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Aug. 8, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:34:34

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #714

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	Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for the 8th of August.
	I am very pleased to have Richard Vobes.
	Hello.
	Thank you very much for coming on.
	It's my pleasure.
	Very excited.
	And also I'm joined by our very own, a rare guest, BB Dade, also known as Bo Dade, also known as History Bro.
	Many names.
	You've been treated to a rare Bo show today.
	I hope people enjoy it.
	And what we're going to be talking about today is the first segment is going to be The War on Rural Britain.
	The second is going to be Bose.
	You're going to be talking about Don't Be a Doomer.
	Don't be all doom and gloom about the future.
	And the third one is a quite a positive story really about Elon promising to defend people if they lose their jobs for tweets, which I think is actually a very significant thing.
	I'm very much looking forward to how this develops.
	But I suppose we may as well get on with it.
	As you may well have noticed in the news, things have been made increasingly difficult for people who live in rural areas in Britain.
	Particularly with, say, the cost of running a farm or urban developments.
	We're going to be looking at some of the most recent examples because this is something I'm very passionate about.
	I see lots of value in rural living over urban living.
	I think there are lots of psychological elements that are very healthy for human beings that you can find in the countryside.
	And the incentives in, say, an urban environment, very population dense, are not particularly good for making moral good people.
	And I'll be talking a little bit more about that in a second.
	But first I wanted to highlight the fact that there has been lots of news recently about how evil and nasty people are in the countryside.
	And this, I think, largely helps to undermine people's sympathy for people who live in rural areas, because People know other people who live in the countryside, I imagine, and they might feel sympathetic that their village is going to be ruined by the actions of the government.
	So there have been lots of things that have sought to paint People who live in the countryside is being backward in some way.
	And there have been a whole host of articles.
	This one is from The Guardian.
	This is from February.
	The English countryside can still feel off limits to people of colour.
	We are working to change that.
	And if you move to the next one, John, this one's from The Times.
	Is rural racism real?
	Yes, I remember it well.
	And here we have the BBC.
	This is all the way back in July of 2021.
	Rural racism in Dorset.
	Why is our countryside 98% white?
	And again, here's the Telegraph.
	This is more reporting on what someone else said.
	British countryside is racist, says Countryfile presenter.
	And this is the more recent one from the New York Times.
	I don't know what the New York Times has to do with the English countryside, but apparently it's a place of profound inequality.
	And here they're mostly talking about how in some places 80% of the houses are second homes.
	Which is just painting, yes, these things have already been destroyed.
	You don't necessarily need to feel bad for them anymore because they've already been bought up.
	This is, you know, the one percenters ruining the countryside, so it doesn't matter if we impose things on them.
	That's kind of me reading between the lines between all of the different media narratives that we've had.
	Also a very nice picture there.
	And one of the main things I think that is destroying rural areas is building lots of new homes in a community.
	Quite often, rural villages have been around for hundreds, if not some even thousands of years, and so they're very stratified.
	Some of the homes are sites of historic importance, The community is very static.
	Some people have lived there for several generations, and so introducing lots of new people shatters the ecosystem, the society which is built up in these towns, and I think that it's quite a tragedy, really, that this sort of thing is going on.
	And particularly because the pressure for lots of these new builds is coming artificially.
	Our population isn't naturally increasing, it's increasing because of things like mass immigration, which is politically motivated.
	But I wanted to draw attention to this next article here, and this is from The Lester Mercury.
	I like reading local news because they pick up on some of the issues that national news simply miss because they're too small.
	And it says, fears new town homes will turn countryside into nondescript suburbia.
	And that's exactly what's going on.
	It's going to lose the charm of what made it nice in the first place.
	And it's just going to become another suburban area.
	It's going to perhaps even become swallowed up by a city.
	And you've had lots of experience going around the country.
	Is this something that you've noticed to a certain extent already?
	Definitely.
	It's been going on for donkeys, this.
	So my background, for those that don't know who I am, is I had a channel called The Bald Explorer.
	And I used to go exploring with my camera around looking at heritage, landscape and nature.
	And the depressing sites were the farm fields which were there for generations and generations providing food for this country.
	are being dug up, concreted over, bricked up with what effectively, to me, looks like concentration camps of houses.
	And the houses may have slight variation.
	You might have three or four different types of houses that make up these new builds.
	But it's everywhere, and if you drive around the countryside now, particularly in Sussex where I'm based, there's very few places in which there is a big buffer of countryside.
	So many, particularly on the coast, the coast has been swallowed up by new builds.
	And they're all supposedly affordable, but a lot of them seem to be very executive.
	And they also have a build quality that looks like in 10 years' time you'll be repairing and maintaining, unlike perhaps in the Victorian era when they built very sturdy houses that, okay, now, 150 odd years later, they do need some attention, but the new stuff is so flimsy.
	And you read plenty of reports in local papers of people complaining about how their wonderful new house is falling to bits.
	But it's a worrying, well it's more than a worrying trend, it's a deliberate destruction of our countryside.
	Absolutely.
	I'm glad you see it the same way and I would add on to that that many of the new builds that are being built remind me of some of the Chinese construction that I've seen where there's like a balcony in a very tall apartment and you can just peel it off of the wall because it's made in such a poor way that if you... You've got these balconies or these rails on windows that are supposed to be representative of perhaps a real balcony.
	You can't walk onto it.
	Some of these, what look like French windows, you can't open You know, they've just hit the metal rail.
	There's a lot of meanness in the design.
	The architects who do these should be absolutely embarrassed by what they're doing, but they've got their hands contailed by the developers and the government and authority to build what effectively is going to be the 15-minute cities, which is the prison that they are pushing us into.
	Yeah, it certainly seems to be going that way.
	It's going to sound silly, but if people can be removed from the countryside and slowly incentivised to move into cities, if they're concentrated in a certain area, it's going to make them easier to control.
	That wasn't an allusion to anything else.
	That's perhaps not the best word to use.
	Well, it clearly is though, isn't it?
	If you've got people concentrated, as I said, concentration camps, it doesn't have to have any wartime connotation.
	If you concentrate people in one area, you have control of those people.
	Yes, and I think that it is part of this sort of concerted effort.
	And so if we move on to some of the other examples, these are just recent examples that I've seen in the news.
	Here's a Devon village that could be getting dozens of new homes, particularly of significance to me because I'm from Devonshire and I am starting to see what I thought was isolated to some of the other parts of the Southern Hemisphere bleed into Devon now.
	There's sky-high rates of crime that are related to immigration, largely.
	And people are being moved down from, say, Liverpool and Manchester from council houses, because there's a shortage of them up there, to ones down here, down to Devon, sorry.
	And it's leading to lots more crime, lots of violent crime, knife crime even, which is unheard of where I grew up.
	And it's quite a shame, really, because it's destroying the community that I I grew up with and was used to and really valued and it's a shame that one of the last bastions of that.
	I think shame, you know, when you say it's a shame, is putting it incredibly mildly.
	I'm trying to contain my anger.
	When things are, you know, oh it's a shame, oh well never mind, it's terrible.
	I mean it's dreadful, it shouldn't happen and we have to resist this.
	This is a country.
	You mentioned earlier or in the report that says it's racist because white people live in what was a white country and these villages because they are not the cities and the towns where perhaps other people have migrated to in large numbers regardless of skin color or anything.
	And the towns and villages have been secondarily migrated to.
	How can you say it's racist that white people who traditionally lived in this country live in this country?
	I mean, it's it's a nonsense.
	But that's an agenda being pushed.
	We know that.
	I mean, we're not stupid, are we?
	We know that that is an agenda to make white people feel that they are in the wrong place.
	I, as a white middle class That's one of the most egregious examples, isn't it?
	exist.
	You know, look at adverts on the television have been wiped out.
	I no longer exist.
	That's one of the most egregious examples, isn't it?
	Where you'll struggle to find… But we do exist.
	You know, the thing is, and I think people are waking up to this rubbish, absolutely waking up to it.
	The other thing that we didn't touch on, which I think is very important, is with new builds and new materials coming into the countries.
	You go around the UK and you'll find where I am in Sussex, the geology is where I am is chalk and flint and then green sand and clay.
	And that is represented in the buildings.
	And when you build in the material that is local to that, the buildings look right.
	They sit nicely in the country, there is an aesthetic.
	Bath is certainly a great example of that.
	Exactly.
	So you've got bath stone, you've got, what's the other stone from down in Dorset that they use?
	Oh I know, I can't remember the name.
	And then if you go up into Scotland say, you've got the Granite City, in the Cotswolds you've got Elliptic Limestone, you've got everywhere you go, you go up into say Cheshire or Shropshire and you'll see the timber frame buildings because there's a lot more trees, Elizabethan buildings with Watland Dorb and Georgian stuff and it all looks right.
	But what we're now seeing is this bland, utilitarian, boring, drab design going everywhere.
	And I live on the coast, and you'll see in the Regency period we had some very beautiful buildings because people were coming to the seaside, they were taking the water, and the whole seaside What would you call it?
	The seaside event, if you like, of going on holiday, taking the water, relaxation.
	And you had all that beautiful, lovely architecture, Regency, Victorian, a bit Georgian.
	But now, again, all along the coast, you'll see this boring, utilitarian, inner-city type of buildings, inappropriate, being built.
	This is being done all over the place and I mean this is one of the problems with the new builds is there's no attention to where it's going and local... I wouldn't mind so much if it was local materials and it looked right and spaced right and housed people in a... because if you don't have aesthetics where you live you're also going to get Um, mental issues associated with it.
	If you feel crammed in, if it's boring, if there's no space to it, then you're going to get ill.
	And that's again part of the agenda.
	And I think that having, as someone who's lived in Swindon for nearly three years, I can certainly tell you with authority, if you live around ugly buildings in a run-down area, it gets to you.
	It's depressing.
	And hence your crime will start to, will increase.
	Hopefully not mine personally.
	No, no, but crime.
	I mean, you were talking about in Devon, as soon as you start bringing in all these different elements, the Portland Purbeck stone, there we go.
	Thank you, John.
	Thank you very much.
	Once you start bringing in a bland environment where there's no aesthetics, there's no aspiration.
	So you're getting trapped.
	And then of course, as you said, you're bringing in immigrants or moving people.
	And in order to bring them into our culture and our traditions, the architecture is very much part of that.
	The space you live in inspires you, or not, as the case may be.
	And if you just house people in boxes, utilitarian boxes, ticky tacky boxes, Then you're just asking for trouble.
	I mean, it seems so obvious.
	It does.
	And I actually covered this in a conversation that I'm going to get onto and talk about in a second.
	But I actually did a whole video about urban environments and how they affect you psychologically and incentivise certain negative behaviour.
	But if you can move on to another one, John, this is, I think, in Northampton, 900 homes in the countryside, which is The size of a reasonable town just astroturfed there, I suppose, which I find really frustrating.
	But this next one, I thought, to give credit to the French, I know I'm going to lose my passport for this, but rural France will suffer most from no new build policy, warns Mayor.
	And this is, I think, actually something to do with their push for net zero, because they mentioned 2050, which of course is the key number, and there's no net such and such.
	But the idea is that you preserve rural France by not building new houses in it, which seems common sense to me.
	So yes, we're being outdone by the French as a patriotic British man.
	I mean, you've got to ask yourself, why is it rural?
	Well, because you have farms.
	Yes.
	Because you need to grow food.
	You need space.
	You need countryside.
	You need places for wildlife.
	I mean, rural isn't just a thing that you just happen to have.
	It has its place.
	It's a very important part of your ecosystem and part of your country.
	You can't just keep building, building, building, and then think, oh, actually, we do need to grow things.
	We do need all these species on this.
	We may be the dominant species on this planet, but we still owe it to all these other creatures.
	You know, we're not gods.
	I'm quite keen on this sort of biblical notion of stewardship.
	I think that that characterisation of the environment is very good, because it sets the right tone for how you should approach the environment more generally, I think.
	But moving on to something else entirely.
	If you manage to defeat all of these new builds in your local community, somehow you resist your local council or the government's efforts to turn your lovely village into a concrete hellhole.
	Well, it seems like the government is going to just build some great big power lines and Oliver Dowden here, who I absolutely despise, says, onshore power won't blight countryside, says Dowden, amid unease over pylons.
	And normally when a Conservative says something, it normally means the opposite.
	And this is somewhat indicated by this next link here by the Daily Mail.
	Pay people to support electricity pylons near their countryside homes.
	Net zero czar suggests lump sum reward to speed up grid improvements amid Tory row over rural power lines.
	So yes, they're already thinking of ways to make it at least palatable for people to swallow this and I find it really quite frustrating.
	Obviously they've got power lines have to go somewhere but it seems... So can I just add... Of course.
	Why?
	Why do the power lines?
	Have we not got power lines?
	Have we not got a national grid already set up?
	Why do we need a lot more power lines?
	I don't really understand why we need more of them, but I was going to suggest that it's probably a good idea not to have them right next to where people are living.
	Well, we know that.
	I mean, again, science has shown that the outfall from electricity radiation is not good over power lines.
	I'd suggest, Richard, it's all very, very, very deliberate.
	Part of an agenda, I think you mentioned earlier, an agenda.
	You had a link from the New York Slimes earlier, didn't you?
	What place have they got to be passing judgment on the British countryside?
	You know, they're part of Operation Mockingbird still.
	They're obviously part of the agenda.
	And yeah, the idea that you will just conquer it over all of Britain.
	I think it's a very, very cynical and deliberate thing.
	Well, it's something, it's our heritage.
	Something we value and love.
	So it must be annihilated, then, for its own sake.
	The idea that the countryside is racist, you'd characterize it as a nonsense.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Complete nonsense.
	Doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
	Just feel guilty and put up with what you love being destroyed.
	That's what it is.
	It's got nothing really to do with anything else, like the logistics of power lines.
	No, it's something that's beautiful that we value.
	Let's ruin it.
	Might be wrong about that, but that's how I feel.
	What do you call the towers?
	The... Pylons.
	Pylons.
	There are pylon collectors.
	You can go online and find a pylon.
	People love them and they number them and they look for them, which is fine.
	I've got no problem with that whatsoever.
	We've all got our quirks and good luck to them.
	However, obviously, you don't want them all over the place.
	It's interesting if you look at the amount of wind farms that are going up.
	We all know what wind farms are.
	These are these Things that are supposed to be run by the wind.
	Very rarely works, yeah.
	That you need diesel to actually get going.
	And then if the wind drops, you still need the diesel to keep them going.
	And if it goes over 30 miles an hour, you have to turn them off.
	Very useful things.
	Where are the power lines for those?
	I suppose they're underground, aren't they?
	You never see them, do you?
	They're not overground.
	So are they underground?
	I guess they must be, yeah.
	All of them?
	Everyone?
	I mean they're all over the place.
	We had a whole load bunged in the sea opposite where I live.
	It's got a name, can't remember it.
	Typical, when you're filming.
	And we had this massive great scar across the countryside in which the power lines, I forget whether it's, I think it's for EDF.
	Massive great scar where they dug up the thing and supposedly in there is the power lines.
	I'm not saying they're not there.
	I'm not saying it's a conspiracy.
	But you see all these wind farms.
	There's no overhead which would be cheaper, easier to monitor.
	But you don't see them.
	Where are they?
	When were they dug in there?
	The towers go up and the blades go around by diesel.
	I'm just getting a bit sceptical that wind farms actually are doing what they're supposed to be doing, because I don't know where the power lines are.
	Well, I certainly know that they're not generating enough electricity to pay for themselves.
	They are, by definition, pointless anyway.
	No, I agree.
	I mean, it's ridiculous.
	I mean, the whole thing is such a scam that it's just getting to the point that anybody's taking any of this seriously and not actually challenging government and authority and the councils and saying, actually, you know, I want to see the actual evidence of this because I just don't believe you.
	I think it's, you know, most of it's rubbish.
	And all these power lines, will they be actually carrying power or are they just there as an aesthetic?
	Yeah, well, I've not really thought about that to be honest.
	I just saw them as an ugly necessity.
	Again, another blight to keep us down.
	And it's worth mentioning as well that I have my episode of Contemplations, Our Cities, The Problem, where I talk about the psychology of living in a city and how it's detrimental to being what I see as a good person and actually Sorry Bill, I know you grew up in the big smoke, didn't you?
	Yeah, I'm a London boy and these country bumpkins, they can't deal with it.
	All joking aside though, I do think that is going too far, that a cityscape ruins your character.
	I don't agree with you.
	I don't think it ruins your character, but it puts incentives in place that make bad behaviour more likely, I think.
	Maybe, maybe.
	Another thing which has been in the news is this, and this is debanking gun clubs.
	So banks have supposedly shut a third of all gun clubs accounts, which seems entirely unnecessary to me.
	So this is HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds and NatWest.
	They're refusing accounts or credit to businesses linked to what is seen as largely a countryside pursuit, isn't it?
	It's sort of rural hunting.
	I think something like 90% of all firearms are in Devon and Cornwall, which are very rural areas.
	And so it's just another punitive measure against people in the countryside doing what they do.
	Because I think if you have instincts that are moored in your time and place and in your culture, you're going to be more sure of your own beliefs.
	And therefore you're going to be less susceptible to being brainwashed into whatever agenda is being designed for you by the people in Whitehall and Westminster or Davos for that matter.
	And I'd certainly be remiss if I didn't mention farming as well.
	The NFU recently raised, as of yesterday, concerns with the UK's food self-sufficiency.
	This should be something that we've It's sorted out already, really, if we're in a sort of realistic world, which obviously we're not.
	Because being self-sufficient with your food is essential to national defense.
	I mean, did we not learn our lessons from, say, World War II, where we relied on importing food?
	And that gave our enemies a certain amount of power over us.
	They could leverage it.
	Big for victory.
	Exactly, yeah.
	But yes, I would like to see more food self-sufficiency.
	Here we have another example, this is from the 6th of August, about Bristol City Council basically incentivising or pressuring the last city farm owner in Bristol to basically settle up the about half of her most productive land so they can build a crematorium, which I thought was quite a fitting analogy really, that they're going to infringe on agricultural land to build a crematorium.
	Well, I imagine you'll probably need a few more if you continue approaching agriculture in this way.
	Isn't it weird though, the seemingly global, at least in the West, the agenda to have a war on farms and farmers?
	That's so sinister, isn't it?
	It basically seems like a prerequisite for mass population control, doesn't it?
	I know that sounds quite conspiratorially minded, but... No, it's one cause and effect of that.
	Yeah, if you can't grow enough food, people start to starve.
	I'm staggered there, because...
	You need to turn farms into crematoriums suggests that there is going to be an increase in deaths.
	And didn't we have a recent event in which some magic solution was put into people's arms that has not gone down terribly well.
	I know the NHS have decided to increase the size of their mortuaries tenfold.
	Because apparently they're expecting a lot more deaths.
	And when asked, the person who told me, the whistleblower who told me, said, well, you know, what with global warming, there might be more floods and more fires.
	And that was the reason that we would suddenly need tenfold more mortuaries.
	Mortuaries, obviously, you know, you've got to put the bodies somewhere.
	So we need this space for crematoriums so we can burn them and then presumably sprinkle the ashes somewhere.
	And the great thing about a crematorium and the places where you put ashes and things is that you won't be able to put it back into farmland because, not for a hundred years or so, because you can't go around digging up the remains or the scattered remains of deceased people.
	Farms are being targeted and the self-sufficiency thing is a huge problem.
	And it's just not being addressed.
	And on my channel, I'm encouraging everybody to grow food because we're going to see very shortly, next year, we're going to see massive shortages of food.
	We can see already, and you may think this is conspiratorial, and it probably is a conspiracy, but it doesn't mean it's not true, that the weather is being engineered.
	You look at the moment, we've been told that July was the hottest July on record.
	And that's obviously not true.
	You only have to have lived through July and know… Pouring with rain, yeah.
	It hasn't stopped raining in Swindon.
	We're in the era of global boiling apparently now, according to the UN, which is again a palpable lie.
	And the weather is being manipulated so that next year crops will not be at the height that they will be in or should be in.
	And there's going to be a food shortage.
	And we need farmland and we need people to grow.
	There are wonderful ways of doing it.
	No dig that Charles Dowding has given to the world and pioneered.
	And he's down your way a bit.
	not in Swindon, but, you know, near, near Deva.
	He's in, um, he's in Somerset where they are like that.
	See, it's nice in Somerset.
	Um, but yeah, we've got to get people growing, even if it's in window boxes or anywhere.
	Somebody got in touch with me and although I often get criticized for my strident views,
	Somebody said, if actually, if people use their gardens instead of boring, useless, monocultured lawns, where they're just trying to get one type of grass and it looks nice, but actually did a no-dig type garden, we could go back to, as you said, you mentioned Dig for Victory, where people were the most healthiest they'd ever been for hundreds of years during the Second World War, because they weren't eating the highly processed
	poisoned food in supermarkets and the dreadful lacking in minerals and vitamins of the fruit and veg in supermarkets.
	People should be buying from farm shops or growing their own.
	And this is so serious.
	I mean, this is so serious that people are just not taking it seriously.
	They're not taking it seriously.
	I saw the other day some statistics about certain types of diseases and childhood cancers amongst the Amish community is almost non-existent because they eat food they've grown themselves organically.
	They also have a lot of manual labour, don't they?
	And so they've got all of the building blocks of living a healthy lifestyle.
	Certainly their children don't eat really any processed food and suddenly lots of their diseases are just non-existent to them.
	I don't know if that was Amish propaganda or... Sorry, just say that again.
	So you're saying that they're not ill?
	Yeah.
	Or they get ill a lot less, I think.
	That's self-evident, isn't it?
	If you eat food that has minerals and vitamins and all the nutrients that the body needs, if you're drinking pure water, you're not... I mean, if you drink tap water, you're a fool because it's poison.
	I wouldn't.
	If you see what's in tap water, you wouldn't drink it.
	If you're not filtering your water, you're an idiot.
	No, I'm being serious.
	I mean, unless you look into these things, you just don't know.
	You assume that what comes out the tap is okay.
	But if you go to your local water supplier and say, could you give me an analysis, please, of what's in my water?
	You'll be surprised at what is in the water.
	And I've been told then, if you go back to them and say, actually, you're not supplying H2O, which is two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, you're not supplying what you're saying.
	They'll say, well, we won't charge you then.
	All right, well, that sounds worthwhile.
	Well, definitely worthwhile because if they're not, if trade's description, if they're not actually sending you H2O water, but they're sending you a mixture of arsenic and all sorts of stuff in there, you know, think of all, think of the pill that millions of women are weeing down the loo that's going back.
	I've heard about this.
	Yeah.
	I mean, if you don't drink filtered water, and a good filter, you are seriously likely to be ill.
	It's turning the frogs gay.
	I've heard.
	It may well be.
	It's boiling the frogs in the bath and they don't know it.
	But it's the same with food.
	People are going to supermarkets and I recommend putting on a pair of glasses, which do not actually exist, that when you look at the shelves of the brightly coloured food, what you actually see is blue bottles with poisoning.
	Because they have so much rubbish in the food.
	This is why people have got to grow it themselves or go to organic farmers or as near to organic farmers and support farm shops.
	Okay, well, I don't think we have time to go through some of the other stuff, so I think that's alright.
	No, no, it's okay.
	I put it towards the end because it was some of the less pressing stuff, but I think that we've pretty much established, yes, that there does seem to be a concerted effort against the rural areas of Britain, largely because the nature of the communities themselves seem to lend themselves well to making people more sure of what they believe, and therefore they're less easy to control.
	I think that that's at least a fair summary of what we've been talking about.
	Anyway, you're going to be telling us all about why it's not all doom and gloom, or why we shouldn't at least vocally be miserable about the state of the world.
	Right, yeah, where I've been on the podcast a few times before, I've got a slight reputation for trying to do something positive, a bit of a white pill.
	And I thought I wanted to just, I really want to just address the issue of confidence.
	I think it's extremely important, arguably one of the most important issues of our time, if we're engaged here in some sort of culture war.
	I think people's confidence is giant, a giant thing.
	You're only defeated if you believe you are.
	And there's, to my mind, a terrible strain of thought towards Doomerism, Defeatism, Nihilism, People believing that everything's already lost.
	How often do you see it on Twitter or something?
	People make whole videos about how England or the West is already lost.
	It's already over.
	Give up.
	There's no point fighting it.
	It's a fait accompli.
	I just say no to that.
	I'll hear none of it.
	I'll have none of it, actually.
	We've only just... We've barely begun to awaken.
	We haven't even begun to fight.
	Don't give up, is what I'm saying.
	Where this podcast has to at least nominally be attached to something in the news, I think one of the people you could point to is Peter Hitchens, and he said Chris Hitchens then.
	Peter Hitchens, there's a tweet up there which he put fairly recently and he's been banging this drum for years now where he says, he said this in a tweet, you are all doomed Leave as soon as you can.
	I am not, in fact, joking.
	And no, I won't advise you where to go.
	Once again, I address the youth of Britain.
	That, to me, is not only weak and contemptible, it's poison, actually.
	That's a cancerous thing to say.
	I think.
	And I think it should be kicked back against.
	I kind of hate doomers and accelerationists.
	If you're an accelerationist out there, stop doing it.
	We don't need that.
	That doesn't help anybody.
	OK?
	It really does exasperate me when I see it.
	It's so sort of effeminate to me.
	It's so sort of cowardly.
	In the 90s, when I was younger, there used to be this idea that you'd be depressed or despondent because there was no Great Calls.
	Our fathers and forefathers had a Great Calls in the World Wars or something that gave their life meaning.
	There's a bit in Fight Club and Brad Pitt says it.
	We have no Great Depression.
	Great Depression is only our lives.
	Well, you've got a Calls now and what?
	You're just going to give in and roll over?
	You're just going to give in to cretins?
	You know, somebody like Narinder Kaur, or Clive Lewis, or Navarra Media, or The Guardian.
	Just gonna give in?
	Not even gonna fight?
	No, no, no, no, no.
	No, no, no.
	No.
	Got to start being a man about it.
	Stop being a child.
	And I think that's really important.
	I really do think, because it's a psychological thing.
	You're doing... Hitchens there is doing the work of our enemies.
	Is he in the pay of the CCP or the WEF?
	Why is he saying that?
	That's a despicable thing to say.
	I think he's always been very cynical, hasn't he?
	He makes money out of writing books about it.
	Well, I think there are certainly incentives for him to say it, but I also think that he probably genuinely believes it.
	But I also think that if you feel that way, it's bad form to spread the discontent.
	I see it as something that you personally have to work with privately if you're feeling disillusioned.
	But if you are Going about things as if Britain's already lost, you need to give up.
	Well, if you're already giving up before it's a said and done thing, then I call into question how much you really cared about Britain in the first place.
	I have this notion of being a captain on a sinking ship.
	You've got to be the last man on the boat before it sinks, because you won't be able to live with yourself if you potentially abandoned people under your watch.
	I see that, although I don't necessarily have any position of authority to say these sorts of things, I still feel an obligation to the people who live in Britain, particularly the people who I grew up with, my family.
	I've got Everyone I know and love is in this country and if you're giving up on everyone you know and love, which is effectively what Hitchens is saying, you leave the country.
	And the Englishman not yet born.
	Yeah.
	And so what are you left to live with?
	Are you just going to be some sort of economic mercenaries hopping between different countries before they, you know, inevitably backslide into some sort of collapse?
	Hitchens isn't prepared to tell you.
	He doesn't necessarily say where to go, what to do.
	He's explicitly saying he's not going to tell you.
	Yeah.
	Because he's out of ideas, that's what it is.
	He's out of ideas.
	I mean, I wrote an article about this, if you want to bring that up John, where I put it a bit better, rather than just a rant, it's actually put in better words, where There's something worth fighting for.
	It's worth fighting for, even though you think it might all be lost.
	Even if you really think that, and you want to have an endless pity party for yourself.
	Okay, but keep it down though, because lots of us still want to fight on.
	You're just destroying morale.
	We need morale.
	Also, there's the sort of Pascal's wager element of, well, what if you're wrong about your analysis that we're all doomed?
	And then will you be able to live with yourself if you gave up and then eventually things actually come around and things improve?
	Well, I would say that that would be a very difficult thing to swallow if you just gave up the slightest sign of hardship.
	What are you going to think of yourself?
	Just fight back.
	It's always worth fighting back.
	Always.
	I've been in a number of fights in my time.
	And one time I didn't fight back when I was 13 or 14.
	It wasn't a terrible beating, but I didn't fight back.
	And the shame of that afterwards, the shame of it.
	We completely lost our country, completely replaced in our own country, all of our heritage, because they mean they're coming for everything you hold dear.
	They're going to burn it down.
	And you didn't do anything.
	You didn't stand up.
	You didn't say anything.
	The shame of that.
	Well, I won't have it.
	How can you live with yourself?
	Academic Agent recently published a book, Prophets of Doom, where he talks about people like Toynbee and Carlyle and Spengler and all their prophecies of doom, reveling in it, wallowing in it.
	Disgusting.
	Now, it's exactly what we don't need.
	In World War II, for example, if you were pro-Nazi, or in many times of war, if you were openly seditious against the cause, that was a terrible thing.
	That was a terrible crime, really.
	And now it's sort of fashionable.
	It's sort of something cool that most people do on Twitter or something.
	I find it sickening.
	I mean really, really, really sickening.
	Kenneth Clarke, the art historian, not the politician.
	The late Lord Kenneth Clarke.
	Not the former Mayor of London.
	No, no.
	There's two Lord Kenneth Clarks.
	There's the one that used to be Major's Home Secretary.
	And then there's the old art historian, the father of Alan Clark.
	And he said, I've said this before and I'll say it again.
	I'll keep banging this drum.
	He said that a civilization, a culture can destroy itself through cynicism and despondency just as much as through bombs.
	Well, he's absolutely right.
	If history tells us anything, It's that whole nations, whole cultures, whole civilizations can be destroyed, can implode, simply through a lack of confidence, simply through doomerism.
	I very much agree, yeah.
	I think that we shouldn't be giving up.
	I think that if you're giving up this hurdle, then there are serious questions about who you are and your character.
	Richard, you've been very, very quiet.
	Well, I was just thinking, you've got to give people something to fight for.
	If you have nothing to fight for, and I don't think the youth are being given things to fight for.
	They don't know what this country really means.
	You're talking because you know history and you have it in your blood.
	But I think the youth of today, again, like with the water, they've been poisoned.
	And we have this woke agenda where We've seen the slow march through the institutions in which the students were poisoned who became the teachers and the lecturers who are now poisoning and passing this agenda on in which all our traditions and cultures in this country are being, as you said, are being told that they're no good and Hitchin is advising people to leave.
	But I think I mean, I agree with you.
	I mean, personally, this country is an amazing country.
	I am incredibly proud of this country.
	We have done some amazing things.
	That said, a lot of what we think about the history in this country is all very different than the textbooks actually tell us because there is a great awakening happening and a lot of what we've been told is not actually true.
	But that said, it is still a noble and honest country.
	We are honourable people and we have given the world so much.
	And like the countryside, we're all being blamed for it.
	We are the inheritors of a thousand years of glorious tradition.
	And just because some leftists Lie about it, at least by omission.
	Well, it shouldn't stop.
	Anyone can read a book.
	There are plenty of based or based adjacent historians on YouTube.
	It can be found.
	But you make a good point where lots of people say, lots of doomers and accelerationists types will say, well, there's nothing I can do.
	What can I do?
	Well, I would say that one man, even one man, let alone a few thousand, with a righteous cause and a fire in his belly can do unbelievable things.
	Again, history has shown us time and time again that really a small cadre of men can change history and pivot it on a dime even.
	And so I would say to give some people something to cling on to, Something to stand opposed to the doomerism of Spengler or something.
	There's somebody called James Stockdale.
	A lot of people probably never heard of him.
	There's a picture, John, of Admiral James Stockdale.
	That's Kenneth Clark, the Lord Clark.
	The next one.
	Well, there you go.
	There's Admiral Stockdale.
	And he won the Medal of Honour.
	He was a prisoner of war in Vietnam in Hanoi Hilton for eight years.
	Most men that sort of experience would absolutely break.
	And it didn't break him.
	It didn't really come all that close to breaking him.
	Because his attitude was twofold.
	One, an unshakable optimism.
	Not blind optimism though, and I'll get into that in a moment.
	A type of unshakable faith that you will get through it.
	But that, combined with a contradictory idea, but combined with, and at the same time, to hold these two things in your mind at the same time, which is a bit of a paradox why this has been called the Stockdale Paradox, is also to look at with your eyes open at the horrors of what you're facing.
	The real horrors of what you're facing.
	And don't shy away from it.
	Don't bury your head in the sand.
	Don't just have an endless pity for yourself.
	And yet also to never give up hope.
	But that isn't blind optimism.
	As he said in Prisoners of War, in Vietnam, Hanoi Hilton, where he was tortured many times, dozens of times.
	Terrible torture.
	He said that, you know, if you give up hope, if you're a pessimist, you definitely die.
	You're done.
	But optimists also die.
	If you have a blind optimism that you're going to be home by Christmas, then when you're not home by Christmas, You die of heartbreak.
	You can die of ennui.
	Your will can be so profoundly broken that it physically breaks you.
	That's certainly true.
	Whereas Stockdale, Stockdale Paradox, is something you can cling on to.
	It seems to have worked.
	I take solace in it.
	That combination of two different things, which are a bit contradictory, is never give up.
	Don't even dream of giving up.
	Don't entertain it for a moment, and yet look with clear eyes upon what you're confronted with.
	Don't shy away from it.
	I think that's an incredibly powerful mindset.
	I think that's the sort of thing the West, more men in the West, are going to need, rather than simply rolling over.
	And giving up, it sickens me.
	But you need to have something to hang all of that on.
	And I think that's the problem that we have at the moment, is that all those things that you intuitively are hanging that principle of not giving up, that wartime spirit, if you like, has been so eroded that kids, youth of today, don't know what you're talking about.
	Pride.
	Family.
	Appearances.
	We mentioned in the architecture how important having a good aesthetic around you lifts the spirit.
	If you haven't got the spirit, if you are pushed down and there is nothing to hold on to, Then what are you fighting for?
	I think some do.
	I think many do.
	I don't necessarily buy the narrative that all Zoomers are like this lost generation of mindless buffoons.
	I don't actually buy that.
	Well, I'm not many.
	I wasn't saying you were saying exactly that.
	But nonetheless, I think there are lots and lots of people, their voices perhaps drowned out.
	Perhaps ridiculed too much.
	I know there's there's a few Zoomers in our office.
	I know of lots of young people who are Really quiet based, who are fans of history, who do reject the narrative that all of our history and heritage is somehow wrong and evil.
	But I also do take your point that it has been eroded in the last few decades.
	Again, okay, so here we go.
	If you have children at school, get them out.
	Mm-hmm.
	The state system is killing... Home school if you can, absolutely agree with you there Richard.
	...is killing your children.
	They're teaching four-year-olds how to masturbate.
	They are sexualizing our children.
	We've seen the film The Sound of Freedom is out, which is showing how paedophiles in this world are taking children.
	This is on a huge scale.
	But the state is Taking away the fight from children, they're making them into useless slaves.
	You know what school's like.
	You have to put your hand up if you want to go for a week.
	Human basic, not even a right, a basic need.
	You have to shut up because I'm talking, says the teacher.
	I'm telling you there's more than two genders and you cannot have a difference of opinion.
	All of this is going on in the state schools.
	And if you have your children in the state school, you are losing your children.
	If you are a parent who have anything that you want to fight for, get the kids out and home school.
	Because why have you got to obey the state?
	You're free sovereign people.
	You make up your own mind.
	And when you're free sovereign people and you understand what life really is, you have something to fight for.
	And I think that's what Hitchin is getting at when he says leave, because the system is killing the youth.
	It's killing their morale.
	It's killing their pride.
	It's killing their sense of purpose.
	And that, I think, is what he means.
	To telling them to, because this country is doomed in that.
	Now, I don't think it has to be that way.
	And I think actually we're going to win all of this.
	I'm actually incredibly positive, even though it sounds like I'm saying a lot of, um, hard things for people to accept.
	But I think we have to realize what's going on and actually wake up because then we can turn it around.
	You know, Socrates was deprived of his life for corrupting the mind of the youth.
	I believe that is what Hitchens aims at there, to corrupt the morale of the youth.
	A terrible crime in my opinion.
	But one last thing I'd like to say before we have to move on, because time's getting on, is that I think maybe the real battleground isn't necessarily the children, of course it is one of them, but it's here and now, it's for the men of the West.
	For the men of our times to stand up now, not to leave it to the children that will be in the next generation or the Zoomers, but for the men of today to start manning up and standing up.
	Well, the other thing people say is that, what can I do?
	All the main parties, the uni party has been corrupted.
	Well, John, there was a link there to some recent polling and although I'm sort of quite openly a partisan for reform, One of the battlegrounds is at the ballot box.
	And you don't agree?
	No.
	Well anyway, well there is.
	And so Labour and Lib Dem and the Conservatives obviously have abandoned the interests of our nation.
	Whereas at least Reform have got some policies Like net zero migration, to have no dealings whatsoever with the WEF, various things.
	And there's some hope there, and there'll be parties in the future which will have perhaps even more hard-line policies.
	So if I could say anything, it's to not vote for the main three parties, or the Greens of course.
	I would be very surprised if our audience were considering voting Green, to be honest.
	Right, yeah.
	I mean, it doesn't have to be reform.
	It could be, you know, Lawrence Fox's party or the English Constitutional Party.
	Because if you abandon the ballot box, then what, you're just hoping for a violent revolution, then?
	Why violent?
	What, a non-violent takeover of Whitehall and Downing Street and the Parliament buildings?
	They are.
	The whole government system is rigged.
	Yeah.
	It's had its day.
	It's over.
	Or all government?
	The current system of government that we have is finished.
	So what do you recommend?
	I recommend that we turn our backs and we go back to communities.
	That we, the people, grow up.
	As you say, man up.
	And instead of acting like children and asking those people to sort things out for us, we sort them out for ourselves.
	There are more of us than there are of them.
	Obviously we need rules and laws.
	We can't have anarchy old-fashioned.
	Well, an anarchy of... the version of anarchy that says it's violent.
	Not true anarchy where you self-rule.
	I think you're going to see it in our lifetime.
	Won't they come for you in those communities?
	Will the police and the Home Office just allow those communities to exist?
	The police have families.
	Every police man and woman has a mother and father.
	They may have children.
	Same with the army.
	Once you start seeing communities actually work, I think people are like water, that they will find the line of least resistance, and they will go where life is good.
	At the moment, we live under a tyrannical system.
	There is not a fag paper between Conservative and Labour.
	I can't see how reform or any of those are going to get in.
	If they do get in, they're all going to end up as puppet governments, as we've seen.
	They'll all be under the thumb.
	They'll have photographs of children attached to them.
	They won't be able to do what you think they're going to be able to do.
	Because the One World Government won't let it.
	We have got to turn our backs on that system and make life... Just give up.
	Just abandon it.
	Not... See, that's what I'm talking about.
	Reform is polling higher than the Lib Dems there.
	It's not a complete... I'm not saying give up, am I?
	You're misrepresenting what I'm saying.
	I'm saying we're taking back control.
	It's our country.
	It's not their country.
	They are our servants.
	We have the biggest amount of power.
	We don't have to vote for any of them.
	they're going around with the begging bowl saying, please vote for me.
	We have the biggest amount of power.
	We don't have to vote for any of them.
	If we don't vote for them, they have no power.
	We can turn our backs and we can say, right, let's have the country we actually want.
	When have they given us the things?
	Who asked for 15 minute cities?
	Not you, not I. Who asked for CBDC, Central Bank Digital Currency?
	Not you, not I. Who wants a cashless society in which you have to go and download an app and agree to terms and conditions so you can park your flaming car?
	Not you and I.
	Who agreed to net zero and the nonsense of that?
	Who agreed to having our countryside, as we've said, blighted by boring houses?
	Not you or I. This is the whole point.
	Reform is against all of those policies.
	Will they get in?
	Well, if you have some faith in it.
	See, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
	I don't want to live in a commune.
	I don't want to abandon the parliamentary system.
	You don't want to abandon the parliamentary system of MPs who are not doing their job.
	MPs can change.
	MPs can change.
	Hundreds and hundreds of years of tradition.
	Yeah.
	Just do away with it and have living commune.
	Well, if you've got MPs who are saying that a certain vaccine that was given to the country, everybody took it.
	And even though the yellow card system that Andrew Bridgen, who you've had on this show only recently, was saying that actually there's something wrong and the House of Commons, everybody abandoned him and wouldn't listen, including the opposition.
	If you're telling me then that the MPs who I know from my show where my viewers have written to their MP and said, my mother has died from this, there are problems with this.
	If you're telling me that the MPs who then say, but no, it's safe and effective.
	And then you have those idiots at Pfizer who are sitting there being attacked by the government in the senators in Australia, who cannot answer simple questions like, is that vaccine transmissible?
	And they will not answer it.
	If your MPs I'm not even questioning the excess deaths and you believe in that system.
	Well, I hold my hands up and... The MPs can change it.
	I absolutely agree with you that the current tranche of MPs, yeah, I think they're all a cabal of criminals.
	Absolutely.
	I never bought that narrative.
	I didn't have the vaccine.
	I absolutely agree with you on all of it.
	But that's the current tranche of MPs.
	That can be changed out the ballot box.
	That's my point.
	What if there were a whole new generation of MPs that thought as you or I did?
	What then?
	What then?
	Well, maybe we would have a system.
	But I don't think that you're going to vote them in in that way.
	Why not?
	Why not?
	Why?
	Yeah, why not?
	Because I think you've got to change a hell of a lot of minds.
	That's what we're doing right here, right now, Richard.
	So, OK.
	So I'm attempting to do right here, right now.
	Good luck.
	Thank you.
	I'll take it.
	We've got to move on now.
	I'm going to say something quickly to close it out.
	I think that one thing that people certainly need, if we are to change anything at all, whichever means you come down on, is that we need a positive vision of the world we want to create.
	I think that there's some very clear things being set out by many political minds, and I think that it's actually quite promising that we're evaluating our civilisation and we're able to pick out the things in which We can get behind and agree with and push for that we used to have.
	I think it's a very powerful thing to say, look at the past.
	We can show you photos, we can show you accounts.
	This is what people used to have and it's been taken away from you and they're not going to tell you this.
	So, your quality of life at the minute, many people at home, has been deliberately interfered with by elites, more or less, and so you could have had it so much better
	Had we been more vigilant in defending what we took for granted at one point, I say we as in a nation, not necessarily individuals, but I think that there is a price to having a free and good society and that is constant vigilance and being aware of what makes it good and defending those things.
	Okay, so on to some positive news and that is a massive win for free speech and I'm very pleased to be talking about this because this is actually quite massive and I was taken aback by this, if anything, and of course it is this tweet by Elon Musk.
	If you are unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, we will fund your legal bill.
	No limit.
	Please let us know.
	Which is absolutely monumental if he actually goes through with it because that will mean that Twitter will have an advantage over pretty much every other social media platform in that it will be able to Defend free speech to a level which no other company can, because of course, world's richest man can cover your legal bills.
	Who's really, realistically, as an employer, going to want to go up against that?
	So it's probably not going to come to court if this actually becomes a practice.
	And I think there's actually a very good reason for this, because people may look at this and think, oh, Elon's being very benevolent, but I think actually, This is my sort of speculation, if you will.
	Please let me know what you think.
	But I think there's a very good financial reason for Twitter, now called X for some reason, to do this.
	And that is that it's excellent marketing for them.
	Yes, there may well be a financial incentive here, and that is if they're seen to be visibly and publicly defending people who have fallen afoul of their employers, well people are going to have confidence in the platform that they are secure in voicing their opinions, which has been one of the flashpoints of the culture war more generally, that people are scared to say what they think publicly.
	You see this amongst many political commentators in the more online sphere.
	They're hesitant to even use their own names, and why would that be?
	Obviously, we at Lotus Eaters do use our own names, but it doesn't come without its own hardships.
	I think that if people are more comfortable saying what they think and not having to hide behind an identity, although I fully support online anonymity, I'm not doing a Jordan Peterson on you and saying, you know, these terrible online trolls.
	I don't care about that.
	I think online anonymity is far, far more important than that.
	So just as an aside.
	But I think that actually this proposition by Elon Musk is very well thought out and I think actually serves both public discourse and Twitter more generally very well.
	What are your thoughts, I suppose?
	Did King Elon saved every one of us?
	I'm joking of course, but that's quite a noble thing to offer, right?
	I mean, I've never seen any other billionaire or mogul ever offer anything like that.
	I mean, it's sort of unbelievable in a way, but good luck to him and any people who take him up on it and win their legal cases.
	Brilliant.
	I think it's, well, on the face of it, it sounds like it's resetting where we used to be with the internet.
	Where people could just say stuff without fear.
	Hopefully it will mean that whistleblowers can talk about their company, if their company, if their corporation that they work for is doing wrong, that they can reveal it.
	And presumably there'll be a number of cases which will obviously be the test cases to see if Elon will actually honour that.
	But once companies realise that basically putting your dirty washing in public And many companies perhaps will not want to do that.
	So an employee perhaps who worked for Gillette a while ago, who thought the woke way that they were doing the adverts for the best a man can have, which pretty much destroyed what a man was, who might have wanted to say, actually, I disagree with the company's approach.
	He will now be able to say that.
	And the ASDA bloke who was sacked for retweeting, I think it was a Billy Connolly tweet some while ago.
	I didn't hear about that one.
	That's probably about three years old now.
	Okay.
	And it was a joke, but he lost his job.
	And all those people who've innocently retweeted something or have something to say, I think that's great.
	I mean, if it's as genuine as it seems, and we have to take it on as face value, it's going to be interesting reading the bloody comments, isn't it?
	I know, yeah.
	I saw Anthony Cumia, you know, Anthony off of Anthony and Opie.
	Oh yeah.
	I saw him reply to Elon saying, someone I know retweeted something I'd said that was spicy and they got fired or they got cancelled in their private life.
	Help them out.
	If Elon does it, and there's a few test cases, it might be nice, it might reset us a bit.
	Do you remember when we were younger, not even that long ago, 10-15 years ago, most people, nearly everyone in the West, were sort of free speech absolutists.
	It would be weird to say, no I don't believe in free speech.
	Obviously you're not talking about liable and real cases of defamation things, not including that.
	Shouting fire in a crowded theatre, not including those things, but beyond that.
	Everyone was just sort of an absolutist when it came to free speech and now we're in this strange sort of hellscape where you can't say anything or you're treading on eggshells at all times.
	If this even resets it even a tiny bit, I think the most insidious thing that's eroded that old attitude you're talking about is changing the definition of harm and this is something that actually has a lot of legal weight because of course A term so subjective, because of course you can define psychological harm in particular as anything you really want, and so it gives you enormous power.
	I would say physical harm is where we should draw the line, because ultimately you're in control of your own mind, and you choose ultimately whether something harms you or not psychologically, because it's sort of mind over matter, if you will.
	Although I believe that consciousness has a material basis in the brain, so that's a very ironic thing to say, but you get the point I'm trying to make.
	These sorts of things, in changing definitions, these slight-of-hand underminings, have eroded what used to be the case.
	I imagine Elon Musk must remember this himself.
	And so this is a very very important thing and it's worth mentioning as well that the mainstream media did pick up on this and here we have Forbes among many others talking about it.
	They added some previous details about it's not entirely clear how this is going to be set out but what is clear is that there is a very long trail of bodies in a sort of hyperbolic sense of people who have fallen victims for speaking their own opinions, and I'm going to go through a few of them just to highlight just how important this is.
	First of all, it's difficult to feel bad for Hollywood actresses, but Gina Carano, famous for comparing, I think it was, Covid policies to mid-century Germans.
	I'm calling them that to not fall afoul of YouTube censorship.
	But yes, she lost her job, I think it was in The Mandalorian.
	Former MMA fighter, John says.
	Yes, that's worth pointing out as well.
	Yeah, I can't believe I forgot that.
	Yes, she's lost work.
	Also the journalist Majid Nawaz as well, he's currently suing LBC for sacking him over tweets about the US's election in 2020 and the Covid mandates.
	So yes, he very tangibly lost his job and a lot of money, so I hear.
	Because of voicing his opinions, and he's meant to be a commentator, and so you've got to question, well, if it can come from people who talk about their opinions for a living, then it can affect anyone, can't it?
	And here's a good example of someone who wasn't involved in politics before his encounter with being cancelled, and this is James Esses, who He was expelled from his master's degree for talking about medicalization of children.
	This is from the gender ideologues, the transitioning kids sort of thing.
	So he got kicked off of his course and he's actually been in a couple of exchanges with Elon Musk personally.
	Has he?
	He has, yeah.
	Did we have him on?
	Yeah, and speaking of which...
	If you move on, John.
	Didn't you interview him?
	Yeah, I did.
	Here he is.
	I had an interview with him, so if you want to hear his story, make sure to check it out.
	But yeah, he's a very good bloke and I fully support what he's doing.
	He's also back on the podcast soon, according to John.
	But yes, I think he's got nothing but good intentions and I think if you could, go and support him and also watch that interview.
	It happens all the time though, doesn't it?
	I saw a NASCAR driver just the other day.
	Well, I'm just about to talk about that.
	I should look at your links before I start speaking.
	That's alright.
	This is a president of Thomas Jefferson University resigning after he liked a tweet, I think.
	He liked tweets critical of the vaccines, gender-affirming surgery, college diversity, equity and inclusion offices.
	So, just liking tweets is apparently enough to make you lose your job.
	Quite an esteemed job, I would imagine, as well.
	And talking of that NASCAR driver, here he is.
	NASCAR driver Noah Gregson suspended from racing due to social media conduct.
	And what he did was he liked a rather insensitive meme, which I'm going to show everyone.
	Here it is.
	This was on Instagram, I think.
	It was a picture of George Floyd on the crab from, what's it called?
	The Mermaid.
	Little Mermaid?
	That's the one.
	I can't believe I forgot that.
	It's very hard to remember stuff when you're on camera, I find.
	But yes, I mean, this isn't exactly comedy gold, but I also don't think someone should be suspended from their job because of basically their poor taste in humour.
	Because knee rhymes with C.
	Yeah, it's not a genius coming up with this sort of stuff.
	But nevertheless, however distasteful we find it, we should defend people's right to like what they like.
	Yeah, of course. - Yes.
	And here we have potential complication, if you will.
	This is a Wisconsin teacher who was fired for a private tweet, and she was complaining about not allowing her class to perform Rainbowland with Dolly Parton and Miley Cyrus.
	And she said it was an extreme and punitive overreaction.
	But this is, as the name suggests, Rainbowland.
	a clearly political song, and if Elon Musk is offering this up, and one would presume that he's got employees at Twitter administrating this sort of policy, then what's to stop them from favouring people here, for example, who seek to indoctrinate children politically, because she was fired for a tweet?
	So wait, what happened?
	She didn't let them do it?
	No, no, no.
	She wanted them to and she tweeted about it.
	Right.
	Complaining and then she got fired for it.
	OK.
	But it's basically a song that's meant to be about accepting LGBTQ plus and because it's in a state where you're not allowed to push that sort of thing on children.
	So she got cancelled from the other side?
	Yes.
	From the based side of the aisle?
	Yeah.
	OK.
	So this is sort of a cautionary tale, if you will, because I don't agree with what she's doing, but you could argue that she has a case that she was fired for something she tweeted that is seemingly innocuous.
	And so it could be a sort of poison chalice.
	We see it as being on our side, per se, because normally we are the victims of persecution.
	However, as with many things in actuality, it could well be a tool to further tyrannise us, potentially.
	And I don't mean to, you know, She shouldn't be fired.
	I mean, regardless, I mean, you said it earlier, it's that whole thing, whether you disagree or agree with somebody's tweet, they shouldn't be fired for it.
	If you give them enough rope, they'll hang themselves.
	And if, you know, if she's putting over something that's rather horrible and shouldn't be happened, I agree she should be able to have her say, but people hopefully will see through it and say, well, it's a horrible thing.
	I don't know why you're doing it, but I'm glad I know that you're doing it.
	And I'm glad I know that's what you think, because I should avoid you.
	Yeah, she should have her right to say even if we disagree with it.
	Otherwise you're having a one-way system, aren't you?
	Absolutely, a healthy way to do it because this slide towards let's get you fired Let's have your bank accounts closed down.
	Let's have you even publicly shamed.
	I mean you're getting very close to sort of Maoist era things getting very close to being publicly shamed and then you're publicly Humiliated, physically, and that's the path it goes down.
	And you don't want the public to accept that public shaming, because that's what they've got in China.
	If you misbehave, your name comes up on a screen.
	Well, we don't want to get to a point where we find that okay.
	It might have been alright in the old days of the stocks, when people can throw tomatoes at you.
	You certainly don't need it now.
	Yeah, you're physically pilliorid.
	Or in the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, you're sort of half lynched.
	Or murdered, or actually murdered in the end.
	We've grown up, hopefully.
	I would like to think so.
	But yeah, to use the example of China actually, there is something quite insidious in some of, because the social credit scores are administered individually per each city, so they have different rules, but one city, I can't remember which one off the top of my head, but they punished people's social credit score for associating with people who had low scores.
	Which, you know, is a manifestation of that same impulse, but in a very formal and government-regimented way.
	And so, that is what I want to avoid at all costs, really.
	This is where it's that thing about, if you have an opinion, It's perfectly fine to have an opinion.
	If the opinion isn't of the other person's opinion, it doesn't mean they're an idiot.
	And we've seen that.
	You know, if you don't share my opinion, you're an idiot.
	I don't care if you don't share my opinion.
	This is my opinion and we can debate it as grown-ups.
	And, you know, a lot of people don't share my opinion.
	I have no problem with that.
	That's that's a healthy thing.
	That's why we can have a healthy debate about something, because if we're all of the same, you know, we're all on the left or all on the right and we just have our own echo chamber, it's very boring.
	I find that the best approach, really, is going by sort of case-by-case basis, on an individual basis, and extending an olive branch, and if it gets thrown back in your face, well, you'd be like, well, I tried, and I'm not going to make that mistake again.
	I think that's how you do it, because I know many people who have said they're socialists, who have actually had very civil and interesting and constructive conversations with me.
	And people change their mind.
	That's the thing that we often forget, because people might have a visceral reaction to something and say, oh no, no, I disagree with you, you're an idiot.
	Decade later, or ten minutes later, they may have thought that through and gone, no, actually, I overreacted.
	Actually, there's part of your argument that I actually agree with and there's other parts that I feel uncomfortable with.
	I think we should let people have that ability to change their mind.
	And get over themselves.
	I think when it comes to changing someone's mind, I don't think it actually happens in the moment.
	It's very rare that there's a sort of exchange of ideas and then they go, you know what, you're right.
	You'd think they're being silly or condescending to you, and normally there's this conflict, and then they go away and they think about it, and they ruminate on it for quite some time, and then eventually they change their mind.
	For example, when I went to university, I went in relatively left-wing, sort of left-liberal, and came out relatively right-wing.
	And that was through actually talking to other left-wingers and just realizing, "Wow, these people are horrible.
	I don't want anything to do with them." And I re-evaluated my entire worldview, mainly because I valued politeness and they were not polite to any disagreement.
	And I was just like, well, there's no need not to be civil if this is what people are really like.
	And many of them were very condescending towards actual working class people, and it seemed like quite a strange juxtaposition to be on the one hand, a defender of it.
	So I went away and did a lot of thinking, ended up reading about economics and all sorts of things, and now I'm completely out the other side.
	But it's through these sorts of exchanges of ideas, and that's why they're so important.
	Although sometimes an exchange of ideas can be futile, depending on the individual, there are people who can be won over, or at least put on the right path and take themselves there of their own volition.
	I think that we shouldn't necessarily give up on that, because if you give up on trying to convince people, trying to have a free discussion, then that's the end of civility as we know it, really.
	You need a free exchange of ideas, otherwise all that's left is hostility and violence, and I don't think anyone wants that.
	People absolutely need to be able to evolve and change their mind.
	Normal people can't be expected to be ideological zealots from the moment they become an adult.
	That's not fair.
	That's not normal, actually.
	Normal people are not subject to a party whip.
	You need to be able to change your mind and evolve, and everyone does actually, nearly everyone does.
	I think there's something slightly wrong with you if you have the exact same views in your 50s or 60s as you did when you were 18.
	There's probably something, a restive development or something going on.
	I very much agree with that, yeah.
	You've got to be allowed to change your mind.
	And just to say, this is, just to state the obvious, this is the thin end of the wedge of just thought crime, thought policing, And you end up with what China has, where you will lose your liberty for having the wrong thoughts.
	And well, it's Orwellian, isn't it?
	It's truly in the direct sense Orwellian.
	In fact, some of the things the CCP do are... George Orwell didn't even go that far in 1984.
	It's beyond that already in some cases, in some ways.
	And I personally believe that no one is a legitimate authority enough to tell people what they can say, or even think, for that matter.
	That's, I mean, even more so.
	And I don't know whether this sentiment is shared, but I would like to think it is.
	Well, if we're all equal, who is above us to tell us what we must think?
	At least in the sense of we all equally have a right to have opinions, right?
	Yes, of course.
	But if man is born equal...
	than who's to tell that man what he can or can't think or do come to that matter.
	It would be a consensus of the group that would decide what you perhaps would do, i.e.
	have rules and things like that.
	But to have a free opinion and to challenge authority or other people's opinions has got to be a good thing.
	Because even though your challenge might be ludicrous, There might be something in there that the other party hasn't considered.
	And that's how you develop.
	Well, I think it's useful, even if you feel like you've made up your mind about the person that you're discussing with, that you disagree with.
	It's still good to understand where they're coming from, even if it's purely from a basis of, well, I've encountered these ideas before.
	I better understand them.
	And so I can come up with more compelling arguments against them.
	And there are many good reasons for it, I think.
	And so I'm going to just quickly fire through a few more examples because we are slightly over time.
	Here we have a case that the Daily Mail has reported on saying, Video game firm Fires Woman After Trans Activist Publicly Branded Her A Transphobe For Following Conservative Accounts And Voicing Excitement Over Harry Potter Game.
	And the funny thing is that it was the excitement over the Harry Potter game that she presumes is the reason why her employer was contacted because it's a games developer.
	And so if people are getting cancelled over mainstream franchises and their enthusiasm for them, it's getting beyond absurd at this point.
	And here we have another example that it can affect anyone.
	Take that singer Howard Donald apologizes after liking series of offensive tweets.
	And here the Huffington Post says, Pink News reported that Post called for people to defund Disney.
	Is that Offensive, is it?
	Alongside a photo of a Pride concert being held in one of the company's theme parks, another argued that no woman can have a penis and no man can have a vagina.
	I think this video is going to get demonetized on YouTube.
	Another of these tweets that Howard reportedly had liked claimed only women have periods and to suggest others including non-binary people and many trans men also do You know, times are bad when they're coming for Howard.
	Even Howard's not saying the coal mine for free speech.
	US President Trump and influencer Andrew Tate.
	So, yes.
	You know times are bad when they're coming for Howard.
	Even Howard's not saying the coal mine for free speech.
	I've always said this, that Howard Donald is our cultural bellwether for the health of our democracy.
	So it is worth mentioning as well that it's not just Elon.
	As Toby Young points out, replying to Elon Musk, the Free Speech Union has done this sort of thing already to a certain extent, at least in Britain.
	So if you're in Britain, they're certainly someone to reach out to if you're having troubles.
	And I very much support the work they do.
	They're doing some great stuff.
	And here's their website.
	We're not in any way affiliated.
	I'm just recommending them purely because I approve of what they do.
	If we move on to some of the alternative platforms to Twitter, of course, YouTube, which many of you are probably watching this on, has some very, very stringent guidelines on how to produce your content.
	And we've fallen afoul of them, even though we tried our best not to do it.
	Had to move lots of the conversations we would have had on YouTube onto our website simply because we didn't want to fall afoul of the guidelines and have all of our work taken down.
	And I imagine that you have fallen afoul of this as well.
	Well, I have.
	And you say it's their stringent guidelines.
	It would be useful if they actually told you what those guidelines really were.
	The actual writing of the guidelines is very subjective and wishy-washy, but they enforce them quite stringently.
	And they apply it retroactively, which is the most mean-spirited thing.
	They'll change it and that applied in the past now.
	Yes.
	That's crazy, actually.
	And if you have a video that has something in it that they're not happy with, it would be nice to go, OK, I accept that I'm on your platform.
	These are your rules.
	I'll edit it out.
	But no, either the video is taken down, or you're demonetized, or you're given a strike, which, depending on how many you've got, means a certain amount of time off the platform.
	And the fact that you can't just simply make amends, I think is reprehensible.
	Because I would be more than happy, if I say something that they don't like, I can say, oops, I'm really sorry, I'll take that out.
	Let's take that out, reformat the video, and let it go.
	They're still making money off the back of it, I'm still keeping that video there, and hopefully the advertising is bringing in a bit of revenue for me, and everybody's happy.
	But the fact that they give you this whacking great slap around the face, and when you challenge it, they just go, oh, it's medical misinformation, for example, thanks to the WHO's rules.
	But what bit?
	Tell me so I don't make the mistake again.
	But they don't.
	It doesn't make any sense, really.
	I got a warning on my small channel, History Bro, once for hate speech, it was, and the video was simply World War II footage.
	Archive footage.
	There was no speech.
	There was no speech whatsoever.
	Definitely hate speech.
	War footage from the 1940s.
	Definitely hate speech.
	Eastern Front war footage.
	Oh my goodness.
	And yeah, that was somehow hate speech.
	I mean, it's crazy.
	It makes no sense.
	No.
	The funny thing is, as well, they use the defense of, well, advertisers don't want to be on controversial videos.
	And our YouTube channels have been demonetized and they're still running ads on them.
	We just don't make any money.
	YouTube does.
	So there's a perverse incentive there for them to Somebody's advertising on it then.
	If they don't want to advertise it, that's fine.
	Just let me still have the video up.
	Yeah, I'd still take it.
	And it's also worth mentioning finally that Facebook is one of the competitors of Twitter.
	As the recent spats with Elon Musk and Zuckerberg have suggested.
	And yes, they pretty much censored anybody that the Biden administration had told them to.
	And they've got the quote, we didn't ask questions.
	And again, we move on to this final one here.
	Zuckerberg says establishment asked Facebook to censor COVID misinfo that ended up true and it undermines trust.
	Yeah, you don't say!
	Yeah, just a bit.
	But this is why it's so important.
	Hopefully I've highlighted why this sort of thing is necessary and even if Elon doesn't follow through, which I'd be very disappointed in him for doing, but I think he's got the money to do so, something like this needs to exist because I think one of the best ways to hold the government to account isn't using government apparatuses because of course the checks and balances don't always work as intended as can be seen in many political systems.
	It can be the private sector and I think that that's actually a very good avenue but of course we should be doing whatever we can to push for what we believe in and so I'll take pretty much anything I can get at the minute.
	I'm not necessarily picky, I'm not in the position politically to choose but hopefully some good news and I suppose we can move on to some of the written comments.
	I think we've only got a few minutes to go.
	I don't know whether we can overrun by a couple of minutes, John, just so we can read a few comments.
	Is that okay?
	Lovely, thank you.
	So, comment number one, Bo and Richard having a bit of a passionate chat about our country's direction is exactly what we need more of.
	Great show of opinions and options for moving forward towards merry old England, wherever that may be.
	Cheers everyone, Richard is a great guest as well.
	Thank you very much.
	So on my first segment, The War on Rural Britain, the letter M is for Meow.
	Interesting name there.
	I completely agree with Mr. Vobes on the architecture of a place being the source from the land of which it resides on.
	It very much acts as another connection between man and the land.
	I'm going to go to Justin B now.
	I agree with the homegrown food.
	I intend to do some of this this year, but I only have a couple of... Sorry, I've been reading so much that I find it really difficult at the end of the show.
	I've only had a couple started and they didn't do well with the heat and the rain.
	I only buy from farm shops though.
	Someone whose thumb is only green because he caught it with a hammer.
	I'd appreciate any recommendations for where to get advice on setting up a food garden.
	Oh yes, well, check out Charles Dowding.
	Charles Dowding.
	I think it's charlesdowding.com.
	No dig.
	He's got loads of videos on there.
	Very good.
	People can get a private allotment, if that's your thing, people can do that.
	I see those a lot all the time.
	The waiting list for allotments is huge and more and more people are doing that.
	And there are initiatives for people to buy land and collectively grow, which I think is really, really good.
	There's lots of that going on.
	So, if you can't afford it and you want to get on the ladder, that's a really good place.
	Okay, so this is for Bo's segment.
	Omar Awad says, Peter is speaking from the perspective of someone who has somewhere else to go, a full back plan.
	He can tell you to give up because he's safe, rather than blackpilling the youth with what he's lost and they've never had the chance to experience.
	He should be selling them what they could gain by standing up and fighting for England.
	Very well said, and I very much agree, and I believe that he does have Holiday Homes Abroad.
	He's done quite well for himself, has Peter.
	Lord Nerevar says, on the Dooma segment, I've actually noticed the opposite trend recently.
	Even though conditions are getting noticeably worse, more people are starting to catch on and push back, from people cancelling their license fees to every Disney product now bombing hard.
	The tide is slowly turning.
	All we have to do is keep it there.
	Yes, I do agree.
	That's very reassuring.
	Absolutely.
	I think people are waking up to, you know, they've been put under the thumb so much that people who had acquiesced for so long, and I think that's the British spirit manifesting itself.
	But unlike the Chinese who've been under communist rule for so long, they've sort of just, they've lost hope.
	We still have it deep in our heart.
	We still have it and we're pushing back and we are taking that country back.
	Yeah, I mean, we were talking about this off camera, weren't we?
	And I was saying more or less the sentiment of, yeah, people are actually noticing, aren't they?
	Yeah, definitely.
	And it's going to grow.
	It's snowballing like no other time.
	It's a fantastic time to be alive.
	Even to bear witness alone, not that that's what you should solely be doing.
	No, there's so many changes are going to come.
	I mean, I know I've been talking sort of the doom and gloom in talking about what things are actually happening, but the future is going to be so rosy.
	It really is.
	I can't say more than that at the moment, but people are noticing and when people notice they're going to do something.
	People are rising up and I'm so excited.
	So, AK, hopefully not the gun, love what you said Bo, we are placed where we are in time with the huge responsibility of carrying our civilization forward, that should be motivation in itself.
	It's nice to hear our comment section so motivated, I mean, It's not all doom and gloom, thankfully.
	Each generation has the duty to fight for freedoms and liberty, unfortunately.
	Had an easier time in the last half century or so, but you've got to do it each generation.
	Absolutely.
	Here's one for the Elon segment, I might go back quickly just so we can read a few more.
	JJHW, I've been permanently suspended from Twitter, don't count on Elon for anything.
	I'm sorry to hear that.
	You're normally pretty good at tagging us in stuff and commenting on our website, so at least you won't get cancelled from Lotus Eaters.
	You're free to comment wherever you want.
	Shameless self-promotion, I know.
	But hopefully there's something that can be done to restore that, because I imagine you're generally very sensible on the website, and so I imagine you probably weren't doing anything to deserve it on Twitter.
	Best of luck to you.
	And I'm going to quickly scroll all the way back up again.
	And, uh, where are we?
	So I'm going to go back to the first segment in a sort of, uh, organized chaos.
	Um, where were we?
	Okay.
	Kevin Fox, control the production of food.
	You control the population kind of works or say Mao, Stein, Pol Pot and several others thought.
	And that, um, is obviously very true.
	Yes.
	People.
	all of a sudden fall in line when they go hungry, or at least they're not going to be able to put up a good enough resistance.
	And I wasn't going to read another one, but I see mention of Devon.
	Maria Manzi, Devon is becoming a suburb of London, Josh.
	It is worse than you can imagine.
	I'm going home soon, so I hope not.
	But yes, I think Londoner, sorry, Beau, is sort of a pejorative term down in the deep West country in that it's synonymous with just being selfish and not having a community spirit.
	And I think it's a little bit uncharitable, but it's also the kind of person who buys a second home in Devon.
	I think there's a bit of a selection mechanism there for the kind of Londoner you get.
	And actually, I quite like visiting my friends in London.
	They're all very nice people.
	I do get it that a lot of people, London is shorthand for the belly of the beast.
	I do understand.
	I do get it.
	But I think we've probably got to wrap up the show.
	I do apologise for overrunning a little bit but we did read some of the comments and we've gone over a bit more than we normally do.
	Thank you very much Richard.
	Thank you very much for asking me.
	It's been an absolute joy.
	And I've really enjoyed this, actually.
	This has been a lot of fun, this podcast.
	And thank you, Bo, as well, for a rare guest appearance on the podcast.
	And thank you at home for watching.
	And of course, make sure to tune in tomorrow, 1pm British Summer Time, to catch the show.
	And thank you very much for watching.

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