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July 14, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:31:10
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #697
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Good afternoon and welcome to the podcast of Lotus Eaters.
This is podcast episode 697.
John, I'm sorry to do this right as the podcast starts.
I'm getting an echo of myself in my ear, so if you could please just mute that for me.
Is that gone?
No, that's still me going.
Sorry.
Sorry about this watching from home right now.
I'm really... Oh, that's... I'm just going to have to do that.
Apologies for that, folks.
I'm your host today, Harry, joined by our special guest, Nick Buckley.
Good afternoon, everybody.
You're not getting it in your ear as well, are you?
I was getting other people talking in my ear.
Yeah, yeah, that's what it was.
Is it gone now?
I pulled my thing out, I don't know.
Okay, we're both doing the same thing.
Apologies, we're a very professional setup now, you can tell because we've got the big fancy screens in the background.
Anyway, today what we're going to be talking about, we're going to be talking about the Hugh Edwards fiasco, we're going to be talking about the Holy Trinity of Wokedom, and then we're going to finish it off with The story about a strange reaction that's been done to a film that is actually just about preventing child sex trafficking, a Hollywood action, well, not even Hollywood, an action film, where people have had very strange responses to it.
But before we get into that, we've got a Rumble livestream coming up later on today, where Callum and Carl will be talking about Tumblr taking over a school.
I still don't know what this is about.
Carl and I spoke about it very briefly on the podcast.
I'm not even sure what Tumblr is.
I wish.
I wish that I also had no idea what Tumblr was.
I know it's a social media app, but that's... I don't know what it is.
It's one of the worst.
People say bad things about Twitter, which are completely reasonable, but Tumblr is far worse, or at least was.
I don't even know what's going on right now.
But yeah, they're going to be talking about that, so tune in live later on at 3.30 on Rumble.
You do not need a subscription to be able to watch that.
And with that out of the way, is there anything you would like to say before we get on with the news, Nick?
Just for people watching, I now write articles for Lotus Eaters.
So get onto Lotus Eaters, check my bio out, and there's loads of articles on there for me.
Yeah, lovely.
And with that, let's get into the news.
So first thing we're going to be talking about today is how I just can't, I can't believe the sun would do this.
Can you believe that The Sun would do this?
Spread lies and malice about an innocent and completely anonymous PBC presenter doing bad things that then turn out to have some potential truth to them.
Obviously what we're talking about is Hugh Edwards, which is still full of allegations and we can't say anything certain right now.
But it seems that some, the BBC and a lot of the other media apparatus in the UK has decided they are going to close ranks, even those outside of the BBC, which is one of the interesting things I've noticed about this.
So for anybody who forgets about, was it 10 years ago, 10, 11 years ago now, was that when all the Savile stuff came out?
Just after he died, so yes, so probably, yeah.
Yeah, about that long ago in 2011, 2012.
So BBC has somewhat of a reputation at this point.
Sadly, because our license fee goes to it, our tax money goes to it, and the government are making sure that it never goes anywhere the BBC is seen in the UK as the gold standard prestige of news journalism because of the history that it has and because of the fact that it's attached to the UK government as well.
So, which is why it's always very interesting when something like this happens, because it's publicly funded, because it has the prestige behind it.
And a lot of people who are coming out and saying that the sun shouldn't have broken this news in the first place, and I will say, there is some, you know, the sun is known as a rag in the UK.
I'm not going to be defending the sun here.
There was some sketchy stuff about how they were going about breaking this news and there were some questions that were asked about it.
But still, people trying to completely obfuscate and say this doesn't matter at all.
No, it matters when public money is going into an organization that is expected to give people honest and trustworthy news.
You want to care about the sort of people who are giving you this news.
You want to be able to trust them.
You're going to be trusting what they say.
So I think that's what's interesting about this.
Yeah, I mean, most organisations will protect their stars.
They will protect the geese that lay the golden eggs.
Look at Gary Lineker, all the trouble he's got into over Twitter.
Constantly.
Look at football clubs where the number nine striker can do and say anything and will get away with it because he's the star of the team.
This is human nature to protect the most valuable people of the tribe.
Now, in a society where we talk about equity and equality all the time, it just doesn't ring true.
But part of the problem is we don't have any more societal shame anymore now.
Anything goes.
If I want to do it froggy style in a bucket, then I'm allowed to.
And it's like, no, we used to have a time where we'd judge people on their actions.
We don't judge people.
It's hard to judge people now.
Well, there's plenty of judgment going around, I would argue, but it's been flipped on its head.
If you are against or maybe want to uphold standards that come from anywhere before about 2010, really, then you're considered to be somebody who is being judgmental and therefore It is more than fine to be judgmental against you.
It's this very strange, malformed idea of the judge-not-lest-you-be-judge-yourself idea that I've seen lots of progressives throw out over the years.
It's this idea of, I will use Christian morality on you when it suits me, despite the fact that I myself do not adhere to Christian morality, and in fact will go out of my way to spit at Christian morality, a lot of the time.
But I think you're right when you mentioned Gary Lineker, because it does just draw up that BBC is in a constant state of controversy over the past 10 or so years after the Savile situation, and it doesn't help that a lot of the people who man the BBC, like Gary Lineker, go out of their way to just insult and show contempt towards people who are paying his bills.
Yeah, but just as many people applaud Gary Lineker for what he says.
So there's a tight line to walk.
I think what annoys most of us is the hypocrisy.
Now, if Hugh Edwards, this scandal, would have been somebody, if he'd have worked at GB News, for instance, This would be a whole different story completely.
So it's not that they're protecting the morality of this, it's that they're protecting someone who they perceive is on their side, who says all the right things.
Yeah, they're protecting their friends because they know that they're not their enemies and that's where this really comes down to.
Before I get into some more of the details, and let you all know what's going on here, we've got some more excellent videos on the website now.
This is the most recent Symposium which has come out, which is Stelios' series, episode 27 on the Epic of Gilgamesh, where he was talking about Carl and Bo in what has in itself become quite an epic episode.
You can see from the timestamp there, it might be hard to make out on the screen right now, but that is 3 hours and 21 minutes long.
Almost three and a half hours long, appropriately for the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of, if not the oldest surviving stories that we can, that we have access to at the moment.
And we've also, it's in our brand new studio as well.
People were excited to see what the new studio looks like.
I've seen it today.
We've taken a look at the new studio today.
If you think this studio was good, then the other studios blew me away.
It's fantastic.
Yeah, also if you think that this studio is maybe a bit too disconnected, if it's a bit too clinical and modern, you'll be very pleased with the new studio.
If you thought the old one was homely and felt like cozy, then this one will blow your mind on those fronts.
But anyway, so the initial reports that were going out were, as I mentioned, coming from The Sun where they were reporting like this a few days ago.
This all sort of came out at the beginning of this week when they were saying, BBC presenter suspended over sex claims and broke lockdown laws to meet young stranger from a dating site.
So initially, no names were being given out about this.
It was only all being reported anonymously regarding the person that this is all surrounding.
So for the first half of the week, I don't know about you, but there were lots of people I know who were involved in speculation.
Who's it going to be?
Yeah.
Who's it going to be?
The name Hugh Edwards was thrown out a few times in speculation, but a lot of people I heard say that was either, I don't know who that is, or no, it couldn't be him.
Obviously, as I say though, the allegations thus far are just allegations.
Nothing has been confirmed.
And in fact, police have looked into the matter and said that there has been nothing illegal go on.
So like you say, it's more a matter of, for the people who are complaining about this situation, for the people who are defending this situation, it's a matter of morality.
for the people who are offended by what Hugh Edwards might have done, which is that we don't want our news being presented to us by people who are immoral.
It's really, really complicated.
So for me, the biggest part of this story, if true, again, we don't know if it's true or not, but the biggest part of the allegation for me is the young person involved, and we say young person, but they're not a child.
They're not technically, legally a child, but they're a young person, used the money they got for their drug habit.
That's the crux of this scandal.
It's not that we've got an older man engaged in sexual conduct or sending naked photos or anything like that with someone younger.
That happens all the time.
If that part does turn out to be true, depending on the age when it started with the boy, then I would pass judgement on that.
Well yeah, so what people might not understand is in this country it's legal to have sex at 16.
Gay sex, heterosexual sex, sex in a bucket, anything you want from 16.
Taking photos of somebody under the age of 18, sexual photos, is illegal.
So the laws don't match up there.
So if this young person was 17, that's been reported, it may not be true.
If he was 17, sending sexually explicit photos, then a crime has been committed there.
If he was 18, then no crimes have been committed.
Yeah, I think another part of the story as well is that part of the allegations are that he went out and broke lockdown laws.
Who didn't?
Everybody did.
Who didn't?
Everybody did, but it was enough when directed at certain people to be able to bring politicians down, or at least allow themselves to be brought down.
So it's just another layer of the hypocrisy that you mentioned earlier.
So what the reports say in this particular article was that the son had received messages which suggest that as well as visiting the 23-year-old's home, the star had sent cash and asked for a picture.
He was sent a naked, semi-naked photograph and I believe the son got a lot of this information From the boy's parents as well.
In an interview, the youngster told how the star travelled across London to another county to meet them at their flat in February 2021.
He said that they first met the presenter in 2020 on a dating site.
The presenter had started a chat with a 17-year-old follower on Instagram using love hearts and kisses in his messages.
The BBC reported that another youngster has claimed the presenter sent them threatening and abusive messages.
Jeremy Vine, had called on a well-known BBC star to name himself as the presenter at the center of the scandal.
So there was a lot going on there that left a lot of things up in the air, left a lot of people speculating of what was going on.
But as soon as it came out, without even questioning the validity of the information regarding this, BBC and the Guardian both came out with essentially the same article asking questions for the Sun over the BBC presenter story.
And to be fair, there were some valid questions to be asking about this, which was mainly surrounding how valid is all of this?
What is the veracity of this?
Are you just accepting information that's been given to you that could smear a man's entire life regarding this?
But I see this as the media closing ranks.
As they often do, whether it's the BBC, whether it's the Guardian, all of these people will be attending the same parties, all of these people will know one another, and so they close ranks to keep themselves safe.
There's also competition.
This is a very competitive market, newspapers, so if they can damage the sun, Just like any other business would damage their competitors.
And what we need to understand about The Sun, I would imagine, and I'm 99% sure this will be true, they would be trying to check everything they can because they don't want to be sued.
I mean, this is all fair.
Because you look what happened to News of the World.
They went because of something similar to this.
So, you know, it's, they would be checking everything and if they turn out to be false, then I'll be on Hugh Edwards' side to sue the pants off him.
Oh, of course.
But I've seen some reports that...
Sue the pants off him might not have been the appropriate thing there.
I think Hugh Edwards, from what I've seen from other reporting, has been in touch with, I think, Cliff Richards' lawyer, is what I was seeing.
And apparently because of the fact that they maintained anonymity with the people that they were reporting on at the same time, there would be some difficulty with a defamation lawsuit if they were to direct it against The Sun.
Oh yeah.
Because they kept the name out.
So that would probably be why The Sun kept the name out in the first place, because that's one of the questions The Guardian and the BBC were asking, which is, okay, if you've got all of this damning information, why are you keeping it anonymous?
But once again, When it comes to things like alleged crimes then you do have to be careful when you're reporting on them because eventually it did come out that there was truth to the matter or at least some truth to the matter that there was a BBC star at the centre of a scandal who had been removed from the BBC or suspended from the BBC for a temporary time whilst the BBC were making an internal inquiry and that turned out to be, as we've mentioned, Hugh Edwards.
So it was his wife who came out and said this and she announced that she's Vicky Flint.
She said that in light of the recent reporting regarding a BBC presenter, I am making this statement on behalf of my husband Hugh Edwards after what have been five extremely difficult days for our family.
I'm doing this primarily out of concern for his mental well-being and to protect our children.
So in that statement, once again, no confirmation of anything whatsoever.
So it is still alleged.
I believe once he is out of hospital, that is when we will get an announcement from Hugh Edwards, whether there is any validity to the claims.
Worse in matters and he has suffered another serious episode and is now receiving inpatient hospital care.
We'll stay for the foreseeable future.
So in that statement, once again, no confirmation of anything whatsoever.
So it is still alleged, I believe, once he is out of hospital, that is when we will get an announcement from Hugh Edwards, whether there is any validity to the claims.
I wouldn't be shocked if he came out and denied every single one of them.
But at the same time, the BBC, as I said, is doing an internal inquiry right now.
Although two police... If I go to the... Not that one, but this one.
So there has been a police inquiry already.
And they've said, I think it's two police forces have said there's nothing criminal about what's gone on, but the BBC is still resuming its investigation now because they paused the investigation while the police were looking into it.
So we'll see what happens, but as it seems right now, it doesn't seem that anybody's broken any laws in this.
So like you say, if photographs were sent, photographs were sent by people of legal age within the UK.
Or as you stated before in one of the news articles, the photos were semi-naked.
Oh yeah, walking that tightrope.
Well, semi-naked, you've got shorts on.
That's semi-naked.
So, so there's nothing illegal about that.
Yeah.
It would still be strange for people to come out if he does, if there is truth about all of this, it would be strange for people to come out and defend him.
Uh, because he is still, he would have still been doing something.
As far as I'm concerned, very immoral.
He's married.
He's 61 years old.
He's got children.
He was breaking.
I know everybody did it, but he was breaking the lockdown laws and we were expecting to hold other people to account.
on such things, so we should be expected to hold him to account on it as well.
And as you said, if this was coming out with GB News presenters, then they would be all over it, there would be no excuses made.
Or if it was on the other foot and it was young girls that he was speaking to.
I mean, I hate to bring up this example.
Leonardo DiCaprio gets so much flack for going out with women who are a bit younger than him.
But these are women who are well within legal age and well able to make their own decisions regarding who they date.
If Leonardo DiCaprio, an older man, does want to go out with them for a set amount of time, and it is always a very set amount of time with him, that's their decision to make.
They have the autonomy to be able to make those decisions.
um they still that it still has a different set of um it's still judged by different standards.
It is but again this case is different because a money was spent on drugs the young person involved i believe is obviously and his parents have stated he's he's a drug addict so you're keeping somebody in an unfit state with the money you're giving them he's married So, you know, he's let his wife down.
He's let his children down.
But the people like us who think this is a model.
The people who don't always think it isn't.
You know, we've got girls chopping their breasts off and lots of people are clapping going, you go girl, you can be a boy.
So it's, this is part of the culture when you can be, you can break certain aspects of social norms if you're on the right side.
You're right, if this was girls, he'd be called a pervert and he would have been attacked more.
But because he's now can claim that he's part of the alphabet people, And the only way out of this for him is to say he's trans.
Well, no, actually, I don't want to paint all of them with the same brush here.
But I will say when you look into it, it is remarkable how many male members of the alphabet soup go out of their way to defend the kind of relationships where you have a much older man with a younger boy.
Obviously, in this circumstance, the police have said there's nothing criminal about it.
I have seen many cases, Peter Tatchell, for instance, Has gone out of his way in the past to excuse relationships that people that he knows have had when they were an incredibly inappropriate age.
There's a very infamous clip of him going around.
Absolutely.
Yeah, where he's talking about one of my friends started having sex when he was nine with much older men.
He says it was perfectly fine.
Therefore, we should just take his word for it.
As if people aren't able to post hoc rationalize these things in their mind and say, because you don't want to feel like you're out of control in your own life.
Especially at that sort of age.
So of course you're going to turn around and say, no, actually I was in full control because it helps to keep you grounded, whether you were or not.
You can lie to yourself.
People do that all the time.
And that side of the alphabet lobby does sadly, occasionally make excuses for that kind of behavior.
So like you say, it is very different when it's with younger men rather than younger girls.
I'm not too sure what it is.
I'm not too sure.
I just think there's a hypocrisy there when it is with younger men because you then can claim that you're a victim and you always should have been gay but society forced you into a marriage with a woman and you've had kids and you could never be yourself but now I'm 61.
And I feel liberated.
And you can play that card and people are lapping that up and I don't think any of that matters.
I think we need to go back to a time where when you marry somebody you have respect for them and you hold the sanctity of marriage and you have a life with them and you're not running around with other people and you're not embarrassing your children.
That's what this is about for me.
It's not about The sex or the gender of whoever it was before.
It's not even the age difference.
Because who are we to judge an age difference?
We shouldn't be judging that.
We should be judging people on their self-respect.
I certainly won't be disagreeing with you on anything that you just said about, you know, sanctity of marriage.
I'm very much on board with what you're saying there.
One of the other things about this that we've not mentioned so far is that according to some of the news reporting I've seen, there are also other allegations coming out from people outside of this one person whose family have been speaking to the press, which is that apparently other BBC young interns and young staffers at the BBC have been saying that there has been a particular presenter which might once again be Hugh Edwards.
this is all alleged still, that might still, who's been sending harassing messages to them and applying pressure to them to get what he wants from them.
So that could be related to this as well.
And if I carry on, like I said, the BBC has been investigating this for a little bit and in fact was investigating this before the documents were published by The Sun So once again, when the BBC comes out and starts to trash the entirety of what The Sun is doing, And they know that they're already investigating a journalist within their own organization.
They know who that journalist is.
They probably knew who The Sun would have been talking about.
Therefore, when they start to come out and question, say, oh, The Sun's being so terrible here, like you say, their competitor.
But it seems to me to be closing ranks because The Sun is outside of the BBC sphere.
It's part of the Murdoch news sphere, isn't it?
The BBC, The Guardian, all of them, they hate the Murdoch branch of the media in the UK.
And I'm not a particularly huge fan of them either, just to be clear.
But sources have claimed that Newsnight host Victoria Derbyshire has been carrying out inquiries for a while into the newsreader's conduct according to the website deadline.
Two BBC insiders claimed that Ms Derbyshire had contacted multiple individuals while another downplayed the work and denied it had been an investigation, saying no evidence of wrongdoing was found.
Once again, they're restarting this investigation, they're continuing it, so we'll find out what happens in the future.
And apparently the parents of the Hugh Edwards case have been offered tens of thousands for a talk TV interview, which is currently being edited for broadcast, so we'll see what happens there.
And like I say, this is all up in the air at the moment, this is speculation, this is allegation, which makes it funny to me But a lot of members of the news media, outside of just the BBC itself, but also going into GB News and a lot of the much more lefty commentators they have, are treating it like this is set in stone, this is what actually has happened, Hugh Edwards has done these things, now it's time for me to make excuses for them.
Very, very strange because if we go here, so outside of that, first of all, we have Alistair Campbell, who is a big fan and friend of Hugh Edwards in the first place, saying a memo to the BBC.
Interesting how he phrases it like that.
For those unaware, Alistair Campbell was essentially what, head spin doctor for Tony Blair?
Is that how you'd characterize him?
Yeah.
Yeah, saying, stop playing the game your enemies want you to.
Relegate the Hugh Edwards story so low down the bulletins it disappears.
Lead them on to a story of a former PM, he's referring to Boris Johnson here, who said he would hand over all his text to an inquiry.
This is regarding the COVID controversy with the, what was it, Partygate issues with Boris.
Failing to do so in defiance of a court order, which is what you should have done earlier in the week.
Stop confusing the public interest with what the right-wing rags say the public are interested in.
Interview police regarding why they investigated Hugh, but not a PM defying high court.
It's interesting to me that Alistair is basically just laying out there how Outlets like the BBC can just manipulate the news.
Well all you need to do is just push it down and then push this other one up.
And I know this because I was the spin doctor for Tony Blair.
I know how all of this works so that's nice and revealing there.
There's a clip in a TV program called Yes Prime Minister.
I don't think I've watched that.
You need to watch it.
It's fantastic.
It's from the 80s.
There's a clip in it where the Prime Minister is talking to his top civil servant going you know there's this big story is going to come out about uh you know an MP or something what can we do what can we do to stop it we can't stop it it's going to come out well but what you can do is you can um
deport 72 russian diplomats and say they're spies and and that then you'll will will go to number one and all the media outlets and nobody be worried about the mp who did it so that's what they do yep that makes perfect sense to me and it's it's just um Shocking to me how open they are about how they manipulate the news, especially because I forget what the name of it is, but the UK government actually has essentially a kill switch that they can do.
If they don't want any of the news to report on a particular story, they can just send out a memo to every newspaper in the country and say, just don't report on it, and they have to abide by it.
Bo knows the name of that, but I cannot remember the name of that particular kill I would imagine it's very hard to do.
I'd imagine you've got to tick so many boxes.
Has to come under the Official Secrets Act.
I imagine there's a lot more to it than just we don't want you to report on that.
Potentially.
Potentially, but the government's very shady.
I don't trust them.
Don't trust them as far as I can throw them.
As I mentioned, Alistair Campbell's good friends with Hugh Edwards, so he has great incentive to run back up for him if any of this is true.
And they are going heavy on the mental health card because for a long time, Hugh Edwards has been doing interviews about how depressed he is.
But once again, if this is true, I too have experienced depression in my life.
I don't immediately go and seek to cheat on my spouse.
That wouldn't be my first go at the very least.
And then there are the people who are just making up excuses for it, as if it's all been confirmed in the first place.
People saying, for everyone defending Hugh Edwards, asking to give him the benefit of the doubt, mental health, no crime committed, etc.
Ask how you would react if one of these gentlemen were facing the exact same situation.
What would be your answer, hypocrites?
Well, They would be going against him.
This is not an effective tactic as far as I'm concerned.
I misread this originally and thought it said the opposite, so I apologize for that.
But there are people doing the other thing.
You said exactly what I said to you before.
If it was a different news reader from a different channel, GB News, this whole story would be spun differently.
Yeah, and then there are people like Albie from GB News saying, many religious conservatives seem to be forgetting what the Bible says.
Here you go, this is what I said.
I'm going to hold you to the standard of the Bible, despite the fact I wouldn't hold to it myself.
I hate this.
I hate it when people do this.
Very frustrating.
But he's just saying, oh, just forgive.
Just forgive and forget.
Just forgive and forget.
I flipped through the Bible.
It's a bit of a long book, but that's the only thing that I took away from it.
Very frustrating when people do this.
Tom Harwood, as you would expect.
This was when people were still speculating.
I have a feeling that because this person in question is a liberal BBC type and the newspaper that highlighted this is the Sun, we're getting some very different reactions to the story on different quarters, blah, blah, blah.
What it's worth, I think the liberal BBC supporting Welsh nationalists has been wronged in this play so far.
And I think that regardless of his politics.
Okay, great statement.
Benjamin Butterworth, a young person, never complained, except for the potential BBC interns and such, who did complain about it.
And also, once again, it's not whether the person involved complained, it's the immorality.
I've stopped at least 15 girls being raped.
None of them complained.
We just uncovered it.
Yeah, you don't need the person to complain in the first place for the actions.
A lot of the time they don't know they're a victim, they don't know they're being abused and being victimized.
You can convince a young person on many levels, on many things.
Just because they don't complain doesn't mean they're not a victim and they're being abused.
Yeah, and there's other stuff regarding this, but I think that's all we need to cover.
But just remember that the institutions who are tasked in the UK with giving you trustworthy news are often staffed by untrustworthy people.
And I say that regardless of whether the allegations regarding Hugh Edwards are true or not.
That's just a carte blanche.
That's how I take it.
Don't trust the BBC.
Shock!
Hover!
I know, I know.
It's very shocking to come from me, but there you go.
Let's move on to the next segment, shall we?
Mike's segment.
So we've got the first image up.
So I'm going to discuss the Holy Trinity of Wokedom.
So the first question is, what is Woke?
Have you got a definition for Woke?
Top of your head, nice and simple.
Mine is anti-white, anti-European.
That's my definition for woke, because generally as far as I see it, woke is less particular ideas and more a coalition of people who exist either outside of the mainstream, that being, or did exist outside of the mainstream, that being the
alphabet lobby and other such groups and then foreigners who have been imported into the country like Muslims and such to form a coalition against the people who are native to European countries as a way for politicians to maintain power.
That's how I see it.
Nice and simple.
It's evil, but it's simple.
But for me the simple version of woke is it's basically political correctness on steroids.
It's just the natural progression of what we had in the 80s and 90s of political correctness.
It's just been advanced and social media has pushed it even further along the line.
Now I've got quite a bit of experience in this from growing up.
I remember the first bits of political correctness I can remember.
First one was from the 70s.
I was in primary school, went swimming one day.
I used to have long hair and I wore my sister's swimming cap because I didn't want to get it wet and then have wet hair all day.
There's no such thing as air dryers, no lockers, nothing like that.
It all sounds very 80s so far.
The 70s.
Oh 70s, oh yes.
Yes, we're looking at mid 70s.
So when the teacher saw me put my sister's had swimming cap on she stopped the whole class and went see what Nick's doing and that's fantastic because not it's not only girls who wear shower caps and swimming caps and for Nick to be able to do that in class that's fantastic he can have 20 house points she what she was basically saying was breaking down gender norms in my class at a primary school.
I thought lots of men had long hair in the 70s though?
It was a trendy thing, yeah.
Some say my hair is too long now as well because I've not had a haircut in a bit.
She was just pointing out to the rest of the class that boys can wear swimming caps and it's not a girly thing to do, it's a gender thing.
And I remember in the 80s demonstrations on Green and Common about the nuclear weapons the Americans were importing there to protect us from the USSR.
And that was all about feminist groups setting camps up and it was what you see now with the feminists of today.
You know, pink hair, half mental, doing the same sort of thing.
Only half?
I would say half.
Okay, you're being fair.
Yeah, I'm being fair.
So this is not a new thing.
This has always been going on for my lifetime.
It just changed the morphs into something slightly different.
We're becoming more progressive, more woke, more equal.
We've got more stuff.
We're all richer, even though there's still bits of poverty.
We're all richer than we've ever been.
Are we any happier?
Is any of this working?
And the answer is obviously not.
One in five women are on antidepressants.
Suicide is the biggest killer of males under 50.
So it's like, None of it's working.
Why isn't it working?
Because none of these ideas actually produce a better society.
It just fragments society into Christians against Muslims, gays against straights, blacks against whites and you cannot build a harmonious community country when you're fragmenting people all the time.
Is there a reason for that?
Well we all know the reason.
It's all about revolution and we're going to get to that in a little while.
So every religion has a holy book.
And Wokedom now I think is almost like, is a religion basically and it has three tenets.
The first book, if we can have the first image, second image, yep that's it, is what everyone's heard of, Critical Race Theory.
Now we on Black Lives Matter, a huge debt of gratitude for this because up to 2020 No one had heard the critical base theory.
Nobody knew any of this was going on.
It was only through BLM.
And that, when I say BLM, it's a corrupt, failed, international con.
Nothing good about BLM.
But it brought all this to the public's attention.
And it talks about being anti-racist.
Now when anyone says anti-racist what they mean is racist.
If you're an anti-racist it means you are a racist.
That's the only description I can come up with with being an anti-racist.
And at the moment we live in a society where everything is racist.
The Mayor of London was saying last week the air in London is racist.
What he actually said was... I mean Sadiq Khan has said some very silly things.
Black and brown people in London are suffering more with polluted air than white people in London because the dirty air only goes in the mouths of black and brown people and the clean air saves itself until a white person is walking past and it shoots in their mouth and
Okay, I can imagine what that's about, which is that the areas in which, because these people, they come into the country and they form ethnic enclaves, especially when they come in the numbers, especially in a city like London, which is no longer majority English.
So they'll form their ethnic enclaves, and I imagine the areas that they live in are more polluted than areas where the white people live in, which to me that just sounds like a way for Sadiq Khan to justify extending the ULES program, which everybody hates and even Labour hate.
Even the Labour MPs who are operating in London from the reports I've seen recently absolutely despise the ULES program because they know it's ridiculously unpopular.
But now if you disagree with Ules in London after that information is given you.
Now you're racist.
Now you're obviously a racist because you don't care about black and brown people but everything's racist.
Chess is now racist.
Classical music, reading, being punctual.
is racist because black people cannot be punctual so it's racist to be punctual.
Trains are racist.
Last week cricket is racist.
Everything can be classed as racist now and it all goes back to critical race.
I mean it sounds a bit silly but it's actually in the tenets of critical race theory and what it means is Racism is happening all the time.
So it's not, the question is, did racism happen?
That's not the question.
The question is, where and how did racism manifest itself in that situation?
Because racism is everywhere.
And if you can't see the racism, it means you're a racist.
You've got to look and find where it is.
It's always lurking.
It's always there.
And there's a great description of this.
A black man and a white man walk into a shop at exactly the same time.
You've heard this?
I think I've heard this one before.
Exactly the same time.
The shopkeeper looks at both of them.
Who does he serve first?
The white man or the black man?
If he serves the white man first, that's because he sees white people as most superior and they deserve a better service.
If he serves the black man first, it's racist because he doesn't want He doesn't want a black man not being served first and wandering around the shop because he could be stealing things.
Yeah I was trying to remember what the stupid reason for it being oh if you choose the black guy first why that one's racist.
Yep.
Because that was the most ridiculous to me when I heard this.
Well it explains critical race theory perfectly as in races are happening every minute of every day and you've just to find out where it is and if you can't see it You're part of the problem and you are the racist.
Well, the interesting thing for me in that scenario that's established is no matter, like you say, no matter the decision that is made, it's not that you are the racist because it will be applied differently to the type of person who the question is directed at.
So if you, you wouldn't ask that question of a black person.
But if it's a white person in the situation, then you will be the villain no matter what.
For me, a lot of this comes down to villainizing white people constantly in every scenario.
Oh, absolutely.
And also affirmative action as well in the US was shown to have also disproportionately negatively affected Asian applicants into universities like Harvard as well.
So anybody who has a particular cultural standard of living, um then they get victimized by this and made to feel terrible and made to feel as though they're evil 24 7 just for their existence and their history.
And that's what Critical Base Theory does.
My last point on this is If you deny you're a racist, because all white people are racist, they just don't know they're racist, there's different levels of racism in every white person, according to Critical Race Theory.
If you deny you're a racist, it's a little bit like the witch trials in medieval England.
So, you ask a woman, are you a witch?
And she says no, so you put her in a pool of water.
If she floats, it means she's a witch, so you burn her.
If she sinks and drowns, it means she wasn't a witch.
So there's no good outcome for that poor woman whatsoever.
You've seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail, right?
It just makes me think of that situation at the beginning of the film where they weigh the woman against the duck.
And she weighs more than a duck, therefore she's a witch.
How are you so learned in the ways of science?
It's that kind of stupid logic.
When I first saw that, I just thought that was Monty Python being silly.
So they were being prophetic?
Yeah they were basing it on what used to happen in Medieval England where you would try to drown the woman, if she survived you burn her for being a witch, if she drowned to death then she wasn't a witch.
It's like that's what critical race is, that every white person's a racist.
Yeah, before we get off the critical race theory, I just need to go into salesman mode for a very quick moment, which is that on the website, on LotusEaters.com, we've got lots of content covering critical race theory.
Carl's the one who covered a lot of it.
He's got an entire series explaining critical race theory.
I think that's Somewhere between five and ten episodes long.
And then he also did a video called, because I know that what you were talking about there from the, it's not if racism happened, it's how did it manifest itself in a situation.
That's from Robin D'Angelo's White Fragility.
He's got a video talking about a conservative's guide to Robin D'Angelo's White Fragility.
So if you want to find those on the website, I don't remember exactly if they're premium or not.
I imagine some of them premium.
So check that out on the website if you're interested in learning more about critical race theory as well.
No, absolutely, because I'm only going to skim over some of these some of these trinities of wokedom.
The next one is gender theory.
We can have the next slide up.
So gender theory is taught in universities.
You know, you can do this.
Gender theory came out of women's studies in the 60s.
Then it turned into gender studies and then a sidearm morphed into gay and lesbian studies.
So what you're telling me this is all a gigantic mistake that's come from trying to understand women?
No one can understand women.
Exactly.
Women don't understand women.
So I started in universities and it was really started for white, bored, educated, ungrateful, middle-class women.
Who couldn't achieve what they wanted to achieve based on their merits, so then had to find an excuse.
It was obviously my gender.
It's because I'm a woman.
Someone's holding me back.
And that's how it started, gender theory.
And we know that's not correct.
It's been assisted by men.
None of this could have happened without weak men supporting this.
Well, that's true.
Yeah.
And then you have to say, why do weak men support this?
And it's because it's one of the ways they can potentially gain access to sex.
So if they can, it's a mating strategy.
So if they can support these half delusional women, And then we're halfway getting dates, halfway being their partners, halfway getting married, halfway to sex.
And it's a mating strategy.
Men will do almost anything for access to sex.
I've laughed at so many girls' jokes in the past.
Told them they were beautiful, told them they were funny.
Lied out of my back teeth.
Dobbing yourself in, are you?
Yes.
Just because that's what men will do.
And it's part of our strategy.
I have seen men debase themselves in the past on behalf of getting female attention.
So any bloke who's watching this video right now, you know you've done it.
We've all done it.
You know what you did.
And you know what?
It's fine because every man's done it over the last 100,000 years.
So there's nothing to be shameful about.
That's what we do to impress women.
Why are we trying to impress women?
And so we will lie to them sometimes.
Does my bum look big in this?
Well, I'm not going to answer that question truthfully, am I?
Well, that's a difficult question now because standards, beauty standards have flipped.
I don't know if you want a yes or a no to that question anymore.
There is no yes or no to it.
The answer is, I don't know because you always look beautiful.
Oh my!
You've practiced that.
You've said that so many times.
The sincerity I got from his eyes.
Exactly.
So gender theory goes into there's no such thing as a man, no such thing as a woman.
We're basically born as empty vessels and then society and cultural norms impose things upon us and then as children we start going down to the path then of being a man or being a woman.
But at the beginning we're empty vessels and we know that's not true.
All the evidence is in.
Social scientists have done experiments with boys and girls They're born as a boy of a girl.
If you've got children, you know, you can tell straight away the boys and the girls.
And it's built in us.
There's such things as biological sex and the brain makeup for those sexes are there.
And for people who don't understand this, you just need to ask people, what is a woman?
Because that gets you the answer.
And people who believe in gender theory will say, well, a woman is anybody who says they're a woman.
But what is that?
Well, it's a woman.
But what is a woman?
Anybody who says.
It's a circular argument.
They cannot answer what a woman is because they don't know themselves.
They just don't want to upset anybody because gender theory has convinced 50 years of women that they're the same as men.
They're not the same as men.
That's why they're unhappy.
20% are taking antidepressants.
And, you know, our marriages are failing.
We're bringing up children worse.
Women are very unhappy compared to men.
Women's happiness has been declining since the 1960s, decade upon decade.
And it's because we're making women do things that men do.
Women need to do the things women need to do to succeed and have a Well, I've seen those graphs that you're referring to, and it's interesting that when contrasted with graphs of men, men have got a few dips here and there, but they generally report pretty much the same happiness that they always have done.
Men are more than happy to... If society tells men, we hate you, go away, men are going, alright, okay, I'll lock myself away in a room, I'll play video games all day, and I'll be pretty much content as long as nobody's asking anything else of me.
It's not so much a pretty much content, it was because men, and especially young men, are already unhappy.
Men have to earn their happiness.
Men start off at a disadvantage.
Men start off with nobody wanting them.
Physically weaker, not being attractive, having no status, having no resources.
Girls their age are going out with 25 year olds with cars.
It's difficult being a young man.
Men get happier over time.
Women become less happier.
Women are born happy with everything and their happiness declines when their looks go, their reproductive cycle diminishes.
So they become unhappy unless they've got children and grandchildren.
So, men are used to knocks in life.
That's what we always get.
How many women have men walked up to you for a date or chat up and they go, no, not interested.
And we've got to take that on the chin.
We've got to then find someone else to ask because women don't go around asking men for dates.
They don't take it on the chin.
Well, I don't...
My missus asked me out, so.
I'm not saying it never happens.
I'm just the exception.
Yeah, but most men have to chase women.
There's always exceptions.
I mean, you're extraordinarily beautiful.
So no wonder she came and asked you.
Well, thank you very much.
If we can have the next slide.
Yeah, I'll pop that up.
There we go.
The next theory out of this trinity is queer theory.
And this is the most complicated.
This is the most That's crazy out of all of them.
Well I can say from my own experience because I've done research into this, Connor's done research, Connor has read that what 900 page however so long book by Simone de Beauvoir and has read some of the founding texts of queer theory that come from people like Gail.
Ruben and Judith Butler.
A lot of it, the purpose of the queer theory is to make no sense in the first place because that's the whole thing.
It's supposed to be taking the rules that society is operating by and tears them up.
That's the whole point of it in the first place.
Exactly.
So I'm glad you said that because it's part of the postmodern creations we had from the 60s.
The people who talk about queer theory Don't understand queer theory and they only talk about it because it makes them sound intelligent because nobody else understands it either.
It's about taking all the social norms, everything we believe is fact and saying no it's not.
These things aren't true.
These things are only true because you think they're true.
But when you look at it through a post-modern lens, they're not true.
It destroys everything.
And one of the biggest things, it's about breaking down barriers.
And one of those barriers is the barrier between adults and children.
We treat children differently to adults.
We always have done.
Hopefully, we always will do.
Queer Theory says, There is no babies between children and adults.
They're the same.
They're just smaller versions.
That's why we're now looking at, you've heard of the frame, maps.
Minor attractors is a disgusting term.
So if people don't know what MAPS is, MAPS is a new word for pedos.
So we can't use the word pedo anymore because it's offensive to the pedos.
So now we have to use MAPS which stands for Minor Attracted Persons and that comes under Queer Theory because their philosophy is Why are we dictating to young people when they can have sex, when they can enter romantic relationships?
Why have we said 16 in this country, 18 in Turkey, 15 in France?
I think it's 13 in Spain or something.
Is it?
Yeah.
Why do we have these arbitrary numbers that society just said that's the age limit?
Who are we to dictate and persecute an 11-year-old?
And that's what queer theory does on many levels, not just about sex.
That's why we have a body positivity movement now.
Who are we to say that Lizzo isn't the most beautiful woman in the world?
You know, she's the size of a hippo.
She's got a pretty face and she's a talented musician.
I don't like her music, but people buy it.
I wouldn't agree with pretty face, but you know, if you've got, you've got your opinion.
Well, I just said you've got a pretty face.
You didn't, you didn't disagree with that, did you?
Why would I?
There you go.
No, no, you are right.
She's relatively musically talented in terms of the instruments she can play.
As disgraceful as it was, she got the opportunity to play, was it... The glass flute.
Yeah, the glass flute.
Was that John Adams?
One of the founding fathers, I believe.
And she presumably played it very well.
I think she's classically trained.
I hate her music, but you know, I'm sure if you got her on a flute, then she'd, you know, be very good at it.
She sells enough records for me to say she's talented.
I don't like her music but she's obviously talented.
People spend money on her but that's not the point.
The point is she's now told she's beautiful because that's body positivity.
That's queer theory saying There's no such thing as a standard beauty.
There's no such thing as a perfect hourglass figure is the most beautiful.
You can be any size, any shape, and you're still beautiful.
That's queer theory.
There's no more social norms.
Now what we risk with queer theory is when we tear down social norms.
How do we live our lives?
The only reason me and you can have this interview is because subconsciously we know what we can do and what we can't do.
I know there's no fear of you stand up and punching me.
You know there's no chance of me suddenly turning into a Nazi and screaming Hitler propaganda down the lens.
There's certain things...
I'm glad to hear that.
But they're social norms.
If it wasn't for our social norms, we couldn't have a conversation because we have no idea what the other person is going to do or say.
And that's why society at the moment is beginning to crumble and break down because we can't walk into a neighborhood now and know we're safe because we don't know if this is a neighborhood we can be safe.
We don't interact with certain people because we don't know how to react.
with their conversations.
It's very damaging.
It's taken us back to, it's taken us to Mogadishu, where nobody knows how it works, but it just, it just crumbles.
That's the dangers of queer theory.
And then going back, my final point on queer theory is, this is not new.
We had a group in the 1970s called PIE, the Pedophile Information Exchange, and they were lobbying government to reduce the age of consent to three for sex.
Yes, and I've done some research on them myself.
The first thing was there was a big scandal that came out about 10 years ago where it came out that the Home Office had thrown them a bit of money, I think.
They got a grant?
Yes, in the early 1980s I think they got about £50,000 through a grant from the government.
So the government was actively giving money to the paedophile information exchange.
Also there was the issue with, I forget the name of the organisation, but it was a liberal free speech organisation.
Liberty, that was the name of the organization, yes, that included Harriet Harman, who later went on to be part of Tony Blair's government.
They were actively defending the right of Pi to exist as an organization within the UK and worked with them.
Very disturbing to know all of that happened.
Yep, and we think that can never happen again.
It's happening now.
Our government now are throwing money to these organizations.
You know, it's all government funded, a lot of it through EDI and through the woke agenda.
We're just repeating history again.
Queer theory is the most dangerous out of all the theories.
So where does all this lead?
Quickly, I'll wind up.
Well, where does it lead?
Critical race theory leads us to a place where we don't want to communicate and engage with people of different races because we don't want to be accused of racism.
We don't know how they'll perceive us.
So it means we stop talking to brown and black people and they stop talking to us in case we're racist.
It breaks down communities.
Gender theory, where does that lead us to?
Well, it leads us to young women having their breasts amputated at the moment.
That's where gender theory takes us to.
And then Queer Theory, that takes us to the sexualisation and basically, in case you can't publish it, the sexualisation of children.
That's where that takes us to.
Why are we pushing these theories?
Why are the world pushing these theories?
Because they want a better world.
A better world?
Today is the best the world has ever been.
It will only get better tomorrow.
Never been better than it is now.
We've never been richer, healthier, more food, more resources, more comfort.
I'm talking about the whole world.
The poorest people in Africa are better off today than they were 100 years ago.
We live in utopia now.
But what happens is some people don't think this is good enough.
And we've got the last slide.
Some people, normally fat, blue haired, woke, university lesbians.
I'm not saying she's any of those things apart from the blue hair.
And she is fat as well.
From the camera angle, yeah.
Yeah, it's the camera angle, I'm sure.
Some people think they can do better.
Some people say, let's tear it all down because what we have at the moment is terrible and we can start again from scratch.
It's taken us a hundred thousand years to get where we are today and people like her think they can do it in a couple of years.
Sorry, she's staring at me!
If she's not one of those people, then I apologize.
I just found the picture.
She might be a lovely person.
I thought it was a great picture with the grimace and everything.
We make changes, small, tiny tweaks to our community and our society, not by tearing it down, burning it to the ground and start it again with a Marxist revolution.
So be wary of the Trinity of Wokedom.
All right.
And with that, let's move on to the last segment.
She's gone.
She's gone.
The eye of Sauron has left.
Thank goodness.
Yes.
So let's talk about Sound of Freedom.
Sound of Freedom is a film that has come out recently, which is which is showing the events of people in real life.
I think the name is Tim Ballard, a man whose exploits helped to break up sex trafficking rings across South America.
You know, it will have some embellishments.
As part of the story, because anything based on a true story will have some embellishments.
It will not actually accurately present how these things go down.
Because I'm sad to say, if you expect a purely accurate film on how a true event went down, you're not going to get it.
People are going to be horrified when they hear what actually happened in the events behind Braveheart, for instance, which is a notoriously historically inaccurate film.
But it's been very popular.
People have been really enjoying it.
It's entertainment, it's not a documentary.
Well yeah, people want to watch a film where the bad guys are child and people traffickers and they get what's coming to them, given to them by righteous, well-adjusted, strong men.
That's the kind of film that people have been yearning for.
Hollywood's not been doing a good job of that.
No.
Hollywood has not been doing a good job of that for a long time.
And because a film has now come out which is giving the people what they want, which is bad guys are evil and they get what's coming to them.
Newspapers like the Guardian and the liberal media have decided that what they want to do is now smear this as being QAnon paranoid conspiracy and all I can really say to that is, what an odd thing to say.
And before I get into the rest of this, once again I'm going to direct everybody to the website where we have so much Excellent videos and so many excellent articles on here, including this Brokenomics video where he's talking about The Fourth Turning, which is an influential book that seeks to understand generational cycles and how they shape history.
It sounds very much like the cyclical idea of history, you know, empires rising, empires falling.
I can't say that for certain because I've not watched this video yet, but Dan is always excellent in his Brokenomics videos.
So please check that out.
And as you can see there in that image, he is, as always, dressed like a Miami drug dealer.
So if that's not enough reason to watch this episode of Brokenomics, then I don't know what's going to convince you.
Anyway, so there's been some bad news for Hollywood over the past few weeks is they keep releasing films that everybody says, I don't want that.
That looks rubbish.
Please stop trying to get me to watch this.
And then they release the films and nobody goes to watch it or More likely, nobody goes to watch it in enough numbers to actually make any amount of money back.
And some of the articles I'm going to be referring to later on don't seem to understand how it works with how Hollywood makes their money and how Hollywood budgets films.
When you see the budget of a film, It'll say, for instance, in this, the two films I'm going to be referencing here are The Flash and Indiana Jones 5, The Dial of Destiny.
No, I've not seen either of them.
I've not even seen Sound of Freedom.
The most recent film I watched last night, I watched Pirates of the Caribbean, The Curse of the Black Pearl for the probably 50th time.
I've watched that film so many times because I love it.
It's a good old fashioned adventure Hollywood film, the kind that you don't get anymore because you don't get a big budget for that, for a film that actually goes, shall we just make something that people can enjoy?
Yeah.
You're not going to get a character like Captain Jack Sparrow anymore and you're not going to get a film like Pirates of the Caribbean anymore because it's set in the Caribbean during British colonial times.
You know if they made it right now it would need to have some insufferable subplot about slaves being freed or all of the horrors of colonialism and they went no!
We just want to make a good action film starring pirates and that's all it needed to be but I've not watched any of these and I don't want to except maybe The Sound of Freedom.
You've tried to watch it but you've not been able to make it to a showing yet have you?
Yeah.
I don't know if it's been released internationally actually because from the box office that I've seen they've only got domestic box office so that suggests it might only be in America at the moment.
I will be going to the cinema to watch the Ina Jones film.
I just have to.
Oh dear.
I'll let you know what it's like next time I come.
I will be going to watch it.
Okay, you know, I mean, fair play to you, God bless you and good luck because...
So far, like I say, The Flash and Indiana Jones, people haven't been enjoying them.
They've not been getting excellent reviews, although some people are saying Indiana Jones 5 is at least not as bad as Indiana Jones 4, which isn't the best... I fairly enjoyed it.
It wasn't as good as the others.
There's parts of it that I can enjoy, but I imagine that that's just people who... Right, I just want to address this very quickly, okay?
There is a subset of people who, probably due to the influence of a website, who I do like, I've got to put that out there called Red Letter Media.
Are you aware of them?
They did back in 2009 what they called the Plinkett Reviews where they put a character on called Mr. Plinkett.
He's an old crotchety man who does disturbing things in his spare time and they really really ragged on the George Lucas era prequel films of Star Wars and did the same to the George Lucas and Steven Spielberg Indiana 4.
And they have a certain amount of their identity.
And I understand the prequels are not amazing films, but they have redeeming qualities as far as I'm concerned.
Same with Indiana Jones 4.
But there are people who have wrapped up so much of their identity in hating George Lucas and everything that he did post, let's say, Indiana Jones 3.
That they cannot admit films that come out these days, like the Star Wars sequels or like New Indiana Jones, are worse because they have just wrapped so much of their identity in hating George Lucas.
I just wanted to get that out there.
I don't think it's fair.
George seems like a nice guy.
Leave him alone.
There's my public service announcement for today.
Anyway, carrying on.
So The Flash, Had a domestic box office of $105 million, an international box office of $156 million, leading to a worldwide gross of $262 million, with some change on top of that.
The budget for this film was $200 million.
So to the layperson, they hear that and they think, okay, so it's made $60 million.
No, that's not how that works.
So you get the production budget.
For the film, and then what you have to do to figure out how much it will even need to make the break-even is double it.
Because you've also got to look into things like the marketing, all of the interviews, all of the payments that are going to have to go to the stars for everything afterwards.
Are there going to have to be reshoots?
Are you going to have to go back?
Are you going to have to re-edit the whole film?
How much is all of this going to cost?
You're going to have to have adverts on television.
You're going to have to add adverts on the radio.
You're going to have to hire out billboards.
All of this costs Millions of dollars to be able to do so take the production budget and then double it so reasonably you'd want 400 million dollars for this and then consider that you'll probably have taken out loans be able to afford the production in the first place add the interest on all of that loans and everything so you sometimes you don't even double sometimes you may be two and a half So, 500 million for this.
And then remember, Hollywood don't make films just so they can make 50 million dollars, now they do it so they can make a billion dollars!
Ever since Avatar broke records, they've just been in an arms race to see who can make the most money, because they all want to hit that billion dollar mark.
So this, complete disappointment.
Everybody hates it.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
This had a production budget of about $300 million.
How they make it so expensive, I don't know.
Worldwide, $258 million.
So they've not even made back The production budget just yet and this is very disappointing for all the bean counters over in Hollywood and it's because people just don't want to go see these films anymore.
People are tired of being insulted by the films they go to watch.
I don't want to spoil too much for you but I have seen some reviews of this film and there is Phoebe Waller-Bridges plays a new female character who is taking the place essentially of indie and I think what people don't want to watch, certainly I don't want to watch, is an 80-year-old Indiana Jones failing to be cool and being emasculated by a younger, stuck-up, annoying woman.
Indy had cool female characters in all the other films, or at least in the first three.
I mean, what was it, Marianne came back for the fourth one?
Yeah and she was fine from what I remember you know it was nice to see her back it was nice to have a nice full circle story for Indiana Jones but that's just not what happens in these films now then they go oh you had a full circle story for your character they had a complete character arc well guess what we're going to revisit them They're a miserable, failed old man now.
Look at Luke Skywalker and all the more recent Star Wars films.
It's a miserable, failed old man who's not supposed to be aspirational.
He's horrible.
He's evil.
He's basically just like your grumpy, racist granddad.
You should hate him.
Instead, look up to this young, amazing, strong and powerful, independent woman.
That's what they do with these films.
And it's infuriating, but this is something that's been going on for years.
I'm just repeating lines that people have been saying for years now.
a spin-off with her that's what they're trying to do because he's doing no more but can they do a new franchise with her?
no even the people who i've seen who gave positive reviews of the film said yeah i didn't like her very much so if they're looking because everybody watches indiana jones for indiana jones because he's cool because he's fun But The Sound of Freedom had a production budget, I've checked, of $14.5 million.
So let's say about $30 million overall to be able to break even.
That's tiny.
It is very small nowadays for how much... I mean, it's interesting because I mentioned Indiana Jones.
Production budget for the first indie, Radius of the Lost Ark, $24 million.
That's just how much things have ballooned since the 1980s.
But this, $14.5 million, so say about $30 million, and it's made a worldwide, obviously it's domestic right now, but of $53 million, which isn't a huge profit, but unlike the other films, it's actually a profit.
Because they knew what they were working with, they knew the kind of budget that they should work within, and they decided to just go with that.
And it's made them money.
People want to go see it, and it's been getting positive reviews off the back of it as well.
I looked at the Rotten Tomatoes, and I think it's got 78% Rotten Tomatoes score from the critics because they're going to be here and they're going like, oh, oh, it's about men doing things that help people.
Oh, this is very right wing.
I don't know about this.
The actual people's score for the non-critics score is 99%.
So everybody else just really enjoys this film.
And there you go, BBC talking about it.
It tells the story of a government agent who busts a child sexual abuse ring operation in Colombia.
The main character is based on Timothy Ballard, a former Department of Homeland Security agent who founded an anti-human trafficking organization, Operation Underground Railroad.
Now I've seen from some of these other articles that we look at, some of them cast aspersions on his exploits within the Department of Homeland Security.
They say, well, the Department of Homeland Security can't confirm nor deny if anything that he talks about actually happened.
Probably because they've got-- - Can't.
- Yeah, that's not how government-- - No, that's not how these police agencies work.
- Yeah, they can't just go, oh yeah, that all happened.
Or they can't even turn around and say, no, that didn't happen, because they need to keep this classified.
Maybe he's been breaking some NDAs by giving his stories, but at the end of the day, he's not gone to prison for them, has he?
So it's a very strange thing to complain about there.
Yeah, the review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes gives the movie a critic score of 77%, so it's 1% off.
The film star, and this is where I think some of the controversy is coming from outside of the film, because it seems like, to be fair, This particular star, Tim Caviezel, who's starring as Tim Ballard's character in this, has said some strange things.
He said that he's talked repeatedly about some of his more bizarre themes.
He attended a QAnon-themed conference in 2021, has appeared under a number of times on Steve Bannon's podcast, which is nothing to say he's bad for, but then also called QAnon a good thing.
Now, I don't know enough about QAnon personally to comment on that.
Make up for your own mind whether that means that he's a weird conspiracy theorist or if he's on your side.
It just means now we don't like him.
Yes, it's an excuse for these sorts of reviewers to turn around and say he's not on our side.
That's what it is.
And using the language of the movement, he warned that a big storm is coming and also referred to the mystical qualities of adrenochrome, a chemical that QAnon fans falsely believe is being harvested from the brains of child victims.
Now, I'm not saying that adrenochrome is a real thing, but I will say that the elites literally got caught having a child sex ring with being orchestrated by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, who went down for child sex trafficking in a ring of people doing that, where she was the only person who went down And nobody else got taken, got took down for it.
So who was she trafficking these people to is a question that we'll be asking forever.
You can make up your own minds of who you might think was involved in that, in that situation.
But you know, it's very difficult for me now to look at articles like this from the BBC and articles from the Guardian, like we'll see in a moment, where it calls it a big conspiracy theory when we know that this happened and we know that this does happen.
Not even just in the big scale like that.
There are countries like Colombia that do still have this sort of thing happen to them.
So just going out and saying, oh, it's a paranoid conspiracy theory movie.
It's very strange.
One odd thing to say for something that we know actually happens.
It's almost like you want to downplay this whole thing.
Things like this.
I mean, I don't know if this is true and I never heard of this bit before, but let's look at what we do know is true.
If you are born an albino in Africa, The likelihood of you being snatched off the street, killed, chopped up and eaten as medicine by other people is quite high.
I did not know that.
There's documentaries on it.
If you want to think about what we will ingest because we think it'll have some sort of positive effect.
Powdered rhino horn um tiger penis so if if someone said to very rich people we're going to suck this chemical out of a child's brain it'll kill the child but then you can ingest it and it'll make you younger or make you live longer well that wouldn't surprise me if some people would do that No, I agree that it wouldn't surprise me if people would do that either.
Not that I'm saying that I can guarantee that it does happen, but we know some of the things that did happen.
So once again, trying to downplay all of this just because of the fact that it lies on the opposite aisle of where you want to be politically seems very immoral to me.
Carrying on, Angel Studios has denied links to QAnon and distanced itself from the remarks of the star of its surprise hit, so these will be the people who actually made the film.
If I scroll down for this, there you can see on the right, yep, that's Tim Ballard in that picture there, the person who the story is based on.
Very interesting figure.
Every actor has their opinions and many have said controversial things, said Mr. Harmon, the studio president.
For us, it's not about that, it's about getting the message out there.
Right now, there's children who are suffering.
Very admirable, as far as I'm concerned, because Hollywood doesn't make films like this anymore.
They would prefer to shove strong, independent women down your gullet and make you beg for more, rather than actually make interesting films that people care about.
Here's the offending Guardian article, Sound of Freedom, the QAnon-adjacent thriller seducing America.
Getting lots of nice buzzwords in the title there, so that everybody goes, ooh, this is a bad person film for the bad people.
A white man a hero?
I know.
We've got to get rid of these films.
Jesus, we do.
I know, it's so terrible.
If it was being the same thing being done by a strong black woman, then maybe, maybe we could accept it.
But no, with this guy.
And he's helping brown children.
I know.
This is white saviour.
I'm leaving.
This is white saviour right here.
He's got blonde hair.
He's got blue eyes.
I'm disgusted.
I'm sorry, I love the rhetoric that's used here.
Type the word Sound of Freedom into Twitter.
Decent people who wish to live good, happy lives should under no circumstances actually do this.
And the search will yield dozens of triumphant reports crowing about the improbable victory of a film by that title over the likes of Indiana Jones at the box office this week.
Now, what I'd recommend after reading this next paragraph is for the person who wrote this article to reverse the video about 10 minutes and listen to my spiel about how films actually make money because he really needs it.
Bless him.
It says, That's not strictly speaking accurate.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny had already been out for five days, the first three of which out-earned Sound of Freedom's opening day take when the new independent thriller came to theaters on Tuesday.
But for a fleeting moment, while the intended audience of Indy's latest outing was presumably spending time with their families and friends at barbecues, an unoccupied freedom fandom rallied by the star Jim Cavazial Claimed the day with a $14.2 million gross versus Dial of Destiny's $11.7 million gross.
No matter that these figures require selective, almost willfully misleading framing to allow for the David and Goliath narrative trumpeted by supporters, as the copious tweets accusing Disney of being in cahoots with the global capital of high-powered... Jesus Christ, this is such a paragraph.
I know.
High-power pedophiles, makes clear.
No comment.
The truth doesn't have too much purchase around these parts.
So they're insinuating that, oh, you're just manipulating the figures to make it seem like it's out-earned.
Nobody's saying that it's out-earned.
People are saying it made a profit, which Indiana Jones, so far, has failed to do.
Once again, reverse this video, figure out how movies make their money and how much actually gets spent on these films, and then come back to me, please, Mr. Guardian Journalist.
May also talk, here's some of the choice select quotes I've got here.
The uninitiated may not pick up on the red yarn and cork board subject.
Subtext pinned onto a mostly straightforward extract submission.
So it's right wing because of the fact once, like we mentioned, there's a white man and he's helping brown people.
Therefore, therefore it's evil and right wing.
Make it make sense.
And yet a coating of plausible deniability covers a film.
So, once again, it's not saying nothing explicit.
It's just, here are these events happening in a way that you can understand and empathize with.
Therefore, it's evil, according to this.
These zestier strains of scaremongering are absent in the text itself.
That's right.
I've made it up myself.
But they lurk in the shadows around the film, outwardly non-insane, Enough to lure in the persuadable, the disappointingly unjuicy sound of freedom pretends to be a real movie, because this person is now the arbiter of what is and isn't a real movie, like a pregnancy crisis center masquerading as a bona fide health clinic.
So let's just get some, ooh these people probably don't support abortion, either these people don't support murdering children in the womb.
Okay, no I don't actually, thank you for noticing.
Though we differ on the culprits and causes, everyone agrees that child trafficking is indefensible.
They had to say that at the end.
It's the final paragraph.
If I just scroll all the way down over here.
By the way, we also don't support child trafficking.
Just in case anybody was confused by this article, The Guardian does not support child trafficking.
And we know they don't because They reported on this in 2018.
The film is set in Colombia.
I would assume that this might be the actual child sex trafficking ring that they are talking about in the film that Jim Ballard was involved in taking down.
Here's an article from 2018 about a child sex trafficking being rife in Colombia's picturesque city of Cartagena.
Did you read that article?
I read through most of the article and it's harrowing.
Army Captain Vaping women across Cartagena, taking him to tattoo parlours to get his initials tattooed under the breast.
It's horrifying.
Dozens and dozens and dozens of them.
Yeah and this is the sort of thing that happens in places that the Sound of Freedom is dramatising, yes, but it's based on true narratives.
So the Guardian reports on these things but then turns around and says, but if you make a film about it, if it's too right-wing for us, if the implication of the film is too right-wing for us, No thank you.
Similarly, Rolling Stone, my favorite, came out and said that it's a superhero movie for dads with brain worms, dropping QAnon again.
To be fair, once again with the QAnon stuff, this actor might not have done himself any favors bringing that up in his own personal life, but that's his personal life.
The film has nothing to do with QAnon.
This one as well, why anti-trafficking experts are torturing the sound of freedom.
Once again, if you want accuracy in films, sorry to break this to you, Braveheart is not actually how it went down.
He's raising it as a problem, even if half of it's made up.
They say the whole film's made up.
Does it matter?
He's still raising a real issue that's happening across the world.
Child sexual exploitation.
Yeah, but what is it that Hollywood cares about?
What is it that Hollywood cares about while all of this is going on and their films are being tanked while films that people actually want to go and see are succeeding?
Well, they're saying, we're on strike.
We're on strike because we don't want to be replaced with AI.
And neither do the writers.
And the writers want to be paid more.
We all want to be paid more.
Nobody wants to be replaced with AI.
And I don't say this because I actually think that it would be good in the long run.
But as far as Hollywood productions go right now, if most of the people involved in them, certainly the writers, were replaced with AI, I would expect we would get much better films.
Yeah, I mean, let's be honest, most of the films Hollywood produced could be done by AI.
Every rom-com, every action film, could all be done by AI.
What couldn't be done would be the human interest stories.
And some of the original films that were like, oh that came out of nowhere, what was that about?
Matrix would be a good example of something that just comes out.
I would never want films, not necessarily Hollywood, I think Hollywood should crash and burn to be perfectly honest, but I would never want films to be replaced by robots making films for us because it would remove the humanity.
Obviously it would, but it's going to happen, but Marvel absolutely could It's already on a production line but if they just had the AI doing it I would imagine we'd probably get better more logically consistent stories than what we get nowadays.
I've not watched Marvel.
Well it all depends who programs it.
So if you've got AI and you program it to be a woke superhero film you're still going to get a piece of rubbish.
Yeah, but with that, that's everything I wanted to talk about regarding this.
If you get the opportunity to watch Sound of Freedom, I'd say it seems like a film worth supporting.
So I'll try and watch it as soon as I get opportunity to.
Seems a film you're going to watch and you're going to be entertained.
You're going to sit there and you're going to deep down inside, you're going to want to be that man.
You're going to convince yourself you would do the same as him in that situation because you're a real man.
It'll be aspirational.
Aspirational.
And you're doing good.
You're protecting the tribe.
You're improving the world.
You're improving communities.
And they're the sort of films men need to watch more of.
Yes, absolutely.
And with that, let's go on to the written comments, because I don't believe I'm going to put this back in now, John.
I'm hoping that the echo has gone away.
You can talk to me now, John.
Hello?
I hope... Oh no, don't talk to me like that, not right in my ear, John, please.
No, I know they can't hear you, but I can hear you.
But you are beautiful.
Thank you.
I'm being harassed is what I'm going to say into the camera.
I will blink twice to let you know I'm in danger.
Okay, there we go.
We don't have any video comments today, do we, John?
No.
So that's all right.
We'll go straight into the written comments.
First, though, I will just give a big shout out to our top donor for today of Justin, who donated £100.
Thank you very much, Justin.
We really appreciate that.
We'll read some of the comments now, though.
So Russian Garbage Human says, Nick, absolute pleasure to see you back.
You're welcome.
Thank you.
And Christian Anderson says, are you sure there's voices in your ear, Harry, and not just in your head?
I heard them too.
Yeah.
See, Nick heard them too.
Therefore, if one of us is going crazy, we're both going crazy.
So there we go.
Wigan Survivalist says, Harry, will you do a review of Sound of Freedom with Connor and also Oppenheimer if you and Connor get the chance?
Sound of Freedom, I would absolutely do a review with Connor.
I love reviewing media with Connor.
He's a great guy.
Oppenheimer, I'll be perfect.
I'm tired of Christopher Nolan films.
I don't care.
Christopher Nolan, he's made some films that I really enjoy, but his films are so long and they're so slow.
I don't know who he is.
What films has he done?
Christopher Nolan, you might be most aware of him for the Dark Knight trilogy.
He did Batman Begins, Dark Knight, Dark Knight Rises.
He did Inception.
My personal favorite film of his is one of his really early ones.
I think it's his second film is Memento.
Yep.
If you ever watched that.
What else has he done?
He did Interstellar.
Oh, actually, no, Memento is joint first with the Prestige as well.
if you've watched that.
- That was an amazing film.
- Yes, that was a fantastic film.
- It was all okay, that was amazing.
- Yeah, the prestige is fantastic.
And then what else did he do?
He did Dunkirk.
And then the most recent one that he did was, I can't even remember the name of it.
It was some film about time travel and being able to reverse time while you're also moving forward in time.
The main character of the film was called Protagonist.
And I thought to myself, I don't want to watch that.
I don't care.
I'm sure it'll be a well-made, competently done film.
Josh is much more interested in watching it than I am.
So if anybody's going to do a review of Oppenheimer, it'll probably end up being Josh.
So maybe he'll do something with that.
Oh God, I've been talking so long, my voice is going croaky.
Lord Nerevar says, Just remember, if you replace Hugh Edwards with someone like Nigel Farage or Calvin Robinson, in this story, all of a sudden the exact people who are defending Mr. Edwards would be clawing their eyes out with bloodlust.
We can see the apparatus they use to protect their own in full operation now.
Yep.
Yep.
I agree completely.
Like I say, for me, it's them closing ranks.
They don't care about principle, they don't care about morality, they care about protecting them and theirs.
Omar Awad.
It's not a big club, it's a nonce club.
Thank God you're not in it.
Allegedly.
Allegedly.
Just want to put that out there.
Just when you think you hate them enough, MSM can't be replaced by AI fast enough.
Yeah, have you seen that as well, actually?
The Associated Press has reportedly been thinking about replacing some of their staff writers with AI, which, if your writing can be replaced with AI, it's obviously not that valuable.
RJL.
What was more interesting was that I think the story serves as an analysis into both left and rights thinking.
People on the left were defending Edwards citing his mental health and no laws were broken.
On the other side where the right was saying it's still weird and he was sexually engaging with a teenager, allegedly.
Looking at that, we can say that the left morality is rooted in the state and subjectivism, whereas the right is rooted in traditionalism and objectivism.
Yeah, I can certainly see that division in the way that the reaction is going.
The money for the drugs is my big point.
Yeah, I can understand.
I think there's layers of immorality, but certainly that's a terrible thing to do, to fund a young kid's drug habit.
Potentially, that's terrible.
Just remember, if you're asking yourself, am I on the right side of an issue?
Guardian are suddenly asking Sourcebro as if they have any care for standards and ethics in journalism.
Just remember, if you're asking yourself, am I on the right side of an issue?
Just remember, if the opposite side are the literal friends of Savile, that you're probably doing something right.
Yeah, once again, I don't mind Hollywood shutting itself down for a year.
Good, go away.
Self-report.
Unions in general are cancer, but if they remove all cringe-woke projects in favor of movies like this with their strike, then they may have some uses.
Yeah, once again, I don't mind Hollywood shutting itself down for a year.
Good, go away.
Then people who I meet in the street won't ask me about your terrible films.
George Hap again, BBC protecting a nonce.
No way, it's like they have a pedo statue right in front of their HQ.
Oh, yeah, do you remember that?
Yeah, that, but again, that's complicated.
So he, the guy who created the statue above the BBC's main building, he was an artist.
After he died, it was discovered then he was a pedo.
It's got nothing, a bit like Michael Jackson.
Maybe an unsavory character, but people still plays music.
Well, with Michael Jackson, there is a lot of conjecture as to whether he actually did it or not.
But in the public's mind, he's guilty.
In the public's mind, yes.
But people still plays music.
This is true.
I think one of the problems with the statue of the BBC, though, is that along with the crimes that he committed, the statue itself is of an older man clutching, I think, a nude younger boy.
So with the context of who he was privately, I think a lot of people find it very unsavory, that statue to say that.
I can understand why you say it's art.
It's just rings of cancel culture.
All right.
Let's carry on.
So let's ask some of your My first memory of wokeism is at 10 years old when our P5 teacher was explaining to us that we can't use the term blackboards or whiteboards anymore.
I never got this.
How old are you?
Are you younger or older than me, Bay State?
Because I don't, I'd never got this.
Can't use blackboards or whiteboards anymore because that's where racism comes from.
I still remember the entire class of 10-year-olds looking at her like she's an idiot.
Yeah, I wonder why.
You know, you'd think people would be embarrassed becoming that aware that you're dumber than a 10-year-old, but alas, apparently they cannot feel embarrassment.
Yeah, that seems like that's a particularly bad example.
I never... Blackboards and whiteboards, that's where racism comes from.
I remember blackboards in my school being referred to as chalkboards.
Maybe for me it's because by the time I went into school, we started to get digital boards, but even then we still had whiteboards and we didn't call them not whiteboards, we didn't call them like pen boards or something, we called them whiteboards.
So that's very strange.
I'll have to read this one, I'm sorry.
Sophie Liv, Nick is correct, Harry is a very beautiful man.
Why do you guys think I'm watching the Lotus Eaters all the time?
The quality of men here is just top notch.
High quality, strong men.
Keep going guys, you are the goal to reach for.
To be fair, thank you very much Sophie.
Someone needs to set up an I Love Javi fan club.
No!
That's what they need to do.
Oh, that will devolve, that will devolve very quickly.
Right.
Moving swiftly on, Arizona Desert Rat says, Woke the application of intersectionality in critical race theory without regard towards statistical facts or the effects of applying the theories.
That's fair.
Yeah.
They're right.
The reality of applying the theories, they always go the opposite way than intended.
Yeah.
TMKS says, we can't use the term pedo because that's offensive to the pedos.
Quote of the day.
I think that was one of yours there.
It was.
Someone online, Lizzo is objectively unattractive because she's unfit, which is naturally not something that you want in a mate.
That's fair.
Yeah.
Joan of Arc, been saying Wokeism is a non-theistic religion for many years.
One thing Woke and LaVey Satanism have in common is that it's the non-theistic part of them the rest of us tend to have a harder time wrapping our heads around.
Other similarities include a heavy dose of Gnosticism and everything that flows from that.
I don't know what exactly you mean by Satanism, but I am aware of the Church of Satan.
They say that they don't believe in God.
They worship themselves instead.
It's a sort of religion of self-love, which still seems like it would lead to many immoral outcomes to me, because if you just love yourself and everything that you do, then surely you think that you're beyond any wrongdoing.
Those stupid people wanting to be special.
Yes, and Dan Taylor says the idea of children as a blank slate is not a new idea.
The original idea comes from John Locke and it was called tabula rasa.
That is a decent point to be fair.
His whole idea of the state of nature just assumes that everybody in the state of nature is the same in the first place.
Children being seen as fully formed miniature humans was a common idea from the Middle Ages.
That's very interesting, thank you for that.
Omar Awad, they have so many rights they can't remember what it's like to be wrong.
Like a sort of pro-choice paralysis, they can't find a new cause to champion without becoming lunatics.
I think it's, I wouldn't even call most of what they get in the woke lobby rights.
They get privileges and they're used to being given privileges constantly by all the way from when they were children, by their parents.
Like you say, a lot of them are middle to upper middle class.
They come from privileged backgrounds, so second they don't get they want, or even just get told no in a situation, off with the fairies, they snap.
They do, but it's also because the white middle class.
There's no victimhood for them.
So they don't want to be middle class and white.
So therefore I need to be gay.
I need to be part of the LGBT community.
I need to be an ally because I'm just white and I'm just straight and I'm just middle class.
Some of it is that projection of trying to be something a bit more special.
Well, I mean, I think you can take pride in your identity if you want to just acknowledge who you are.
It's the fetishism of victimhood, which is what comes with it, because even if they don't attach themselves to the, oh, I'm gay, I'm this, I'm that, they'll still go with, like you say, the critical race theory aspects of it, where I'm an oppressor because I'm white.
But then again, by putting themselves in that position, they're still putting themselves above you because I recognize what I've done.
I know that I'm a bad person, which makes me in fact a better person.
Not even a good person, it makes me a better person than you is the attitude that I always get from it.
RJL, I got asked, am I a racist?
Half-jokingly at work recently for simply talking about what I'd seen driving in the morning.
Someone had put up a massive sign saying, migrants are leeching our country.
The word is just used by smarmy intellects to other people and outcast them from society.
Well, yeah, it's just a It's a word that's got a smell to it.
And if you use that word on somebody else, it puts the smell on them.
And it makes them feel bad and it makes the people around them not want to associate with them.
It's a really awful way of trying to socially isolate people.
But it's beginning to lose its power.
All those words are losing their power.
I can certainly hope so.
Yeah.
Brian Tomlinson.
Is London air racist?
I used to arrive home after a shift in town wearing the black face of pollution.
Derek Power.
Woke is cultural Marxism, which is modern Gnosticism.
All right.
And RJ L says, under what an odd thing to say, he says, Harry, a guy who played a guitar in a pirate band likes Pirates of the Caribbean.
Go figure.
Hey, listen, I'm a simple man.
I like what I like.
Pirates are cool, okay?
And the outfit went well when I had really long hair.
I could probably get it back now, actually.
But Ross Stigall says, Hollywood hate the sound of freedom because it's like sand.
It gets everywhere and it makes them uncomfortable and difficult to traffic children.
There you go, Harry.
I paraphrased Attack of the Clones for you.
Thank you very much.
George Lucas would be proud.
Rose Gunela says, I don't think George Lucas is a bad person.
He just has nobody left around him willing to tell him no, George.
That's a bad idea.
If Jim Henson hadn't died, maybe the prequels would have been better.
Jim could have told him no.
That might be true, but I still think there's a lot in the prequels to really enjoy, so I'm willing to go back.
I'll watch them soon, and then I'll let everybody know what I think of them, and I'm probably going to come back loving them even more.
Jar Jar was robbed, I tell you.
Anyway, I think that's all we've got time for right now.
So we've got the live stream on Rumble coming up later on in about an hour's time.
So once again, you don't need a membership for that.
Although if you want to subscribe to the website, please feel free to do so.
Where Carl and Callum will be once again talking about Tumblr taking over a school, which should be interesting.
And before we sign off, is there anything you'd like to say to the audience again, Nick?
Not just follow me on Twitter.
At Nick Buckley MBE.
There we go.
Lovely.
Thank you very much for coming in again.
It's been fun.
It's always a pleasure.
Thank you very much for tuning in.
We'll see you next Monday at one o'clock British time.
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