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Nov. 9, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:30:34

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #781

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	Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters episode 781 on today, the 9th, not the 3rd of November, because unlike Connor and Callum, I know what day not the 3rd of November, because unlike Connor and Callum, I know
	I know that I'm wearing a matching pair of socks, you know, I'm not dressed like some Islamist right now, so we're keeping the standards real high.
	And I'm joined by Carl, as you can all tell.
	And today we're going to be covering how Twitter is no longer safe for activists.
	Good news, we're winning lads.
	Yes, we're also going to be staging an intervention and letting everybody know that Bill Maher is not your friend.
	Bill Maher has fallen!
	Bill Maher has stayed at the same elevation, man.
	People have been coping over this video.
	I'm coping over it!
	And also how Orwell was even more based than you first thought.
	Yeah, and so he's cancelled.
	Yeah, and so you're not allowed to like him anymore.
	At least we've got Huxley for the time being.
	But before we get into that, I'll just let everybody know that later on after the podcast, half an hour after at three o'clock our time, we're going to be doing Lads Hour number 10 for the three-year celebration of the Lotus Eaters and we'll be doing a Q&A answering your questions and also Shootin' the... shootin' the S a little bit.
	Yeah, I've got some funny things to look at.
	Yeah, there was something that we were maybe going to incorporate into this, but we're saving it.
	We'll save it for last hour instead.
	It's just really funny, and... it might... cross a line, so... Alright, and with that, I think we should get into it.
	So good news, everyone.
	Twitter is no longer safe for activists.
	Say, the left-wing activists who I didn't want Twitter to be safe for.
	So it looks like we're winning, lads.
	Everything's going great.
	The march continues.
	But before we begin...
	Today, we've got our Lads Hour, which Harry just announced, but to go along with the Lads Hour, we have a promo code.
	So the Lads Hour is going to be a Q&A where we just sit for a couple of hours and talk to you guys about the third birthday of loadseaters.com and this podcast.
	Thank you everyone, by the way, for staying with us, watching, subscribing, making sure that we can have lights and screens and things like that, because it's all paid for by you guys.
	So if you want to sign up, you get three months at 33% discount if you use Birthday as your code sign up.
	Um, now for those long-term subscribers going, Hey, don't we get anything you do?
	It just wasn't ready today.
	I really wanted it to be ready.
	It was just, you know, these things can happen.
	So next week we will unveil a birthday surprise for our long-term or just any subscribers really.
	Um, because we haven't forgotten you.
	We just couldn't get it done in time.
	But, uh, but if you want to sign up for 3% off for three months and that supports us, that keeps all the lights on and you get access to our massive library of excellent premium content.
	Connor is just recording an interview with Eric Kaufman at the moment.
	As we speak.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	A big fan.
	I'm a big fan of his because I just think he's a really valuable voice in the discourse right now.
	And I imagine that's going to be an amazing conversation.
	So go and sign up.
	You'll be able to see it anyway.
	So let's begin because this, uh, I think the buttons have stopped working.
	Right, so back in February, ages ago now, not in the before time though, I did have my Twitter account at this point, but a few months, three months after Elon Musk had purchased Twitter and gutted it like a madman.
	You can see Amnesty International like, oh no, there's wars and genocides going on around the world, but Our Twitter activists are upset.
	Therefore, this is going to take priority over all of that.
	Not going to be talking about wars and genocides and human rights violations or anything like that.
	No, no, no.
	We're talking about hate speech on Twitter because we're Amnesty International.
	We cover very serious and important topics.
	So they complain that social media giants, Twitter is failing to protect LGBTQ plus organizations.
	Good.
	I don't want these organizations.
	But what are they failing to protect them from?
	Quote, online violence.
	I assume this means online speech.
	Which is obviously not violence.
	I mean what does online violence mean as a phrase?
	Violence is physical activity.
	Tweeting at someone is not violence.
	Typically, it's meant, you've hurt my fee-fees.
	Yes.
	That's all it's ever meant.
	That's precisely what I mean.
	There is no such thing as online violence.
	There cannot be, definitionally, any such thing.
	Well, if we're talking about the LGBTQ, yada, yada, yada community, The violence against their sensitivities.
	The violence against their sensitivities.
	There are certain sectors of that community who you would say are at higher risk if you say something nasty they might do something violent to themselves.
	That's not online violence though, that's physical violence in the real world that they may well do to themselves.
	But when surveyed, a bunch of people, left-wing activists specifically, said they'd experienced a higher level of abusive and hateful speech.
	The word violence dropped off there, didn't it?
	You know, like, oh, no, it's abusive and hateful speech.
	Yeah, but what happened to the violence?
	I want to know how many wounds were inflicted.
	You know, what was the casualty figure for this?
	And it turns out that none, actually.
	So people were disagreeing with them, basically.
	The survey targeted 11 LGBTQ plus organizations, as well as nine high profile LGBTQ plus individuals who advocate on LGBTQ plus issues.
	And I believe everything that they say.
	I certainly don't think they think this is part of a narrative they're going to try and construct in order to force Twitter to do what they want instead of just allowing Twitter to be a fairly neutral platform.
	I always trust incredibly selectively biased surveys conducted by pressure groups on behalf of pressure groups.
	That's how I know I'm being told the truth.
	Exactly.
	The whole thing is just such a caricature of what like any real world sort of journalism or activism or advocacy should look like.
	It's just a bunch of really bizarre people saying, Hey, I'm getting my feelings hurt a lot more now that people are allowed to talk back to me.
	This is unacceptable.
	Right.
	Nine of the respondents tried to report abuse to Twitter and eight out of the nine said that Twitter took no action to mitigate or take down the reported content.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Good.
	I can't silence my opponents.
	How has this happened?
	Well, I mean, these organizations, most of them will be staffed by the same kind of freaks that you imagine.
	And a lot of them will be staffed by over-sensitive female, harpy HR managers.
	Well, you say female, but I mean, like that's definitely up in the air.
	Who knows?
	Well, I mean, how can you tell the difference?
	Very confused people.
	Yeah, very confused.
	But it reminds me of at the beginning of October when Survive the Jive and other people put out their incredible responses.
	And we put out our incredible response to the horrible history, Black Britain, Black Roman Britain thing.
	And I heard from sources on the inside that a lot of these organizations had media or media departments that were staffed almost entirely by women who were weeping and crying and bawling their eyes out because they were running around going, all of these evil white racists are saying that this isn't true what we're saying.
	Why would they say this?
	I want to reframe this.
	It's not just women.
	It's left-wing activists.
	Well, this is the reports that I received.
	Yeah, but it's not like, you know, a bunch of based right-wing women are like, oh, no.
	Obviously, I don't think, I don't think it's going to be based right wing women who are going to be staffing the media departments of big news organizations.
	Exactly.
	So I think it's worth making the distinction just so ladies watching don't feel like we're unfairly characterized.
	Of course.
	I don't think any of the women watching, the women watching this are smart enough to know to exaggerate themselves.
	But anyway, let's continue because the wins just keep coming for us.
	60% of the respondents said that the hateful and abusive speech had impacted how they used the platform, including posting to Twitter less frequently, sharing less information regarding their work, and limiting who they interact with on the platform.
	Oh great, it's working!
	Exactly!
	That's just exactly what I wanted Elon to do and he's done it!
	Well this was when, what was that alternative?
	This is so great!
	What was that Japanese alternative that they all went to or said that they were going to go to?
	I thought like, Mastodon.
	Yeah, yeah, Mastodon.
	That was the alternative.
	I don't know if it was Japanese, but... I think it was... I think it's servers are held in Japan, which is... Oh, right.
	And, um, it had... If I remember, I reported at the time it had such a problem with certain content that Elon was trying to eliminate from Twitter that they had to disable the search function on the website.
	Because I... I went on it and was like, okay, what are people... what was... is this an actual viable Twitter alternative?
	Hmm.
	That's strange.
	I can't search for anything on here and they disabled it because it was such a prevalent problem on the site that if you searched for anything it would pop up.
	That's interesting.
	I didn't know about that because the only thing I knew about Mastodon is a bunch of really hardcore Nazis used it and I'm not sure there's a block function on it.
	Because it's like this decentralized thing?
	Yeah, I think that was the main reason why they couldn't get rid of it.
	Yeah.
	Why they had to disable the search function because it was a bunch of decentralized servers mainly focused around people in Japan.
	Yeah, so I had a friend of mine who uses Mastodon because he is very, very extreme and he was sending me loads, he was just DMing me loads of posts where they're like, hi Mastodon, I'm here and it was just Nazis, just I can't say any of it.
	Swastika, swastika, swastika.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I can't say any of the things that they were replying to.
	So, like, it's, you know, just a progressive journalist.
	I'm from the New York Times.
	I'm here to use Bastadon.
	It's just this speech, and they can't block it.
	So it's just like... That's fantastic.
	I know.
	I know.
	I don't mean to laugh so much, but it was really funny.
	Anyway, so yeah, the activists and the organizations were reporting that they were posting less frequently to Twitter, which is just brilliant.
	Michael Kleinman, Amnesty International's USA Senior Director of Technology and Human Rights.
	Weird.
	Dual hat to wear, isn't it?
	Twitter must do more to protect LGBTQ plus activists and organizations on the platform.
	Twitter considers itself a digital town square, yet the town square where the LGBTQ voices are all too often shouted down and silenced by constant hateful speech and harassment.
	A. Organizations don't need protection, so go away.
	B. Right, so you're complaining here.
	The game is no longer rigged.
	The game used to be rigged when someone tweeted at me, I would report them and they'd get their accounts suspended.
	And therefore I had free speech, but now everyone has free speech on Twitter.
	The game is no longer rigged.
	And I'm just constantly getting drowned out by thousands of people telling me to piss off.
	And I don't like it.
	That's all this amounts to.
	Kelly Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, said social media's outside importance in our lives means that platforms like Twitter have an obligation to provide a space free from violent rhetoric and harassment, an obligation they have long ignored.
	Okay, or what?
	Nothing, that's what.
	So if we go to the next one, that was back in February, but come November now, this month, Oh dear, the same problem is still occurring.
	A year after Elon Musk bought Twitter, X is now a worthless platform.
	Some say it's no longer safe for activists.
	The whole point of all social media organizations since the beginning has to provide a safe space for activists.
	Not just any activist, left wing activists.
	Leftist activists.
	Exactly.
	I will push back slightly and say there are still problems with Twitter.
	Yeah, of course.
	And there are still people who you could say are denied a voice on it.
	For instance, Alex Jones, I believe, still doesn't have access to his account primarily because of Elon's personal animus against him.
	So you can't say that there's a free speech absolutism on the platform because Elon is still allowing his own personal feelings.
	And there might still, we don't know, but there might still be back-end interference from intelligence agencies going on there.
	More than likely is.
	More than likely is.
	But it is better than it was.
	I'm not saying that Twitter is a perfect platform.
	I'm not saying it doesn't have problems.
	I'm saying that the left are losing on Twitter, and I love it.
	I love watching them lose, right?
	As they complain here, you know, Elon, it's been a year since Elon took over.
	Walk-in, you remember?
	Let that sink in.
	Love it.
	Love what he's doing.
	Love everything about this, right?
	Over the past 12 months, Elon, Mr. Musk, sorry, they call him, has gutted content moderation.
	Brilliant.
	Restored accounts of previously banned extremists.
	Hello?
	And allowed users to purchase account verification.
	Love everything about this.
	The Bluebird logos disappeared.
	Are people still earning loads and loads of money off of the tweets that they put out?
	Some people are.
	I'm not.
	I'm getting about $250 a month.
	Don't get me wrong.
	It's more than I'm getting.
	Yeah.
	I'm glad to get $250 a month, but like some people are getting like four grand.
	How am I not getting that?
	I'm getting millions of... Anyway.
	Right.
	So, uh, they, they're complaining that, you know, look, it just, it just feels less safe on Twitter.
	It's like, good.
	I don't want you to feel safe on Twitter.
	I don't want you on Twitter.
	I want you to go away of your own volition.
	I don't want you suspended.
	I don't want your account, you know, terminated by Twitter because then I can't tweet at you.
	Um, I just want you to feel like I don't really like that platform and I'm going to go to Mastodon when the Nazis hang out.
	I want you.
	Because I view you as the same kind of extremist as they are, just on the very other side.
	Someone who's just a total... they make every space they're in toxic, the left, and I don't want them in there.
	Well yeah, I think the maybe most viable alternative for them to go to is, I think there's threads on Instagram.
	We'll get to it in a minute.
	It's just funny how that didn't pan out, right?
	And of course they say, well look, U.S.
	media, including Fortune and Bloomberg, reporting that a new employee stock plan shows that X is only worth $19 billion.
	Okay, but that's 19 billion that's shared between like a quarter of the staff.
	So if it's half the value, but between a quarter of the staff, they're all doing better.
	But even then, it shows it wasn't about the money, maybe.
	You know, like Elon went on Joe Rogan and he was like, look, I just felt this was destroying civilization.
	And so maybe it's not about the money.
	I'm not saying Elon's the world's greatest guy, but he's done a lot of things I really approve of and he's really personally helped me out.
	Anyway, so while many have been enthralled by the apparent demise of Miskima's social media platform, and you know what, you can tell the demise of a social media platform.
	By the fact that everyone's talking about it non-stop, all day, every day, right?
	They're always posting articles, Twitter's doing this now, Twitter's doing that now.
	I'm not happy with what's happening on Twitter, because you can tell that's how it's, that's dying.
	When the primary competitors of a particular platform, because Musk has said explicitly he wants it to be a place where people can break news before the mainstream tabloids and the mainstream media can get to it.
	And he joked that most of what you see in the headlines is whatever was posted on Twitter the day before.
	Which is totally true.
	All of these people are competitors of Twitter and they're constantly going on about Twitter's dead this time.
	It's really gone now.
	Any day now it's going to shut down for good.
	It's just competitors trying to almost spiritually manifest from the ether this will.
	We want the will to power for Twitter to shut down.
	But they can't.
	It won't.
	But they complain that, you know, Mr. Musk's lack of regulation has opened the floodgates for hate speech against marginalized groups and for misinformation.
	X far from resembles the town square space Twitter once carved out on the internet, where journalists, academic and activists could share information, campaign and address threats around the world.
	That's not true.
	That's all happening.
	It's just you get to hear what the right wing actually thinks now.
	Well, yeah, they mean that they had it nicely corralled.
	So it was only their acceptable activists and journalists and academics being able to say things that they already agreed with.
	Now they hear opinions of those who they disagree with.
	And this is heartbreaking.
	It's tragic.
	And there's no way of dealing with it if you're a leftist because you're a ball of neurosis.
	Yes, it wasn't perfect, but it proved extremely powerful in enabling freedom of expression, which is why we needed to silence a bunch of other people and make sure they don't have freedom of expression, right?
	It amplified marginalized voices and mobilized social justice movements such as the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and Me Too.
	Do platforms like, outlets like ABC and the other big ones, do they still feign some kind of neutrality in their news reportings?
	I hope not.
	I bloody well hope not.
	They shouldn't do, but they really do a bad job of it now.
	If there's one thing that I can say isn't unequivocal good over the past few years, it's revealing to normies, I would say, Just how politically biased a lot of these platforms are.
	A lot of people already knew and already saw it, but it's very obvious to anybody because they don't even try and hide it.
	Oh, it's wild these days, isn't it?
	And so, they're constantly complaining there are no moderators to keep the site from being overrun with hate.
	Uh, or having, uh, the executives in charge of making rules and enforcing them.
	So that just essentially says we can't spew a bunch of nonsense without being able to silence our detractors.
	It's like, yep, that's good.
	Uh, the single biggest thing that has dressed, there's been basically the, is, is basically the eradication of trust and safety teams across Twitter.
	Right.
	Who's going to employ the feminists?
	Yeah, exactly.
	Where are they going to work now?
	We don't have jobs where we can just go and get caramel lattes on demand.
	Oh, that's such a shame.
	That's such a shame.
	But they do say, look, there are actual real problems from this.
	For example, in Myanmar, Twitter has played Burma for anyone.
	He's traditional-minded.
	Twitter has played a crucial role in helping people share information and giving them a voice since the 2021 military coup.
	Yadana Maung, Justice for Myanmar spokesman, said that cyber security... Nice try.
	I gave it my best shot.
	I gave it my best shot.
	Sooner you than me.
	Yeah, I know, right?
	I should have been practicing it before the podcast, really.
	But, uh, but they say that, uh, you know, the cybersecurity and privacy threats have increased for the group since Musk's takeover.
	And so too has the platforms compliance with requests from authoritarian regimes like the European Union.
	Because this month, the European Union, the European commission announced an investigation into X for alleged dissemination of bogus information and terrorist conflict regarding the conflict between content regarding the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
	It's like, okay, so.
	These ones don't want the anti-content, but when these ones don't want their anti-content, oh, these ones are the good guys.
	It's literally, I mean, I don't want to be like, oh, friend-enemy distinction.
	This is a bit cliched, but it's so obvious that that's what this is.
	It's just, this is good for us, and therefore we like it.
	That's bad for you, therefore we don't like it.
	If you don't want to, if you don't want to say friend-enemy distinction because you think it's cliche, just say in-group, out-group.
	Even then, that's just cliche.
	It's just cliche to say, like, oh, they're just doing this because it's theirs.
	If it's true!
	I know, but that's the thing.
	It's true.
	It's self-evidently obvious.
	It's self-evident, and it's not really a very interesting or deep analysis, but that is really what this is about.
	It doesn't need to be deep.
	Honestly, for most people, I think that's where their thought process ends.
	Are they on my side?
	If so, it doesn't matter.
	I don't think most people do think that.
	I think that the activists do think that.
	The activists, that's how this works.
	And that's why Twitter is a right-wing platform now, basically.
	But Professor Lever says that anyone who's still on X after relying on the platform for years as a valuable space for public debate was hanging on by the skin of their teeth, wishing there was somewhere else to go.
	You've got loads of other options, you just don't want You're really annoyed and you really want to use this one, but I mean, you can use this one.
	It's just not going to be a safe space and other people will get to push back.
	That's just.
	And these people can private their accounts.
	Yeah, but they want.
	They want the likes and the clicks and the engagement.
	If they do that, then oh, you know, but they just want a megaphone and to never be challenged.
	And Elon has just been like, no, look, you're all going to have to have a discussion about this.
	And they hate it.
	And so that's why they're on the verge of leaving Twitter.
	You are right, a lot of these people are both cripplingly insecure and also massively egoistic, so they can't bear to private their accounts, because if they do, then that means they won't get as many updoots as it is that they want, and then they can't get the dopamine hit.
	And they also, oh, if I, if I turn off comments, I don't get people telling me, yay, I'm great.
	But I also, uh, I'm saved from the flood of people saying, listen, you stupid SJW, you know, I'm not going to swear, but you know, like all of the, um, cutting and incisive criticism that they get and can't stand to get.
	But anyway, I'll leave it.
	John, is the buttons working?
	Cause they're not working.
	Oh, wait.
	They're not working.
	Oh no, they keep flashing on and off.
	You'll have to do it, John.
	Yeah, that's fine.
	Get my own notes up on my laptop then.
	Just a very professional operation.
	At least I've not spilt my drink today, so far.
	I've got my eye on it.
	Did you not see that yesterday?
	No, I didn't see that yesterday, but I was like, that's how low our standards are.
	I had a minor aneurysm, and my hand spasmed, and I spilt hot coffee all over myself.
	So, let's get on with it.
	So this, I'm staging an intervention, guys.
	And Carl, I'm staging an intervention.
	I know.
	Every single time, once every month or so, there will be a clip that circulates of this random based liberal, mostly Bill Maher, says something blindingly obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to politics for the past 10 years.
	And loads of conservative commenters point at it and go, OMG!
	So based!
	Totally our guy!
	He's not.
	He's not.
	Bill Maher is not your guy and he's not your friend.
	He hates you.
	Oron McIntyre described it recently and put it brilliantly.
	He would not spit on you if you were on fire.
	He thinks you are an evil, decadent conservative and has nothing but contempt for your beliefs.
	I don't think he'll think you're decadent.
	I think he'll think you're uptight.
	Well, yeah, yeah.
	Uptight.
	That's probably a better way of putting it.
	I've been a fan of Bill Maher for decades, right?
	Because Bill Maher, like, you've got to understand that liberalism is kind of like a magic spell that gets cast over a person's mind.
	And so it erases aspects of reality and introduces things that aren't true.
	To be the new reality.
	And so when someone who is a liberal says something that is actually true, that's always in a way kind of praiseworthy.
	That's always something noteworthy at the very least.
	And it's not say that he's our guy.
	No, he is a liberal.
	He is always going to be under the magic spell, but Bill Maher is better than your average liberal.
	In a kind of Yogi Bear way.
	Because he is able to perceive through the veil of liberalism into things that aren't.
	I think this is quibbling between very minor distinctions.
	It's like saying, would you rather... I'm not saying it's not!
	Would you rather be stabbed in the stomach or the kidney?
	No, no, no, no.
	He's not that bad.
	And Bill Maher is always... I mean, he's got some strength.
	Would you rather be blind or deaf?
	I'd rather be deaf.
	Fair.
	Has always been really hardcore on free speech, right?
	He's always been really good at that.
	He's always been really good against wokeism, even if he is a liberal and therefore has a bunch of other things that a conservative or a traditionalist would be like, no, that's terrible, right?
	Which is what I think you're about to launch.
	But he's also been sympathetic to The underdog as well.
	He did a bit a couple of decades ago now, talking about the plight of men.
	And this was back when feminism was a big deal.
	And if you spoke out against feminism, you were a misogynist, right?
	And so it was actually kind of brave for Bill Maher to stand and go, look, actually millions of men are really leading lives of quiet desperation and actually suffering.
	And women do not understand this because they do hold quite a privileged place in society, right?
	And so, like I said, Bill Maher has his strengths and has been consistent on these, but you are right, he hasn't changed, right?
	And despite having some good aspects, as I'm well aware you're about to tell me, He has some negatives as well.
	Now that we've gotten over Karl's Cope speech, trying to explain desperately why he's the best of the liberals, but he is still a liberal.
	He's still a liberal and overwhelmingly he would hate your views if you were to explain actual conservative views.
	No, no, no, because I will get on to examples of this.
	All I'm saying Bill, call me, I'll come on your show, we'll have it out.
	He might have you on his show, but he would have you on his show to give you the Jon Stewart treatment, to misrepresent your views, insult you, denigrate you.
	He would laugh at you and he would speak through both sides of his mouth so that he would be able to make sure that the audience know that you are someone worthy of being mocked and not taken seriously because you do not adhere to centrist 90s liberalism.
	I'm not sure about that.
	Did you not see Milo on Bill Maher's show?
	No, I didn't.
	Right.
	Go and watch it.
	He's actually really complimentary towards Milo, right?
	He says he's like a modern day Christopher Hitchens.
	This is like, okay.
	So honestly, I feel that you are making a kind of gestalt entity out of every left wing late night talk show host.
	And actually Bill Maher is a separate thing, but you aren't wrong that at base he is still a liberal.
	He's not John Stewart and he's not, you know, John Oliver or Stephen Colbert or all the rest.
	He's not those.
	And that he isn't, he isn't a separate category.
	And I mean, he's been brutal against Islam, which is.
	Yeah, but he's been brutal against Islam because it's not liberal enough for it.
	Well, yeah, of course, because he's a liberal, right?
	Yes.
	But, but he's, he's not this kind of, Okay, but as you mentioned the plight of men, I think it's relevant to point out that we had a book club recently on the website where we spoke about the plight of men.
	And we focused this around Nora Vincent's book, Self-Made Man, which was a really interesting experiment that she did.
	And may she rest in peace as well, because sadly last year she chose to go to school.
	switzerland and uh voluntarily take her own life as i understand it was a consequence of living for a partially for 18 months partially yes because she suffered a psychotic break after she had conducted this experiment had to had to put herself in a in an institute so that she could undergo psycho psychotherapeutic evaluation and all sorts because she was in a position where she might hurt herself and sadly she ended up doing that the book is fascinating just like what you know she actually experiences life as a man
	and it's like oh my god you guys have to live with this yeah she wasn't trying to become a transsexual or anything like that she was very Very aware of her own identity being that of a woman, but it was an experiment because she thought to herself, because she was kind of feminist back when she started it, she thought, well we always talk about how men have it so much easier, let me give that a test.
	It did not work out very well for her, and this was a very fascinating book club that I did with Connor and Dan.
	So that's premium on the website, so you can get a subscription to the website, £5 a month, and at the moment we've got the birthday code for any subscribers, that's 33% off.
	for three months so if you feel like checking that out give us a subscribe and give us some support we'd really appreciate that there you go on the screen discount code birthday birthday yeah yeah we should have got poppers or something i was thinking as we started the podcast i should have got the party poppers but oh well but so an example of what i'm talking about with Bill Maher in particular is this recent video came out where he's talking to Neil deGrasse Tyson And loads of...
	Anti-woke liberal and conservative accounts have been taking this.
	It's like red meat whenever they go.
	Yes, it is.
	Bill Maher.
	Get him, Bill!
	Bill Maher has posted a video.
	Therefore, excellent.
	Great.
	I can get a 10 minute clip out of this.
	I can get some nice clicks out of this one.
	And you always see it because he'll do something like this because everybody knows Neil deGrasse Tyson isn't all there.
	He's a bit crazy.
	He does keep informing me that the only part of your body you can lick in a mirror is your tongue.
	Well, obviously, Neil.
	What?
	Why would you say that?
	Every year you tweet this out.
	Why would you say that?
	Also, if I was... The only part of your body you can lick in a mirror is your tongue.
	Obviously, it's a reflection!
	Why would you try and lick the mirror in the first place?
	That's window-licking behaviour, Neil!
	You tweet it every year!
	Also, the only part of my body I can poke in a mirror is my finger!
	I can only put my own head in the mirror, Neil!
	Oh my God!
	What an incredible observation!
	Mind-blowing.
	I know.
	Did you know that if you see a mirror reflection, it's flipped the opposite?
	Oh my God!
	How did you tell?
	I didn't know that!
	Oh my God, I hate him.
	He's the Reddit scientist.
	He is a Reddit scientist.
	He is the Reddit scientist who provides all of these pointless little tidbits and trivia factoids that don't matter, nobody should care about, but people go, so my God!
	So my God!
	But he's kind of low-hanging fruit.
	He's low-hanging fruit because basically he's the idiot scientist and will come out with takes that are there for people who think they're smart.
	And it's very easy to dismantle them because he gets very emotional and he yells.
	Even if you don't need to necessarily dismantle them, it's just like, okay, that's not a very incisive observation about whatever you're talking about.
	So even if it might be true, I think he does posts every year around Christmas time, so we're ramping up for it.
	Wait for it, where he's like, well, actually, if you look into the physics of it, Santa couldn't physically deliver presents to everybody.
	Who cares?
	No, no, you're wrong on that.
	He's magic.
	You're wrong on that, actually, Neil.
	He's magic.
	Santa has magic.
	Santa has magic on his side.
	Therefore, it makes perfect sense.
	You ugly Santa denier.
	Take it somewhere else, Neil.
	You get Bill Maher attacking low-hanging fruit and not even... No, no, no.
	So, again, Bill Maher's not attacking low-hanging fruit.
	I mean, he's having him on as a guest.
	He's having an interview, but then people like... I've never heard of this person before, RattlesnakeTV, but he managed to get 150, almost 1,000 views out of this.
	And it can basically be summed up in this 20-second clip that's at the beginning of it saying, coming up, Eric Kaufman just barged in on us.
	He had something to say.
	I don't think he likes Neil deGrasse Tyson either.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Let's play this, because it sums up the... This is all... You don't need a 10 minute video.
	You need this 20 second clip.
	You should be calling them out.
	Somebody like you, who has standing with kids.
	It's demeaning and insulting.
	No!
	Quite frankly, because it's reducing what I do.
	Let's segregate society.
	That's not segregating!
	It says boys and a separate doorway on the other side of the school that says girls.
	Oh God!
	Why are we doing this?
	Because people are mostly boys and girls.
	See, this is... I think this supports... Oh, this is highbrow content right here.
	No, I'm not saying it's highbrow content, obviously.
	I mean, Bill Maher's a comedian, right?
	But the point being... You're saying you're annoyed that you didn't get a segment out of this.
	In a way, yeah.
	No, no, no.
	There's no point.
	But the point is, Bill Maher is correct and he is at least, like again, he's speaking through the magic spell and saying, no, there are boys and girls.
	That's basically what everyone is.
	So that's why we do it.
	What are you being freakish for?
	And there's another clip, I don't know whether you've got it, where he's like going around, he's saying to him, look, you should have been policing this nonsense in universities and you weren't.
	And so that's totally true, totally reasonable, and the right thing to do.
	So this is why Bill Maher is, like, actually better than the average liberal.
	Now, I mean, personally, he's quite a decadent person, obviously he's got many other flaws, but he's not as bad as, like, the Jon Stewart's.
	Like, he's not, like, at least not that I've seen, like, wildly dishonest like Jon Stewart is.
	He doesn't tend to belittle his guests as much as Jon Stewart.
	All right, with all that, but if... I'm good.
	Bill Maher defense forcing.
	What I'm confused about, though, is with all of that that you've just said, any well-meaning switched-on conservative or right-winger will have been well aware of everything that you've just said.
	They should be.
	For at least the past five to six years, maybe much longer than that, maybe even going back.
	He's been doing this since the 90s.
	Well, I was going to say maybe even going back to the 90s.
	And they have their own critiques of it that come from a much more logically and morally consistent worldview than Bill Maher, who I would say is mainly just trying to inculcate him in that comfy, cozy 90s sphere where everybody can get along and we can have our multicultural society without any problems, without any issues grinding up.
	We can have social engineering baked into the laws, but not so much that it makes me uncomfortable.
	None of that was really Bill Maher's concern.
	Bill Maher, he obviously was in favor of multicultural society, but the effects of it hadn't manifested in the ways they are now, so it wasn't immediately obvious that things would turn out like they did.
	But also, Bill Maher, being a hardcore free speech absolutist, he was like, no, no, we're going to have it out, we're going to have the discussions.
	And it was assumed in the 90s there would be no irreconcilable differences, because of course we didn't have any of the problems that we have now.
	Turns out there are lots of irreconcilable differences.
	Once again, it seems to me that conservatives have this beaten spouse Some conservatives, where they desperately want approval.
	They desperately want approval from people that they see as closer to the mainstream from them.
	This is why, as Oren McIntyre has spoken about, there is the ratchet effect that goes on, especially in the American right and the British right, where you'll have somebody who is an out-and-out progressive leftist like JK Rowling start saying sensible things about the latest insane thing that the left has started doing.
	JK Rowling doesn't change her views at all, but Everybody on the right is so eager to be in with the cool kids because J.K.
	Rowling, oh my god, she's the Harry Potter girl.
	Everybody thinks that she's the cool kid that they go, okay, well, we'll count out some of your social beliefs because we want to be a bit closer to you and a bit closer to the mainstream.
	We want that glow.
	from the mainstream.
	And so they'll go, okay, well, if we, if it helps us get along, I'll, I'll give this over.
	I'll give this over to you.
	I'll give this over to you.
	And you constantly do that.
	And you find that the right becomes more and more left wing over time.
	Whereas these people stay in the exact same position.
	Conversely, it's more difficult to win them over to your point of view, if you're being uncharitable and unkind to them, and you won't give them the time of day.
	Yeah, but you don't need to win them over to your side.
	Why not?
	Well, because they're not particularly useful.
	I think if J.K.
	Rowling came out and was like, you know what, actually, now I think about it, Harry Potter's a really right-wing text, which it is, by the way, and actually... But what would that do?
	What do you mean, what would that do?
	What practically would that achieve?
	J.K.
	Rowling starts preaching traditionalism!
	What practically would that achieve, other than all of a sudden a load of leftists who already hate Harry Potter because they say that the creator is transphobic going even harder I'm trying to censor it.
	There are millions of water stones in a moment.
	No, no, they can't cancel Harry Potter.
	That's the thing, because Harry Potter, I mean, even though J.K.
	Rowling is a raging transphobe, Harry...
	Harry Potter is too big an institution to just dismantle, right?
	There are Harry, I've had to go to Harry Potter worlds and like, you know, Disney has a Harry Potter section and they've got like Harry Potter shops and stuff like that.
	It's just too big to cancel.
	It's a genuine, like generational phenomenon for the millennials.
	You know, you're not millennial, are you?
	I'm kind of between 1996.
	I'm not a millennial either, right?
	So like, I don't think we understand that in the early 2000s, Harry Potter was like, I very much understand.
	But no, no, it's just too big.
	I remember when the Deathly Hallows came out, all of the queues to every local bookshop, overnight, in midnight, from midnight onwards, there were ridiculous queues, people camping.
	I think that if J.K.
	Rowling came out tomorrow and was like, yeah, you know what, I'm actually really right wing and this would be the right way to, and she basically sounded like Aaron McIntyre or something.
	That would be a hell of a shift.
	What would that do?
	I think that'd do a lot, actually.
	I think that millions and millions and millions of young people would be like, yeah, no, she's making a lot of sense.
	And I think the culture would shift in a certain direction that would be very favorable to right-wing politics.
	So actually, I think that we shouldn't underestimate and we shouldn't necessarily just be mean to them because it makes us sound kind of like spurned lovers or something.
	But that's never going to happen.
	You've painted a nice fantasy, but J.K.
	Rowling is not going to come out tomorrow and say, you know what, maybe we should deport them.
	That's nothing that she is ever going to say.
	It is a lost cause.
	I mean, she's a women's rights activist.
	How do we feel about this group of people that you're talking about?
	These people can hold two contradictory views very easily in their own heads because they don't see them as contradictory.
	They see you as an evil racist for even suggesting that there are differences that maybe cause problems for the other primary issues that they hold tightly to.
	Maybe, but a year ago, Graham Linan or three years ago, Graham Linan would never have come on this podcast, but he's on tomorrow.
	So don't, don't, don't.
	Rule out anything.
	This is true, but because, just because you found one or two edge cases... Again, all of it's on about that thing and that thing.
	In fact, hey man, like, we've got some tangible wins here.
	Right.
	It's exciting and easy to be a Doomer because that's a... I'm not saying it's exciting.
	I don't like being a Doomer.
	I don't think I'm being a Doomer.
	I think I'm being realistic about it.
	But realistically, we've got Grey and Blinded on tomorrow.
	JK Rowling will never appear on this podcast.
	You don't know that!
	You could have said that a year, you know, two years ago.
	Graham Linehan will never appear on your podcast.
	Like, you could have said that and it would have been like, yeah, well, obviously.
	And yet here we are.
	So don't, never rule out.
	She loves, she's a big fan of Posey Parker.
	Posey Parker's been on this podcast.
	So don't rule out anything.
	Okay.
	This is the thing.
	I'm, I'm anyway, sorry.
	Oh, all right.
	Detract us there, but I'm holding my ground on this one.
	You should be kind to those people who are leaving the spell of liberalism because actually... They're not leaving the spell of liberalism.
	Liberalism has left them behind.
	Progressive leftism has left Yeah, no, I agree.
	I agree.
	But this was all packaged into liberalism, and I don't think they realized it.
	And actually, if we can give a convincing narrative of how something different should be, it's sort of like, wouldn't you like to have a nice sort of more romantic, literally Harry Potter view, where people belong in a structure, in a system, and it works for them?
	Actually, I think that could be quite persuasive.
	They thought they were living in that world.
	Yeah, and it turns out they're not.
	So we can provide the alternative.
	You know, but they see that world as just being, well, you know, we took a few steps in the wrong direction.
	We just need to roll back those steps and then we're back in the perfect utopia.
	But I think that's quite easy to dispel.
	I think that we can be like, well, how are you going to do that?
	And they'll be like, I don't know.
	But the journey needs to continue.
	We can't go back.
	And I think that's a fairly self-evident point, if you had a reasonable conversation with them at that point.
	Anyway, sorry.
	I know, I know, I tanted at this.
	I just think you're being too hard line.
	This feels very like Twitter online, right?
	I'm not.
	You always use that.
	You always say that.
	It kind of is, though.
	The analysis is correct, right?
	Yeah, but I don't think the analysis is correct.
	What views of J.K.
	Rowling's have changed over the past few years?
	I don't know J.K.
	Rowling personally, but I mean, the fact that she's willing to ground her analysis in biological reality is a great start.
	That was never in question for her, though.
	There was never a moment where she was happy with biological men invading women's spaces.
	And even now, if you go back and read in 2020, the statement that she put out, she said that she is more than happy to respect people's pronouns and all of that.
	Same positions as she ever was.
	It's just that when it starts to encroach into something that she cares about, that being the safety of women having their own spaces, that's where she draws the line.
	And I'm glad that she decided to draw that line.
	Yeah.
	It doesn't mean that she's going to be calling for mass deportation any time soon.
	I didn't say it would be soon.
	All I'm saying is... I don't think it's ever going to happen.
	Yeah, but there are lots of things that are happening that I didn't think are ever going to happen.
	So anyway.
	All right.
	Anyway.
	Anyway, the hate march against Bill Maher will continue.
	I try and stage an intervention in there.
	You're just like, no, I need it.
	I desperately need it.
	I don't watch Bill Maher anymore.
	Right.
	But I, I just, I just don't feel you're being actually, I don't think you're actually characterizing him accurately.
	No, I'm not being romantic enough.
	Or even charitable or like inaccurate.
	But like, cause I mean, like if this was Jon Stewart, I would totally agree.
	On all of these points, but I think you're trying.
	And if I'd been saying all of this three years ago, you'd be like, no, Jon Stewart, there's a chance, there's a chance Jon Stewart.
	I don't, I don't think I would.
	I think I've been very disappointed with Jon Stewart for a very long time, but Bill Maher is not nearly as bad as Jon Stewart ever was.
	But anyway, sorry.
	Oh, okay.
	All right.
	Jon Stewart used to care about free speech, man.
	Yeah, Jon Stewart doesn't give a damn about it.
	He never has.
	But you are right at the end of this, though, that Bill Maher is not perfect and he's not our guy.
	Yeah, Bill Maher isn't our guy.
	He's a guy that people go to every so often so they can draw some internet clicks.
	Cynical!
	It is very cynical!
	Cynical!
	You are cynical!
	It is very cynical!
	It is very cynical!
	What these people are doing is cynical and I need to call it out, okay?
	Once again, Dave Rubin, who I know that you're friends with, I'm not saying anything against his own personal character, but he's doing it because everybody does it, because it's the trend where you go, Bill Maher has said something right.
	Congratulations.
	My gran says things that are right every so often.
	You don't see me making YouTube videos about it.
	My man destroys the left.
	I'd watch that.
	With facts and logic.
	Yeah, I'd absolutely watch that.
	Bit late for that now.
	She's dead.
	Anyway.
	That's a shame.
	Jesus.
	It is a shame.
	The dark.
	Yeah.
	So you've got all of this.
	Well, this is Academic Ancient.
	His recent videos where he's doing Talking Turley because Steve Turley, who I'd never heard of before, is like the measuring stick for the online conservative YouTube trend chasers.
	He seems like a nice guy.
	The boomer cons.
	Yeah, the boomer cons.
	And he says something absolutely hilarious in this video as well, where he says that you're absolutely right, Bill Maher, who's been most affected by cancel culture?
	That's right, the comedians.
	And they have been affected, but I wouldn't say the worst.
	A lot of them have made a lot of money off of being anti-woke comedians.
	But I always kind of hate this approach as well, because it's like, well, people...
	you know, realize things that they personally perceive.
	So obviously a comedian's like, wow, a lot of comedians are getting canceled, but academics like, wow, a lot of academics getting canceled.
	And so I can't, you know, it's not really like a joke.
	So, well, you didn't notice this thing that you don't pay attention to happening.
	So well, how would they?
	Well, no, it's funny that it's coming from Steve Turley, who is a conservative, who is a conservative activist, who didn't point to all of the cases of normal people saying normal things.
	He didn't say people like James D'Amour, normal guys with views that are slightly outside of the Overton window.
	James D'Amour might have been a bit before Steve Turley's time, to be honest.
	Yeah, but if you're talking about who's been affected by cancel culture as a whole phenomenon, you can't say it's been comedians most affected.
	I'm not saying that, but from the Bill Maher perspective, if that's what he pays attention to, Well, Bill Maher obviously is paying attention to the fact that comedians, some comedians, have been affected by it.
	But people like Turley who say that, yeah, I'm a conservative guy, I care about right-wing politics.
	Yeah.
	Can you really say that any comedian has been more persecuted over things than, say, Donald Trump has?
	Who I believe is currently in a court case at the moment.
	There are like 96 charges against him or something.
	It's ridiculous.
	Yeah, I'm not saying that.
	But this is where I come to the most recent thing that I've seen going online.
	So a few months ago, it was about three months ago at this point, Bill Maher did an interview with Sharon Osbourne, the wife of Ozzy Osbourne.
	Not a particularly pleasant person.
	Yeah, I don't like that.
	I don't think, I don't know, I think I suppose you would have to be as drugged up as Ozzy was to get married to a woman like Sharon Osbourne.
	Yeah, she's just got a very grating personality to me.
	Yes.
	There's a certain kind of British woman that has a very common sort of personality type in Britain and Sharon Osbourne seems to have it.
	I don't like it.
	and from this video there was this clip that was going around and as you can see there's the description here where he says he calls london going from 86 percent white to 36 percent white in mere decades a happy fact that if the english don't like it they can move Yeah, well, they have.
	They've moved out of London.
	And he says, that's life on Earth.
	Things change.
	And that's a description of what was said.
	But I don't think you can really capture the smug, self-righteous and haughty attitude with which this topic is being discussed without watching the clip.
	And so let's, in fact, let's just go to the beginning and we can listen to this.
	But in 1984, I remember walking around London Like, it was all white.
	It was all white.
	But you go outside of that now.
	But now it's totally changed.
	It went from, I read this in Andrew Sullivan's column, it went from, in 50 years, it went from 86% white to 36% white.
	Now, this is not a complaint.
	See, if we were conservatives, this would be like a lament.
	Great.
	It's a fact.
	It's a fact.
	And it's a happy fact.
	And if you can't discuss it... Just don't tell me we're living in a year we're not living in.
	We're living in the year when London is mostly people of colour.
	Yes, it is.
	And I'm applauding it.
	Happy for you.
	Happy for it.
	But let's live in the year we're living in.
	You go to Windsor, Windsor Castle, OK?
	And the town, of course, is called Windsor.
	And it used to be, when I was a kid, all English tea shops with China and everybody used to go there for afternoon tea.
	And you'd go to Windsor Park and watch some polo.
	And now you go around there, there's no more fucking tea shops.
	None of that.
	It's Arabic restaurants.
	It's Jamaican restaurants.
	It's Chinese.
	It is a complete and utter melting pot.
	And it's great!
	And there's always going to be some people, and we can't hate them for it, who remember the tea shop And that's their memories of their youth and where they first fell in love or whatever.
	And so they're going to be nostalgic for it.
	And you can't hate them because they're like, I don't recognize my country anymore.
	Because in the Brexit vote, there was a lot of that.
	People said that.
	People who've lived in England their whole life.
	Of course.
	And the old village green England.
	The traditional things have gone.
	Right.
	But we still have the royal family that is way too traditional.
	It's way too.
	I love them, but they're way too traditional.
	It needs to be cut back on the shit.
	My message to those people is always, sorry, but that's life on earth.
	Things change.
	Nothing stays the same.
	And if you stay the same, you're left behind.
	You don't have to like the change.
	But you can't just stand there in the middle of the street and go, stop!
	I am standing athwart change.
	It just doesn't work that way.
	Change is going to come, and it's going to roll over you.
	It's how you deal with it.
	That's right.
	You know, you can move.
	You'll have to, maybe.
	It's sad.
	Maybe it would be a better choice to try to adapt to what's new.
	Oh my God, I hate everything about that.
	So have you changed any of your views?
	No, because you can still see underlying this.
	Bill Maher is not attacking, and he is in fact actively in defense of these people, right?
	No, he's not.
	Just because of the fact that he said, oh, you can't hate them for it, doesn't mean that I can't detect the smug condescension coming from that.
	This idea that change is just some implacable force that happens and you're not allowed to be unhappy about it.
	Hang on a second.
	Right.
	So change is an implacable force, right?
	The only constant in the universe is genuinely that it changes.
	But the way in which it changes... He's still a liberal progressive at heart and he still believes that change will only ever go in the direction of multiculturalism and globalisation.
	I know.
	He believes in the Whig view of history that change means demography, displacement of native peoples in the West.
	That guy, he is on that guy.
	But he also has this side where he is... I didn't detect smugness from that at all.
	I don't know, I got some from Sharon Osbourne.
	Oh yeah, loads from Sharon Osbourne.
	Like I said, I already don't like her.
	If you just say, oh that's life, that's change, but why did it have to happen?
	Who's behind it?
	It's lazy, and it's because of his status in society.
	He's rich, he's famous, he doesn't need to... He can go wherever he wants and he can have wherever.
	I mean, he'll be living in a gated community.
	Exactly, in LA.
	So it's not his problem, right?
	But he's not being terribly, totally unsympathetic to those people.
	He's just saying, look, it was just inevitable.
	And to be honest, in a way, it kind of is inevitable.
	If we're going to have a liberal world order, that this happens, right?
	In the way... Yeah, so if we have the world order that he supports, then I don't get my country.
	Young girls get raped by gangs of foreigners.
	And he's there going, oh, well, you can't say stop change.
	Because to him, liberalism is a spell.
	It's a magic spell.
	But you told me that sometimes he dispels this magic spell.
	Sometimes he sees through it.
	Sometimes he sees through it.
	When it comes to incredibly basic biological facts about the differences between men and women, he's perfectly sensible.
	But when it comes to everything else that matters to me, my traditions, my culture, my people.
	He saw that as well.
	He said, look, you know, this causes nostalgia for people.
	The tea shops were actually valuable.
	It's just nostalgia.
	It's nothing more.
	But the point is, you know, he recognizes there is something human in there that has been lost.
	It's just that he is what he is, and he's, you know, must be like 65 or something.
	He's 67, I think.
	There we go, yeah.
	Getting to 70 years old.
	But there's no changing him, as far as he's concerned.
	This is the inevitable path of history, right?
	He's not going to change his mind, but he's not as bad as, say, Sharon Osbourne sat there, right?
	Who was actually proud.
	Who was saying that the royal family needed to change.
	Yeah, even more.
	And the fact that it was good that the tea shops were gone.
	I mean, like, I don't think Bill Maher thinks it was good that the tea shop's gone.
	No, he said that's great.
	He responded and said, yeah, that's great.
	Yeah, yeah, this is a sort of, you know, this is what progressives say.
	Everything that progressives have done is good.
	But if the tea shops were there, I think he would find them novel and interesting and exciting, right?
	And he understands that there can be a lament for the tea shops.
	He understands why the Conservatives would be lamenting that.
	That's the thing, because he's not banging a nationalist drum for us, he's not defending our right to self-determination or sovereignty, but you are allowed to bang one sovereign nationalist drum at the moment, which is that he's more than happy to go on vehement rants about how evil you are, to be anti-Israel, and obviously there is an argument to be made there, but my response to him in this situation would be, well... I'm English, therefore I'm going to bang my nationalist drum for London.
	That's change, bro.
	Who cares if the demographics of Israel change?
	That's life.
	The IDF can't stand in the road of change and still hold up a sign saying, stop.
	You know, I would love to see what his response to that would be.
	Because he's not irrational.
	He's not like a, you know, just a bigot or something.
	So I would actually, I would like... And he's still got major TDS as well.
	Yeah, of course he does.
	Let's not forget that.
	Yeah, of course he does.
	And he's still saying, oh, this is just as bad as white nationalism, et cetera, et cetera.
	But the other thing as well, what I want to say is that he hates traditional conservative views.
	He thinks that it's backwards.
	He thinks that it's ignorant and disgusting.
	For instance, here's an example that I just got today where Mike Johnson, you know, Mike Johnson, the new Speaker of the House of Representatives.
	He said on his most recent show on Friday night, he railed against Johnson's devout Christian faith as a red flag, but went further by suggesting the Republican leader is mentally ill.
	Here's what he said.
	He said, when you're this much of a religious fanatic, there's no room for real democracy.
	He's a new atheist.
	Yeah, I know.
	But it's still telling, isn't it?
	He says, that's not what you believe in.
	He said today, look in the Bible, that's my worldview, Ma said during the panel discussion.
	And I was reading about this horrible shooting in Maine.
	And you know, we don't know much about the guy yet, but apparently he heard voices.
	And I thought, is he that different from Mike Johnson?
	I mean, to a degree, yes, but it's thinner than you think.
	So if you are religious, if you hold traditional views, Ma is still the kind of liberal Who will equate you to a schizophrenic hearing voices in your head who's going to shoot up.
	He considers you a danger.
	He considers you his enemy.
	Yeah, I mean... So you shouldn't consider him your friend is what I'm saying.
	And you're not wrong.
	Okay, so, intervention, not as successful as I was hoping, maybe for some of you watching.
	Well, you are right that at bottom, Bill Maher will end up just capitulating and agreeing with everything that the most radical progressives really end up doing, but he's not the evil Jon Stewart type.
	If he was given a choice between the world that you want and the world the progressives want... Oh, he'll end up choosing that?
	He would choose that.
	Radically it's framed, I suppose.
	I think he is kind of on the fence because he can perceive reality in spite of being a liberal.
	So it would be difficult, but he's not as bad as many of the others.
	But you are right, at bottom, ultimately he's not the friend of conservatives.
	Shall we move on to Bay Storwell?
	Yes, who also wasn't really a friend of conservatives.
	Well, he was certainly more so than, certainly more so than Bill Maher, although he did simp for the Spanish Republicans.
	And so, yes, I can definitely see that Orwell had a lot of problems.
	So Orwell is cancelled, finally.
	The snake finally got around to the portion of its own tail that contained Orwell.
	Orwell lived for a long time on the left, right?
	Because when society was more traditional, Orwell was a left-winger.
	And then the left kept going, and going, and going, and going, and going.
	And now finally we have arrived at the point where Orwell was a racist misogynist and needs to be cancelled.
	So for anyone who doesn't know, we've covered a lot of George Orwell's work because while George Orwell of course called himself socialist and was very active in left-wing politics and movements and wrote a lot about this, there was something else in Orwell that was a traditional Englishman and very sensitive to what was happening in the country and not just ideological.
	You see this of course most prominently I would say in 1984 which is of course a critique of Leftism generally, which is why the party is called Ingsoc.
	You see this in Animal Farm, which is a critique of Stalinism, and you see this in The Road to Wigan Pier as well, but more on that in his Notes on Nationalism.
	He has quite a nuanced view of what nationalism could mean or not mean, which is excellent, and his The essay on shooting an elephant, which is when he was a colonial officer in Burma, is a very fascinating thing and one that really resonated with me, actually.
	The term, you wear a mask and your face grows to fit it, I think is something that deserves more thought.
	Most people don't give.
	And so anyway, as you can see, go and sign up for £5 a month or using our promo code because it's our birthday today, 33% off, the promo code being BIRTHDAY.
	Go and watch all of those because there are deep dives into Orwell's work.
	So when I start talking about Orwell and his work, you can see we are not new to the corpus of George Orwell.
	We know what we're talking about.
	And it turns out that Orwell was, quote, sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, and sometimes violent.
	I mean, he did shoot an elephant.
	And he also fought for the Spanish Republicans as well.
	So yeah, he did conduct a lot of violence.
	Didn't he get shot in the neck in the Spanish Civil War?
	Uh, he was wounded.
	I don't know where the wound was.
	So anyway, so, um, as, as you can see, uh, this is, this comes from a biography that's written about his wife.
	Oh, because this is part of the cultural revolution where we need to reframe all influential male figures from the perspective of the women in their lives.
	Yes.
	It's a pretty common trend at the moment.
	You may recall that a few months ago we covered the feminist rewriting of 1984, which is, I mean...
	Okay.
	If you don't understand the irony of this, then we'll just carry on.
	They do.
	They just dislike what 1984 is warning against and they go, well, we need to make it out.
	Remember that when a woman got a chance to write a dystopia, she wrote, oh my God, what if women had to give birth to babies?
	That was the most terrifying thing she could think of.
	Imagine.
	I know.
	Anyway, so Anna Fonda is the woman who's written this biography of Eileen O'Shaughnessy, who is Orwell's wife.
	Highlighting the contributions O'Shaughnessy made to his work, including helping to write Animal Farm.
	So one of his works she helped write, we're told.
	But I love this kind of, well I don't love it, but like this kind of character assassination is interesting because It's not like he died recently.
	He died way before any of the issues that have arised in the last 50 odd years or whatever.
	He died in 1949?
	Yeah, but the main issues that we're dealing with really sort of arose about 50 years ago.
	Even then they were quite small and have amplified in the last decade or so.
	There's no way Orwell could have predicted that this is where we are going to have been.
	What he was predicting were fairly reasonable things that he was saying in his works.
	And so it's like, you know, because in like, you know, the 70s or 80s, you still wouldn't expect Orwell to have been able to perceive that far down.
	And then in 2023, where we're in an actual lunatic asylum, it's not reasonable to think Orwell should have foreseen any of this.
	So it's like really long character assassination, a long arc of character assassination that we're dealing with here.
	Anyway, so according to Funder, the darkness that runs through 1984 is a reflection of Orwell's soul.
	And that's weird, because you would have thought it would be a reflection of left-wing politics, because that's expressly what it's a critique of.
	It was the worry of what happens if authoritarian Stalinism were to come to England.
	Yeah.
	That's what it's about.
	Yeah, and at that sort of time in history, everybody was becoming more and more aware of how bad Stalinism was.
	Obviously, they hid it.
	The left-wing journalists hid it in the 1930s.
	They were big fans of Stalin until it all came out and they were like, wow, is that really true?
	Yeah, and understandably, given how dark Stalinism was, that's why 1984 is so dark?
	Well, that's the point.
	Orwell is saying, look, actually, you don't realize how bad leftism is going to get.
	That's what he's saying.
	And that's why 1984 is as dark as it is.
	It's not so much a reflection of Orwell.
	It's more a reflection of what you are.
	Which is, so it's just, okay, well, you know, he's just this evil, evil man, actually.
	And so, but you know, it's the darkness in the soul.
	It's about making you feel afraid of Orwell.
	This is how we're describing.
	We're not saying that his work is bad, we're saying he's sinister, he's evil.
	Like so much else, it's supposed to give you a pre-built emotional reaction that doesn't come from you, but you've been programmed into feeling it.
	Um, and she just goes on and on about like all of this, like decency is such a core Orwellian value.
	He writes about it.
	It's the quality of the proles in 1984 that's going to save us.
	He wanted to be decent, to be seen as decent, by which he means a man of integrity, the same inside and out.
	Also, he used that word to refer to being heterosexual.
	He was enormously homophobic, but deeply attracted to men and not particularly interested in women sexually.
	Was he gay?
	George Orwell.
	Pretty certainly he wasn't.
	Yeah, I've never seen that allegation before.
	But I think what this is really about is because he writes from a man's point of view.
	Not terribly surprising, given these man...
	Also, if you're talking about dystopian novels that are a reflection of a lot of the political events that were going on in leftist politics in the early 20th century, other than maybe a few of the socially revolutionary women who were involved in the early Bolshevik movement, and the suffragettes, but that wasn't to do with socialism that was going on in Russia, where are all the women?
	Yeah, most of his men.
	But she says he's a very complicated man.
	He's sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, sometimes violent, and also brilliant.
	I've read an unbelievable amount of Orwell's work, I've examined it and studied it in detail, and I don't recognize that characterization at all.
	I don't think he is sadistic.
	Whenever anything horrible is done to a character, it's never played up for pleasure, which is what sadism is.
	Nothing about his work comes across as hating women.
	At all.
	In fact, he seems to characterize women, uh, in many different ways, broadly and deeply sometimes.
	And homophobic.
	I'm just like, okay, but when has he ever, like, maybe I just haven't read the commentary on gayness that Orwell's given at some point, but I'm just not aware of it.
	And like sometimes violent.
	Well, he's writing fiction books.
	He desperately wants to be decent and wanted to be decent as an honorable thing, a noble thing, but writing a book like 1984, which is violent, misogynistic, sadistic, grim, and paranoid.
	Is it grim and is it paranoid to think that leftism is going to create a 1984 style totalitarian dystopia?
	There were several in existence at the very time you wrote it?
	Once again, this is nothing more than a hit piece.
	This is an emotional hit piece.
	It says here in the note, I see here, decency is such a core Orwellian value.
	And I think that's part of the problem here, which is not just an Orwellian value, it's a British Yes, very much a British man.
	As much as Orwell had his socialist leanings and as much as he sided with the wrong side in the Spanish Civil War, at base level, he was a British patriot.
	He was an Englishman.
	He was an English patriot who cared about the well-being of the English people.
	This is why, post-World War II, he was actively drawing up lists that he was trying to give to the British government, trying to name people that he perceived as conducting anti-British activities.
	Based Orwell drawing up lists of the leftists.
	Because there was something that changed in him throughout the 1940s from that idealism that he experienced in the 30s where he basically became the first, alongside people like James Burnham, he became a reactionary post-liberal to a certain degree.
	And if he'd gone on to live a longer life, we might have seen even more of that as he got older.
	But that's what they're attacking here, They're attacking British decency.
	They're attacking English values.
	But notice how they're like, you know, decency is an Orwellian value.
	So yeah, but it's not a left-wing value, is it?
	You know, you guys don't value decency.
	Their values are spite and petty resentment.
	Well, it's not necessarily anyway.
	That's just a manifestation of their values.
	Um, but anyway, he, uh, He's talking about the Soviet Union, obviously, but they ignore that.
	Fonda is the author of a bestseller which noted that Orwell had a feminist mother and sisters, an art who ran a literary salon, and this fabulous, intelligent, strong wife.
	And in his work, he absolutely ignores women.
	He is a misogynist.
	Does he ignore women, though?
	There are women in 1984.
	1984, a love story?
	Yes.
	Very dark one, but still.
	I mean, Animal Farm is about animals.
	Male animals.
	There's one man that's a farmer, but like, okay, the farmer, yeah.
	Why isn't it the farmer's wife?
	Or the female farmer, I guess.
	But like, Animal Farm is mostly not humans.
	So, okay.
	I guess he is technically ignoring women.
	And I guess from a feminist perspective, that makes him a misogynist.
	And so, essentially what she's coming to is men just aren't allowed to write about their own stuff.
	If you're not writing from the perspective of a woman, well, that's off.
	So, anyway, in one of the letters that Shaughnessy wrote to her friend, she says that she wanted to visit this friend, but found it difficult because Orwell was ill, requiring her to stay home and tend him, or contact her when she was away, requesting that she come home again.
	Thunder, the woman who wrote this book, cited this as evidence that O'Shaughnessy was being kept in a controlling environment.
	Right.
	Is that controlling?
	You've got to help your husband because he's sick.
	Ah, yes.
	Typical evil male controlling.
	Helping your ailing husband.
	I mean, the man died of tuberculosis.
	Yeah, I know.
	Oh, he's so controlling.
	He wants me to come and help him because he's dying of TB.
	What are you talking about?
	This is absurd.
	Yes.
	Um, but, uh, this, this, um, is not the only book this year to reassess Orwell through a feminist lens.
	Sandra Newman has written Julia, which retells 1984 through the eyes of its main female character.
	Newman was invited by the Orwell estate to take on the project.
	She absolutely idealized, sorry, idolized the author when she was younger, having read his political works.
	And then you read his fiction, particularly 1984, and that hatred of women is really extreme.
	So, there are a couple of bits in 1984 that I understand they would be able to.
	He talks about the compliance of women with the regime.
	Which is just something that happened.
	Which women like Sandra Newman are an explicit example of with the current regime that we live under.
	Yeah.
	I'm sorry.
	There are plenty.
	That's a great point.
	Plenty of based women out there.
	Plenty of based women watching this right now.
	But women as a group tend to be much more compliant and emotionally susceptible to arguments made from a kind of sentimentality.
	Certainly much more so than men are, although there are plenty of men who are more than willing to go along with the emotional trends.
	But she says, there are three different points in the book where Winston fantasizes about murdering a woman.
	At one point, he thinks about raping and then murdering Julia.
	It's not really treated as strange and he's still the hero.
	It's like, right.
	No, that's, you are given a look and this is what character development is.
	Into the conflicted mind of a person who is not sure what they are actually doing.
	So the point of Winston, he doesn't know why he's breaking out of the conditioning.
	He doesn't know why he's doing this.
	It's just wrong.
	And he knows it's wrong.
	And so what he's trying to show you is that Winston is a confused in a, in a difficult spot.
	He's a confused man.
	Things are difficult for Winston to process.
	And obviously he doesn't murder and rape Julia.
	So.
	It's a fleeting thought where he's like, okay, I don't understand why I'm thinking this.
	And it's difficult for him to deal with.
	This shows that he is vulnerable and human.
	Not that he is not the hero we must disavow and condemn.
	Like a normal person would say, wow, that was really intense and well-written.
	That's fascinating.
	So this person's come away.
	George Orwell hates women.
	That's the only perspective these people will ever have.
	Yes, yes.
	However, Newman said her understanding of Orwell was influenced by reading about something from one of his former girlfriends, who said that he did not hate women, but simply did not think they were important.
	I mean, A, you're talking to an ex-girlfriend here, right?
	And even the ex-girlfriend said that he didn't hate them.
	Yeah, exactly.
	He doesn't hate women, you feminist freak.
	What is wrong with you?
	And he's writing a fiction that you make up things that aren't real in fictions.
	Also, that's such a blanket statement.
	Did not think that they were important.
	Obviously, women are important.
	What's the context in what he was saying?
	Did he mean?
	Well, I've got a context here.
	Oh, okay.
	All right.
	When he wrote a serious novel, it couldn't be about women.
	A very strange point of view from a man whose family was full of serious intellectual women.
	It's like, okay, so he just wrote a novel that just wasn't about women.
	He spoke from his own position and women most affected.
	That's the feminist view.
	Yeah.
	Pathetic.
	Exceptionally so.
	Was that everything for that?
	Yep.
	Excellent.
	Well, in that case, we've got a few video comments.
	Let's go into the video comments.
	Connor asking on Twitter, well, why don't the police just arrest these Just Stop Oil activists made me think about the arrests of Roger Hallam and Indigo, whatever her name is.
	Essentially, it's all just a smokescreen to disguise the fact that the government wants to find a way of legitimising these environmental policies and to distract the public.
	Yeah, probably.
	Yeah, also clamping down on protests and other civil movements.
	They want to put something in front of the cameras that everybody hates and everybody disagrees with, so that people are more than happy to go along with new legislation.
	That seems to be part of it.
	That's definitely a part of it, but I mean, have you ever met any of them dressed up or like...
	Oh, I know that the Just Stop It Oil activists themselves are absolutely insane.
	Yeah.
	And just the environmental activists in general.
	I've been to London when they've been out protesting and I spoke to a bunch of them.
	And a lot of them are really, I mean, the ones I spoke to were obviously upper class or upper middle class, right?
	They were really well educated.
	They obviously had, you know, houses and, you know, elite careers and things like that.
	And it's like, yeah, you're not going to get them treated like the Tommy Robinson lot.
	They're not going to treat these people in the same way.
	That's why they're being treated with such light touch.
	It's a class issue as well.
	That's certainly part of it, but I do think there's also a concentrated effort to try not to mishandle them in the same way that you're more than happy to mishandle the people who'll push back against them.
	Yeah, totally.
	Because of their ideological and class status, they're going to have a great deal of support from various shitlib institutions.
	Some people think that Veterans Day, November 11th, or Remembrance Day, as you Brits call it, has something to do with World War I and the end of hostilities.
	But what people really don't know is that the end of World War I was delayed until 11-11-11 for the sole purpose of creating a worldwide holiday in which the United States Marine Corps could get a day off after the November 10th Marine Corps birthday.
	Hoorah!
	I have no idea about that.
	Is that true?
	I have no idea.
	So people were allowed to die for a few extra days just to... I have no idea.
	I wouldn't put it past the American military or the American government to do something like that, but 11-11-11, it was 11-11-18, wasn't it?
	1111 it was 111118 wasn't it i'd have to look it up i don't know lovely lovely day to be hiking though Thank you.
	Would be really nice if it weren't so misty.
	Ah, that's good enough.
	It's actually really scary about this.
	I really can't appreciate just how high up this is.
	I made it to the top.
	And so foggy, so I'm getting the bug back down.
	Oh, Jesus.
	I can't believe you're not wearing a coat.
	That looks cold.
	Right.
	Average white guy problems is you see something really tall and you go, I need to get to the top of that.
	And you don't think about anything that comes after when you're at the top of it.
	So many men have reached, well, have looked at Everest and thought that same thing.
	But that's really cool though.
	I mean, beautiful scenery.
	Looks like a great trip.
	True.
	You know, that looks really good fun.
	But yeah, man, be careful.
	Jesus Christ.
	Well, he sent the video in, so I assume he got down somehow.
	Hopefully the next video isn't him in a hospital bed in a full body cast.
	I don't know where he is.
	It looked like somewhere in Canada or something, right?
	But I climbed Ben Nevis when I was in my thirties.
	There's two ways of going.
	You can go up the walking trail that everyone does, or you can go around the rear side and it's like a big ridge and then up just, essentially it's giant boulders you've got to climb over.
	And about halfway up the giant boulders, the clouds came in and so, and I lost my friends on the side.
	Oh no!
	That sounds terrifying.
	Yeah, it was.
	I've actually got a video from like, it was in like, was it 2010 or something?
	So I've got a really crap camera phone video of just me like in the middle of this thick mist with just rocks, you know, boulders everywhere.
	Is this where your Bigfoot obsession came from?
	Did you see something shifting in the mist?
	No, no, no, no.
	I was just like, yeah, okay, so if I don't make it back alive, this is the last video you're seeing.
	I think I've got it on my Facebook somewhere or something like that.
	Um, but, uh, but yeah, no, it's, um, it's pretty scary actually, when you're up a mountain and the mist comes in, like genuinely terrifying.
	And if you're in Canada, you've got to be more scared because maybe you do get caught by Bigfoot.
	Same.
	Anyway, Springfield Valley Itland says, just want to say the latest Broconomics is really, really good.
	Everyone should check it out.
	Also, I'm getting married tomorrow, so wish me luck.
	Well, good luck.
	Fantastic.
	Good luck to you.
	Blood for the Blood God has sent us $300 on Rumble.
	Thanks, man.
	Nice.
	Thank you.
	Saying, first round of drinks are on me, lads.
	Well, here's to you.
	Yeah, thank you.
	Andrew says, congratulations on three years.
	Here's to three more.
	Very thankful for all the work you do.
	Thank you very much.
	And Lord Nerevar says, happy third birthday, gents.
	Here's to many more.
	Thank you so much.
	Lord Nerevar says, Twitter is actually fun again these days.
	The new CEO hasn't yet been as bad as we were expecting.
	And with the shifting of the open window, looking to the right, it's becoming possible and even acceptable to voice some common sense opinions.
	I'm liking these dangerous social media platforms personally.
	Yeah, me too, man.
	The deport the illegals is great discourse, which wouldn't have been possible five years ago.
	No, certainly would not have.
	Just wouldn't have happened.
	You know, everyone who said it would have been whacked instantly.
	And now, like, you know, it's really common.
	Matt says, the right being back on Twitter has been disastrous for the left.
	The Bud Light boycott wouldn't have been possible without the organization provided by Twitter.
	Probably true.
	We get to ratio them, pop up information in their bubble, and expose how absurd and unpopular their positions really are.
	It shows how much damage one semi-rogue elite can do to consensus.
	I'm not having anyone talk bad about Elon Musk.
	He's done so much damage to the left in our favor.
	I'm just happy with it.
	I would rather that there would be more people of Elon's temperament who have ridiculous shed loads of money and are willing to use it for political purposes that benefit us.
	And obviously Elon is included in that because I'm glad that he did what he did.
	But this is something political that benefited us, you know?
	Well, that's what I'm saying.
	The problem the right has is being like, okay, he's not 100% everything I want him to be and therefore I've got to reject him.
	It's like, the left actually doesn't do that.
	No, the right is not rejecting everything that he has done.
	The right is promoting caution because there is a tendency on the centre-right To see anybody doing anything that benefits us, and that's fantastic that it benefits us, and immediately hopping onto the bandwagon and saying everything this guy does is going to be for our benefit.
	Sure, I mean, I'm not saying that.
	Yeah, I think they're just cautioning.
	They're saying, be cautious about this.
	I think that the right is so used to taking outs that it's not prepared to take some wins.
	But I think there's a kind of like, no, we're the sort of perpetual whipping boy and we're always losing and therefore there's a kind of security in that.
	And when you start embracing some wins, you've then got something to lose.
	I think they're advising caution.
	And advising not to get wrapped up and too enthusiastic about things which could easily blow back in your face, especially when we do still have the vast majority of the establishment against us.
	And that includes the legal professions, that includes Whitehall in England, that includes the police are still not administering laws that are for our benefit.
	What if I told you we're getting based on a Kasparian in next week?
	We're not.
	I wouldn't put it past you.
	Well, I tried.
	I don't have anaerob.
	Why not?
	I wouldn't put it past you.
	Why not have anaerob?
	Why not?
	It'd be fun.
	Because she's still an insane leftist.
	Yeah, okay.
	I like talking to insane leftists.
	Alright, you know, if you want to do that, okay.
	Yeah, I'm not saying you have to do it.
	Yeah, I mean, I don't see what good comes from it.
	Well, I mean, probably some great clips, but also just getting them, because the thing is, you can just start presenting them with things that they can be like, that's kind of true.
	What kind of person sexually assaulted you outside of your house?
	A homeless man?
	What kind of homeless man?
	You can ask them all of these questions.
	There is an emotional block that these people cannot get past.
	They can't break through that block.
	Like the daughter of a Swedish politician or Danish politician, wherever it was, who was raped by a migrant and then turned around and said, no, don't deport him.
	He's just behaving in that way because of structural racism, etc, etc.
	I don't think Anna's one of those people.
	I think she's come out of that and is actually like, no, criminals need to be punished actually.
	And so it's like, right, that's a step in the right direction and who knows where that goes.
	Anyway.
	Oh my God, an incredibly common sense position no one would have disagreed with 20 years ago.
	Yeah, no, no, I know.
	I know.
	I'm not quite impressed by it either.
	But the point is, what it shows is the spell doesn't hold over.
	So now she's going to be like, right, okay, what do I think?
	And that's where conservatives should be able to go, here's what you think, you know.
	She still has plenty that she thinks herself that she's not going to let conservatives dictate to her.
	I don't know why you think that.
	I don't know why you think that she's in a position to be like, yeah, I'm going to defeat the conservatives in debate.
	I think she'll just lose any conservative, literally any conservative in any debate because she's had her worldview completely severed.
	Debate is a spectator sport that is used to convince the people watching.
	Other than maybe Dave Rubin speaking to Larry Elder, I've never seen anyone come out of the other side of a contentious debate, especially in internet blood sports, who's actually had their mind changed by it.
	But this is another thing the right does, where it's like, oh no, this observes reality.
	No, because you're not observing reality.
	You're saying this person is a totemic... I'm pointing to... No, listen, listen, you just said she'll never change her mind.
	No, she will.
	People are not just, like, the left are not just like, Platonic totems that are forever the same thing, they do change and they can be brought over to more reasonable positions.
	But the right wants to be like, no, they're forever the enemy.
	It's like, not necessarily, actually.
	Anyway, let me carry on.
	Rick says, in regards to Bill Maher's view on change, there's organic change that happens naturally, which means, as Rick's going to say, the tea shops don't just disappear.
	And then there's synthetic change that's occurring in the Anglosphere currently, that's enforced by dishonest and hidden actors.
	Organic change is inevitable and the only real constant.
	Synthetic change is enforced for some agenda and is cancerous and harmful to both societies and entire cultures as a whole.
	Bill Maher either conflates the two or is unable to distinguish between them.
	I think it's ignorance rather than mendacity.
	So I think if you sat down and explained that to him, I think he would accept it.
	But then he started, like, getting a bit upset.
	It's at that point the shit liberated come out, I think.
	Well, on that, let me read this one.
	Sophie Lives says, I did see Bill Maher on Trigonometry the other day, and the thing is, he seemed pretty reasonable and smart.
	For most of the interview, and then Trump was brought up and he just lost it.
	It was unreal.
	It was like, with a finger snap, he turned from clever to absolutely deranged and angry.
	TDS is real, my guys.
	And that's what I'm saying.
	These people have psychological blocks that no matter what you do, no matter how reasonable and well-structured and logical your arguments are, you'll never get past them.
	Would anybody 10 years ago watching Sam Harris talk about the subjects that he did when it was IDW and such.
	Did they think that all it would take is one real estate mogul becoming president to reveal how ideological and insane and emotional he could be?
	Because Sam Harris was the guy who put on the neutral, emotionless, you know, he speaks in a way that could cure you of insomnia.
	Yeah.
	He was very dull to listen to.
	He's the, I'm the reason emotionless guy.
	But the second Trump comes into it, all of a sudden he say, I would forgive war crimes to get Trump out of office.
	I would kill children myself.
	I would buy Hunter Biden, all of the meth he could ever want to make sure that Donald Trump isn't in office.
	Nobody would have expected that coming from someone like him.
	Sure.
	And that's what this reveals.
	It reveals that there are lines that these people will never cross.
	Yeah, some.
	But, okay, I don't care if Bill Maher always hates Trump.
	It doesn't bother me at all.
	It's not just Trump.
	It's everything that Trump is standing for and everything Trump is trying to represent.
	I don't think that's true.
	I don't think they see Trump as being necessarily representative of the wider thing.
	Anyway, it's a much, much longer conversation for another time.
	"Bill Maher, you could move," Ramshackle Otter says.
	And then I pressed the wrong button, and now I'm gonna find that comment.
	Damn it. - Did you miss, did you lose the Ramshackle Otter?
	- Yeah. - Would you like me to read it?
	I've got it. - If you've got it, yeah. - "Bill Maher, you could move," My mum moved from Kent after hundreds of years of family history there to get away from them.
	Them, I assume, meaning all of the diversity.
	Now she lives in one of the smallest towns in North Northamptonshire.
	A couple of weeks ago she was walking her dog and there was a chap praying to Mecca on the grass verge next to the cemetery.
	Where can we go?
	That's a good question.
	That is exactly the question.
	If I ever go on the Bill Maher Show, I will put all of this to him.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, if you got invited onto a show, I'm not saying I would dissuade you from doing it, if only because it would be very entertaining to see the discussion that results.
	I think it could be a lot more reasonable than you think.
	Omar says, the Venn diagram of people who want to melt in pop culture and people who can afford to effing leave is a bloody circle.
	And that really, I think, is what it comes down to with Bill Maher.
	Go on holiday if you want to experience other cultures, we don't need ethnic cooks, or to invade foreign countries for their spices, we have the recipes.
	I take it you've seen the... Yeah, that's wonderful.
	If only the Conservatives had ever been as based as that one clip.
	If only the Conservatives were the boogeyman that the left has thought they have been for the past 60 years.
	Yeah, just like, you know, now we have the recipes, do we need them to stay?
	I like curry!
	It's the delivery, man.
	So funny.
	funny as desert rat says all it's 1984 an animal farmer on the top seller list in the u.s. after trump was elected i was surprised since i knew they were anti-communist books yeah it's really weird isn't it's just like the left has no perception of the actual purpose of all well's work Like, they always go, oh, he was a socialist.
	It's like, yeah, but nobody did more against socialism than Orwell.
	I think he's probably the most influential anti-socialist.
	Well, I mean, if you read Scruton's Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, he speaks about, obviously, a lot of radical intellectuals, mainly coming from the French tradition.
	But he has much kinder words to say about English socialists.
	He says there was basically an English parochial socialism that really did just come from, well I've gone around England and seen that there are some people who are worse off than me and I genuinely want something nice for them.
	It didn't come from an internationalist perspective where you wanted the entire global world to be one kumbaya.
	It came from this perspective of, well I want other people who are Englishmen To live good lives, because I think that's what Englishmen deserve to have.
	English socialism was generally not Marxist.
	Yes.
	That's what it boils down to.
	And so, yeah, it does have a different atmosphere or aura to it.
	But you can see that Orwell is looking at international socialism being like, this is evil.
	This is going to bring about the worst tyranny we've ever seen ever.
	And we've got to do something about it.
	I've got to say something to speak about it.
	And so, yeah, it's just crazy how, like, Bong, Orwell was a man of the left.
	I'm going to buy Orwell.
	It's like, OK, but if you don't understand, you know, Rick says the gaslighting coming off this article is like a thick and choking miasma.
	Women most affected.
	Yeah, it's mental.
	Absolutely mental.
	Matt says, I like how Orwell argues that patriotism is the least egregious form of nationalism.
	Exactly.
	The term nationalism was a complete misnomer.
	Ideological fanaticism would have been a more appropriate term.
	Yeah, I mean, notes on nationalism are great.
	Go watch the book club on it.
	Andrew says, I'm a millennial and the only thing in my life that I've ever gone to a midnight launch for was the Harry Potter books.
	For many of us, they were the only thing exposing us to a cultural identity into the hero's journey.
	Everything else was multicultural propaganda.
	Yeah, that's the interesting thing about Harry Potter is I know you and others have made very salient arguments that there are definite parts of the books that you could say are of a right-wing perspective.
	The entire framing!
	It really comes from the fact that J.K.
	Rowling, at the end of the day, was kind of ripping off... Yeah, she was not very creative.
	She was ripping off all of the other fantasy that she'd ever read, which was, a lot of it formulated, those tropes were formulated by people with deeply conservative worldviews.
	Not just that, she literally just ripped off the traditional structure of England.
	Yeah, and the John... You want an English boarding school?
	Here's Eton, but for wizards.
	Yeah, also the... What was his name?
	John Campbell?
	Was he the guy who came up with the Heroes' Journey?
	Joseph.
	Joseph Campbell, yeah.
	She was going off of all of the tropes and all of the already established things.
	Yeah, but okay, that's not really a criticism.
	Because every story is there.
	I'm not saying that it's a criticism.
	I just found it funny that when you go to baseline tropes, a lot of them are deeply conservative.
	Yeah, totally.
	Like, you know, traditional mythology.
	But like everything about Harry Potter is actually really exclusive and innate.
	Like you're born a wizard.
	You can't just become a bloody wizard.
	To be fair.
	You're a muggle!
	I say that she got everything from tropes.
	I still don't know how she thought the subplot in the fourth one where Dobby and all of the house elves don't want to be freed from slavery.
	I don't know where she was coming from.
	Maybe she read the slave narrative.
	Maybe she read the first chapter of Aristotle's Politics and said, you know what?
	He makes some really great points.
	Maybe I'll read Harry Potter and do a right-wing analysis of it.
	Because I've never read Harry Potter.
	It would be interesting to see.
	Yeah.
	It would be interesting to see.
	Yeah, I think that's all the time we've got.
	So thank you very much for watching.
	We'll be back on the podcast tomorrow.
	And for our premium subscribers, remember to tune in about half an hour for our third birthday Q&A for Lads Hour 10.
	Thanks for watching.
	Goodbye.
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