probably been bribing, in fact we know they've been bribing your politicians in New Zealand and Australia for years now.
So, get used to having a Chinese boss is literally what it's going to be.
If you don't already.
If you don't already, yeah.
Justin says, I always think how quaint when I hear Americans say they fought a civil war to end slavery.
I just didn't think we need to fight ourselves but almost started a world war to stop everyone else.
I mean, they could have tried the British route, which is, oh, you're a slave owner, take this lump sum of money, and we don't have to murder you, but Lincoln didn't work like that.
I've got a great comment here from Omar.
Oh, right.
This is so funny.
If you care more about historical slavery over current day slavery, just because it's not perpetuated by white people, you have no moral standing to have an opinion on anything over anyone.
I'm half Sudanese, and honestly, F off foreigner.
I totally agree, Matt.
Pretty based.
The only whitewashing of history is telling everyone slavery ended permanently without the asterisk in the current day West.
Yeah.
And like, in the progressive mind, slavery just kind of evaporated, right?
It was just like, oh, and then in the modern West, we didn't have slavery and everything was great.
And everyone just gave up slavery for some reason.
Everybody just woke up one morning and went, you know, slavery's bad.
Exactly.
No, we had to force it.
It was through force.
Every single time.
We made them do it.
And this is what the leftists constantly want to drop off.
It's like, no, no, no.
We don't want to talk about how gunboat diplomacy was responsible for ending the slave trade.
Even though it absolutely was.
God, we used to be great.
Alexander says, I get so tired of hearing about slavery.
No one alive in the US today in the UK owns slaves.
We have no apologies for it.
This also includes talking about how we ended slavery.
If we don't take the blame or sins of other people, we don't take credit for the good they did.
Yeah, but I think that Gary Young is right.
He's like, well, we always say we, and then you say, I don't know if we're enslaved.
He's like, nah, I'm just going to say we ended it.
That's the answer to this.
Although that has reminded me of that amusing Sunak poster that came out recently, and it's like, boat migrants won't have access to British modern day slavery.
What a typo.
I sure they know what they're doing.
Only British people would be modern day slaves in Britain, thank you very much.
You'll have to go to Sudan or something, boat people.
But no, but this thing, like...
Having it so we're kind of trying to step off the continuum of our own civilization leaves it vulnerable to attack by the left.
And actually us actually speaking from within our own civilization saying, no, we ended slavery.
No, we.
We.
I helped pay for this.
You helped pay for this.
We ended slavery.
Then what are they going to say?
Now, this is why their position has actually been pushed back.
My Gary has got to the point where he's like, well, you didn't own slaves.
You didn't do this.
It's like, yeah, I know I didn't.
Now shut up, Gary.
You know, if your only argument is, you know, you can't collectively say, you know, take credit for the good things unless you take credit for the bad things.
Okay, but the good things outweigh the bad things, Gary.
This is what Nigel Biggar, when I was on GB News, explained.
Look, this is historically just the ledger, essentially, of the, you know, the sins and the boons that the British Empire brought, on balance, probably did more good than bad.
We're not having it.
We're not having this left-wing negative narrative.
X, Y, and Z says, funny how they emigrate to a western country and then complain how bad it is.
There's nothing stopping you from leaving.
Yeah, there's nothing stopping you from going back to Sudan, is there?
You know?
Maybe go talk about the congenital fault of Sudan for its slave trade.
I've seen the, well, just leave that argument.
The funny thing is they always immediately go to moral indignation when you use that because they have no actual argument against it.
If I was in a country... How dare you say that?
Well, no, but seriously, why don't you?
Yeah, exactly.
If I lived in a country where I was like, you know, I hate this country, this country's just congenitally... If I lived in Ireland, and it was like, this country's congenitally racist against the English, and they're like, well, why don't you go back to England?
I'd be like, well...
I don't know.
Why don't I go back to England, you know?
I would probably think, yeah, maybe I should.
Bleach Demon says, Amusing that collective guilt and shame is required to properly genuflect to the left, but collective pride in the Empire's abolition of slavery is the greatest and unimaginable.
White man's burden is never over.
Slash sarcasm.
Well, that's the thing.
I think we can be proud of the abolition of slavery, actually.
And so I'm going to be.
And so what about the British Empire?
Yeah, we ended it.
We ended it.
We ended it.
I think we can be proud of that, and we can also just be proud of the general glory that was the Empire anyway.
Yeah, that's also a majestic aspect as well.
Colin says, There are a surprising number of videos on YouTube of black Americans and others reacting to other videos telling the truth about the slave trade.
The first one I saw, in fact, was a reaction to Carl's video on the British Crusade against slavery.
All of the other ones I've seen have concluded with the reactors being surprised, and often annoyed, about how little they have been told about what actually happened.
Yeah, people send me these all the time.
Oh, do they?
Yeah, yeah, where it's just some normie, just some normie, you know, American, you know, black person or whatever.
And it's like, I had no idea that a British did this.
And it's like, yeah, I know.
You have no idea.
You don't know what it is that we did.
And so when, like, Gary Young and Nesby McIntyre are like, oh, we can't tell the history of the slave trade.
It's like, no, you don't tell the history of the slave trade, actually, which is why we need to become more loud and obnoxious about this.
We need to get North FC about this.
Yeah, exactly!
You know, when Gary Young brings up slavery, we go, you're welcome, Gary.
What?
It's for ending it.
You're welcome.
But anyway, yeah, so... I'm not having it.
I'm not having this, right?
Kevin says, land may be okay now, but just wait.
Western governments are going to see the dollar drop, so they will begin moving to the yuan, so they can continue to line their pockets.
The closer they get to China, the closer we will get to the Chinese system where all land belongs to the state.
The Dutch have shown that with their compulsory confiscation of farmers' plan, China's system is why they can build all these empty cities.
The locals get a notice nailed on the door telling them to get out of home.
They've had three generations and there's nothing they can do.
Yeah, we have moved into the sort of command state.
Well, I mean, if we adopt the one in the first place, then we've lost.
Because all of a sudden China has complete control over all of our resources because they control how we trade those resources.
I mean, we didn't adopt the bloody euro.
Why would we adopt the yuan?
Honestly, we've got to do something about this.
Brian says, regarding the purchase of gold, where do you keep it as to trust an intermediary to purchase it and hold the gold these investors open to fraud as cryptocurrency?
Is that the same Dominic Frisby that had a wallet of 45,000 in cryptocurrency that just disappeared?
Here today, hacked skin tomorrow.
Well, I mean, I would say that if I had bought gold, I would keep it Where I live, you know, I would have a vault or something.
I would take the Ron Swanson approach and bury it in various places.
I think that's the only way I'd be content with my gold.
We've got Russians in Thailand here complaining they're trapped here because they can't get back into Russia.
I'm sure he did talk to us about this at some point, but I'm afraid I can't remember why they were trapped in Russia.
So...
Wait, do you mean trapped in Thailand?
Trapped in Thailand, yeah.
So yeah, I don't know, I'm afraid.
Well, neither do I. No.
I've never been to Thailand.
We'll have to ask Rory about it.
Yeah, he did tell us about this.
It's totally skipping my memory.
So sorry, I can't... You'll have to explain it to us in a Zoom call tomorrow, in fact.
That's very interesting, though.
But I think that's about all we've got time for, so...
▲
Export Selection