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May 23, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:30:34
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #659
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*Music* Hello and welcome to the podcast of Loth Cesis episode 659 For today, Tuesday the 23rd of May 2023.
I'm your host, Conor, joined today by Stelios.
Hello.
Who is slightly under the weather, so I won't tax you too hard, mate, but always good to be on with you.
Not because of the elections.
I'm not under the weather because of that.
No, I've just talked you to death, of course.
So, today we're going to be discussing how the Conservative vanguard has arrived.
We have finally manifested some good news.
There's going to be a white pill here.
There might be a white pill in the election segment.
Stelios is going to be talking about how Greece is ousting its communists to varying degrees.
And also, something looks bad for Bill Gates.
I mean, it usually does, but something particularly bad involving a man who didn't kill himself.
Before we start, we have a couple of promotions, if that's alright.
So tomorrow, at three o'clock, there will be a premium video between myself and Josh, titled Daycare Will Destroy the West.
It's a literature review of early childhood and lifelong outcomes resulting from institutional childcare and schooling.
And I have to warn you, it's pretty dark stuff.
And this will be a prelude to an interview I did, which will be coming out later, with Stephen Jay Shaw, about the total demographic collapse of the West due to birth rates.
So, Two bits of content coming soon, but if you haven't subscribed to the website yet, £5 a month helps us keep the lights on, helps us bring in guests, and you get content like this.
And then tomorrow at 3.30, we're going to have a livestream of Julius Evola's revolt against the modern world.
It's going to be a part one because it's such a dense text.
Average Roland Wrapp fans will be delighted, and this is a book club between Carl and Stelios, who I'm sure is going to feel much better by then and have plenty of great contributions.
As per usual.
I'm really interested to see what this is about.
I've read nothing about it, but usually that's good for these videos.
Yeah, going in blind.
I hope to read it myself soon, and it should tie into a comics corner in future, so stay tuned.
But without further ado, let's jump straight into today's stories.
So, it seems that the Conservatives, after the National Conservative Conference, which we covered here very favourably, actually, and I was delighted to have attended, so Thank you to the organisers for inviting me.
Seems that the actually Conservative Capital C Conservatives decided to do some conserving, at which point this means rebuilding, because we're in a society of utter ash heaps.
All of our values have been torn asunder, it's hard to have families, and we're taxed to death.
And so they thought, that's not really a good thing, both electorally and morally, to allow our country to degrade in such a way.
So, We, after doing a bit of Pavlovian politics and praising the politicians when they do something right, we gave them a little bit of dinner when they rang that little bell, and so now it seems that the exact kind of conservatives we wanted to do something are doing something.
So today let's look at the state of play and how we're being betrayed by the establishment versus this new vanguard which has risen from the midst.
And I know it's a bit bleak out there, guys, but, you know, we're trying to make some change best we can.
So if we go on to this one, Just to plug, first of all, if you're all not aware that we've been demonetised by YouTube, as little as £5 a month can help us keep the lights on.
The Conservatives are sick of liberalism, and so is Karl.
So he decided to debate liberalism with our fantastic Stelios here for his Symposium series.
I know there is a part two of this coming out.
Do you want to give a brief overview of what this conversation entailed?
Well, the second part is going to be about a different conversation.
It's going to be about comprehensive liberalism.
It's not exactly part two, but there may be a part two of this in the near future.
Yeah, and correct me if I'm wrong, and I watched this so I really enjoyed it, but Karl's complaint is very much like the similar complaint that a lot of the academics and even MPs like Miriam Cates, my favourite, gave in this conference, which was that liberalism has metastasized, it's spread like a cancer, going from protecting the individual from unjust incursions by the state on their liberty, to destroying relationships in the Rousseauian conception, so they allow the individual to maximally consume things without ever relying on other people.
And that's quite alienating.
So just one thing to say on that.
My, let's say, position in the debate is that just because some positions of liberalism don't work and have really negative consequences, we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Yeah, and I think that's a valuable conversation to have within the discourse of the right.
That's what happened at the conference.
And if you want to be better informed, you can go and watch that video.
So let's jump on to the first one.
Let's look at what exactly the establishment are doing to stonewall this conservative revivalism within the Conservative Party.
So it comes straight from the top Rishi Sunak, professional useless person who nobody elected and nobody wanted because he's a globalist stooge has been consulted on what he's going to do to stop the invasion at the south coast over the English Channel by all of the boat migrants, the seafaring insurgents who pack up our hotels and make it so that working people of Britain have most of their income parceled off
So that a bunch of 20, 30-something Afghans and Africans can sit around, smoke and buy trainers from JD Sports.
I love my country sometimes.
So Rishi Sunak has said, I won't rest until we can stop the boats.
And he only means the little dinghies, he doesn't mean the big ones that are bringing over millions of people every year legally.
He wants the safe legal routes to be the real thing and to crack down on small boats.
It's one of his five pledges.
Frankly, I fundamentally just don't believe him, but we'll listen to what he says.
So Rishi Sunak has vowed not to rest until we can stop the boats, and he said that Britain can lead the way in tackling illegal migration in Europe.
The Prime Minister used a rare summit of the Council of Europe in Iceland to call on the European Court of Human Rights, the ECHR, To reform its approach to interim injunctions, which we used to block the first scheduled deportation flight to Rwanda in the 11th hour in June last year.
Yeah, there's still not been many people deported to Rwanda at all, they've built massive hotels out there, we're giving them loads of money, and also the Rwanda deal isn't a solution, because it turns out it's an exchange program, because for the people that we send over, they send over Rwandans to come and use the NHS.
So we're going to be footing the bill for other foreign nationals.
So it's not going to solve the problem, it's just going to be a pipeline.
As you will see, the UK has, to a large extent, the same problem with Greece with regards to immigration.
Right.
This has to do with borders of the sea, sea borders.
And it's very difficult to guard against them, but it's doable.
Yeah.
You can just turn them around and say no, and the fewer economic incentives that they would get upon arriving, the fewer people are incentivized to make the journey in the first place.
Because if they show up and they know they're going to get nothing, and they're possibly going to disappear into the system and get no handouts, then nobody's going to want to come.
They'll just sit and stay in Calais until Care for Calais gives them a handout instead.
Sorry, I must revise it.
I wanted to say to guard them, not guard against them.
I don't want to The UK is attempting to reform the European Court's use of the interim injunctions, known as Rule 39 orders, so they can't be used to arbitrarily block future deportations without representation from member states or transparency over the decision.
Sulak said he was also using his visit to Reykjavik and meetings with individual European leaders to urge closer cooperation on tackling illegal migration, acknowledging his domestic efforts to stop the boats with his migration bill must go hand-in-hand with closer international partnerships.
basically saying that these countries that they're passing through either tame them or send them back there so they don't have to come to Britain as the final resting stop.
We are currently the world's halfway house, the dumping ground for economic chances and it's destroying the country so hopefully someone gets a handle on it.
But I don't think Rishi Sunak will because he's been told in this article Iceland's foreign minister rebuffed Sunak saying the Council of Europe summit was not being used to reform the European court's rules.
So he came there, he said he was going to do it, but that's not the purpose of the meeting so it didn't get done.
Now, you cannot laugh at the next article, right Stelios?
Look me in the eye, tell me.
You can't laugh, okay?
This is the person who has helped block the ECHR reform, this very masculine man.
Tiny Cox, the Dutch Senator who is President of the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly, you couldn't make it up, told The Guardian that Britain will end up like Russia and face exclusion if it chose to ignore obligations to abide by the Strasbourg Base Court.
Tiny cocks told us that we can't control our own country.
That really does summarise British politics for the last 30 years, doesn't it?
Anyway, moving on to the next one.
The reason we've got to get a handle on this is because, as Matt Goodwin has shown in this graph here, the government spends 1.3 billion a year on housing boat migrants.
1.3 billion.
And that's higher than the levelling up budget that Boris Johnson promised in his 2019 election to give to the North in order to upgrade their infrastructure and their regional opportunities.
Because, for those who don't know, there's kind of a stigma around the Conservative Party.
Post-Thatcher because the closure of the coal mines and the unwillingness to do regional investment under neoliberalism meant that lots of the North felt that their communities and their intergenerational job opportunities were decimated and so they held it against the Conservatives and that's handed Labour successive victories in the heartlands and also obviously Handed it to Blair after John Major, even though the parties are pretty much the same.
Boris Johnson broke that said red wall, and now — and this is something from Matt Goodwin's book, and we'll be talking to Matt Goodwin pretty soon on the website, so stay tuned — six in ten of Boris Johnson voters in 2019 are just checked out of politics.
They're not even necessarily flipping to the other side, they just don't feel represented.
And one of the major reasons is migration.
They just feel that they're getting the raw end of the deal.
Why should I go to work and pay for some boat migrant, to sit in a hotel, have a cleaner come round and clean up his mess, and he can buy brand new trainers and cigarettes, while I can't get a house.
And I've lived here, and my family have worked and lived here, for basically nothing, all of their lives.
It's just not fair.
Sorry, you said 4 out of 10, or 6 out of 10?
6 out of 10.
So that's a very big number.
That's staggering.
That is just mass disenfranchisement.
And it shows that people do not think that there is anyone who is actually advocating for something different.
I can't really name, other than a couple of politicians which we will name in here and give credit to, anyone who's at least at the top end of politics who substantively represents my interest.
I think reform are doing some good policies but they need a rebrand and their unwillingness to have conversations with other people in the disparate right parties, particularly Andrew Bridgen who is an excellent MP and a very nice man that We've had on the show, and I've obviously spoken to offline occasionally as well, the fact that they ostracised him from the party shows that they're also out of touch with the dissident sphere, the people that feel that they weren't represented through lockdown, through immigration, through high taxes, and so there needs to be a merging here.
They can't just be establishment because people are just fed up.
I think it's very, let's say, weird to think that Liz Truss essentially didn't understand anything from the last 25 years and she went back into advocating a form of Thatcherism when it seemed to me that conservative people want to move away from that paradigm and want to embrace a different one.
Well, we're less focused on materialism.
I think Truss's economic policies were not bad.
She did not crash the economy.
The gilt market was about to collapse on the Friday before, and on the Monday when she announced her budget, she was a convenient scapegoat.
I'm not a big Truss fan.
She's dim as a two-watt bulb, but she didn't deserve that.
But Truss was contemplating free movement with India.
She wanted to, again, increase migration.
Entirely out of touch with the British electorate.
She'd have to live in these communities and say, my country on my doorstep looks nothing like what my dad lived in.
And I wanted that.
I can't live anywhere else other than England because I'm sentimentally attached to it.
Don't turn it into an economic zone for people, when the rubber hits the road, who will just flee back home and take their money with them and have no ties to the place.
It's very alienating.
It's not very nice.
And that's only going to get worse under Sunax if we go to the next one.
Rishi Sunak has now ditched the manifesto pledge that started under David Cameron to reduce migration, continued under Boris Johnson, but Boris Johnson increased migration, and now Sunak has ruled out explicitly committing to reducing migration.
Despite facing record levels of net migration, so it's going to peak at at least 700,000, it might go up to a million net this year.
Now bear in mind that's nearly double what it was June last year, 2022, of 504,000 net.
So double inside a year.
That's utterly infeasible.
We've got crumbling transport infrastructure, we haven't upgraded our roads, we haven't upgraded our sewage systems practically since the Victorian era, and so we're massively increasing the population that have stuff flowing through that.
The NHS is dying on its knees, and that might be the better if something were to take its place, but instead we've just constantly got to pay more for it and can never keep up with funding.
Everything's going to pot, and instead, again, you're glutting the country with people that need services on demand the moment they arrive here.
It's unsustainable.
So, Mr. Sunak refused to get drawn on speculation of what next week's numbers will show, though he defended last year's record high by pointing out it included large numbers of Ukrainian refugees.
New visa schemes for people coming from Hong Kong, Afghanistan and Ukraine made up 138,000 of last year's 504,000.
238,000 of last year's 504,000.
Okay.
Okay.
First of all, I understand the temporary stays for Hong Kong.
Because back in 1998, the British government dropped the ball and seceded sovereignty to them when they very much would like still to have our partnership to defend them from neighbouring mainland China.
And so China came in and assumed Hong Kong and stole up its citizenship, and we continue to deal with China, legitimising their actions, so actually taking in a few Hong Kong refugees temporarily to then repatriate them when they get their country back, I'm totally for.
Not with 400,000 other people on top of that who are never going to leave.
Not good.
The Prime Minister said he's crystal clear about wanting net migration to come down, admitting it's too high.
I'm committed to bringing down the levels of migration.
We're clear about that.
There are a range that we're considering.
At the same time, I think people know I'm relentlessly focusing on stopping the boats because levels of illegal migration are too high and they've escalated massively over the last few years.
See the sleight of hand they play there?
He isn't committed to bringing down the net number.
He's instead, I'll bring migration down by stopping the small boats.
That is a fraction of a percentage.
Every year you're importing a city the size of Liverpool.
Now it's going to be two cities the size of Liverpool into the UK who immediately need housing and infrastructure and transport.
And he thinks this is going to have no impact?
People care about more than just the small boats.
The thing is that it seems to me that this policy is just gear to show an image of some boats, let's say, being turned towards the other side.
But as you say, it doesn't necessarily tackle the problem.
It's electorally expedient, but he wishes to continue with the actual problem, which is the cultural and economic effects of mass migration.
Because they've got themselves into a death spiral with lower birth rates, economic disincentives to having families, and the election cycle means that you're not planning for the long term, you're planning for the next four years.
And so if every year, if your economic policy is tanking the economy, if you just bring in more people, then GDP goes up because more people are having more money change hands.
It doesn't matter if GDP per capita, per person, average earnings are going down.
Instead, it's that slow growth graph.
And so I would love to have this question answered.
If we're importing so many doctors, lawyers and engineers, and immigration is great for the economy, why is growth just not exponentially jumped?
Yeah, it's because it's just not the case.
It's a lie.
So stop it.
The cabinet recently split over immigration because the Chancellor, Education Secretary, Health Secretary and Scottish Secretary disagreed with the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, who wanted to decrease the numbers.
And bear in mind, Suella Braverman is currently being faced with an ethics probe because she may or may not have used expenses to claim for a speeding ticket.
And so SUNAC is consulting an independent ethics advisor over whether or not to ouster for the party for this.
Now, I think it's a stupid thing to do.
I don't want my politicians wasting my tax money on things like that anyway.
Just on principle.
But it's obvious that if she gets ousted for that, it's because she is going against the orthodoxy.
Because as you said, Sudak is saying one thing, trying to look like he's on the side of the electorate, and selling them short on the other.
Because he actually doesn't care.
So, I want to ask you about this.
There is an image, let's say outside the UK, that politicians in the UK are are uniquely sensitive to things like that and they frequently resign over things like, you know, someone watching some, let's say, questionable material.
Do you think that's fake?
It's just that there are deeper reasons why they get ousted and they find, come up with a silly excuse.
That's a good question.
I think they often pressure MPs to leave for political reasons rather than matters of principle, because Angela Rayner, for example, claiming airpods on her expenses.
Okay, there's not really much different from Suella Braveman other than Suella obviously minorly broke the law, which isn't good either.
But the perfect example is the Chris Pinscher affair with Boris Johnson.
So last summer, one of the things that catalyzed Boris Johnson's exit was that Chris Pinscher was going around literally pinching young men, and it was well known, and Boris Johnson was going to appoint him a new position of authority within the Conservative Party, despite knowing this, and so he had had so many ethics complaints against him, but they only took action when it started looking bad for Boris in the papers.
And so they'll let their side get away with – and this goes for both parties – they'll let their side get away with practically anything, as long as it doesn't draw too much political fire and lose them too many votes.
And so the bus is only there to throw people under when it's going to be costly for the party, Not because they've done something wrong, necessarily.
And that's what I think the Braverman thing is.
If she goes, it'll be an excuse for the fact that she just wants to lower migration.
And even then, Suella Braverman's a liberal.
As I said, she was the only person to show up doing some sort of premature election speech at the conference with a teleprompter on either side of her, and she said that the thing that the UK stood for was equality.
That's conservatism.
No, no, no, no, that's liberalism.
You just don't understand what people want, do you?
So Jeremy Hunt had signalled to business leaders at the British Chamber of Commerce this week that immigration controls would be eased further to plug labour shortages in the short term.
Why do we have endless labour shortages again?
Oh yeah, because the more people that come here en masse, the more security you need, the more care home workers, the more hospital staff, the more infrastructure upgrades.
So it's a self-generating problem.
You're always going to have a labour shortage if you just keep importing loads of people here to generate more jobs to meet the demand.
Stop it.
Sustainable growth.
Have kids instead.
But you won't do that, will you?
Scottish Secretary Alistair Jack said he's entirely supportive of high levels of immigration to boost the Scottish workforce.
And this is why the Conservatives have absolutely no foothold in Scotland.
This morning the Telegraph revealed that the Education Secretary Gillian Keegan said she is hugely proud that 600,000 foreign students are now coming to the UK.
An active target at the Department of Education said they've hit eight years early.
Oh, brilliant!
We've ruined the country even faster than expected.
And then get this.
A departmental memo, seen by the Telegraph, said the 600k target for international students is not a one-year expectation.
We're expected to deliver on it every year.
It's the new normal to have 600,000 transitory foreign students to come in every year.
And the reason this is a problem is because all of the universities and the accommodation providers are addicted to foreign money.
Because the Chinese students can come in, pay higher fees, pay higher accommodation costs up front, create mini-ethnic enclaves the entire time, and then take all of their skills back to their home country to then steal our intellectual property and undermine our country.
And then you get chain migration as well, of where students from other countries will bring over their family members, even though they're not studying.
So you'll just get loads of people coming in.
It's an endless problem.
And then, speaking of someone openly seditious, Michael Gove, at the conference, just to highlight this, if you think your concerns are going to be addressed, this man is holding the ideological testicles of the party in a vice at the moment, not the first time he's probably held a pair, and he says that if you focus on culture wars you're going to lose.
So, It's all about the consensus.
They know where they're going to take us.
It's the progressive technocratic future.
They're just negotiating how fast we're going to get there, how much money we're going to spend getting there, and how we're going to sell it to the plebs.
I think that's atrocious because if he doesn't formulate, and if the conservatives don't formulate a positive vision, it's not going to work.
What's going to buy into it?
Nobody's excited about marginal tax rates increasing or decreasing.
And it's because if you try to articulate a rousing vision of the future, it cuts against the vision that they secretly want.
Or you could say that, obviously, taxes do matter, but they are not the only thing that matters.
And to the extent that he says that people shouldn't care just about culture war, it seems that he's advocating for that rhetoric to be used, the rhetoric that just focuses on taxes.
Yeah, but that's because if you're negotiating... When you have culture war issues, you should abstain from touching them.
Yeah, because if you're negotiating everything like you're moving beads on an abacus, then you're playing within the abacus, right?
You're playing within the neoliberal paradigm.
And so, the moment you engage in culture wars, you're talking about substantive moral issues, rather than just how much money goes here and how much goes there.
What they really want is to deprive you of the moral language to disagree with them, And so you're slowly losing over time.
And that's what Michael Gove does.
That's why he's a sort of mover and shaker in politics, because he can reframe the debate so that his opponents will always agree with him, and then he'll get what he wants.
Just reject the paradigm.
And it seems that that's actually happening.
So a group has risen to the occasion.
They're calling themselves the New Conservatives.
Now, this is not the first pressure group within the Conservative Party.
We've had things like the European Research Group before that spearheaded Brexit, involving Jacob Rees-Mogg.
But the New Conservatives are a dozen MPs drawn from the 2017 and 2019 intakes, and they want a fundamental realignment of the party so it better reflects the interests of voters in the Midlands and across the Red Wall in the North.
So we're seeing that Constituency that feels alienated, that's 6 out of 10, be substantively represented.
And there's quite a few people that share their sentiments down here, down south, me included.
So the members are Lee Anderson, who's Deputy Party Chairman, 30P Lee, as people like to call him, Andrew Lua, Danny Kruger, Nick Fletcher, Miriam Cates, Alex Stafford, Jonathan Gullis, and Sarah Atherton.
I might suggest allowing Desmond Swain to join too, but we'll hope.
So, if you're not familiar with some of these MPs, we'll go through that in a moment, but I just want to go through this exclusive interview.
So, for taxes, Kate has called to an end to fiscal drag, because people are being pulled into upper tax brackets by inflation, despite not actually getting any more money.
They want to replenish the armed forces, because this has been the lowest since the Napoleonic Wars, and we've basically depleted and gutted our reserves whilst funding Ukraine.
They've said they want to make it so that Tony Blair's university admissions target goes down so they can fund practical skills and apprenticeships, which will be useful when AI takes everyone's job.
They said about family policy, of course, at the National Conservative Conference, which we've already covered, but they want people to have more babies and lower immigration.
And they've got quite a lot on immigration, actually.
So Lee Anderson said, it is clear that immigration should be a priority.
I suspect if you knocked on a hundred doors in any of our constituencies and asked them if migration was too high, 99% will say yes.
So he's appealing to the actual issues that people want represented.
He said, while he believed migration could be a good thing, there must be limits.
Most of us who sit in that chamber don't have to worry about being on the council house waiting list.
They don't have to worry about getting a dental appointment.
We don't just sit there in pain because their knee operation has been cancelled for the 10th time.
These are real things that affect people in our areas, those we represent.
Sometimes I don't think we do a very good job of it, because the message is not cutting through.
We need to gently remind people that in that place, what's happening in the real world.
Britain, he argued, was at risk of becoming full up.
In 50 years time, our children and our grandchildren will look at us on YouTube or whatever, and say, why didn't you sort it out?
If the population continues to increase at this rate, and migrations are a million a year, in 50 years time, there's going to be no space in this island.
Our children, our grandchildren will say, why?
You had the chance to sort it out.
At some stage our country will fall.
What do we do then?
He's appealing to the intergenerational project, not just the next four years and a GDP graph.
It's an actual conservative mindset.
This is encouraging.
Asked whether the Tories really could meet their pledge to reduce migration to less than 250,000, given the scale of numbers, the new conservatives were adamant the government must try.
Danny Kruger said that he's adamant that they must leave the ECHR, whereas Andrew Lua, who's a bit more of a moderate, said that he's ambivalent, but they're all just agreeing that it doesn't matter what we do, as long as we get results.
So I thought, just to finish up, we'll look at the careers of these individual people in case you weren't familiar with them, obviously, being an outsider to British politics, or in case some of our viewers aren't as Westminster wonky as some of us.
So we look at the honour roll, and it's half encouraging, because this is the roll of people in 2021 who voted against vaccine passports.
Now, half of the members voted against them, but Nick Fletcher, Alex Stafford, Jonathan Gullis and Sarah Atherton voted for vaccine passports.
So that goes my ears up, and so they've got a bit of a hill to overcome for goodwill, for me, personally.
But, given this was a couple of years ago, there may have been some misinformation or, and this isn't to insult them, but a bit of cowardice on their part, thinking that they're only backbenchers, they'll be whipped into shape, they'll lose the whip otherwise because the COVID hysteria was as bad for society as it was within the party, I'm sure.
I think there's some room to forgive them if they make the right noises, make the right apologies, and advocate for the right policies.
Now, I don't necessarily trust Stafford yet.
I will say why.
In his summary, and I've just taken a cursory look for his career, he self-described himself as a Margaret Thatcher fan, he said that he likes David Cameron's social democratic policies, and that he was arguing that lockdown was the prime opportunity to instigate a green revolution.
So you've got a lot of goodwill to make up with me, buddy, I tell you that now.
But start changing that around and we'll see.
But let's go on to some of the other members.
So Jonathan Gullis, I just liked this.
He said that anyone who's promoting the term white privilege should be reported to the Home Office as political extremists.
I love this.
Yeah, exactly.
See?
See?
This is the spirit we want to manifest.
The unapologetic crushing of one's enemies is the stage that we've gotten to because they don't want to negotiate with us.
They don't want to talk about how to get to the same destination.
Again, we're using parallel moral languages here.
They view us as evil.
We are in an existential way of defending our way of life.
Therefore, okay, if they're going to accuse everyone of inherent racism, inherent sin, and therefore should be persecuted to correct historical grievances, no, no, sorry, you don't deserve government funding to do that.
Stop whining.
You can't build a society just on victimization.
You need more than that.
Yeah, grievance is entropic.
These people you are referring to, I hope they succeed in getting this message across.
Absolutely.
Let's go on to Lee Anderson.
Carl's already covered him pretty comprehensively in this segment on Rumble, so you can go and check that out, please, John, if you go to the next tab.
And Lee Anderson, just to summarise his career, he's pro-death penalty.
Very based.
He's a Brexiteer, and he waived his party chairman's salary when he got the position, so he didn't want to take public money.
He's instead taken on a contributor role at GB News for £100,000, which I think, despite going on GB News pretty frequently, I love the network, I think it's fair to maybe criticise the amount of MPs that are on there, because you'd hope that they're focusing more on representing their constituency rather than just juggling other jobs, but I'd rather he takes private capital than takes a significant pay boost, because I think loads of MPs are overpaid anyway.
Like, do you know, during the pandemic, for example, When they were doing loads of money printing, and everyone was out of work, and we were all broke, and we're now facing inflation.
Do you know the MPs stuck in a pay rise for themselves?
Parasites.
The lot of you.
Anyway, going on to the next one, Andrew Lua.
So he's a former MEP turned Brexiteer and he's a member of the Common Sense Group and he co-signed this letter because during the pandemic they decided to try and ban church services and there was actually deliberation of whether or not they were going to ban the Armistice Day service for social distancing and I like this letter that he's helped author and sign because it says Here.
A common sense group was formed to speak for the silent majority of voters tired of being patronized by elitist bourgeois liberals whenever issues such as immigration or law and order are raised.
Part of our mission is to ensure that the institutional custodians of history and heritage, tasked with safeguarding and celebrating British values, are not colored by cultural Marxist dogma colloquially known as the woke agenda.
History must neither be sanitized nor rewritten to suit snowflake preoccupations, a clique of powerful privileged liberals must not be allowed to rewrite our history in their image.
Now, not only is that an actual really good bit of prose, with some powerful alliterative imagery there, but he identifies the problem perfectly.
These people are our enemies, they're tasked with dismantling and decolonizing a place that was never colonized, and all they want to do is build atop the ashes, and they're most of the way there.
So, group better get ready to conserve something instead.
And for many years it seems to me that they flew under the conservative radar.
Yes.
And apparently they fly under the Michael Gove's radar.
Still.
I would suggest that Michael Gove is happy to let this go on.
Okay, that would be my inclination.
Just to finish up on the last two, here's Nick Fletcher.
Nick Fletcher was actually ripped for suggesting in a parliamentary debate that male role models are being obluted from the media because they're being racially and sexually recast with black women.
And he said that is there any wonder that when the only role models in media are the likes of Tommy Shelby and the Gangsters, that young men don't feel substantially represented and don't have missions of heroism to aspire to?
And some SMP guy said that in a reboot of The Equalizer, Queen Latifah playing the title role that Denzel Washington would otherwise play was positive, and Nick Fletcher turned around and said that the government should be helping men to be proud to be men rather than feeling awful about their gender.
I think putting forward a positive message is quite alright, actually, so that's a good step in the right direction.
And the last one, and this is the spirit that I really wanted manifested.
Sarah Ratherton.
Now, Sarah Ratherton is a 2019 intake MP.
She's not done all that much since starting, of course, because most politics have been brought up by the pandemic.
But she got a lot of flack because she just said, uh, let's deploy the army in the channel to stop the boats.
Rishi Sunak isn't suggesting that.
But she's just like, Royal Britannia!
Back on the waves, lads!
And she didn't back off of this.
She got loads of flack for it.
But no, didn't apologise.
And this is the point.
This is the kind of spirit I want.
This is why this group is encouraging after this conference.
You've got to learn that the progressives will not cut you any slack.
They hate you.
They want to tear asunder your civilisation.
And so rather than speaking by the terms of their debate, rather than moving the beans on their abacus and allowing society to fall apart, You flip over the board, reject their moral framework, do not apologize, and double down.
So I look forward to see what comes from this group and hopefully it's something positive.
Okay, so I have good news from Europe's southeast.
You will see that Greek voters punished the Syriza party, the coalition of radical left party.
Now, let's start with the first optimistic tweet.
If you can scroll up a bit, Yes, okay.
This is Stathis Kallivas, our nation's optimist.
These elections are the first act of a two-act play in Greece.
First act is the unexpectedly huge difference of 20 points between New Democracy and Syriza tonight.
Second act will probably be the overtaking of Syriza by PASOK, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, which is basically more social democracy.
in the coming elections, likely to be held in June 25.
And as he replies to this original tweet, he says, this is nothing less than the political end of the 2010 crisis.
I like optimism.
And, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be optimistic.
Now, if we move on the next tweet, please, the previous Chancellor of Austria, Sebastian Kurz.
He says, congratulations to Kyriakos Mitsotakis for again winning the Greek parliamentary elections decisively.
Greek voters remember well that Syriza nearly led them to the brink of collapse, while you have brought back economic growth and prosperity.
So what are the differences between the main parties?
Because I'm a complete layman to Greek politics.
Okay, so we have now, as you will see, we will have Six parties in the parliament, but there were seven.
I'll tell you about the first three ones.
So New Democracy is a party that was a bit more statist.
It's statist right.
They had a center-right agenda.
With Mitsotakis, it has a bit of a broader appeal.
Both to the center and also to the right, because he seems to be worried by... he seems to listen to people who ask for things on all sides, so his appeal is much greater.
So he came to power of the new democracy after the second term of Syriza, the second election win of Syriza in September 2011.
15?
There was an internal, let's say...
There was a sort of... Schism?
Nominees.
Yeah, there were four nominees that were going for the leadership position and he eventually won.
I think it was early 2016 when the whole process finished.
And he has done a lot to, let's say, renew and rebrand New Democracy.
So it's considered much... People look at it and they don't frequently see the old face of New Democracy.
He is considered to have a much broader appeal.
Now, the second party was Syriza, which is the coalition of radical left, which I will definitely talk a lot about in this segment.
I will try to capsulize a lot of what they did wrong.
It's a difficult task, but you will appreciate the intensity of how bad they were.
The Panhellenic Socialist Party is basically Social Democrat Party.
It was led by Papandreou in the 80s and he was very Keynesian in its economics.
Right.
And basically his rule in the 80s and then another term in the 90s has given many people, including many Greeks, the fear that if Greeks were to go to the drachma, Greek politicians would constantly print money They would have zero respect for economic theory and what it says about inflation.
They would just keep doing so because it was politically expedient.
They would see this as politically expedient.
So if you ask people who are more to the center and center-right, they're really dissatisfied with the 80s that were led by PASOK.
But as you will see, PASOK turned a bit more social democratic.
It wasn't socialist in the classical sense that we are talking about when we talk about, you know, political theory.
And Syriza was a very strange party that was basically based on rage, on anti-systemic rage, and as you will see, they had nothing positive to say.
So, let's move on to the next video by BBC.
The governing New Democratic Party has achieved a resounding victory, which the party's leader, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has called a political earthquake.
He described his party's 41% share of the vote as a mandate to govern for four more years.
But with almost all the votes counted, the centre-right party looks like it's falling short of an absolute majority.
Okay, now, the thing is, you may ask me why is this considered to be a political earthquake even if there is no majority.
I will tell you a bit about what we called the 50 bonus, the 50 seats bonus, that basically Syriza revoked when they understood that they were going to lose the previous elections in July 2019.
So, basically, the thing is that in Greece we love to disagree with each other.
We absolutely love disagreeing with each other.
And lawmakers have understood this.
And they think that they thought that basically, if we leave the people into forming coalitions, they won't form coalitions.
And we're on the risk of having, let's say, enduring time, we have a long duration of lack of governance.
Right.
And that is very difficult and very dangerous for the country.
So, until 2019, until the second term of the Syriza party, This was in place.
This was effective.
But the Syriza party understood that they were going to lose the next elections, and they changed the law.
Right.
They couldn't change it for the elections of 2019, but they thought that basically Mitsotakis was going to fail magnificently, and that they were going to take advantage of this election right now.
So it's an instance of foresight, but in a bad context.
Okay, they were unbelievably shortsighted in everything that they preached.
The only thing that they had foresight about was how to create problem and trouble and create more division for the country afterwards.
Now, if we look on this link, we will see that basically by electoral constituency, every constituency except one voted for a new democracy.
Okay, the one is on the, it's Rodopi constituency, where Syriza got just 33.18%, and New Democracy got 27.06%.
Now, why that is, is a big question, but if you shall see, the whole of the map of Greece is blue.
And this means that traditional Syriza, or leftist strongholds, they voted for New Democracy, even Crete, in the South.
Okay, so the thing is, if we scrolled up a bit, please, we will see that New Democracy got 40.79% and secured 146 seats.
We have a parliament of 300 seats.
We have a parliament of 300 seats.
In order to have majority, you need to have at least 151.
That's a nasty situation because you have a hung parliament and usually you have one or two people blackmailing the party who leads and that's not a big solution.
That's not a good solution.
That is why Mitsotakis now is going to go for a second round and he's not going to seek a coalition of other parties.
We had a sort of coalition in 2012 But it was very difficult.
We had the new democracy in PASOK.
PASOK was a bit more serious then because the people who were in PASOK, they understood that there needs to be some deep economic changes and they were actually pushing forward that agenda and they helped.
There was another party, a weird leftist party, but they initially helped the coalition but then left.
Right.
Okay, so it's an unstable situation.
That is why we're going to have a second round.
And also, if you see, the other parties, they're not anywhere near 40.79%.
So all it takes to establish a majority is five more seats.
Now, the Syriza party lost close to 11% relative to the previous election.
So that's a very major loss.
New Democracy won just around one, one point something percent.
PASOK won a lot, I think it won close to three percent.
And Europe's favourite Stalinists, the Greek Communist Party, they had an increase of 1.7, particularly.
So at least you have to give to them that they're not playing the Trotskyist card.
Yeah, at least they're honest about being awful people.
You have to give it to them that they're not playing the Trotskyist card, that if Trotsky were in power, the world would be heaven on earth.
Now, speaking of communism, you can visit the website.
It's...
Go to the Lotus Ease link, please, John.
Perfect.
Yep.
You can visit our website where for only £5 a month you can have access to all our premium content such as Real Communism has already been tried by the esteemed gentleman over here.
Oh, you're very nice.
Thank you very much.
Okay.
Now, some people haven't got the message.
No.
Well, my reading on this is that actually it's not the communist utopia that was the goal, but it's actually the violent revolution, mass genocide, theft, and self-empowerment atop the dictatorship of the proletariat that's the goal, because it seems that Marx's personal conduct wanted to enrich himself, and it just so happens that every single person that practices Marxism, well, they want the same thing.
OK, so with just five pounds a month, you can get access to all our premium content and watch videos such as these videos where you cannot find them elsewhere, at least to the depth that we are examining them.
OK, now let's move to the Novara Media prediction, because I'm sure that you're going to appreciate it very much.
So the Novara Media on May the 13th, They said, in this month's Greek elections, taking place on the 21st of May, the left parties are projected to grow, with a right-wing New Democracy party losing their majority.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no!
This is partly due to the introduction of a proportional electoral system.
Oh, dear.
That's the revoking of the 50 seats bonus.
Okay.
And they were having some really… I think they fell out.
146 is 22 seats more than 124.
Near miss.
So close.
94 is close to 20-something more than 72.
And the Varoufakis party was ousted.
It wasn't even in the party.
Is this the same Yanis Varoufakis who wrote the introduction to the Communist Manifesto?
Yes, some people may know him for his criticisms of the EU and may love him for it.
I don't think Greeks love him as much.
No, it would seem that the Poles seem to burn that out.
So the thing is that I think we should, I won't, I will be honest, I will miss some of the paraphernalia of Verofax's party.
We can just watch the next video by Sky News on Mute.
This is just You need to see, this is a Greek MP talking on a video conference.
She's a member of the Varoufakis MeRA25, and there's another MP walking behind, Cleon, who is just getting a bit comfy, if you see.
Was he getting his kit off during an interview?
Just look.
I mean, we had Right Said Fred on the show last week, and he's literally doing I'm Too Sexy for my shirt.
Yeah.
Well, he really felt like it and you know, she, he got a bit... Why didn't she say something until... Yeah, maybe he was about to wear something a bit less comfortable, more comfortable.
Okay, now, so basically you see there's a double score and the thing is that This is something that is really unprecedented in Greece, because, you know, both New Democracy won, but also Syriza lost big time.
And I think that it's important to remember and capsulize why Syriza was so unpopular and why it remains unpopular to this day.
Just we see this from Louis Goodall.
Big, big win for incumbent New Democracy party in Greek elections.
New Democracy win all but one electoral district, even all left-wing fortresses.
Vote share is up a bit on last election, but main story is huge fall on in Syriza vote.
Okay, so I will try to capsulize why Syriza has failed big time, and this is something that most of Syriza members, even their politicians, they haven't even understood, because although they try to brand themselves as the party of the people, if you see, they're not really interested in talking to people.
They're interested in talking down to people.
So for the sake of image, they did a lot of, let's say, public events, they did try to raise the profile of people who are publicly concerned, and that they were really close to the simple folk.
But actually, they talked down to people, and you will see that they implemented the sort of atrocious politics, policies when they were in power.
So I will try to capsulize what was so wrong with them.
So basically, Syriza governed for four and a half years, so they governed from January 2015 to July 2019.
Now, in normal conditions, a term of the Greek premiership is for Yes, but we haven't had a four-year premiership in a long while.
Now we had sort of shy of a four-year premiership for two months.
And that's a big, that's a significant difference in degree because Syriza, for instance, came into power.
And in six months, they just asked for a second election after the referendum of 2015.
So the thing is that this is important not just for Greeks, but for people who are really interested in anti-systemic thinking, because like with everything, there are good and bad versions of it.
Now, let's say something about what was the very bad aspect of Syriza's anti-systemic thing.
They had essentially zero positive things to put forward.
They had zero positive vision.
They were a anti-system party.
They branded themselves as an anti-system party and basically they stayed an anti-system party ever since in rhetoric.
But actually, with respect to the implementation of policies, they actually had the worst austerity measure.
The memorandum that Tsipras signed was worse than the previous ones.
So the thing is that people voted for them because they thought that they were voting for an anti-system party.
But actually it was an anti-system because it was the rotting breadth of a dying system.
Because they had a meteoric rise from somewhere like 4% to let's say 31% or something.
That was not, as we say, out of nowhere.
They took over the old PASOK, the old Socialist Party, who wanted basically to resist changes.
So they branded themselves as the anti-systemic party.
And what they did was focused on particular individuals as scapegoats.
Right.
But the problem with this kind of anti-systemic policy is that it focuses on individuals and not on policies.
It's cathartic, but it doesn't lead to long-term sustainable change.
Exactly.
Now, the thing is, when you want to change a system of political clientelism that creates an inefficient state and a debt crisis, you don't go actually preaching the virtues of that state.
And this is what Syriza did.
Now, weird thing is that he branded himself as a protest party, and not just a protest party within Europe.
He wanted to approach the image.
He wanted to cultivate the image of a leftist, of a hard left European leader.
And he, if you can see here, he's the only Greek MP who attended the Fidel Castro's funeral, and he also delivered a eulogy.
Now, weird thing, he was talking, he was saying things like, hasta la victoria siempre, and you know, until the final victory of the people, things like that.
In Greece, on the domestic level, he wasn't really interested in people.
Now, the thing is, their rhetoric was very venomous.
When you have rhetoric, you have at least criticism and the putting forward of a positive vision.
With respect to their criticism, they did something disgusting and shameful, completely uncivil and divisive.
They reignited civil war rhetoric and junta rhetoric.
And that is particularly problematic in Greece because the civil war in Greece was fought in the late 40s.
So we have people who were alive back then.
And also the Greek junta was between 1967 and 1974.
So they diverted public discussion completely from the next day on what to do to basically obfuscating the problem and creating scapegoats and saying that these were national traitors.
What was the latter event?
The Greek junta was a crazy militarist junta that was very anti-communist and it wasn't very good for Greece.
During their last year, a third of Cyprus was basically occupied.
This is because there were many people who were saying that, you know, during that period we were sleeping with, you know, open windows.
The history in Cyprus shows different conclusions.
So the thing is that when they raise the tone and they talk about, you know, national treason and stuff like that, The dialogue is not helped and we stop looking at the next day.
We just become, we think like has-beens.
And this is what the whole left is doing constantly.
They constantly try to talk about the old days, you know, the referendum of 2015, the old glorious days of this or that year.
They have zero positive, they had zero positive view for the country.
Now let's talk a bit more now about the thing, They're horrible stance on immigration, because this is something that was that is really close also to UK politics here.
So the thing is, in 2015, just in 2015, estimates say that because three press opened the borders, There was a flood of one million, at least one million migrants.
Right, so very similar to what's going to happen in the UK this year then.
So it's double the amount of net migration of, is it 2022?
Yes.
That was 504,000.
Yes.
Okay, so it's roughly double that in a country that has roughly a seventh of the population of the UK.
Right.
So, the thing is that we have sort of 10.5 million people, and if you can understand an influx of 1 million people just instantly in a year, 10% of your population mix just changes.
Now, the thing is that this is very important to note because it shows how Syriza was completely voluntaristic in its rhetoric and they had zero understanding of real-time solutions.
Tell me, how does it sound to you?
In a country that has close to 30% unemployment, what's going to happen if you simultaneously bring forth about a million people, and you don't also liberalise the economy or make it a bit more competitive, in which case there are some risks of at least assimilating some of them.
Yeah, you're going to have cultural tensions, you're going to have rampant rates of welfare prescription, you're going to have higher rates of homelessness, you're going to have stress on public services, it's just a dreadful idea.
Almost like the UK shouldn't be doing it either.
So the thing is, the minister that was charged with dealing with migration then was asked, you know, what are they doing?
And she said, basically, they are sunbathing.
OK, that's to show how dystopian these years were.
OK, now the thing is, now we are going to the the issue with Syriza and the truth they promised, which shows how how much they lied to people.
They promised nationally proud negotiation.
They were basically cultivating the image that the previous parties were national traders, that they were, you know, people who had nothing in mind about who they cared not about the country and nationally proud Negotiation in Syriza meant signing the Disgraceful Prespice Agreement.
That was a way of ending the naming dispute with our neighbors on the north.
And basically Syriza was signed this deal and they had zero idea of what the people want and they had zero idea of what being nationally proud means.
Now, national pride, especially in a country like Greece that doesn't have belligerent tendencies, seems to be a prerequisite for even defending the country.
OK, so the thing is that the way I see it, the history of a country is linked with memory and you don't own the history.
You don't give the name Macedonia to someone else because you think that it's going to be expedience for your neighbor in the North to join NATO.
You don't own the name.
It's bequeathed to you or it gets passed to you by generations and generations of history.
You don't own it.
It's not a card to give it away.
Now, one thing is that if we see here from the Greek analysts, he very frequently shows interesting stuff.
He said, the period between 2015-2019 saw Greece at the bottom of the Democracy Index.
The challenges to the rule of law were deep and wide, but not as interesting for many foreign journalists, enabling it with the rise of Syriza to cover.
Greece is definitely imperfect, but thankfully improving.
Now, another thing, they try to control the press.
They try to say that they had a minister then, I think it's Konstantinos Papas, who was saying that our channels are in chaos, so we need to control them, so we need to basically run some, let's say, contest and have some of them to operate and others, well, others not.
A bit like Ofcom in the UK, where the government regulates exactly what people you can platform.
Yeah.
And now there are endless things that this, the series I did wrong, but I want us to move on the next link, please.
The one by, the one by Twitter.
Go.
Okay.
So the, if we go on the next link, please.
Next.
Sorry.
Next, next, next.
Okay, I'll just talk about it.
So, the thing is, we had the Paraskevopoulos Law that was an aberration, and I will read from it some things.
It said that, in addition to the other tribulations, the long-suffering Greek people are now being subjected to the unprecedented legal ramifications of the Paraskevopoulos Law and the extended implementation thereof by the Greek government and the ministers responsible.
Under this law, dangerous criminals are becoming eligible for early release instead of being required to serve their full sentence.
This is despite a tragic incident that occurred in Germany no more than two years ago and sent shockwaves through Europe.
So what happened is that Syriza said, okay, there is a problem.
We have over populated prisons.
So what's the solution?
Cut the prison sentence in half.
That was their solution.
So basically, they turned Athens into Gotham City.
Now, the thing is, if we move just on the next section on the why new democracy one of our segment, Basically, I want to say that New Democracy won because although it was the anti-Syriza party, it didn't brand itself as solely the anti-Syriza party.
So they introduced some kind of normalcy.
They introduced the image of a country that wants to solve its problems to a degree, you know, that not everything is perfect, that if you compare, there's no contest.
Okay, so we have, yeah, I mean, if you see the transformation of the economy, debt to GDP ratio, but take profit org statistics slash government debt to GDP Greece.
Okay, let's forget this.
So the thing is, if I can summarize a bit, so the GDP ratio now has fallen to roughly 171%.
So we had the national debt crisis.
And the thing is, right now, the new democracy doesn't see economics as a zero-sum game.
And more wealth has been created.
And this is good for the country.
Okay, so the thing is, we can move now on the New York Times article to get an idea of why Greece had a better stance of national affairs by looking at the lamentation of this journalist.
As Greece votes, leader says blocking migrants built goodwill with Europe.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has taken a tough line on migrants as he turns around the country's economy.
It's a trade-off that voters in the European Union seem more than willing to abide by.
Above all, European Union leaders appear to have cut Mr. Mitsotakis' slack for doing the continent's unpleasant work of keeping migrants at bay, a development that shows just how much Europe has shifted with crackdowns formerly associated with the right-wing drifting into the mainstream.
Now, next link, please, on the border crisis.
Yes, this was a major test for the willingness of the Greek government to defend its borders.
There was a border crisis in late February 2020.
If you can check those of you who are a bit more interested in things, thousands of migrants rush border as Greek army deploys.
Okay, in Thousands of migrants were trying to find a way across Turkey's western border with Greece on Monday, with only dozens managing to pass through either border fences or fending rivers, after Turkey opened its side of the frontier to migrants and refugees to leave the country for Europe.
Turkey declared its borders open to pressure the European Union into holding it, handle the fallout from the war in neighboring Syria.
Thousands of Turkish troops are supporting the last rebel forces holed up there in the northwestern province of Idlib against the onslaught of Russian-backed Syrian government forces.
So that would never have happened with Syriza.
Right.
Because supporters of Syriza, they were saying that the wall on our borders are It's very similar to the Democrats in the US.
Yes.
So the thing is, if we can end with a not so optimistic thing about the major challenge that no one seems to be talking about in Greece, the demographic bomb.
If we can go on macro trends, please.
If you check on Greece fertility rates, The current fertility rate for Greece in 2013-2023 is 1.263 births per woman.
That is horribly low.
is 1.263 births per woman.
That is horribly low.
Yeah, that's total demographic collapse.
This is total demographic collapse Anything short of 2.1 is basically below replacement rate.
But this is way too low.
And I asked many of my friends who went to, let's say, some of the talks that many, let's say, MPs gave, and I always told them, ask them and pressure them about the demographic.
And basically, no one had any good answer, I'm afraid to say.
What the numbers mean there as well, having spoken to Stephen Shaw, that's not that the majority of women have one child, that's that some women have two, three, four kids, and the majority of women have none.
And so that is just a very long and lonely life that they have in store, and then without any children around to help them as they get older, that means more burdens on the state, more unfulfilled debt-based promises that they have to do, and so it's an economic and demographic total collapse.
So one last thing to say about the Greek elections is that when you have sane policies, you can actually improve your country even in, let's say, unfavorable international conditions.
When you have bad policies, you can actually make your country much worse in conditions that are much better.
OK, wonderful.
Before we move on to the third one, John, is that air conditioning on over in the corner?
Because I'm dying.
See, you see behind the scenes the lotus eaters, folks.
Connor is sweating to death.
Hey, fantastic.
Best man in the business.
Alright, then.
Speaking of sweaty, gross men.
That's not going to be the YouTube transition.
Alright.
A couple of weeks ago, Dan and I decided to cover the Wall Street Journal's exclusive article that looked at the contents of Jeffrey Epstein's calendar.
We found out about some of his clients, including Noam Chomsky and members of certain banks and people who are affiliated with everyone's favourite centre of every conspiracy theory which turns out to be true.
Bill Gates.
Now, they have a follow-up, so if you want to go and watch this, this is a good grounding.
It's not mandatory viewing, but this was a solid segment.
They have a follow-up exclusive that finds out that Bill Gates reportedly had an affair with a Russian bridge player.
Because, apparently, office golf players were all taken, I suppose.
Bit of a weird thing to bridge, really?
I mean, what's she, 95?
Anyway, so, and Jeffrey Epstein found out about it and tried to leverage him, giving lots of money to some sort of shell corporation charity fund.
So we're going to explore the Wall Street Journal's expose here, because... Now, we can't allege anything, right?
We wouldn't dare to dream of saying that Bill Gates has done anything untoward.
But it does make me question why they chose to leak this specific story.
And we'll get into the details as to why, because technically he's not done anything illegal, it's just a bit of personal drama.
So it makes me question...
What else they've found that they can't release yet.
But hey-ho!
If we just go on to this promotion, please!
For £5 a month, you can keep the lights on, and keep us bringing in new guests, and make sure the podcast is up and running, so if you're on YouTube, and... well, first of all, go over to Rumble, because we don't make any money off of YouTube, because they've decided to demonetise us.
But if you aren't, go over to our website, you get the podcast full, uncut, 4-3, all the segments, and also the conversations, and you get premium content like this, like Comics Corner, where Harry and I decide to discuss Old Man Logan and Logan!
And the relevance, well, it...
I couldn't imagine so.
It's not like in Logan, a big farmer and big food boss decides to buy up loads of American farmland and use genetic engineering to breed out exceptionalism.
Good job that's total fiction, isn't it?
Anyway, on with the next one.
This is the article.
This is from the Wall Street Journal.
Jeffrey Epstein appeared to threaten Bill Gates over Microsoft co-founder's affair with a Russian bridge player.
Epstein discovered Gates had an affair with a Russian bridge player and later appeared to use this knowledge to threaten one of the world's richest men, according to people familiar with the matter.
Now, first of all, I hate that phrase, in journalism.
Because it could just mean the guy who slept on the street that saw Bill Gates walk past him sometime.
Like, that is how tenuous it could be.
But given the high-profile nature of this case, I'm not surprised they're trying to protect their sources.
Because, of course, we know that there can't be any sources, because Ghislaine Maxwell is the first person in history to be convicted of trafficking children to absolutely nobody.
What?
Anyway.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, we have Maxwell convicted for trafficking children.
But nobody that she trafficked, too.
How curious.
I wonder who they're protecting.
Anyway, Microsoft co-founder met the woman around 2010, when she was in her twenties.
I mean, we'll see this woman in a bit, and don't be wrong, she's not a runway model, but... Bill Gates?
Really?
It wasn't his winning personality or his incredible pectorals that won her over as a...
Epstein met her in 2013 and later paid for her to attend a software coding school in 2017.
Epstein emailed Gates and asked to be reimbursed for the cost of the course, according to people familiar with the matter.
The email came after the convicted sex offender had struggled and failed to convince Gates to participate in a multi-billion dollar charitable fund.
Slush Fund Front that Epstein had tried to establish with JPMorgan Chase.
The implication behind the message, according to those that viewed it, was that Epstein could reveal the affair if Gates didn't keep up an association between the two men.
Mr Gates met with Epstein solely for philanthropic purposes.
Having failed repeatedly to draw Mr. Gates beyond these matters, Epstein tried unsuccessfully to leverage a past relationship to threaten Mr. Gates, said a spokeswoman for Gates.
Gates, with a net worth in excess of $100 billion and one of the world's biggest philanthropists, Reid Medler, was among the most well-known names in Epstein's calendar.
Starting in 2011, Gates had more than half a dozen meetings scheduled with Epstein, including dinners at Epstein's New York townhouse, the documents show.
Gates flew on Epstein's private plane from New Jersey to Florida in March 2013, according to the flight records.
That same month, the two met in France with an official on the Nobel Peace Prize committee.
They spent much of a day together in New York City in September 2014, meeting other billionaires.
So he flew on the Lolita Express, but the story that we're choosing to leak here is his affair, consensual affair, with a woman in her 20s that Epstein tried to blackmail him with.
Now it's quite interesting.
This confirms the Epstein blackmail theory, right?
Because the theory was, much like the CIA apparently had tapes of JFK and MLK cavorting with prostitutes, that there would be very successful people that would get in compromising positions with the children that Jeffrey Epstein was trafficking, they would then be filmed, and then this would be used as leverage for them to become agents of the intelligence services or to move money around and fund Epstein or his clients if they ever needed it.
Now, of course, we cannot allege that Mr Gates ever encountered anyone underage on the Lolita Express, ever went to Jeffrey Epstein's island.
We can only say that he had this consensual affair with this rather young-looking young woman.
However, why this story?
Because there is nothing criminal, and nothing really damaging for Bill Gates here, is there?
Okay.
All it is, is he had a consensual affair with a young woman, he's now divorced from his wife, so she clearly already knew about it, and there's going to be absolutely no fallout from it, because he's kept all his money.
So, this seems to be a get-out-ahead-of-something-else story.
Perhaps.
You'd only allege that if you were a conspiracy theorist, of course.
Back to the article.
Gates said he'd learned to play bridge from his parents, and the card game became one of his favourite hobbies.
Gates played with Anna Tonova, another devotee of the game.
She attended university in Russia between 2000-2005, according to her LinkedIn profile.
She later founded a bridge club in the US before taking on several roles as a software engineer in the Bay Area.
In a video posted online in 2010, Anna Tova talked about meeting Gates at Bridge Tournament and playing against the co-founder.
We have that video here.
Let's cut to this YouTube video, please.
So I'm going to talk about the famous and popular game among young people called Bridge.
So when they think about Bridge, we also imagine the old ladies like that, right?
So everyone thinks that it's only for my grandma played or my aunt played.
But look at these guys.
Do they look like an old person to you?
I'm talking about Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.
Warren Buffett started to play bridge since he was 13 years old.
And you know what?
They donated a million dollars to promote bridge at schools.
They are very avid bridge players and they support these kids.
So do these kids look like old people to you?
I look like old person to you?
No.
So my point, my main point is, you don't have to be old to play Bridge.
Hmm.
So, fascinating.
You don't have to be very old.
Nothing suspicious there, of course.
Now, we do have a second clip where she talks about how she had played Bridge, Didn't talk about doing much more with Bill Gates, but she played Bridge with Gates, and she says something slightly odd about Warren Buffett.
Let's play that clip, please.
Okay, if you can just cut to the one in the YouTube video then, please, John.
It's three minutes, oh three.
Have to unmute it.
He's an avid bridge player and so do I. I grew up in Russia.
I came to America three and a half years ago.
And in school, before that, I had so much stress.
I couldn't concentrate.
I couldn't memorize things.
I felt very stupid.
And I liked math, but math didn't like me until I was introduced to this game of logic by my math professor.
And now, So, three and a half years ago, I came here.
I don't speak English.
I have no idea how to.
And by studying Bridge, reading Bridge books, I actually learned English.
Actually, it helped me not to go to school, not to take normal classes.
So, also by playing Bridge, I made so many mistakes.
I felt stupid and embarrassed every time when I did something wrong and my partner screamed at me.
But you made so many mistakes that you just learn, stop worry about that.
You just go it and fail.
It's fail.
That's two years ago, two years ago.
I said everyone that I'm going to meet this guy.
Nobody believed me.
Um, last year I play against him at the same table at the national bridge tournament in Washington DC.
I didn't beat him, but I tried to kick him with my leg.
We can pause it there, John.
So, now?
So, woman who looks like Greta Thunberg, which, I wonder if that's actually why Bill Gates is so heavily into climate policy, he's just trying to cosy up to Greta.
Obviously after she stopped being a schoolgirl, of course, but couldn't allege otherwise.
She decided to touch up with her leg under the table.
Obviously every great romance starts with a bridge tournament.
I just found it quite interesting in there that she said that Warren Buffett said that he's learning bridge in case he goes to prison.
For what?
Anyway, moving on back to the article, Anatova had an idea to start an online business to teach people how to play bridge and she sought funds for it.
Boris Nikovich, a Gates confidant and top science advisor at that time, remember Nikovich's name because he'll be coming up again, who also knew Epstein, introduced Anatova to Epstein to help her raise the funds.
Nikovich said when he first met Epstein it was in his capacity as Gates' scientific advisor and they discussed philanthropic proposals.
I deeply regret that I ever met Epstein, Nikovich said.
His crimes were despicable.
I never saw anything like his illegal behavior.
My heart goes out to his victims and families.
But by then he was already a convicted sex offender for six years.
So you're either such a terrible judge of character you shouldn't be out around anyone's money or I wouldn't ledge anything else, of course.
Anatova and Nikovic met at Epstein's townhouse in November 2013, where she presented a proposal to Epstein who provided feedback.
She was looking to raise $500,000 for the venture, what for a couple of packs of cards from Sports Direct, which she called Bridge Planet.
Its mission was to promote Bridge by creating quality tutorials for beginners and advanced players.
On November 9th, Anatova wrote an email to thank Epstein for the meeting and reviewing the proposal.
Epstein didn't invest in the project.
The next year, November 2014, Anatova stayed briefly at an apartment in New York City provided by Epstein.
I didn't interact with him or anyone else there, she said.
Sorry, you mean Antonovar?
Antonovar, sorry.
So am I...
Sorry.
I'm very bad with pronouncing foreign names.
I wanted to see if I was looking at the wrong document.
She failed to secure funding for Bridge Planet...
Antonova said that she decided to become a software programmer instead, and asked several people to lend her money for a programming bootcamp.
Epstein agreed to pay, and he paid directly to the school.
Nothing was exchanged.
I don't know why he did that, she said.
When I asked, he said something like he was wealthy and wanted to help people where he could.
Ah, the nonce with a heart of gold.
When he was meeting with Gates, Epstein also had multiple meetings scheduled with other people close to Gates, including Nikolic, former Microsoft executive Nathan Mithrold, and Gates Foundation staffer Melanie Walker.
Mr. Epstein was a regular at TED conferences, and he was a large donor to basic scientific research.
That's how and why Nathan knew him, and that's exactly where their association ends, said a spokeswoman for Mithroid.
Again, you see how all of these people are regularly meeting with a convicted sex offender, Possibly trying to court him for money and or taking it and then suddenly they just say, oh, it was purely business.
You know, we barely knew each other.
Even though it was repeated he went to his townhouse.
Were they guests at his private island?
We do not know.
We would not possibly allege that whatsoever.
They clearly knew nothing was going on with a man who was already convicted for child sex offences by that point.
Anyway, I should never have associated with him.
Duh.
And now I am thankful that he never invested in my endeavoured, said Nick Colich.
We'll get onto that later.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Walker declined to comment on her meetings with Mr. Epstein.
At the time, Epstein was trying to set up a multi-billion dollar charitable fund with JPMorgan that would potentially pull money from some of the world's most wealthiest people.
Epstein proposed JPMorgan set up the fund with a minimum of 100 million contribution per individual and pay him millions of dollars in fees.
In addition to the fees, Epstein saw the fund as a way to rehabilitate his reputation.
It hinged on securing support from Bill Gates himself.
So, he seemed to believe that he had a very close association with Bill Gates, because in the emails that have been regurgitated by this article cited here, he goes so far as to act as representation for Bill Gates' business.
Why didn't Bill Gates stop that?
Because I would be very worried if you were sending off emails on my behalf, and you'd done something very wrong, and you were trying to get money on my behalf.
Odd that, innit?
Epstein's messages, which were peppered with typos and spelling errors apparently, tried to give the impression that he was close to as a Gates advisor.
Gates wasn't included on emails reviewed by the journal.
The Gates spokeswoman has said that Epstein never worked for Gates and misrepresented their ties in communications with JP Morgan.
In essence, this fund will allow Bill to have access to higher quality people, investment, allocation, governance, without upsetting either his marriage or the sensitivities of the current foundation employees, Epstein wrote on August 16th, 2011.
The next day, Epstein wrote, Bill is terribly frustrated.
I bet.
He would like to boost some of the things that are working without taking away from those that are not.
On October 2nd, he sent another email to Staley and Erodes, criticizing a presentation that J.P.
Morgan had prepared on the project.
The presentation is not tailored to Bill.
He is the only person, the only one that counts.
Now, eventually, this charity actually went nowhere.
The firm didn't need him as a client, a J.P.
Morgan spokesman said.
The firm didn't need him for introductions.
Knowing what we know today, we wish we'd never done business with him.
But the relationship with Bill Gates, even though it has been denied, continued.
Because Epstein offered to get Bill Gates a Nobel Peace Prize for his enterprises in medicine.
Okay.
Which we have all suffered under recently.
While he was working on the charitable fund, Epstein met in 2013 with Gates and Norwegian officials who were visitors to Epstein's townhouse.
Epstein told one former Gates Foundation employee that he knew the Norwegians and could help Gates win a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to eradicate polio.
Gates and Epstein met together in March in Strasbourg, France, at the home of Thorbjorn Jagland, the then-chair of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee.
That September, Epstein scheduled a meeting with Gates, Jagland and others at his townhouse.
Our documents show that Mr. Gates met with Norwegian officials to discuss the security situation in Afghanistan as part of Mr. Gates' work on polio eradication, said the Gates spokeswoman.
Mr. Gates has never been focused on or campaigned for the Nobel Peace Prize or any other prize.
It's like Oscars now.
if he was offered one he'd bloody take it wouldn't he?
Of course he would.
Obama got one for far less and I wish Bill Gates did a hell of a lot less.
Yaglan didn't respond to the request for comment from the Washington from the Wall Street Journal.
It's like Oscars now.
Yeah.
Has zero value.
It's all about politicking.
Yeah.
You've got to buy in you've got to pay money to the right people you've got to go to the right dinners at the House of Convicted Sex Offenders.
But okay.
I suppose it's the same thing with Harvey Weinstein, isn't it?
So, failing to secure funding from Gates using the carrot, Epstein turned to the stick.
In 2017, mysteriously a few years before his sudden suicide, Epstein contacted Gates about the Russian bridge player years after the relationship had ended.
He sent an email to Gates asking to be reimbursed for the costs of Antonova's coding school, so the school that she went to after she didn't get the funding for her bridge tournament and education software.
She then went to the coding school, Epstein paid for the coding school, and then he's now saying to Gates, you've got to pay me for her coding education, obviously implying that I know you've had this affair.
If I leak this out, wouldn't this be bad for you?
Now, it'd be bad for his marriage at the time, because Bill and Melinda were still married, but it was a consensual affair.
And there's been plenty of people that have lost more for doing far less.
So, why was it this affair?
I would hesitate to say that this was a proxy for saying, and I could talk about all the other things, Bill, that you wouldn't like me to talk about, but I'm sure that Bill Gates has done absolutely nothing wrong.
Absolutely nothing.
The spokeswoman said for Gates he didn't make a payment.
Mr. Gates had no financial dealings with Epstein.
Okay.
Sure.
But that doesn't quite add up.
Because then right at the bottom of the article it says, Days before he died in 2019, Epstein changed his will and named Boris Nikolic, who was the Microsoft executive, as a backup executor.
Nikolic said Epstein didn't discuss the idea with him beforehand and that he'd subsequently declined to serve.
He couldn't have listed Bill because that would have been too obvious.
So he chose me.
I have come to believe it was likely a retaliatory move against Bill Gates.
Retaliatory for not giving him the money.
So Epstein was trying to leverage Bill Gates in moving money to Epstein using blackmail material.
Blackmail material, of course, of a girl who looks very youthful but is definitely above age and definitely doesn't look like the girl that Miss Trunchbull pitched up by the pigtails and throws her over the school fence.
But we would never allege that Bill Gates has been anything except a tender lover to his wife and his girlfriend.
Absolutely no skeletons in Bill Gates' closet and I'm sure he's the perfect person to run our health and climate policy.
That's sweet, but at least I need to be in good health.
Well, I actually believe that some of them have some conviction.
Joe DeVock, Conor and Stelios, the Lotus Eaters Dream Team.
Oh, that's very sweet.
Thanks very much.
That's sweet, but at least I need to be in good health.
Sorry, mate.
Brian Tomlinson, good last name.
The new Conservatives are saving themselves in their party, not the country.
Well, I actually believe that some of them have some conviction.
I'm not sold on some of them, but I do know that there are quite a few that do actually have a sort of meteor impact to their conscience, seeing what their party for the last 13 years has done.
And again, remember that some of these are 2019 intake as well, so they're relatively new, relatively inexperienced, and that's the fault of the party for picking some of them.
But some of them in this new coalition are actually pretty good.
Athelstan, 95.
You just know that Labour will win a landslide election with a tiny turnout where the only people voting will vote Labour no matter what, and the Tories being the Tories will interpret that as a sign to adopt even more of the Labour policies going forward.
It feels hopeless.
These small parties without unifying in some way cannot have any impact, and I don't want to join or vote for the Tories either.
It's yes, Minister, but the politician agrees with Humphrey rather than just simply being stupid and manipulated at this point.
Yeah, so my lay of the land is that the Conservatives are going to go and lose.
In that time, they're going to use that as the excuse to double down on Penny Mordaunt, who can carry a sword, and that apparently qualifies her, even though she's best mates with Bill Gates and her brother is an LGBT activist and she thinks that trans men are men and trans women are women.
My hope is that with small fractional groups like this little vanguard party, they can galvanise some kind of Trumpian party within a party.
And stop that arise coming for power.
Because I think what Karl's doing by trying to talk to plenty of the disparate parties and convince them to come together as a coalition is a very noble endeavour.
I think that we can also split our efforts and also talk to willing Conservative politicians within the establishment that want to change it from the inside.
There's a big danger there, I think, that if we are talking to many sides that are really ideologically heavy, there's a tendency for people to think that compromise is a dirty word.
I wouldn't even use ideological, because I don't think these concerns are necessarily ideological.
It may be the wrong word.
They have strong convictions and they're not willing to compromise.
I understand.
I do think, in a dream scenario, and this is not likely to happen, But if the disparate right parties can form enough of a movement to pressure the Conservatives, it can not only just bring them rightwards, but if there is a collapse within the Conservative Party, there are lots of MPs currently dropping out, there are new selection processes going on.
I've spoken to some people that might be moving into those seats, and a couple of them are pretty decent, so that might be optimistic.
But if this party that's flanking them from the right becomes a credible threat, but not too large to take over, then some of those members could be incorporated into a remoralised Conservative Party, and you'd have a... reified is not the word to use, I'm not Thomas... a strengthened apparatus to come back with a vengeance after a few years of Labour rule.
So that would be much better.
Henry, the Conservative Party needs to die, they've conned us one too many times.
Rather than forming a new group, they should change parties to one that supports their principles.
Reference Alex Stafford, he sounds like a con man, his past actions don't look conservative, but he sees his doom at the next election and has joined this new group purely for selfish reasons.
That's entirely possible.
Again, I do know that some members of the group do have best intentions at heart, and some are familiar with the Lotus Eaters and are very much on board.
But yeah, the Conservative Party needs some time in exile.
I will definitely say that.
Because the Labour Party is going to be practically identical anyway.
Are you feeling up to doing any comments from your section?
We could, yeah.
Go for it.
So, X, Y, and Z. I'm not a fan of nationalizing national assets in the commie sense.
However, there needs to be a middle ground where these assets aren't just offloaded to foreign interests, especially hostile nations, as Greece has sold its major port to China.
That's what I liked about the all-by-commie government that came to power during the Grexit crisis.
I supported the idea of Greek sovereignty and not being held under the boot of the EU.
So, pardon my cough, sorry, it's particularly bad.
So, the thing is, I'm not happy at all about selling Pyreus to China for 99 years.
It's that long.
Regarding the other part of your comment, The thing is that there comes a time where you need to make a comparative judgment, and the thing is that if you see the way that Greeks governed in the 80s, where the system that has created the debt crisis in the beginning, it printed drachmas constantly.
And there wasn't any, let's say, fiscal responsibility.
So the thing is that the question was then, do we just want to tell ourselves that we stuck it up to the EU, but we're going to do the same thing?
Or if we're going to actually use these, let's say, circumstances In order to make a change that is actually what the country needed, because if for instance you think that a relatively free market is something that should take place, and if you don't think that people should be crushed by taxes that would support a system like that, presumably you would want your country to move towards that direction.
I think you have to be careful who you sell off your assets to, though, of course.
Of course.
Because selling it to China is mad.
I mean, in the UK, when Margaret Thatcher privatised the water company, she allowed Thames Water to have a leading stake, people who are both Chinese.
And then the way that we fund our nuclear power plants is mental, because we have Bradwell and Sizewell currently under construction, and because they went over budget, now Chinese General Nuclear, which is a state-owned firm, have a 22% and a 33% stake in each, and that's just critical infrastructure.
I totally agree with you.
I'm not happy about it.
Okay.
Lord Nerevar.
I always knew that beyond all the financial destitution and relative instability that Greece was always a bastion of baseness.
Keep it up, Greek friends.
You can lead the way once more.
Okay.
JJHW.
Syriza.
I haven't seen you in a while on my symposium videos, I must say.
Syriza did do something interesting, which was to declare Greece's debt as odious debt, and they had the evidence to prove it.
They could have repudiated the debt, but they didn't, and was even more of a betrayal than going against the bailout referendum.
They did initially, but they had nothing positive to offer.
They didn't put forward Let's say I carefully worked out a plan as to what they were going to do.
If you just listen to them, they were completely voluntaristic in their rhetoric.
In the time old question, where will you find the money?
Their response was essentially, trust me, bro, you'll find them.
No, honestly, I'm not joking.
We had people who never read any economics but Marxist economics.
Honestly, and it's all of it because the people wanted somehow money is going to grow on trees.
Tough reality is that it doesn't work this way.
I would like to vote wealth into existence, but it doesn't work, unfortunately.
Lord Nerevar.
Man, it seems like the case is blown wide open on the Epstein logs.
I can't wait for arrests to be made and justice to finally be served.
There will be arrests, right?
Oh no.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I know you're being sarcastic, but the truth is these people will be protected because the interests are probably so entrenched that we don't even know the half of it.
Like, this is, to use a very overused phrase, tip of the iceberg stuff.
The actual body of the corruption is far beneath the water and it's far too cold for us to dive in and look at the moment.
We just don't have access.
It's not like we, the Lotus Eaters, can hunt it down or parcel through Hunter Biden's iCloud leaks, as Josh was poorly subjected to.
I mean, that man has bleached his eyes multiple times and it's still not coming out.
Hunter Biden's member still haunts his dreams at night.
There's no way for us to give you more information than what's being drip-fed to us currently.
I doubt the elite will go after their own, but... Oh well, at least we can keep ruining Gates' reputation because he wants to tyrannise us.
Rita.
Who knew that bridge was a gateway to affairs and extramarital activities?
I see what you did there.
Omar Awad.
Ask why not children need to play bridge with billionaires, ask why billionaires need to play bridge with children.
I mean, she was of age.
She just... didn't look it.
There should be an article, 10 steps of how to make hair like you, with bridge.
RJ, I learned about the Bill Gates story earlier this morning off of We Are Change, so that's Luke.
But the weirdest thing that was put forward was how similar Antonova was to Gates' daughter.
Needless to say, I almost spit out my cereal when I saw the comparison.
Yeah, I haven't thought about that.
Bit weird.
Derek Power, I wonder if you can get pizza delivery and modern art included with this bridge playing membership?
I don't know what that reference is to.
No idea.
Joan of Arc, Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize and then immediately proceeded to bomb the Middle East more than George W. Bush, Trump and Biden put together.
Well, yeah, of course he did.
Because as the first black president, he could do anything he liked and the establishment was stumped for him.
And to say the only controversy he ever had was a town suit and not Omar Alawaki, you know, killing an American citizen without consulting Congress or having a trial first.
Small things like that that just ruin the American Republic.
A couple of comments on the first bit and then we'll wrap up.
LaFrenchBridgeCreep, do you just keep changing your name?
Is that actually...?
I'm almost impressed.
The ECHR is an independent institution from the EU.
It wasn't part of Brexit, but the ECHR is how the ideologues force its member countries to go their way.
You can't have good Brexit while remaining in the ECHR.
Yeah, it's an extra-political judicial organisation that we shouldn't have signed up to.
The only problem is, as soon as we get out of the ECHR, Rishi Sunak's already said that he wants to use the UN's 1952 declaration of what a refugee is instead, and that includes anyone unable or unwilling to return to their country.
Don't want to, mate.
Like it here.
Love me, Otel.
Simple as.
I'm not reading out that name.
Over the Pants.
Lord, alive with this podcast.
I am happy to see Conservatives, whether it be in the US or elsewhere, finally choosing victory over losing with dignity.
Yeah, the strange newfound respect phenomena that the likes of Mitt Romney and George W. Bush get is pretty sickening, and that's why Michael Gove got a favourable write-up in The Guardian.
If your enemies are writing favourable things about you, then You're either doing something wrong, or you're the enemy.
And with that, I'd like to finish, and I hope we can all wish Stelios getting better, because you're working too hard mate, you look knackered.
Goodbye.
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