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April 12, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:30:40

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #630

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	Good afternoon folks.
	Welcome to the podcast, The Lotus Eaters, for the 12th of April, 2023.
	That is the year.
	I'm joined by Connor.
	It is indeed current year, Carl.
	I know, but like, you don't understand, man.
	The older you get, the more time just blurs and you forget where you are and what year you're in.
	But today we're going to be talking about based Georgia Maloney.
	Fixing Italy, the high price for saving the world, which is another based foreign leader who's fixing his country, and where woke comes from.
	Because for some reason this is a discussion people are having and we've done all of the work here at Lotus Eaters so we can answer that question.
	Anyway, let's begin.
	Adesso Sono Italiano, which apparently means I am now Italian.
	Now, if it doesn't mean that, I did run it past an Italian friend of mine who is called Mario, so you can blame him, but I thought it would be authentic.
	Basically, I think I'm just gonna move to Italy, because it seems like Italy's doing everything right at the moment, because they've got a leader who is actually competent and uses...
	She's actually governing like a conservative.
	the cultural integrity of the country that she lives in.
	Oh, wow.
	And unfortunately, it's not transracialism, because I'm already not white, because I'm Irish, so it's just like hopping through flavours of Neapolitan ice cream on a colour swatch.
	She's actually governing like a conservative.
	Should.
	Seems so, yes.
	Tentatively.
	Obviously the reason for this is because Georgia Maloney has decided that she's not going to sign up to GloboHomo and is instead putting the interests of the people that voted for her first.
	So let's go through all of the based banning spree that she's been doing recently.
	In preparation for our Italian citizenship, you can go and pay £5 a month to subscribe to LotusSuites.com, get all of our free, well, not free, good premium content, there we go, including this, which is Ancient Roman Relationship Advice, in which I subjected you to the poetry of juvenile and ovid and it has some timeless wisdom on how men and women have operated since the roman empire it was all remarkably based and pertinent to the present day yes yeah so do as the romans do which means be a casanova i suppose anyway
	on to the first ban she's banned surrogacy from abroad Now, this is quite interesting because there's been pushings from both the formerly feminist left and the right at the moment who have said that the surrogacy industry seems like some kind of mass gestational enterprise that uses rather poor women in places like Ukraine to have
	Babies for very rich women who are past the wall in America, or gay couples.
	And so you're renting the wombs of women overseas.
	So there was a report, I think John Wheatley covered this quite a while ago before I was here, but there are lots of babies who are being had by Ukrainian women who have now been abandoned in some sort of collective orphanage because of course nobody's coming to pick them up now that the war's broken out.
	So, that seems to be a gross atrocity, and Maloney's gone, well hold on a minute, if I'm going to be against the LGBT lobby, and also be pro-family, maybe you shouldn't mail-order children.
	So, let's read from this New York Times article.
	David Farsi, 49, and his longtime partner, David Chiappa, And they say all gay couples look alike.
	They're also named the same, apparently.
	And their son, Martino Libero Farsi Chiappa, who was born through surrogacy by an American woman, returned to Italy last month to discover that Prime Minister Giorgio Maloney ordered municipalities to obey a court ruling made in December to stop certifying foreign birth certificates of children born to Italian same-sex couples through surrogacy, which is illegal in Italy.
	So you can't actually have a surrogate parent in Italy.
	But you also can't now order them from overseas because the children's birth certificate will not be recognised according to the adopted parents, it will be according to the biological parents.
	So they're giving citizenship rights to people who actually gave birth to them.
	The decision has left Martino and several other children suspended in legal limbo, depriving them of automatic Italian citizenship and residency rights like access to the country's free healthcare system and nursery.
	The government ban, backed up by law enforcement visits to the registry office in Milan, has become the first prominent sign of a hard-right ideological edge that Miss Maloney has mostly checked since winning election in September.
	Her critics now fear she intends to feed her base by slicing away rights that run counter to the conservative vision of family long promoted by Miss Maloney, who once famously denounced birth certificates that listed parent one and parent two instead of mother and father.
	Well, that sounds fine.
	So she's going to keep her campaign promise of making the family, not the atomised hedonistic individual, the central locus of political legitimacy in Italy.
	The core criticism here is not that she's done something wrong, it's that she's not governing like a progressive.
	Yes, so she's not allowing us to have a right to a child at the expense of some poor woman in the third world's bodily autonomy and despite whatever our lifestyle choices may be.
	There's also the coercive nature of, even if the woman volunteers for it, sure, but she's volunteering knowing that she's getting like 10 grand or something like that.
	Under financial duress.
	Yes.
	So this is the problem of consent in the social contract society.
	Yes.
	It's not morally thick enough to govern these sorts of scenarios.
	Yes.
	Coercion is something that they don't really want to talk about.
	Yeah.
	This is the same problem that you see in America when there's lots of people flooding over the border to then give up their blood plasma to elderly people in Silicon Valley so they can have rejuvenation surgeries, which I've actually written about for the website, so go check that one out.
	In an interview shortly before her election, as her young daughter ran around in her Sardinia courtyard, Miss Maloney said she opposed gay marriage not because she was homophobic — I've got many, many homosexual friends, she says — but because she saw it as a step to same-sex adoption, which she opposed, and which the Roman Catholic Church — hello — Successfully lobbied to exclude from a civil unions law passed in 2016.
	Maloney said that growing up without a father, he had abandoned the family in Rome for the Canary Islands when she was young, convinced her that only married families should adopt.
	She acknowledged that since she is not married but in a long-term relationship with her companion, the father of her daughter she too, in her view, should not be allowed to adopt.
	So first of all, Georgia, you should probably get married and practice what you preach a little bit.
	But she's speaking from immediate experience here when she says, I know the damage that family breakup and single motherhood can do to a family, and so in the inverse, voluntarily depriving a child of its mother by having it be born and then shipped overseas to either a gay couple or some woman who wasn't responsible enough to have her own children before her fertility clock went off, not the best thing for putting the child's well-being first.
	No, definitely not.
	It is very selfish, frankly.
	It does strike me as being vain.
	Yes.
	Also, there's a bit here which I think highlights exactly why the surrogacy industry is so fraught with thorniness.
	Eugenia Rossella, the Minister for Family, Birth Rate and Equal Opportunity, has rallied against the uterus for rent warned of a market of babies and argued that there was a racist connotation to the practice in having white women carry fetuses cost more than black women.
	That's the problem, you see.
	It's the lack of racial equality.
	Not the fact that there's a market for babies.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Now that's not the best framing, but it's also kind of disconcerting that you can have a designer baby according to how much you're willing to pay for it.
	Yeah, I don't like this at all.
	No, it's kind of grim.
	Prominent members of Miss Maloney's Brothers of Italy party have called surrogacy a crime even worse than paedophilia, in which gay couples, one of whom is usually the biological father, seek to pass off children as their own and mistake children for Smurfs, saying gay couples can uniquely afford surrogacy, even though it is overwhelmingly used by heterosexual couples.
	Leftists understand per capita challenge difficulty impossible, apparently.
	So Reuters is absolutely furious over this, so they've done multiple tweet threads and articles about it.
	But they let the mask slip here, and they say, Surrogacy, which is regulated and widespread in the United States and Canada, but restricted in much of Europe, is illegal in Italy.
	Critics warn of the potential for a poverty bias against women who become surrogate mothers due to financial need.
	Right, okay.
	So they're admitting the coercion is inherent in the practice.
	This is the gestational version of who will make our coffees in Pratt.
	Or, what's her, Osborne's daughter's name?
	She went on The View.
	Sharon Osborne's daughter.
	Kelly.
	Kelly Osborne.
	Where she said, well, Trump, if you send all the Mexicans back over the border, who's going to clean the toilets in Trump Tower?
	Right, so you see that entire race of people as maids, do you?
	Yeah, well that's the thing, isn't it?
	This is like saying you can't ban prostitution, because what about the poor women who need it for money?
	They'll have to get jobs, won't they?
	They'll have to do something else.
	Italian LGBT couples that want to have a baby have to go abroad as neither surrogacy, I think this is the next tweet down, John, if you just want to scroll, artificial insemination or adoption is available for them domestically.
	Heterosexual couples, on the other hand, can adopt and resort to artificial insemination.
	So, they're just complaining about the fact that gay couples are most affected by this, and it's almost like there's an inherent difference in who can have children and who can't.
	Well yeah, gay couples can't produce children.
	Shock.
	Breaking news.
	Yes.
	But making a law about that is apparently evil, but all right.
	Okay, let's go on to the next one.
	Reuters has an article on this.
	If you read further, it only affects the activists, which is an interesting omission from some of the other articles.
	In March, the ruling coalition presented a law in Parliament to extend a national ban on surrogacy to couples who go abroad for the practice with jail terms of up to two years and fines of 600,000 to 1,000,000 euros.
	Rainbow Family's president, Alicia Kroninski... Krosini?
	foreign name said 90% of italians who choose surrogacy are heterosexual couples but they mostly do it in secret meaning the new ban would de facto affect only gay couples who cannot hide it yes Because there's something different about the gay families.
	There we go.
	Family minister Eugenia Rossella, a former pro-abortion campaigner turned Christian conservative, defended the order to mayors, which enforces a ruling from Italy's top appeals court that says children from LGBT families do not necessarily have to have two legal parents.
	There is no discrimination against these children, as they can still access schooling and medical services through one legal parent, Rossella told last month.
	So you can still go through the adoption process if you aren't a biological parent, you just can't mail order a parent from overseas and exclude their mother from the process.
	That just seems eminently sensible to me.
	I don't have a particularly strong feeling on this, but I don't really see much of a problem, okay?
	So the BBC's also quite upset.
	Italy's Senate this week also rejected a proposal for a standardised European Parenthood Certificate that would be recognised across all 27 member states of the EU.
	For children it would mean proof of parenthood, and for parents it would be a guaranteed right to be recognised across the EU, protecting rights such as inheritance and citizenship.
	But for Italy's far right, Here we go again.
	Infrastructure Minister Matteo Salvini.
	It was a step too far.
	Infamous sensible centrist.
	A person can be heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual.
	Love is free, beautiful and sacred for all.
	How radical a statement, I suppose.
	Sounds like a hippie.
	Yeah.
	Brussels cannot impose the concept of family on us.
	A child needs a mother and a father.
	Children are not bought, not rented, not chosen on the internet.
	See, that's the part that I have the most problem with.
	I don't have an objection to gay couples adopting or anything like this.
	I'm sure there are going to be people who do, but I personally am not against that.
	I really don't like the idea that children are being commodified in this way.
	This is really awful to me.
	Children should be something that you see as genuinely like a mythological part of your life.
	These are your children.
	There aren't others.
	There shouldn't be a market for these things.
	It's one of those things that shouldn't be bought and sold.
	I like the way that Stefan Mull and you conceptualise it much better than the modern liberal conception of relationships can be oppressive on the grounds of their involuntariness.
	He says because the relationship between the child and the parent is involuntary, you as a parent have the obligation to act in a way that if the child could have chosen their parents, they would have picked you.
	So it's a great moral calling rather than just saying, well I want a child and I want it now despite my lifestyle choices and the whole world to create a market to facilitate my desires.
	Well, that's the thing.
	I mean, some things just shouldn't be bought and sold, and children are definitely one of those things.
	And this whole thing is not about the welfare of the children, it's about the vanity and selfishness of the adoptive parents.
	And I really despise this attitude towards the subject.
	Yeah, and there's also contained within this as well the rebuke of the EU's collective citizenship ruling, because it's at least gone, no, we'd rather govern ourselves.
	So, that's also very sensible.
	They're also bidding off the boat migrants, so that's good, she's making good on that promise.
	So according to the European Border Agency, 5,622 migrants landed on the Kent coast in January and February this year, over here in England, an increase of 82% on the same period in 2022.
	This is despite the fact, obviously, that Sunak has created a deal with Albania, and only a couple of hundred Albanians have come across so far this year since that deal.
	So there's a different proportion of who's coming over now in 2023.
	So it's good news for the government that the Albanians have gone down, but really bad news for the rest of us who have to foot the bill for this.
	So where are they all coming from?
	Well, if we look to Italy, in the first three months of this year, 27,280 migrants landed in Italy, numbers not seen since the height of the migrant crisis in 2015.
	On the weekend of March 25th to 26th, the Italian Coast Guard rescued 3,600 migrants and 59 vessels, and another 2,000 made it to Italy aboard an NGO vessel, one of which was Louise Michel, financed by the British street artist Banksy.
	Thanks, Banksy.
	Yep, so Louise Michel was also a revolutionary socialist, a member of the Paris Commune, so he's just an open subversive.
	But anyway... But what I love about Banksy is, like, oh, look at my criticisms.
	It's like, but they all support the status quo, Banksy.
	Yeah.
	What was it about Nietzsche said about three thinkers?
	Yeah, yeah, he's not a free spirit, he's a free thinker.
	Yes.
	At the weekend, they announced that between January 1st and March 31st, Italy had intercepted 501 boats containing 14,406 people.
	Of that number, 13,138 were from sub-Saharan Africa.
	The Ivory Coast and Guinea provide the largest continent, 15 and 12% respectively, a contingent, rather, of migrants arriving in Italy this year, followed by Pakistan, Bangladesh, Tunisia and Egypt.
	The smuggling networks are managed by Turkish... Zero wars in any of those places, I can't help but notice.
	Well, there is a war ongoing in Russia and Ukraine right now.
	They're the ones running the trafficking networks, apparently, in Italy.
	Yeah, so it seems the war is very profitable for both sides.
	Also, according to an article that I haven't linked here, but I read in Remix before, the people smugglers, in order to incentivise the Italian Coast Guard picking them up, they're offering free passage to women and children.
	So they're just using them as bargaining chips.
	So Maloney has campaigned on a naval blockade, but she hasn't implemented that yet, She's also suggested that she wants to reform the Dublin Regulation, so that's the EU legislation that says that you have to seek asylum in the first safe country that you land in, because it obviously isn't working.
	No, no, this is a common misconception.
	That's not a part of the UN Convention.
	You don't have to do Right, that's interesting.
	I'll find you a source for that afterwards, because I was looking into this, thinking, well, if that's the case, why is anyone taking any of this seriously?
	But that's not the case.
	I know that the UN's definition of refugee from 1951 said it's anyone unable or unwilling to stay in their country because of political opinions, which means it's incredibly nebulous for the grounds of asylum application.
	But I was under the illusion that the Dublin legislation said that you had to pick a place.
	I'm reasonably sure they don't.
	I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case considering how it's currently playing out.
	So she's saying, okay, she's interested in reforming that, she's interested in a naval blockade, but the commentary in the Spectator article says, would it be in Italy's interest to reform the Dublin Regulation?
	Because more than half of the 900,000 migrants who have landed in Italy since 2013 have moved to other European countries anyway.
	So she's not only retaining less of the migrants that turn up, Which is why they're all coming here and why they're different compositions now, because there's different people being trafficked by the Russians, Ukrainians and Albanians and the Turkish to us from Italy.
	But also, she's looking into military interventions and legal interventions to stop them coming at all.
	So it seems like Italy's actually going to get a handle on this boat migrant problem, and it's only going to get worse in the UK.
	What sort of attitude is that from the spectator as well?
	So, well, is it really Italy's problem because you sent them elsewhere anyway?
	It's like, well, if they didn't come at all, that would save us all a burden.
	Yeah.
	But the Spectator isn't the most conservative, recently, given by some of its recent hires.
	But that's a segment for another time, I suppose.
	They've also banned lab-grown meat.
	So we won't be eating the synthetic meat, or eating the boogs, if you're from Italy.
	I thought I'd play this little Australian news item that sums it up pretty perfectly.
	This week an Australian start-up made headlines by unveiling a meatball made from flesh grown in a lab using the genetic sequencing of the long-extinct mammoth.
	We wanted to get people excited about the future of food being different to potentially what we had before.
	That there are things that are unique and better than the meats that we're necessarily eating now.
	In recent years, start-ups have been tinkering with everything from lab-grown steaks to salmon fillets.
	Food safety authorities in the US and Singapore have already approved similar products, and the EU is expected to follow suit.
	But one of its members, Italy, is refusing to chow down.
	Italy is the first country that says no to so-called synthetic food and synthetic meat, and it does so formally.
	Italy's new nationalist government says it wants to do away with innovations it sees as an affront to the Mediterranean diet and traditional links between agriculture and food.
	We think products from labs don't guarantee quality or well-being, and we say with pride that it doesn't guarantee the safeguarding of our culture and tradition.
	But Italian food analysts argue otherwise.
	If successful, the products would mean relying less on livestock and huge remote farms, centralizing production and transport, which would reduce emissions.
	From a nutritional point of view, I can't say there are any substantial differences.
	Obviously, it's meat free of any antibiotics.
	That's a major problem in the livestock sector, which shouldn't be underestimated.
	So, in principle, I don't have an issue with lab-grown meat that's without antibiotics or factory farming or something like that.
	But do I trust them not to pump it full of crap that's going to give me moobs?
	No.
	Given the people behind it look like Bill Gates and are Bill Gates.
	So I find it very interesting that the framing by the expert class is, "But don't you want to lower carbon emissions?" And the Italian politicians are going, no, we'd rather maintain the cultural texture of the Mediterranean diet and the rich history and tradition of what Italians have made in terms of culinary innovation.
	So they're talking past each other, and Italy are just going, no thanks, rather have my country.
	Yeah, no, that's exactly right.
	Talking past each other is exactly the way to frame it.
	Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do something, and there are going to be other knock-on effects.
	I mean, we don't know what the consequence of lab-grown meat will be.
	Like, will it have the same density of nutrients the beef, the normal, you know, natural beef does?
	Who knows?
	I don't know.
	I'm sure they don't know what the consequence is going to be 20 years down the line either.
	Yeah, it wouldn't be the first time the Gates Foundation has done something not knowing what the consequences will be decades later.
	Speaking of the Gates Foundation, Reuters are upset about this again, because if you don't know, the Gates Foundation fund Reuters.
	The ban on cell-based meat is not the only initiative Maloney took to block non-conventional food from being served on Italian tables.
	Last week she said the government was preparing a rush of decrees to introduce information labels on products containing or derived from insects amid a debate on the use of cricket flour.
	People must be able to make an informed choice, she wrote on Twitter.
	How far right!
	Good for her!
	So Italy isn't going to be eating the boogs anytime soon, but we are in the UK, so... We will.
	Again, guess I'll be moving.
	Alright, next, NoChapGPT.
	So, they're against AM, anti-AM action.
	The National Data Protection Authority, that's Garante, said that we'll immediately block and investigate open AI from processing the data of Italian users.
	The order is temporary until the company respects the EU's landmark privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation.
	Now, I don't know how good that EU law is.
	Given it's from the EU, it's probably not going to be very good.
	But in principle, should this large aggregate algorithm have access to lots of Italians' data if they don't know it's being sold off to it?
	I think that's totally fair to be protectionist against that.
	It is, but that's really the least of my concerns when it comes to AI.
	Sure.
	I think we can slow the takeover of our AI overlords a little bit.
	I think the Italians, of all people, the Italians, are doing something against that.
	Yeah, who could have imagined it'd be Italy leading the way?
	Yeah.
	Leading the Luddite charge.
	The authorities said the company lacks a legal basis justifying the mass collection and storage of personal data to train the algorithms of ChatGPT.
	The company also processes data inaccurately, it added, and ChatGPT have since said, OK, we're going to talk with the Italian authorities and try and get it back online in the country.
	So Italy seem to be making them acquiesce to their demands, which is a position of strength.
	Now, all of this looks great.
	All of this looks like Italy is building a culturally cohesive utopia.
	Slight obstacle for us.
	Little hurdle to overcome.
	They might be banning English.
	So, best get to learning.
	Let's just move on to the last couple of articles.
	So, public employees could reportedly face fines ranging from 5,000 to 100,000 euros, approximately $5,000 in American, if they're caught using foreign instead of Italian words in any public communication.
	Fines could also be brought against firms that use foreign terms for job titles or schools and universities that use non-Italian expressions.
	Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister have assured reporters it wasn't a government push, but the work of one politician so far.
	The bill was proposed by Fabio Rampelli, a politician from the right-wing Brothers of Italy, of which Maloney is obviously the member, asked if the proposed law had a Mussolinian flavour.
	Tajani responded that the defence of the Italian language has nothing to do with Mussolini.
	Fair statement.
	Entirely justified.
	I'm not even against this, to be honest.
	Because, I mean, we've got Bangladeshi street signs in London now, so I'm just like, yeah, no, I can totally see why you'd do this.
	They're in Birmingham as well.
	For anyone who hasn't seen our Conservative Party conference coverage, there is a part where Rory filmed me talking about the architecture of Victoria Square.
	It looks lovely, aside from the fountain that smelled like rotten eggs.
	And you go down the road a little bit, and there's a rainbow cross-section in Chinatown with a monument put up by Sky News in the middle of it, which is a black dome with gold writing that says, this is what the world would look like if there was no slave trade.
	And all of the street signs are in Urdu.
	Demented.
	Multicultural vomit.
	Yeah.
	Not great.
	So, according to the latest data, the Tricarni, the well-respected Italian language encyclopedia, contains about 9,000 English words and 800,000 Italian words.
	Since 2000, the number of English words that have inserted themselves into the Italian language has grown by 773%.
	So I'm not shocked they're getting slightly protectionist when everything's becoming...
	Yeah, yeah.
	Globally homogenised.
	If Mandarin was propping up, I wouldn't be surprised if they were banning that as well, which inevitably it will because of all the migrant workers that came over that decided to spread Covid in 2020.
	In the lower chamber of deputies we speak Italian, Rampelli wrote.
	We continue our battle for the use of our language instead of English.
	We can't understand why we call dispenser the automatic hand sanitiser dispenser.
	Instead of using the word dispenser in English, Maloney's government would have officials use the much more wordy Italian expression dispensatore di liquido.
	Consistente per le modi.
	So, small practical hurdles to get over.
	Yeah, and the thing is, this is very much like King Canute trying to hold back the tide.
	The reason that language works is because it's useful for people, and if it's not useful, then you'll find that essentially you're just desperately trying to hold back the waves, but they're going to slip through your fingers anyway, because people will use the language that is useful to communicate in.
	I see why they're doing this, but I don't think that's going to work.
	Yeah, I don't think the last one is going to work in execution.
	However, all of the other bands I'm pretty much totally for, so, uh, arrivederci, I guess.
	So, speaking of another foreign leader who's doing interesting things, I don't know how to pronounce this guy's name, so I'm going to mess it up, but let's talk about El Salvador.
	Do you know anything about El Salvador?
	Only a little bit from what Dan has already covered, which is that they've been locking up people with face tattoos across the country, and things seem to be going quite well.
	Yeah, I don't know much about it either, but I thought I'd cover some of it.
	President Naib Bakayli, I think that's his name, has been doing things that I think are very interesting, because he is essentially fighting against the Assyrian Empire.
	And I mention that not as a casual segue, because the people he has been locking up are actually tyrannical and evil.
	and actually do operate like the ancient Assyrians, which we've been covering, Beau and I, in a long series of podcasts on the website, which you can go sign up for for every month, and this is one of my favourite things to talk about in history, because the Assyrians are just mad.
	They're just so mad.
	I have watched this, and Beau's discomfort at the descriptions, the gleeful descriptions, with which the Assyrians tortured adolescent boys and girls and flayed people alive, Does sound like the kind of thing the cartels do today.
	No, no, no.
	That's too small.
	Entire cities of people they would torture and flay, create pillars of skulls and hedgerows of impaled people after burning the entire city down and walking away with everything it contained.
	So the Assyrians basically operate like MS-13 operate, which is why I'm recommending you go watch that First, because you'll get a sort of slice of the genuine depravity and violence that El Salvador has been plagued with, right?
	So let's begin by just exploring who are MS-13 for anyone who doesn't know.
	Now, I'm just going to say I'm not an expert on any of these subjects, Not an expert in El Salvadorian politics, not an expert on MS-13, so I'm just going to use the most surface-level sources that anyone can find.
	Just a quick Google search will bring up everything that we have here, and if it's even slightly accurate to what's going on, well, this is kind of monstrous, and to oppose the solving of this problem would surely put you in league with evil.
	So, as the Wikipedia page for MS-13 says, the Mara Salvatrucha gang originated in Los Angeles set up in the 80s by Salvadorian immigrants in the city's Pico Union neighborhood who immigrated to the United States after the Central American Civil Wars of the 1980s.
	Throughout the 70s and 80s, Salvadorian asylum seekers were refused asylum in the US and instead classified as undocumented migrants.
	In the very beginning, MS-13 was a group of young, delinquent heavy metal fans who lived in Los Angeles.
	However, the undocumented community in Los Angeles was subject to severe racial prejudices and persecution.
	Under these conditions, MS-13 began to mutate into a gang.
	Originally, the gang's main purpose was to protect Salvadorian immigrants from the other, more established gangs of Los Angeles, who are predominantly composed of Mexicans, Asians and African Americans.
	Some of the original members of MS-13 adhere to Satanism.
	While the majority of contemporary MS-13 members do not identify as Satanists, the Satanist influence is still seen in some of their symbolism.
	Right.
	But if there were a... Let's say the EDL, for example.
	If they were founded by Nazis, and they had swastikas in their symbolism, although most were like, yeah, no, I don't really believe in that, they'd still call it a Nazi gang.
	And some, I assume, are good people.
	Yeah.
	So, are we okay to call MS-13 a satanic gang?
	This is why Trump did call them animals how many years ago, I would assume.
	I mean, they are literally monstrous.
	The BBC has a nice little report.
	We'll go through a few things.
	And this was in 2017 before it was too big a deal.
	I mean, Trump hadn't mentioned it.
	So they were trying to run the fence, but it doesn't sound good.
	MS-13 has been accused of recruiting poor and at-risk teenagers.
	Joining is said to require being jumped in, which is subject to a vicious 13-second beating, and getting wet, carrying out a crime, often a murder, for the gang.
	So, to join the gang, you're probably going to become a murderer.
	Right, so with the framing here, it says that they're recruiting poor and at-risk teenagers.
	Okay, sure, I can accept that.
	But then this article and the Wikipedia consolidation of all other articles and reporting from before always seems to blame civilization for the creation of these gangs, because somehow the racist superstructure of the United States is a unique catalyst which produces a Hobbesian war against all.
	And so, you are exculpating the responsibility of the individual criminals for playing football with people's heads by saying, but my white supremacy.
	And I just think that's reprehensible.
	On the plus side, they don't actually mention that in this article.
	The implication might be looming over it, but they don't focus on that.
	They do tell us, though, that MS-13's motto is, quote, kill-rape-control.
	That's their motto.
	The motto of the satanic gang is kill-rape-control.
	Okay.
	And that's just according to the FBI.
	I mean, what do the FBI know?
	Increasingly less these days, but on this matter, I might be... I'm prepared to take their word on this.
	And of course, as you can see, the gang's annual revenue is $31 million, according to Salvadorian police operations.
	So, they're a very, very big, successful gang.
	Of course, they've got tens of thousands of members who are not allowed to leave.
	They get killed if they leave the gang.
	Right, so there's a price for apostasy.
	Yes, you have to kill to get into the gang, you're not allowed to leave the gang, and your mission statement is kill, rape, and control.
	And so obviously you get a lot of deaths, rapes, and organized crime.
	Right, so they're just a marauding horde that need to be dealt with.
	Yeah, they actually are quite similar to the Assyrians.
	They're so bad they get their own prisons.
	The Penal de Securidad Barrios is a prison just for the gang members, and it's run by the gang members in El Salvador, because they're just... no one wants to be their prison guards.
	You've got a prison full of murderous gang members.
	No one would want to be their tattoo artist either, because imagine if you screw up?
	Oh, they do it to each other, I imagine.
	It's part of the initiation, I imagine.
	Anyway, so this was all information from a few years ago.
	So fast forward to March 2022, and you've got literally a thousand murders in El Salvador a year.
	Now, El Salvador has a population of about 6.2 million.
	So that's a really unbelievably high number of gang murders.
	And they declared a state of emergency in March after there were 62 gang killings in one day.
	Their parliament approved this state of emergency because it was the most violent 24-hour period since the end of the Civil War in 1992.
	So it's only more dangerous when there's an active war going on.
	In El Salvador.
	I mean, this is literally one of the most dangerous places in the world because of these gangs, right?
	This equates to 18 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants for the 2021 murder rate, which was 1,140 murders.
	But that was a 30-year low.
	the 2021 murder rate, which was 1,140 murders, but that was a 30-year low.
	So we got it down to 1,140 murders this year.
	Thumbs up.
	The head of University of Kent's psychology department, he was from El Salvador and he had fled specifically because when he was a young man, he wasn't involved in the gangs, but they'd cut some of his fingers off with a pair of pliers.
	Just monstrous.
	Not particularly any reason, just because you were in the territory in the wrong place at the wrong time.
	They are genuinely monstrous.
	And previously, in November 2021, another spate of violence had led to 40 people being killed in three days.
	I mean, these are just insane numbers of lives ruined.
	And then think about all of the people who are related to them, who have now lost a family member.
	And think about the These are not just going to be quick deaths, either.
	A lot of these will be people tortured to death.
	People who are just brutalised.
	And so, President Naib Bukele, who was elected in 2019 on promises to fight organised crime, and as I understand it, he comes from outside of their two-party structure, and he won 52% of the vote, which is massive.
	That would be like UKIP insurging to solve this problem.
	He said, we have a new spike in homicides, something we've worked hard to reduce.
	While we fight criminals in the streets, we must figure out what is happening and who is financing this.
	The country must let the agents and soldiers do their job and must defend them from the accusations of those who protect the gang members.
	But for some reason, there are lots of people on the side of the gang members.
	Isn't that weird?
	You've got this monstrous satanic gang that's terrorizing a country, and you've got this guy who's like, look, we need to deal with these gangs, and there are a bunch of people on the side of the gangs.
	So, there are two possible reasons I could think of for that.
	One is vested interests in the cartels and getting financed by them, which Harry and I have done a podcast on on the website that we cannot mention if this goes up on YouTube, but you can figure it out from an American state yourself.
	And the other reason would be, as I said about the Wikipedia article and the BBC article's framing, is the Foucauldian perspective on that civilization itself is oppressing them, and so the only way they can fight back against their oppression and express their authentic nature is through criminal violence.
	No.
	Right, okay.
	The answer is maliberalism.
	But what about the liberal nature, the liberal tradition of El Salvador?
	Have you considered the damage this has done to liberalism in El Salvador, locking up all these monstrous, murderous gang members?
	You hadn't thought about it, had you?
	You hadn't thought about the divine, transcendent nature of the liberal order and how it's not being applied to El Salvador?
	No, I hadn't, because for all the murder victims, they can't exercise liberalism if they're dead.
	That's right!
	You weren't thinking about this.
	One papier from the international campaign group Human Rights Watch tweeted the measures were very worrying, especially in a country where there are no independent democratic institutions.
	What are you talking about?
	There are literally people being murdered in the street, dozens of them, every single day.
	And you're like, yeah, but the Human Rights Watch.
	It's like, what are you talking about?
	Why can't we stop the murderers, right?
	So, obviously, President, again, I can't pronounce his bloody name, Bukaley, I assume I'm pronouncing that right.
	If you go to the next video, just so you can see, you can plug this in the background so you've got no sound, without the sound.
	This is 50,000, not this, this is not the entire one, but 50,000 gang members, which we can just call murderers, have been arrested.
	And they're treated like the animals that they are, and they're being locked up in a mega prison.
	This does look like something out of a Batman comic.
	Yeah.
	Like you've rounded up all of the Joker's goons.
	Yeah!
	But the Joker's goons weren't this bad.
	Just to tell you, these people are worse than the Joker's goons.
	LaRusso run, I'm sorry.
	For our audio listeners, because their hands are cuffed behind their heads, they have to run with their head down and their hands behind their back.
	You do not take any chances with these people.
	No.
	And not being funny, humiliation is at least the least that they deserve.
	Yeah, exactly.
	The least that they deserve.
	I mean, personally, I would go further.
	But anyway.
	So I thought we'd go to the Washington Post covering This, right?
	Let's watch.
	Last year, the country's president asked Congress for emergency powers to temporarily suspend some constitutional rights after a massive spike in murders attributed to gang crime.
	It includes that arrests can be made without a warrant and detainees no longer have a right to a lawyer.
	Private communications of all citizens can also be accessed by the government.
	Since then, about 64,000 suspects have been arrested.
	Murder reports fell about 57%.
	That's why it was a historic low, because the president had spent the last two years nailing these gangs.
	Did you notice as well, again for audio listeners who didn't see that, the people who were taking the mugshots sat behind the desks had the masks on, so they were wearing full face coverings.
	The riot cops were wearing the same thing, so you could presume that that's to protect them from tear gas or projectiles.
	So either the prison is so susceptible to the riots that the people in the desk jobs need to wear protective gear at all times, or they need to have their face masked so that information about their identities doesn't leak to the outside so their families aren't targeted for prosecuting these gangs.
	Yes.
	That is the level of threat these people are under just for processing active criminals who demark themselves from the population by having full body and face tattoos.
	Yes.
	Again, murderous satanic gang.
	Yeah.
	It's so weird that these are the people.
	But the complaint is, well, you're monitoring all the communications of the people in that country.
	Hello, GCHQ.
	You've been doing this for years.
	Yeah, the Patriarchs.
	Ring any bells?
	When's Edward Snowden coming home?
	Sorry!
	And then, oh well, you're locking people up without due process.
	Yes, just like the January 6th people, who are still in jail.
	I will also say that I am totally against government digital surveillance, and I'm not even sure if it's necessary here, because again, they tattoo their faces for you.
	They're quite easy to spot.
	The only thing I can see is, well, they don't get access to lawyers, and it's like, yeah, they don't.
	That's too bad.
	I don't care.
	The murderous gang where you have to murder someone to become a member of the gang and then terrorise an entire country, multiple countries.
	The mission statement is rape.
	Yeah, the mission statement is literally kill rape control.
	I don't really have that much sympathy.
	If the situation were reversed, I don't think they'd be giving me many lawyers either.
	But anyway, let's go to the next one.
	MSNB News.
	Tonight, mass arrests in El Salvador continue.
	The country's president, Nayib Bukele, doubling down on what he has called a war on gangs.
	The government announcing that at least 50,000 people have been arrested since late March.
	Arrests that they have been touted across social media for months using the hashtag war against gangs and taking to Twitter yet again this time to say the exception has made it possible to intensify the war against gangs and get thousands of terrorists off the streets.
	Over 1% of the Salvadoran population has been detained under the state of emergency and is being held without basic rights to defense.
	Sure.
	The basic rights of these murdering rapists.
	Oh.
	And they all had the gang tattoos.
	They all had the gang tattoos.
	So, excuse me if I'm not suspicious that you're mass-imprisoning people that don't deserve it, and more so that El Salvador has a massive population of murderous raping gang members.
	Yes.
	1% of the population is a member of the Kill Rape Control Gang.
	There's a lot of concordance with Pakistani communities in Telford, but we won't go into that here.
	Yeah, but these people actively mark themselves as part of this gang, right?
	But I love the phrase, he's doubling down on this war against the gang.
	So really, I bet that's made him really popular, actually, in El Salvador.
	That was the interesting thing I saw about the social media posts.
	The way he does the messaging is very Trumpian.
	So, if you noticed, he's got a galvanizing hashtag, he's got the country's national flag next to it, he's got really clear mission statements, and then the curated graphic is of a riot cop arresting one of the gang members with the presidential seal over the top.
	Brilliant.
	That's the similar message you'd see out of the Trump administration.
	I mean, Trump's problems weren't quite this bad, thank God.
	But no, again, he's doubling down on this war against the United States.
	Why should he be... I mean, look at the framing there.
	It's like, well, he's declared war against gangs.
	We criticised him for that, but he's doubled down on it.
	It's like, no, that's good.
	That's absolutely good.
	If you're just a regular person in El Salvador, you want him to exterminate these gangs.
	They should not be on the streets, right?
	And this clip went around.
	Now, this is about two minutes long, but I want us to watch it.
	And if you're just listening to the audio, unfortunately, I can't just translate it in real time.
	But it is a fantastic speech that he gave, and I think we should listen to it.
	We've been eight months in this war against gangs.
	And thank God, we're winning.
	This is a very surprising victory that is so close.
	Let it be clear that glory is for God and that it belongs to God.
	We human beings have the joy of being instruments of God, all of us, to bring peace, freedom and happiness to the Salvadoran people.
	And we are the instrument to heal this land.
	Each one of you is an instrument of God to do so.
	Peace is not achieved by signing agreements between corrupts, by sharing power among murderers.
	Peace is built with work, with sweat, with effort, and with the courage that you and your fellow policemen have.
	You must have something that tells you that you are part of something more important than yourself, and that it is worth risking your life for that which is more important than yourself.
	They are values.
	Values like courage, like courage, like strength, discipline, patriotism, Honor.
	Loyalty.
	Love for others.
	These are fundamental values of human society, but they are values that are being lost more and more in the world.
	If you watch international news, you will realize how the most important values that a human being has, such as honor, loyalty, bravery, courage, love for others, are precisely the values that are being lost more every day, that are being lost less every day.
	And that's why you see how societies that seemed to have already succeeded are now degrading because they're losing the values that made them great.
	Values that probably weren't strong in this land, but were strong in other lands.
	And that's why those lands grew and became great.
	But those values are being lost by them now.
	And on the contrary, in El Salvador, the values that were degraded in our country before are now the most important.
	And if not, look at yourselves.
	Men and women, young people, who have all these values, how can a nation with such values not emerge?
	How can a nation that puts God first and then puts its work and effort with these values not emerge?
	So for all you listeners, President GigaChad there just decided to say we're soldiers of God and that's the mandate that we're going to take as El Salvadorian patriots to crush these gangs that have been destroying our country and make El Salvador a safe haven for the values of courage, love and common brotherhood that have been retreating from the rest of the world.
	Yeah.
	That's brilliant.
	And some of those shots from the helicopter genuinely look like shots of Lord of the Rings preparing to fight in the Return of the King battle at Minas Tirith.
	And they're actually fighting satanic evil gangs.
	I think I might move to El Salvador, actually.
	There we go.
	As soon as he gets it cleaned up.
	Haven't they adopted Bitcoin as one of their national currencies as well?
	I did hear about that, but I don't know anything about it, so I'm not going to bring that up.
	Dan's mentioned it before and he says it has led to some good economic outcomes.
	It seems they're having a bit of a renaissance at the moment.
	But the point is, he's right.
	They're adopting the values of hard work, courage and loyalty.
	Of course you're going to win.
	Anyway, so here's Wikipedia bio.
	Again, go over to this.
	I thought this was just an interesting thing, where they can't even make him sound bad, frankly.
	Because what are you going to say, right?
	El Salvador's murder rate has decreased to historic lows during Bekele's tenure, falling by over 50% in his first year in office.
	Although Bekele attributed the decrease in murders to his deployment of thousands of police and soldiers to gang strongholds and increase in prison security, his government has been accused by the United States of secretly negotiating with MS-13.
	Well, okay, let's say he did.
	He was like, look, we're going to crush you.
	Get your act in line or something like that.
	Okay, fine.
	You take any option you can to start reducing the problem.
	But I mean, he did arrest 66,000 members of the gang.
	Also, he's inherited the mess.
	He hasn't caused it.
	So any steps he's doing to take it are laudable?
	Yeah, exactly.
	I'm not even going to talk about who you secretly negotiate with.
	Jesus Christ.
	But even then, okay, that's the worst allegation they have against him.
	Oh, you were secretly negotiating with him.
	Well, hold on.
	I did crush them.
	Under the Fast and Furious scandal, the Obama administration literally armed MS-13 by giving them illegal guns.
	They literally armed the Taliban by leaving $66 billion worth of equipment there.
	Yeah.
	Like, I'm sorry, I just... What kind of pathetic judgement is this, right?
	But anyway, in March 2020, they arrested 66,000 people with alleged gang affiliations, and Bukele has maintained high approval ratings among Salvadorians throughout his tenure, but had been accused of governing in an authoritarian manner.
	Oh no!
	Anyway... Do you wanna know what his approval rating is?
	It's upwards of 90%, isn't it?
	It is 90%, yeah.
	It's around 90%.
	Like, that's how well-approved of this policy of destroying the satanic gang for God is in El Salvador.
	I just can't find it in myself to find a critique of this.
	And we have Rishi Sunak.
	I mean, I'm glad we don't have the problems they have, but, like, this is great, you know?
	I mean, we will do with the amount of Albanians that keep coming in.
	Yeah.
	But anyway, so the thing that sparked all this off was I saw this article in the New York Times, right?
	El Salvador decimated its ruthless gangs.
	But at what cost?
	Any cost.
	Do you understand?
	Any cost.
	Like, literally, El Salvador are saving their own little world, and the New York Times say, yeah, but what about liberalism?
	It's like, I don't care!
	I just don't care!
	There are no longer murderous gangs controlling the country.
	Like, that's the achievement, and the price you pay for it is whatever it takes, New York Times.
	This is just an embarrassing article, right?
	El Salvador, the smallest country in Central America, was once known as the hemisphere's murder capital, with one of the highest homicide rates anywhere in the world outside of a war zone.
	But in the years since the government declared a state of emergency to quell gang violence, deploying the military onto the streets in force, the nation has undergone a remarkable transformation.
	Now, children play soccer late into the evening on fields that were gang turf.
	Miss Ingleses gathers soil for her plants next to an abandoned building that residents say was used for gang killings.
	Homicides plunged.
	Extortion payments imposed by gangs on businesses and residents, once an economy unto itself, also declined.
	You can walk freely, Miss Ingleses says.
	So much has changed.
	El Faro, El Salvador's leading news outlet, surveyed the country earlier this year and delivered a stunning assessment.
	The gangs largely do not exist.
	Sorry, why is this bad?
	What, a win for order and liberty, one might argue?
	Children playing.
	Oh, the horror.
	Yeah.
	But that achievement, critics say, how can there be a critic of this?
	Like, what kind of monster is like, well, I am going to stand up for MS-13 here.
	I know that it was hell that you were living through because of the satanic gang, but, right, this has come at an incalculable price.
	Mass arrests that swept up thousands of innocent people, the erosion of civil liberties and the country's descent into an increasingly autocratic police state.
	Right, maliberalism.
	It's not a liberal haven in El Salvador.
	No, because it was hell.
	Liberalism can't actually fix the problems of El Salvador.
	So El Salvador's president has to be like, look, we're just going to rely on God and do what we think is the right thing.
	And they fixed all of the problems.
	This does cement my view that you basically need God for liberalism to work.
	That's John Locke's view.
	That's literally every Enlightenment thinker's view.
	Well, except for Rousseau, who thought we were natural savages, and it seems to be that he's been proven right here.
	No, Rousseau was a Christian as well.
	Debatable.
	No, he absolutely was.
	Didn't look after his kids.
	No, yeah, of course not.
	I'm not saying he was a good Christian.
	But he doesn't deny the existence of God.
	Anyway, they carry on.
	Most Salvadorians appear to be willing to accept the deal.
	Right.
	Okay, we're going to be slightly less liberal, and we're going to get rid of the murderous gangs.
	And Mo Salvador is like, I'll take that.
	I'd like to be able to not be killed.
	Low bar, admittedly.
	And the New York Times is like, but have you considered liberalism?
	It's like, well, why would they?
	Liberalism is for countries that don't have gigantic, murderous gangs terrorizing everyone.
	Fed up with the gangs that terrorize them and force so many to flee to the United States, the vast majority of people here support the messages of the president behind them, surveys suggest.
	With approval ratings around 90%, El Salvador's president, the 41-year-old Nayib Bukele, has become one of the world's most popular leaders and has earned fans across the Western Hemisphere.
	Ooh, I think there's a mask-off moment in there, though.
	Fed up with the gangs that terrorised them and forced so many to flee to the United States, the New York Times might be petrified that there's no longer a legitimate reason to import a voter base.
	I mean, that is a fair critique of the New York Times' motivations.
	questions.
	But either way, I am not surprised that 90% of Salvadorians are like, no, this was good.
	This was just a genuine win.
	And if liberalism was going to stand in the way of that, then it's liberalism that has to bend.
	Because I mean, it's not like once all of the problems are done, once all of the gangs are rounded up, dealt with, imprisoned, Problem over, that they can't then engage in liberal reforms, right?
	That's of course something you can restore.
	But you can't impose liberalism on the gangs.
	They're not going to be like, oh, good point about human rights, you know?
	I was a member of a murderous satanic gang, but you did make a persuasive argument about, no, you've got to crush them.
	You have to crush them.
	And that's what Bukele has done, and everyone's thrilled with it.
	Brilliant job.
	New fan converted here.
	And that speech, I found that genuinely inspirational.
	Like, the backhanded way it was like, look, other countries around the world are losing these values, and look at what's happening to them.
	Yeah, us.
	And look at what's happening to us.
	This guy gets it.
	But yeah, they carry on.
	As politicians from Mexico to Guatemala vow to emulate Mr. Bukabi's iron-fisted approach.
	Iron-fisted!
	Iron-fistedly stop the satanic gangs from murdering children.
	Like, good.
	Yes, good.
	Just the open iron fist on the satanic gangs, please.
	Excuse my skepticism about worry about overreach when they tattoo their faces.
	We know exactly who they are because they've literally got MS-13 on their foreheads.
	Like, sorry.
	No, I'm actually very much in favour of what has happened here.
	But critics have grown.
	Again, critics.
	The critics.
	They've grown concerned about how the country could become a model for a dangerous bargaining, sacrificing civil liberties for safety.
	I remain incredibly pessimistic about what this means for the future of democracy in the region, says Christine Wade.
	From the Washington College in Maryland?
	And it's like, you are so remote from the problem.
	Right, woman of letters, completely far from the policies that she prescribes being acted out on the local people.
	Yes.
	I mean, I'll take the grandmother, Mrs. Inglesias.
	I'll take her opinion, because she literally had to live with it every goddamn day.
	I think she's much better informed on the problem of MS-13 than Christine Wade, an El Salvador expert at Washington College in Maryland.
	The risk is that this becomes a popular model for other politicians to say, well, we could provide you with more security in exchange for you giving up some of your rights.
	Why would I need so much security?
	I wonder if Ms.
	Wade ever wrote an article about the lockdowns.
	But oh no, maliberalism is literally the only critique that they have of President Bukele's amazing job fixing one of the worst and most dangerous countries on Earth.
	Brilliant.
	Absolutely brilliant.
	Love it.
	Right.
	I'm just going to blow my nose before we do the next segment because otherwise I'll sound terrible.
	Connor has a cold.
	Which is why Rory has moved desks.
	Typically I am ill.
	There we go.
	Alright then.
	So Tim Poole and Peter Pagosian recently had a debate on Timcast, I think it was Monday night now, about the origins of wokeness and its means of spread versus where it came from and how that shapes its aims and how it plays out in society.
	Both are obviously friends of the show, Tim's shouted out not just our podcast but actually one or two of my segments before, which I'm really chuffed about.
	I've chatted to Serge and Phil Labonte and love Tim Carr's watch every day and you had a fantastic conversation with Peter which is linked down in the description which I recommend you go and watch because you and James Lindsay at some point as well you've tried to shake both of them out of their liberal sensibilities and I think they're slowly but surely getting there.
	Yeah, I think so.
	I mean, like you say, I like all of the people involved in this.
	I consider them to be good people and friends, so this isn't going to be an attack on them or anything like that.
	No, it's not going to be an attack at all, because I think they're both looking at the same issue from two very divergent perspectives, and I feel like we need a synthesis of both of their opinions, because I think one's right on the origins, and one's right on the means of distribution.
	And so I think we're going to look at what exactly woke culture is, where it came from, and how we can attack it and deconstruct it by understanding how it spreads best.
	So, bit of a chicken or egg question, but I thought we'd start off with something we're accused of never being able to define.
	What is wokeness?
	Now, quite a few years ago, a small YouTuber by the name of Sargon of Kad, which I'm not sure what he's up to these days, decided to watch Ash Sarkar's denial and then quick definition of exactly what woke culture is.
	So, if we just play this easily accessible clip please, Jon.
	What precisely do you mean by woke?
	What exactly do you mean here?
	What is woke culture?
	This is what no one has been able to explain to me.
	What is woke culture?
	To answer Ash Sarkar's totally honest question of what is woke culture, we now turn to respected television academic Ash Sarkar from later in that very same podcast.
	Woke is accepting that LGBT identities are valid and should be protected under the law.
	That woke culture is an acknowledgement that there are racialized outcomes reproduced through institutions in society and people of color measurably are treated differently.
	What I want at an interpersonal level is understanding, empathy and solidarity.
	And at a political level, I want the pursuit of redistributive goals, whether that's power, whether that's wealth, whether that's land, in order to pursue aims of social justice along class, gender and race lines.
	So the premises appear to be that man's state of nature is equality.
	That the only way to reach that again, because civilization has distanced us from that, is to affirm your self-conception, so validate your identity, and have political interventions to enact a redistribution of wealth, power and land across identity lines.
	Yeah.
	That seems to be a pretty sensible and easily understandable definition of woke, so I think we can operate based off of that.
	I would also add perhaps a more academic version which would be intersectionality plus praxis.
	So, woke is the adaptation of the intersectional worldview into whatever the current thing is to advance its overall aims.
	To apply an intersectional lens to any particular topic.
	That's what woke is.
	So, Tim disagrees.
	Tim actually says that it doesn't really have any academic content whatsoever, and it's a materially generated product and it's come from algorithms.
	Right.
	I mean, I've read the literature on how intersectionality came to be, so I know that's not correct, but Tim's not someone who spends his time reading really boring critical race theory essays, so I can understand why he doesn't have that perception.
	But he has obviously spoken to James and Peter in this podcast and they have a bit of a battle over that because Peter believes it's all downstream of academia, then it goes from academia to the campus with all students, then it goes from the campus into corporations and the culture and it contaminates everything ubiquitously.
	Tim is right that social media has been a great disseminator of memes of social justice, intersectional social justice.
	So Tim's contention is that social media itself created it and I can summarize it and I'll play this clip in a second to let him speak for himself but it seems to be that he's saying that all of the disparate woke terms that are rage bait started to interact and into lab when websites were making rage bait articles, when the articles would be spread over social media.
	So if you had a police brutality article that would cater to libertarians and a racialized police brutality article that would cater to critical race theory activists, then more terms were amalgamated to drive more rage, more clicks, more advertising revenue.
	And so over time there was a snowball effect of perverse incentives to make woke profitable.
	He is right that this is something that's kind of taken on a life of its own.
	That is correct.
	And he is right that there's...
	an algorithmic ecosphere that we're a part of, you know, all of us talking about culture are a part of.
	He's also right that it is kind of self-generative, because this is why Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay's fat weightlifting article made no impact at all, because it was literally like just exploring an undiscovered country.
	So yeah, that's there, and that fits totally within woke politics.
	And so they didn't, you know, the conceptual penis and things like this, it was all stuff that was essentially pre-packaged in the definition of what woke politics is, and it just required someone to unpackage it.
	But it wasn't something that shone a light on an unusual flaw of intersectionality.
	No, this is the purpose, this is what it does, and so this is why it had no impact on them whatsoever.
	And what Tim, I think, is identifying is the kind of, um, the sort of hive mind nature of the internet.
	Well, once you've given them a new tool in which to analyze the world and explore this undiscovered continent of ideas, then yeah, it does have this kind of self-generative process where it kind of refines itself in a kind of like a nuclear reactor or something, you know, it's burning itself up.
	Um, but he, he is wrong that it didn't come from academia.
	This does all come from A series of articles written by people who identify themselves as critical race theorists and was coined by Kimberley Crenshaw.
	We've done a lot of work on this on the website.
	Go sign up if you want to watch it.
	Yeah, Tim's argument that it's self-generative comes from his conversation that he had recently with 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
	Right.
	And it's on his new Culture War podcast he puts out on Fridays, which is also very good by the way.
	Well done, Tim.
	And he said that Dylan Mulvaney is the product of the AI overlords and that is that it is someone who has been, has had their personality, how sincere is debatable, created by the algorithms that incentivize the adoption of woke politics for maximum exposure and money.
	That's true.
	So he's saying that the algorithms themselves are shaping our self-perception.
	Yep.
	And so he seems to have seeded the creation of wokeism itself, the snowball effect, to the means of distribution rather than the academies which have articulated it.
	It was very carefully and through long labour crafted in the academy and once it arrived at a position that could be used conveniently and memetically to attack liberal human rights laws and the very notion of positions in society that we occupy, then it became very quick for children to be able to turn to their parents and say, no, that's racist, that's sexist, that's transphobic, whatever.
	And so it spread like wildfire.
	I mean, you saw it on Tumblr in like 2013, and now it's everywhere.
	And so it was very quick to do this, but it was, and it is, he is right about the propagation of it through the algorithm, but it didn't come from the algorithm.
	Right.
	Well, I'll allow Tim to make his argument in his own words.
	We can play the first clip, please.
	It's such a bankrupt ideology and the people forwarding it have profoundly mediocre minds.
	Well, it's not that.
	It's that there is no ideology.
	So what do you mean?
	So, I mean, this is my consistent position on what wokeness is.
	Wokeness is the modern left liberal culture formulated by social media algorithms.
	It is characterized by cult-like adherence to liberal social orthodoxy.
	That's all it is.
	And the example of this is Ukraine.
	Why woke people support a war in Ukraine makes literally no sense.
	It doesn't follow any academic theories.
	Ukraine wars is the easiest way to understand this.
	Why is it that Hasan Piker will be like, here are these things that I believe.
	Trans rights.
	And then also, I also am for war in Ukraine.
	And you're like, what do these things have to do with each other?
	And why is it that this individual has no principles?
	It's just...
	He just follows the orthodoxy.
	I totally see what Tim is saying, but also I can see what Tim's missing here.
	He's not looking at liberalism like a game of risk.
	That's why Hassan Piker is in favor of the Ukraine war, because he recognizes that Russia is the red faction and liberalism is the blue faction.
	And if liberalism has control of Ukraine, then everything Hasan Piker wants will be inserted from above into Ukraine.
	You'll have the LGBT stuff, you'll have all the nonsense, right?
	Whereas if Russia controls it, you will not have that thing.
	And so, though Ukraine itself is probably a racist, homophobic country, blah blah blah, He knows that if it's controlled by the blue, by Team Liberalism, then that will change over time.
	Whereas if it's controlled by Team Russia, Team Red, then it won't be controlled.
	And that's why Hasan Piker views this as the expansion of what he wants.
	Yeah, and I think what Tim's possibly conflating here is he says it has no principles.
	It does, but it doesn't have deontological means for enacting those principles.
	So it's a purely utilitarian philosophy if they will use any means necessary to enact woke principles to their end point.
	I push back on that.
	They've got a deontological slate of principles, which is equality and liberty, right?
	Yeah, but not in the way in which they will enact that.
	Sure, they're very cavalier and opportunistic.
	They don't care about the means.
	The ends justify the means for them.
	Tim's like, they don't have an ideology, and then he says the word liberal.
	That is the ideology.
	So he's not correct on that bit.
	To be generous, to be fair, this isn't Tim's wheelhouse, right?
	He's looking at it in the immediate.
	And in the immediate, that is exactly how they appear.
	And so he's not wrong.
	They don't seem to have any principles at all.
	They're in favour of peace and LGBT rights and defunding the police, but they're also in favour of war in Ukraine.
	You've got to look at it in geopolitical terms for that to make sense.
	But it does make sense once you see it.
	Yeah, Peter deliberately said Ukraine is a whole rabbit hole that I don't want to go down and want to avoid the topic.
	I think as well another element that Peter could have hit upon if it was present in his mind at the time is that the deliberate deconstruction that wokeism engages in means that it commands people to outsource their independent rational faculties to some sort of higher authority, the precinct class of academics who define wokeism.
	And so because they've gotten used to that, whatever the current thing is administered from on high, they immediately defer to that as the next trend to jump on to have All of the collective virtue attributed to them as an actor on the right side of history.
	And also, as Tim was pointing out, the generative nature of it on social media.
	Notice how the topics change after the conquest has been achieved.
	We don't talk about women's rights anymore.
	We talk about trans rights now.
	Women's rights were just the means to the entry, and now we're going further down the road.
	I don't know what comes after trans rights.
	Who knows?
	God only knows.
	Transhumanism.
	Probably bestiality rights or something terrible.
	Cenk Uygur most affected.
	But the point being, like, the thing will carry on until there is nothing left to challenge.
	I don't think there's ever going to be nothing left to challenge, so it's going to carry on forever.
	Yeah, you've pre-empted, actually, the generative property of what the next trend will be, because that's actually Tim's argument in the next clip.
	So what's happening is, this is why I say that the problem is not the ideology.
	The ideology has existed for a long time.
	The ideology is a component of the problem.
	The problem is we are in a feedback loop of algorithms quadrupling upon quadrupling our problem.
	It's exponential growth.
	So the example of this I give is 2008, it starts with the viral Ron Paul revolution, which is a good thing.
	Then you start to see, my favorite example is Mike.com, which started off as a website exploiting this, and they were producing libertarian content.
	However, within that libertarian content was anti-police brutality content, because libertarians didn't like that either.
	There was also Second Amendment audits that were going viral, where people were like, the cops stopped me, and you get these videos of people challenging police officers.
	Then, people start adding in a racial component.
	Why?
	Because they start putting up videos of police brutality against black people.
	These videos start getting plastered all over Facebook because it makes money.
	At one point, a website that was dedicated to nothing but police brutality videos was the 400th most viewed website in the world.
	What website was that?
	I'm not going to say what website that was.
	And they were paying their writers an exorbitant amount of money and all they did was post videos of police brutality.
	This starts fracturing the minds of 10-year-olds in 2010 who are now 23-year-olds who are voting in this election whose entire worldview has been built upon a machine that started with Libertarian So here's what happens.
	When libertarians are sharing anti-police content, and they're getting a lot of views, because people don't like injustice.
	It is the epitome of injustice when a cop violates our rights.
	They're supposed to be upholding the law.
	Then you add in a racial component, and now you have an exponential growth.
	The people who hate racism, and the people who hate police brutality, everyone's seeing it and everyone's sharing it.
	Then Mike.com shifts its business model and says, this gets more views.
	Let's do more of this instead.
	The company then slowly, rather exponentially, rapidly shifts into a woke social justice company.
	But here's the thing.
	When this happened, we didn't have the word woke.
	I mean, sort of it.
	It was here and there.
	What was the word?
	Intersectional feminist, which then gave rise to social justice and social justice warriors.
	I mean, at first it was feminism.
	Then it was intersectional feminism.
	Then the SJW.
	Then we ended up with the complaints about critical race theory.
	Then people pointed out actually critical gender theories in there too.
	And now it's woke.
	What we're seeing is a feedback loop of social media algorithms funneling refuse back into the mouths of people in what I would only describe as a human centipede of ideology.
	I mean, he's got a good point, but the only issue is the fact that he can name the theories demonstrates that they come from an academic context.
	But he's completely right that social media and companies like Mike and Vox and Vice did four clicks, rage bait clicks, generate this ecosystem.
	But it did have an underlying thesis to it.
	But he's accurately identifying the propagation.
	I mean, the fact that he even talks about how intersectionality works, when it's like, look, it's libertarian, anti-cop, and now it's racial.
	And so this is the intersection between those two things.
	This is how an intersectional would describe it.
	And so he is right about all of this.
	But it's just that there was a plan beforehand, basically.
	Yeah, and also to execute on the fact that the Libertarians, the Liberals and the intersectionals agree on the abhorrence of racist police violence.
	For different reasons, of course.
	Possibly not even for different reasons.
	Probably for the same reason.
	Well, some are black supremacists, some are just interested in human dignity, but... Sure, but Liberals, Libertarians and even a bunch of leftists probably do agree on the reason that racism is bad.
	Sure.
	I think the heuristic for identifying it is misaligned.
	Sure.
	I'm not saying I don't find the same way.
	Yeah, yeah, no, I know.
	But I think the important point is there.
	Okay, for the algorithm to combine those two things, there must have been some sort of progenitive force to make people outraged, for clicking on that, which means that they had a pre-vested set of values they brought to bear on the algorithm itself.
	So the algorithm is just reacting to what human beings already want and feeding them more of what they want.
	If they were deeply conservative, then they'd be seeing Christian clickbait.
	Exactly.
	That's Satanism.
	Exactly.
	So that's all of my social media feed, for example.
	And so that means that there is some sort of ideological force behind what people bring to bear on the algorithm And I say that because at one point Peter said, like, do you think it's 97, 98% the algorithm?
	Tim went, no, it's 100%.
	And so Peter said, okay, the difference we have here is more substantive than I thought.
	The propagation of it is going to be, at least in Tim's – well, from his perception, it's going to be 100% social media.
	But that's because he's not sat in university lecture halls seeing tens of thousands – I mean, Jordan Peterson thinks somewhere between 300,000 and 3 million students.
	have been radicalized into this.
	And it's like, that's because he was in the lecture halls.
	He was in the universities.
	Tim, his job is social media, like ours is.
	And so he sees it primarily through the social media lens, which is totally legit.
	But it's the combination of these two things.
	These aren't separate things.
	All the university students are on social media.
	So it's the, but he is right in, but they're both right.
	That's the problem.
	As you said, a synthesis is needed here.
	They're both true.
	If I can let the last clip run and then I'll just back up Tim's argument with a bit of data.
	When I try to envision wokeness as an object, it is like a Jackson Pollock painting.
	But that's because wokeness isn't an ideology.
	It is not this thing.
	These things, they frustrate me.
	And I think this chart is probably correct.
	You know, going from post-modernism down into critical race theory and intersectionality, but it applies an academic worldview into the modern problem, which has already been shown by numerous data points, including, there was the Zach Roberts LexisNexis Twitter threat from a few years ago, that all around the same time, everywhere in the world, the same thing happened, where there was a massive spike in the same concepts, ideas, words, and what likely happened is, and I'll put it this way,
	The reason why I don't believe we're dealing with an ideology of the left, we're dealing with algorithmic corruption, is that Jack Dorsey was not woke until he started eating the own refuse of his own social media platform.
	Interesting argument.
	Right, so if we can go on to the data that Tim brought up, because I'll bring up the chart later that he's referring to, but this is the LexisNexis data compiled in this viral Twitter thread that went viral a few years ago by Zach Goldberg.
	And you can see, and this is again from Tim's paradigm having covered Occupy Wall Street.
	Coming from media as well, this is particularly close to home for him.
	Specifically Occupy Wall Street, because if you see the advent date there, it's about 2008-2009 when the protests took off, when the left and right were both protesting Wall Street.
	And then suddenly the New York Times and corporate press outlets start using terms like intersectionality, prejudice, systemic racism, transphobia, feminism at exponential rates.
	If you just take a scroll down, John, just look at some of these charts, please.
	This is since the 90s where they were barely registered.
	Just keep scrolling, mate, just keep going.
	They all show the same thing.
	Yes, yeah.
	But at the bottom it says, for 2018, LexisNexis produces results for 113,596 New York Times articles, 2.7 of which mentioned racism.
	So, he is correct in that there has been a ridiculous growth
	of of these terms and conspiratorial accusations in media and social media since around that time so that's that's a valid assessment um what's spreading this is and this is actually a new york times article ironically enough the phone in the room and this article expands upon findings from a recent cdc study which was released in the 13th of february 2023 that said nearly three in five teenage girls felt persistent sadness in 2021 double the rate of boys and one in three girls seriously considered attempting suicide
	So, Michelle Goldberg had written a column in the New York Times that was grappling with the fact that her Trump derangement syndrome compelled her to blame it on the Trump presidency, but it didn't fit because this was international.
	And so this writer says, the deterioration of teenage mental health predates COVID and Trump, and the deterioration is evident in countries that didn't elect Trump and don't endure mass shootings.
	The mental health trends line up better with the spread of digital technology, including the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and the rise of selfie culture around 2012.
	I'll add one point to Michelle's case.
	Earlier periods in American history also created grist for teenage angst.
	Schoolchildren in the 1950s feared nuclear annihilation.
	The 60s included the Vietnam War, riots, assassinations and murders of civil rights activists.
	In the 70s, popular culture was full of predictions that overpopulation would cause the world to run out of food, But none of this previous doomerism created a teenage mental health crisis like today's.
	One meta-analysis found that 55 studies have a correlation between social media use and mental health problems.
	So that seems pretty valid, especially considering the TikTok generation.
	If we go to this next one that finds out that...
	Let's go around to the chart, please, John.
	Gen Z are up to 19.7% identifying as LGBT, which is up almost 5% since 2020.
	So since lockdown and kids are trapped at home with their phones, LGBT identification has gone up by 5%.
	So Tim has a pretty strong case here.
	Specifically because, as well, he's been talking about getting out of cities repeatedly.
	He's built Chicken City.
	And so, there was a study recently by the London School of Economics that says that cities themselves, we're going to the next one please John, 66 countries were examined and their major cities were more supportive of abortion, homosexuality, promiscuity, prostitution, divorce, gender equality and immigration.
	And this represents about 4.3 billion people, close to half the world's population.
	And white urban areas are in general more liberal than their rural hinterlands, but this effect fades for countries with lower levels of economic prosperity.
	So this seems to be a victim of America's success among the white liberal elite, whose children are becoming even more miserable and indoctrinated to this ideology because of the technology they possess.
	And obviously this might be something to do with the luxury beliefs that Rob Henderson has put out before.
	If we go to this next article that you can read more so in your own time but it essentially says that people have displaced luxury goods for which even the poor can have an abundance of now whether they're buying it on credit like a Dino or because things are so inexpensive in America you can get a TV even if you're on food stamps with luxury beliefs that denote the fact that you went to elite Ivy League colleges and you're in the in crowd.
	You know, this is where accents came from, like the posh British accent.
	Right.
	This came from this because it was a consequence of the Industrial Revolution, because there was no need for the aristocrats to speak differently in any particular affected way.
	But as soon as the peasants could start wearing fine clothes because they were being mass produced, suddenly you needed a way of, and so they had literally like schools and manuals of instruction and things like this.
	And the accent apparently developed.
	Our elocution lessons, that does make sense actually.
	Yes, as a response to show that you had come from a particular background.
	That does make sense.
	So, I think both of our contestions are the fact that Tim has recognised that there is a pipeline here pumping out refuse to the younger generations.
	But if there is a sewage pipeline, there needs to be someone creating the sewage.
	And so that's Boghossian's point, and so I'll just play this one clip from Peter Boghossian please, John.
	So two things.
	One, what Ronald Reagan said in his famous debate, there you go again.
	You're assuming, and I don't mean that as a slander on you, but you're assuming a kind of rationality that the proponents of the ideology have that they simply do not have.
	Oh, I'm quite the opposite.
	I'm saying they quite literally have no rationality and there is no coherent ideology at all.
	What we're looking at is a sewer Of refuse that has been mashed together.
	Yeah.
	And what's happened is I think regular people who are looking for answers seek experts who are anti-woke and they find academics who then give them a very academic explanation.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	So let's talk about a sewer that's been crammed together and force-fed, right?
	Yeah.
	Who is doing the force-feeding?
	The algorithms.
	Okay, again, I'm not saying you're wrong.
	I'm telling you, in no uncertain terms, the data is utterly overwhelming for this.
	The people force-feeding them are people who have gone through teacher training programs, their colleges of education, their university administrators.
	Lyle Asher released a show on my YouTube channel, Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults.
	We know why this is true and the likelihood that two ideologies, that the same ideology could be both promoted in K-12 and academic institutions and be promoted by the algorithm at the same time is virtually zero.
	Well, they're both right though, that's the problem.
	This is frustrating to watch.
	Because, I mean, at the same time, as Tim Paul points out, in sort of like 2009 to 2011, suddenly it starts creeping up and then in the late 2010s, there's this rocketing of focus on social justice issues.
	In the background of all of that is the tireless work of these intersectional academics who have been indoctrinating students.
	And so in the sort of 10-year period from, you know, the professors in 2010 indoctrinating a 20-year-old to 2020 when they're 30 and working at the New York Times, that's what they type about.
	This is the result of generations moving into these businesses.
	And the only reason this works is because it already fits with all of the liberal human rights legislation.
	It fits perfectly within liberal ideology.
	And that's, I mean, we've talked about this so many times, but that's why critical race theory and intersectionality work.
	as well as they do, because they rest on all of the liberal presuppositions and they act as an attack against the liberal human rights ideology itself.
	That's why it spreads.
	That's why all of the things that these young people believe and these institutions, all of the things they already believe, intersectionality knocks to the side and works its way through until it's the only thing that people can talk about.
	So they're both right.
	Yeah, and I don't think we're excessively academicizing the analysis of this, as Tim has said.
	I think we're just attempting to reverse-engineer the end product of a successful cultural revolution, and retrace it back to its roots to find out how do we fight this thing.
	And that's completely correct.
	And Tim is also completely correct, saying, look, the algorithm is spreading all of this and causing it to evolve down the line.
	And that's absolutely true.
	You can see like naturalistic evolutions that have come from these ideological areas where now it's really excessively granulated.
	And if you go back and read something like, you know, the sort of queer theory, they actually use terms that are now offensive terms to describe themselves.
	And so 20 years ago, these academics didn't have this kind of moral development that the hive mind on social media has created.
	And so you can see them being like slightly, oh, yeah, well, I mean, that's, you know, not the word that I would use today sort of thing about it.
	And you can see the development of it.
	And so Tim is also right, but Peter is also correct that that's the case.
	Yeah.
	So I wanted to specifically look at this, because this is the chart that Tim had referenced that Peter had brought up.
	If we can just click on the image, please, John.
	So we'll finish almost on this.
	The reason I wanted to look at this is because it has a very good understanding, and this is where I think Peter's understanding falls down.
	A very good understanding of how woke Social justice fundamentalism, he calls it, is downstream from Marxism, then critical theory, then critical social justice, so identity politics and intersectionality.
	And postmodernism is in there, even though it's for some reason off to the side and not connected to Marxism in this diagram, which I would do.
	But then, if you look at the right-hand side of the diagram for our audio listeners, it starts off with liberalism.
	And liberalism is the only ...point of ideological genesis on here that doesn't have a definition.
	Which I found quite interesting.
	And it goes down to... That's because Tim Urban is doing his best to save liberalism.
	Sure, but also, I think Boghossian is also a liberal.
	James Lindsay is also a liberal, and he's been struggling with this on his own Twitter feed.
	Topic for another time.
	And it feeds into liberal social justice.
	And earlier in the podcast, Boghossian had said, and this is a direct quote, I think you and I, Tim, and everyone in this room actually, falls on the side of liberal social justice.
	Not equality of outcome, but equality of opportunity.
	Not using race to divide, but being what is now a microaggression, colourblind to people.
	And so it proposes that liberal social justice, in the paragraph here it also capitalises the B in Black, so already you can see the melding of the two ideologies of critical race theory and social justice.
	Capital B, Black people.
	Yes, and the LGBT acronym.
	It lends credence to the idea that society still conspires against these groups and there is undue oppression and so they should be protected characteristics under civil rights legislation.
	And so the inability- This is where it becomes positivistic.
	Yes.
	That's the problem, because liberalism was supposed to be negative in its view towards human rights.
	And that's the issue with the lack of definition of liberalism in this.
	And that ultimately is this positivist framing which is why critical social justice can destroy liberalism from within.
	Yes, and this is something that I was talking to Josh with about earlier.
	The problem you have is that ultimately liberalism and Marxism are aimed at similar goals, and that is the solvency of all unjust relationships.
	Originally it was with the state, but now it's been, whether or not it's the family itself, which, because it's been imposed on you, it's a limit on your individual will, so you should have abortion up until the point of birth, and the maximising of material conditions to best express that freedom.
	And Marxism, though it doesn't work in practice, as we went over in our Is Jesus Christ a Socialist video, that's the aim of the Communist Utopia.
	Total material abundance and freedom from responsibility.
	Freedom from all, literally the Rousseauian end point of everyone's a savage in their own world.
	The thing is that you could argue that John Locke is not arguing that.
	And so from a Lockean classical liberal perspective, you can argue that was never the intention.
	But the problem, and I'm going to do a premium podcast talking about this, because I found a great paper that was written by a progressive liberal against a sort of Lockean liberal.
	The problem is that essentially leaves the Lockean under charges of hypocrisy.
	It's like, really, you want to be liberal, but you're okay for non-liberal things to exist.
	Why is that?
	Because you're a hypocrite.
	That's kind of a bad look, you know, and so this is why liberalism turns into a kind of universal acid, and you end up with liberal social justice, which I'm not sure such a thing can really exist, but I think we're running out of time, so let's get some comments.
	I'll do a premium podcast all about this at some point, because I've found some great stuff on it.
	Hmm.
	can be explained purely as physical, but this leaves no means to describe memory or consciousness.
	Dualists say that those phenomena impose upon the physical world from the outside.
	In his book, Galileo's Error, Philip Goff explores a new description, panpsychism, to posit that consciousness exists in all things, but in varying degrees.
	I don't think much of panpsychism, but the book is an accessible read to put fresh ideas in front of people.
	Hmm, never even heard of it.
	Utopia 2.0 Take back the vision of the world they've stolen by giving me your money.
	Utopia 2.0.
	Available now on Amazon.com.
	Part three revolves around the monetary system, trade, and the changes that I see as necessary.
	Utopia 2.0.
	I'll trade you for it.
	Okay.
	Lotus Eaters, I would submit to you here my nine circles of civilization.
	I believe these things are immutable, they are untouchable, and they are also non-transferable.
	Once you're in one, you're kind of stuck there.
	Early 30s, I guess you could transfer.
	But the structure of your civilization starts with tolerated criminals, people who are willing to act outside of the law for the values of your civilization.
	All the way to your sacred leaders who guide the direction of your civilization.
	I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and what you guys think of the structure of civilization itself.
	Does this transfer?
	Does this rate?
	Or am I just talking crazy?
	I need more justification for each of the, each of the rings to be able to agree or disagree with it.
	But yeah, I'd be interested in hearing your rationalization.
	Yeah, I'd want to read an article explaining what you mean by these things.
	But I'm certainly not saying that there's no validity to it.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Henry says, El Salvador and Italy, the last bastions of the West, could have thought.
	Well, I mean, they've got a reason to desire it, right?
	This is one of the things I always have to argue with the sort of dissident right about.
	Explain, look, 300 years ago, liberalism was really justified.
	Things sucked.
	It had a really strong argument for itself in the classical liberal mold.
	And so it's not surprising that it was the most successful ideology of the last few hundred years.
	There are problems with it, as I've got another Five False Assumptions of Liberalism article coming out, and it leads to consequences that are undesirable, but would have been very difficult to predict from the position of someone living in 1690.
	You wouldn't have seen it coming.
	So it's not that they're evil or something like that.
	But we should have a realistic view of where liberalism goes too far.
	An American isolationist says, I have an interesting question.
	The law banning non-Italian speeches passed.
	How will this impact the tourist industry?
	Are there towns in Italy that rely on tourism to survive?
	There are loads of towns in Italy.
	I think it's only on internal government services and documents, so I think they would probably make an exception for street signs or something.
	So in Rome, the word Colosseum probably will be written in English because they want tourists to be able to find it.
	Someone online says, if there's anything I expect to see the Italians protect, it's their food.
	Well, it's certainly not their borders, is it?
	Baron Von Warhawk says, I find it weird that these people are shocked that Italy, a country known for having a very Christian population, don't want massive amounts of Muslims and Alphabet people in their country.
	Imagine my shock.
	Yes, not very much of a surprise, is it?
	Matthew says, Far right is a dog whistle for not progressive.
	That's correct.
	Omar says, I remember a Jordan Peterson discussion where his guests made a point that food has become flavoured, sorry, food has become flavoured divorced from nutrition, porn is sexuality divorced from relationships, and games are thrills divorced from physicality.
	It's fine to make scientific and technological advancements, but just like lead-based fuel, social media, internet, antibiotics, and the ramifications of their wide usage can be catastrophic.
	These scientists could be making the next cadmium girls, even if they tell us it'll be too late to stop our faces melting off.
	It's much easier to invent cigarettes than discover they cause cancer 10 years down the line.
	Yeah.
	Miles says, lab-grown meats are grown from so-called immortal cells that are effectively cancer cells that constantly reproduce.
	Oh, lovely.
	That's gross.
	Stefan says, Italy is rejecting modernity and returning to a tradition.
	Yes, they are.
	Bleach Demon says, That's exactly how it looks from the outside.
	That's exactly how it looks from the outside.
	I don't know.
	Like I said, I don't know anything about El Salvador, really.
	But I'm actually with Wasserbottle here.
	How am I feeling more patriotic for a Central American country than my own?
	Viva El Salvador, amigos.
	I know.
	Man, I watched that speech a bunch of times as a man.
	I wish we had leaders like that.
	Yeah, I felt genuinely inspired.
	Yeah, this guy, he is going to make things better.
	It felt like how I felt watching Trump's 2020 campaign speeches, where I was like, yeah, we are going to make America great.
	Oh, well, hang on a minute.
	I'm thousands of miles away.
	I know.
	Yeah, well, no, I'm totally in favor, though.
	Rue the Day.
	Listening to El Salvador man's speech, I kind of teared up a little bit.
	He speaks beautifully, sure, but what he says is so important.
	The speech of Deus Vult, and we need men like this to move us over here, too.
	Yeah, I know.
	I genuinely felt emotional watching it, to be honest.
	The letter M, despite making up only 1% of the Salvadorian population.
	Well, that shows you how bad the problem is.
	I mean, when 1% of the population is, I mean, that's tens of thousands of people are just murderous, satanic gang members.
	But there's gotta stop!
	I'm sorry!
	I'm totally on his side here.
	here.
	Just the Schmuck says a hard truth people refuse to acknowledge is that mercy is a luxury of the strong.
	If your country is not strong enough to be merciful to criminals then you must be harsh.
	MS13 deserves whatever is done to them.
	Totally agree.
	This is very much the Nietzschean position as well.
	How long can society tolerate its parasites?
	And listening to the woke progressives going, no, you've just got to endure them, you've got to endure them.
	It's like, no, you've got to deal with them.
	And El Salvador has arrived at the Nietzschean position, where it's just like, yeah, no, we have to deal with them.
	That's what we spoke about in the book club, is that the moral community will be in a net deficit if it relinquishes the ability to enact retribution on the people that will take from it.
	I love how it sounded like a crusade as well.
	The conversion's working, slowly but surely.
	Look, I'm not religious, but I would sign up for a good crusade.
	Baystape says, feeling nostalgic, hearing the great Sargon of Akkad again, that cheeky little man.
	Do you ever miss doing your old-style Sargonian monologues and rants?
	Sometimes, but things have changed, so I'm happy with the changes.
	In a way, yes, but it's just nostalgia.
	I think what we're doing here is really important, so I think it's important we carry on.
	But on that note, I'm afraid we're out of time.
	So if you want more from us, go and sign up to lotuses.com.
	Help us keep the lights on, because of course we're demonetized.
	And we'll be back again tomorrow.

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