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March 8, 2024 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:30:39
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #867
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Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters episode 867 for today, Friday, the 8th of March, 2024.
Yes, I do in fact know the date.
I'm your host Connor, joined by Cole, and special guest Harrison Pitt.
Thanks very much for coming in, mate.
Thank you for the invitation.
Would you mind introducing yourself to the audience?
Well, I'll do a brief one.
I'm senior editor at the European Conservative, a senior editor, not the only one, European Conservative magazine and a political commentator at New Culture Forum, and the host of their newest show, Deprogrammed.
Yeah, I've been on there a couple of times.
If you haven't listened to those episodes, do go and give them a watch.
They're good lads.
Today we'll be discussing how the BBC wants to open borders.
Nothing new there.
Pretty shocking.
The old media, signing off.
They're dying.
And how the Manosphere is wrong about marriage.
Because we thought we'd celebrate International Women's Day by three blokes talking about the exact thing that protects women.
But, if you remember, it is Friday.
And on Friday afternoons, we have a Lads Hour.
And today, I'll be hosting this one.
And it is Episode 18, the Dino Question.
Or is it Episode 26?
I thought it was.
Who knows?
I forget the numbering system.
Anyway, point being, we'll be talking about dinos.
Can they be a revolutionised Van Gogh constituency?
Do they deserve our scorn?
Rory will be on it, so it'll be absolutely chaotic.
Good stuff.
Also, another promotion, I believe.
Do we have the website listing for the job, by the way, John?
We've got a new job going.
What is it, Cole?
A production manager.
Yes, so if you have the requisite qualifications, you can go and look at the webpage on our website.
And, yeah.
Go, possibly work for us, I suppose.
It'll be just coming up on screen now.
There we go!
So go, go visit that webpage and you might start working with us, you poor, poor souls.
But!
You lucky things!
Help, he doesn't let me leave!
Without further ado, let's jump into today's stories.
Alright, it should shock absolutely no one that the BBC wants open borders, and as we know, with Ofcom legislation being weaponised in a partisan way, they get absolutely no chastising for having zero right-wing representation on some of their flagship shows.
Now, I say their flagship shows, nobody's really watching or listening, that's before.
This is on BBC Radio 4, which Used to be one of the biggest news broadcasting shows in the country and they've lost 1.2 million listeners in just 12 months.
This is what you get when you try to modernize.
Yes.
Now, this was last year.
This was 2023, and Radio 4 posted its lowest listening figures in 16 years, shedding 1.2 million listeners in 12 months, with the flagship Today programme getting what are thought to be its worst figures since 1999.
Just after something happened.
An industry source suggested Radio 4's attempts to modernise may be turning off its core audience for shows such as Today, perceived to be airing, quote, woke content.
Radio 2, which has been hit by controversy over the departure of a string of older presenters, lost 121,000 listeners.
The results come from Rajar, Typical UK body.
The UK's radio audience management body, its figures show that Radio 4 lost more than 11% of its audience in the year, falling from 10.6 million in the first quarter to 9.4 million in the same period.
So, precipitous declines in the listenership, and also we know lots of people are also cancelling their licence fee, because for those abroad in freedom land, we actually have to pay a television licence in order to have a TV set which subsidises the state broadcaster, which is the BBC.
Which hates us.
Not fun.
So, one regular show on Radio 4 I thought we'd focus in on is Moral Maze.
Have any of you gents listened to this before?
No.
I've listened to some of their episodes from the 90s which were quite good and I think we're going to get into the decline.
What was, do you know any of their hosts in the 90s?
I don't remember what their hosts were called but I know people like Starkey and Roger Scrooge were regular fixtures there.
It was slightly more heterodox, slightly more interesting, there'd be more contentious debates on interesting issues rather than a kind of festival for the uniparty.
Yeah, well that's quite interesting.
How the BBC Ossifies the boundaries of the Overton window are displayed in who they invite on.
As you said, Starkey and Scruton being invited on, they wouldn't be invited on today, because let's have a look at the regular panellists, okay?
So we have Andrew Doyle, who's a pleasant lad, but he is a gay liberal, so he's not representative of the right, right?
He would call himself a sort of traditional centre-left.
Yeah, exactly.
But that's who they would put on the right-wing box.
Well, yeah, that's who they put on the right, and even then, it's probably becoming a bit dicey for him.
Well, quite, and I don't mean to disparage him personally, but I think he's one of those, there's a certain species of person, I think Constantine Kissin is another one, who are in love with the cult of the independent thinker.
They think of themselves as an independent thinker, outside of the tribe.
And as such, there's a certain allergy to the idea of being part of the right in any way.
You kind of want to stand in between the two sides as they squabble, rather than pick one.
Yeah, and this is the thing.
Look, Andrew's show is actually very important on TV news, because he has quite a formative episode.
Whistleblowers on, and he's had My Friends on before.
But if we're talking about right-wing representation, he himself would not define himself as right-wing.
Therefore, we're left high and dry.
Anyone familiar with this fellow?
I'll just hover over his name for anyone who doesn't know.
So, Giles Fraser is a divorced Anglican priest.
He was voted Stonewall's Hero of the Year in 2012, and he's president of the Inclusive Church, which has pushed in synods to, quote, increase the number of people on general synod, both lay and clergy, who would have taken an inclusive line against discrimination on areas of gender, race and sexual orientation.
So he represents the Conservative Party?
Quite, yeah.
Christian skin suitor.
Literally everything wrong with the Anglican Church.
I would say that as a Catholic wouldn't I?
Nesrine Malik.
You're familiar with her, aren't you?
Guardian communist and typical race baiter.
Anne McElvoy, who's an economist journalist and she's a neolib, but of course she's put in the right wing category.
The economist is basically a communist rag at this point.
On the issues that matter.
Yeah, I'm not even joking.
Yeah, their Ukraine posting is Illusionally neocon, I suppose.
The Economist is constantly putting out communist apologetics, why Karl Marx was right and all this sort of thing.
Oh, they recently put out a study, I'm going to cover this on the show on Wednesday, that says, according to the World Economic Forum, it's going to take how many years to achieve gender parity?
And so we looked at 134 countries, and we found that there are still a contingent of women who don't go back to work.
How do we fix this?
So they're deliberately trying to eradicate stay-at-home motherhood.
Ignore what's best for the kid.
Melanie Phillips, also someone they put on the right, so she's a prominent Jewish journalist who's very sceptical of Islam.
Fair enough.
She's one for our box, I suppose.
Ash Sarkar!
Literal communist.
Now, I don't think the BBC's going to invite Mark Collett any time soon, so why does another genocidal ideology get representation?
She is the left-wing antonym of Mark Collett as well.
Antonym of who, sorry?
Mark Collett, the guy who headed up Patriotic Alternative, who said if you could save one book from a fire it would be Mein Kampf.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, people like Ash Sarkar are much more actually in favour of legalised ethnic cleansing than anyone in a patriotic alternative.
I mean, if you interpret diversity and inclusion, diversity, equity and inclusion as it should be interpreted, namely as sort of A committed campaign to making sure that every possible institution across the country is less white, because no one's interested in diversifying the Council of Tower Hamlets, no one's interested in getting pasty lads from Northumbria into rap music.
So clearly when you actually interrogate this ideological commitment, it is a commitment to making the country less white, and it does amount to legalized ethnic cleansing.
And Ash Sarkar is on record as cheering that, while also saying it's not happening.
Yeah, we're winning lads, as I remember her saying.
Mona Siddiqui, who's Professor of Islamic Interreligious Studies at University of Edinburgh, and then Tim Stanley, who's a Catholic journalist for The Spectator and Telegraph.
Now, I like Tim, but he is a Labour Brexiteer, and so he can be quite tepid on some things.
He's also very nice, which is not always a virtue.
As we'll see shortly.
So I read out that list just to say there is zero right-wing representation in the show, basically.
Not seeing it.
Yeah.
Even the people they would count in the right are just liberals who are sceptical of Islam because they hate women and gays.
Which, hey, I don't really like Islam either, but it doesn't mean we share the same trajectory of travel.
So, the reason I brought this up is because Meryl Mays did this episode on immigration, and this was brought to my attention by Louise Perry, who said that she was listening to our show, and she just had to get us to talk about this.
And the reason we have to is because this episode features Tim Stanley, Ash Sarkar, and Richard Tice.
So they finally brought on someone who is meant to represent the right wing and I'm going to upset you boys because there is zero political representation we have at the moment because Richard Tice almost exactly says diversity is our strength.
So just to give you the tone and tenor of the BBC's immigration debate, we'll play the panel's summary positions, and this is opened by the host.
This is a quick thing before we start.
I want to like reform.
I want to.
But everything they do just makes me infuriated.
Appointing Simon Danzig the Rochdale candidate after he was chucked out of the Labour Party for dubious texts?
I mean, literal groomer gets to represent Rochdale?
No.
So Tice excommunicated another candidate who put up a boomer meme on his Facebook page of brushing a liquidated pride flag down a drain and he said this was unacceptable.
That's exactly what we want.
Anyway.
Yep, quite.
So let's listen to the really staunch positions of the panel.
What limits, if any, should we put on those who want to come and live with us?
That's our moral maze tonight.
The panel, Ash Sarkar from the Novara Media Group, the Observer columnist, Sonia Soda.
A moral maze.
The historian, Tim Stanley, and the priest and polemicist, Giles Fraser.
Start with you, Giles.
Do you take a traditional Christian view about this?
Yeah, I think it's really important that we welcome people who are vulnerable coming from other parts of the world, especially dangerous parts of the world.
I also think that immigration more generally enriches, has enriched our country for centuries.
I believe in immigration by consent, but I think it's something we ought to celebrate.
I agree with Giles that immigration is enriching, but I do think that sometimes those on my side of the debate have swept some of the moral questions it raises under the carpet.
I'm thinking things like, are we using immigrants to avoid paying decent wages in sectors like social care?
And are we just free-riding on less affluent countries by recruiting their doctors and engineers rather than training our own?
I think there's a right to move and a right to stay.
I don't want it to be the case that people have to, because of war, persecution, famine, poverty or lack of opportunity, leave the places that they'd otherwise want to stay.
But I also don't want it to be the case that people have to die where they were born if they want to live their lives elsewhere.
My aunt was so angry about all the immigration to Britain that she made a change.
Personally, I would say I'm not just sceptical about immigration, I'm sceptical about migration, in or out.
Because I'm, I'll be honest, I'm uncomfortable with people moving around.
I value attachment, loyalty and home.
I understand people might move out of necessity, but I don't think that's an inherently moral thing to do.
And it can have some bad consequences for where they've come from and where they're going.
Okay.
One voice.
Yes.
Now, that being said, at NatCon, when Jacob Rees-Mogg was being protested by the crazy communists there to pull off stage, Tim did say we need to be more compassionate to asylum seekers as a Catholic.
So he is quite soft on this generally.
Right.
Not great.
And even the other woman, whose name I forget, who said about, well, aren't we just pinching the best and brightest from other countries?
True, yes.
Is that the standpoint I want to... We shouldn't be leading with that point.
That is, at best, sixth, seventh on the list of reasons to be against immigration.
It's subordinate to ethnic and cultural displacement because we've got nowhere else to go, frankly.
That's it.
We were never asked.
But also, I find it very interesting that Ash Sarkar says that she thinks that there is a sort of unlimited right to move and to remain.
She said there's an unlimited right to move wherever you want to go and to remain wherever you are.
I wonder whether she would extend that right to the British in Kenya.
That she would extend that right to the French in Algeria.
Well, we know that she doesn't.
She praised her great-great-aunt for being a terrorist against the British in India.
They didn't have a right to her.
I bet she's also radically against Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Why?
Yeah, I can only imagine her opinions in Israel.
We don't want a single Jewish foot on sacred ethno-nationalistic Palestinian soil.
What happened to their right to stay and right to remain?
This is a very insidious double standard which always counts against European countries.
But also the double standards confected whole cloth out of technologically contingent factors because you can't have a right to move and remain if you don't have mass transit.
And so this right has just been confected out of nowhere.
She acts as if these people have been teleported.
Whereas before, as you pointed out, Historically, migration only happened through colonising armies.
Yes, quite.
And we've got comparable levels of that coming over through legal and illegal migration at the moment, but we're not allowed to draw that parallel.
It's now just a right rather than an invasion, but... Alright, interesting.
So the first guest they get on, because what they do is they bring on people to advance certain positions that the panel can interrogate.
They bring on a Nigerian lesbian immigration lawyer, who comes on to say that we should have no immigration restrictions, because having immigration restrictions is causing mass immigration.
What?
Bear with me on it.
Do the people in the other countries view it as a challenge?
She conceives of the fact that people are only in England because they're trapped here.
She describes the country.
So they're sort of marooned on the British Isles.
Yeah, we're like an internment camp, though.
Tom Hanks castaway.
Yeah, it's not like we lose a few hundred thousand people every year.
Yeah, I was going to say, how does 600,000 a year manage to leave them?
Aha, but have you considered we also have 1.2 million incoming prisoners?
Anyway, I'll just let her talk for us.
I'll pick you up on that.
It seems to be that you are saying that having restrictions on immigration actually encourages greater numbers of immigrants.
Is that what you're saying?
What I am saying is like that because people look at the restrictions they want to come in before, it is too hard for them to come in.
Right, okay.
If people were... Okay, so by that argument we would then never place any more restrictions on because we don't want to encourage more people to try to come in sooner rather than later.
If we have a system that does not have such restrictions and people are allowed to travel when they want to travel, in and out of a place, people would come out and then they would go.
I'm sorry, to nail you down here, you're essentially saying open borders, that people can come and go and stay if they wish and for however long they wish.
I'm not going to use that word, open borders, because the way that people understand open borders is quite different from what I'm trying to explain.
But from what you have described, a lot of listeners will assume that if you do what you're describing, a hell of a lot of people will simply just come and probably stay.
Well, if you say so many people would come and probably stay, you need to look at why people are staying.
The rules in the country allow people to stay because they can't go out.
So people get trapped because they can't go.
But if those rules were not there, those restrictions weren't there, people would go in and out.
So you would not have so much number of people in the country as we are talking about.
I mean, to what extent... I suppose the right-wing response to this is a nation really isn't a nation if it becomes a place where people are just in permanent transit, where they just come and go.
From that point of principle, do you see how it's difficult to define what a country is if it just demographically is a giant ongoing churn?
A country will still have its identity and it will still be described as a country.
What is the guarantee of that?
I'd like her to undergird that a little bit more strongly.
I just think there may be people from foreign countries watching this and I think it might be worth actually stating the point that the United Kingdom has no barrier to people leaving the United Kingdom.
It isn't some kind of iron curtain Soviet Republic that prevents you from leaving.
In fact, do you even have to show your passport to leave the country?
You might have to do it on the plane.
Depends if you're going by the Eurostar on a plane, I think you do.
But, you know, assuming you have a passport, which of course everyone can get, you're allowed to leave.
There's no barrier.
But as we know, there's a large amount of traffic just going across the English Channel.
There is also that.
There's not a lot going the other way.
Well, they're trapped.
Oh yeah, sorry, I forgot.
Diversity is such our strength that we have to turn the entire island into an open-air prison camp to farm it, which is why we're in a recession.
Yeah.
I'm not sure there's much worth responding to in that.
No, no, she also then goes on to cite a Guardian opinion column that says that the British public are wising up to the benefits of migration, which is just the title of the column, but then she doesn't cite anything in support of that column.
Yeah, I don't think she can rotate an apple in her mind, I'm going to be honest.
Of course, this is the particular piece that she cited, again.
Where's the benefit then?
I'm sure all of those children in the Manchester arena were really feeling the benefit.
No, no, no, let's not talk about that, let's talk about the economic growth.
Where's that?
Let's talk about the improvement to the services.
Where's that?
Let's talk about, I don't know, property prices or something like that.
Make it concrete.
Yeah.
I mean, have you got a train to London recently?
Unfortunately.
Like, where's the benefit to having just more and more people crammed onto our island and for some reason us preventing them from leaving?
Well, Mr. Robert Ford says in this, the rising view is that immigration is a resource that can deliver gains for all.
A majority now see immigration as an economically and culturally beneficial, as a driver of economic recovery, and as a vital source of public support for public services.
The share of voters who say migration levels should stay the same or increase has never been higher, even as migration has hit record highs.
Do you remember that map that said that only in London and one constituency in Bristol want to see immigration levels the same or raised?
I need to represent my hometown.
I wonder if there's a certain composition that would be more in favour of chain migration that happened to live in London?
It's just a strange thing.
agree with the lifestyle has been conducted in Brighton.
I wonder if there's a certain composition that would be more in favor of chain migration that happened to live in London.
Well, it's just a strange thing.
I mean, who in a million years would, if you were going to try and gauge the effects of Han Chinese immigration into Tibet and you wanted to get an understanding of whether it had been good or not, Would you ask the Han Chinese diaspora in Tibet or would you ask the Tibetans?
It depends what kind of answer I wanted.
If you wanted to actively destroy the country, you'd ask the Han Chinese.
Exactly.
And it's just a peculiar thing.
And we mentioned the BBC earlier.
I mean, I was writing, I wrote a piece an essay three months or so ago, four months or so ago about Christianity and demographics and in that piece I found a news report in the BBC from the 1990s in which the BBC itself was talking about the way in which the Chinese Communist Party was using Han Chinese immigration into Tibet to try and destabilize Tibetan identity.
What I'm saying is that even at the BBC and at places like The Economist who will likewise say that there are clear consequences to... I read The Economist regularly and they will say things like, well of course demographics matters in India, of course demographics matters in Tibet, but they don't extend that logic to the West.
There seems to be this understanding that Heathrow and Gatwick are together two sort of magic liberal cosmopolitan making portals.
As soon as people pass through those they become upstanding citizens of a multicultural Utopian.
It's clearly not true.
They cleave to their ancestral identity as I would.
If I was a Britishman, if I was an Englishman living in China, I would feel English.
I wouldn't feel Chinese.
With the amount of reign we have, we just have magic soil.
It converts even the most ardent jihadian to a productive secular citizen.
This must be what they believe.
Just a quick thing on that though, as someone who has lived in foreign countries, you become more aware of what you are in the process, in the contact with foreign cultures.
We had Mo, I'm going to butcher his name, but we had Mo Najmi on dProgram recently, it was worth checking out on Twitter, and he said that, he's from Pakistan, and he said that there are areas of this country which strike him as more sort of doggedly Pakistani than Islamabad.
And it's totally true.
When I was living on army camps and RF camps, it's insanely British.
I mean, you go to Gibraltar and it's so, I've never seen so many Union flags.
It's proximity to Spain.
And you double down because you recognize what you are much more because you have like a day-to-day contrast.
Exactly.
The contrast is intensified in your own mind.
It doesn't need to be demonized.
This is another thing.
It's normal.
It's totally normal.
I think it's perfectly possible to make a humane case for demographic realism.
You don't need to demonize another person's culture to say that it is not the same as ours.
In the interest of maintaining ours over time, and in the interest of maintaining all sorts of other things which we have long enjoyed as a sort of homogeneous, freedom-loving people, we would like to maintain our demographic balance.
If anything, it is actually disrespectful not to recognize the difference, because recognition is generally what most people want for themselves and for their own culture.
If you don't, if you refuse to recognize them, then that is essentially saying that you're not worthy of existence.
Friendship cannot exist between two peoples if there is no between.
If they're just one great amorphous, then there's no friendship.
Unfortunately, the parameters of arrogant liberalism which seeks to liquidate all cultural differences and conflicts don't agree with you, gentlemen.
Here's one person who certainly doesn't, who is not a liberal though.
This is Sunder Katwala.
This is someone that Harry's mentioned before, who is the head of the UK think tank British Future and former General Secretary of the Fabian Society.
Ah.
Wolves in sheep's clothing.
Quite.
He's of Indian and Irish heritage.
Could you just hover over the Fabian Society?
Yes, I can.
There we go.
In fact, if we can get that up, because they've obviously changed their logo, because their logo used to be literally a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Really?
Yeah, can you scroll down?
Maybe it's on the… Is this the one that was founded in the late 19th century?
Oh, there it is!
There's the original coat of arms.
This is the one founded in the late 19th century, right?
Yes, to produce socialism by increment in Britain, because they realised a revolution wasn't going to happen here, and so they literally used the wolf in sheep's clothing as their own logo.
Well, these people are again invited onto the BBC, but none of us are, so just a little hint there.
Kat Moeller describes the debate to Tim Stanley as well.
They both, before this little debate, agree that, quote, Enoch Powell was a racist.
Which he wasn't.
He was actually a civic nationalist.
That's the thing.
Do you remember that Labour MP that you cut with Calvin a while ago that said that after the Rivers of Blood speech I was harangued for my ethnicity but I'm British?
And they said, oh, what do you think?
And he said, oh yeah, I accept his identity.
His nation is who he would fight for and play cricket for.
Which is a very incorporative way, actually, of putting it.
But there you go.
Captain Waller, with Stanley already having conceded that, they struggle to find a point where immigration will be unacceptable.
And I just thought I'd play this little bit here.
Understand what is unethical about what Enoch Powell did.
Because it's always ethical to contest next year's immigration.
You might want it high, low or medium.
It's never ethical to contest the immigration of 20 years ago.
Enoch was saying send them all back from the last 20 years.
So we all agreed after Brexit that we can change the free movement rules.
We've got to be fair to all of the Europeans that came.
So by all means have a debate about what is a higher level and what is a lower level.
There was a problem with what Boris Johnson did.
Because ethically, he's a have-your-cake-and-eat-it kind of politician.
He didn't agree with reducing immigration.
He agreed with Brexit.
He wanted control.
He agreed with more immigration.
And while he was making immigration more liberal, he also said, by the way, the numbers will come down.
But isn't that precisely why people feel betrayed?
You said at the beginning, we do have votes on things, like we had a vote on the EU.
OK, people voted to leave the EU and to control freedom of movement.
But the problem is, from their point of view, immigration then went up.
Whoever you vote for, the elite, eat just does what it wants to do if boz chanted to be more honest about which cake he was going to eat he could have taken people with him because the immigration increased the students in the post-study immigration the hong kongers whom we had a responsibility and the ukrainians and the ukrainian case is fascinating because it's totally the opposite of the power argument this was not the government foisting immigration on the people it was individual people in taking them into the hosting immigration on the government because the number of ukrainians we could take was yeah but critic but critic Critically, the public felt there was an element of choice and a personal agency.
They were saying, I am letting someone into my home because I'm choosing to let them in.
And the problem with the system at present is it feels as though they have no control over it.
Politicians set the rules.
It's all about what business wants and they are actually being betrayed.
So let's learn that lesson.
Let's have a humanitarian visa for Britain and let communities be did up by offerings.
This is the issue.
Let's have a parliamentary debate like the budget where we hear We hear about last year, we hear about next year.
Forgive me, but I suspect that you basically want to encourage people to embrace immigration.
Well, actually, the current level, the 750,000 level, was a one-off because three massive things happened at once.
Hong Kong, immigration, pandemic immigration.
When it gets down to 350,000, actually, we could sustain that, but we'd better build the houses.
According to the last census, something like 40% of people living in London were born abroad.
Yes.
Isn't that a remarkable change and isn't it understandable that people are nervous about it?
The people who are born abroad and the children born here, let's not be contesting the immigration of 50 years ago, 20 years ago and 30 years ago.
Let's have a debate about immigration where the migrant citizens, the settled migrants, the ethnic minorities, the white British born for 10 generations can all have a voice in handling it fairly for everybody.
Excuse me if I don't think he's being particularly honest there, because he's being very evasive, isn't he?
Sure.
Almost like the wolf in sheep's clothing argument.
Incredibly, he does sound like a wolf in sheep's clothing.
True to type, yeah.
Yeah, I just wanted to raise the point, obviously he said we need to build the houses, just for anyone who still needs to hear this in the year of our Lord 2024, net migration actually pushes up house prices because it increases scarcity.
Yes.
We're only building about 200,000 houses, even though the government target is 300,000.
And last year we had 672,000 people net coming in.
But notice his language.
We can take 350,000 a year.
Okay, maybe we could.
Why would we want to?
That's the question.
And obviously contrasting unlimited Asian and African immigration with taking displaced housewives from Ukraine.
Yeah, I'm quite actually willing to take women from Ukraine.
I've been to… It's not dangerous.
It's not at all dangerous.
Maybe to some marriages.
I've been to… Notice how when the women are in charge, no we're not taking Ukrainian women.
I've been to refugee transition centres in fact in Hungary and every single person there was a woman or a child or a pet actually, there were lots of pets there as well.
But the only old people there were, sorry I've just given the game away, the only men who were there were incredibly old.
Yeah.
They were not young, able-bodied young men.
And so, you know, refugees aren't difficult to spot when you see them.
So, hopefully to bring on the right-wing opinion, I'll go through Richard Tyson's clips really quickly.
He decided to have a debate with said Reverend Giles.
As a Christian, Harrison, this will enrage you.
Do you think it's important if people come to this country to live here from abroad that they subscribe to some of our sort of fundamental moral, ethical values?
Yes, I do.
I think that's really important.
I think that we've seen that multiculturalism has patently failed, whereas I think actually people who want to come and enjoy the privilege of living in the United Kingdom, I want them to actually say, yes, we all sign up to the single British culture, and then actually that's how people can work together, and that's how people see the benefits, particularly those... Can I just get a question?
Because I just wanted the yes there, because I've got a follow-up really.
Do you think Christianity has played an important formative part in the formation of our British values?
I think without question.
We're a nation that's based on Christianity, we've got the Christian ethos, and some of the things that people treasure about the United Kingdom all over the world are those great Christian values.
So far we agree.
So part of Christianity is welcoming the stranger, welcoming those who come from, who are vulnerable, those who come from places that are, there's a lot in the Bible about refugees and how you treat refugees and how you welcome people.
So that is also a part of our Christian heritage and formation.
Correct.
Yeah, very good.
So you would think that there is a positive moral value for actually welcoming people who are vulnerable from abroad?
And this country has always been very generous in welcoming people.
We've always done our bit.
But I repeat the point that you've got two types of immigration across.
You've got asylum seekers and you've also got deliberately planned immigration over the long term.
You take a country like Dubai, for example, they want huge immigration because they're building a city in the middle of a desert.
But as I say, the thing is, it's got to work for both sides of the equation.
What happens if it doesn't have to work for both sides?
Why do you have to say it works for both sides?
It's very important.
Let me ask the question, I haven't asked the question yet.
So the thing is, one of the sort of things, ethical things, is that actually sometimes you put yourself out for other people.
That there are other people who are in need and you put themselves out for them, as we've done for all sorts of people.
But as was rightly said earlier on, it's about choice.
And that's why people have been so welcoming and really gone, you know, huge extra lengths to welcome people from Ukraine, for example.
But it has to be about choice, as opposed to something that is forced on a community where they're not seeing the benefit.
I want immigration by consent, so we don't disagree with that.
But I just want to hear you.
But then why do you say net zero immigration?
Because actually I think the British people are a welcoming, tolerant lot.
Because unfortunately at the moment what's happened is, if you welcome 1.25 million people the size of Birmingham into a nation that's not growing at all, then everybody's getting a little bit poorer.
The public services are a little bit worse off.
And it goes on and on and on.
And if you do that... Price worth paying.
I mean, Tice is right.
Price worth paying?
Oh, well, yeah.
He said that.
Just directly said that.
Price worth paying.
It wasn't Tice that said that.
No, no, no.
That was Giles singing.
Oh, right.
I love this.
Well, why do we have to give the British people consideration when it comes to imposing millions of immigrants on them?
Because this is our country.
We built it, we paid for it, and we're the ones who are supposed to be in charge of who comes into it.
There's also the point as well that obviously there is a Christian duty to welcome the stranger, but one of the operative words there I would imagine is stranger.
You're recognizing that they're not a part of you and insisting on making them.
There's a difference between being welcoming to people who are in close proximity to you.
So for example, if there was a natural disaster in France, I would probably feel a duty to welcome them into Britain temporarily for as long as needed to be the case.
But that's different from saying that they can therefore become British overnight.
The same seems to apply.
I fall back on the verses from John and Matthew where Christ clears the temple of robbers.
If people are coming into your space and actively defiling its purpose, then yeah, you can actually kick them out.
Indeed.
That's a very Christian principle.
And I might suggest that Abdul is not a particularly vulnerable person if he's holidaying over via the channel dinghy, sponging off my money, and then deciding to leer at schoolgirls or blow up pop concerts.
I just want to be clear as well.
I'm not a Christian, and if I had to choose, I'd be a lot more closer to paganism on this one.
No, clear them out.
Get out, you bloody sponges.
The Anglicans were the weak ones.
There is a form of muscular Christianity.
But yeah, there is, and it can exist.
I hate to admit it as a Christian myself, but there is a weakness in Christianity for charity, sending it to a kind of pathological altruism.
And like Giles Fraser typifies that beautifully.
This is why I'm happy to be a lot more Nietzschean in this.
It's like, no, this is our country, not yours.
Get out.
So I will just quickly finish in the last couple of minutes on Ash Sarkar.
Ash Sarkar spoke to Richard Tice, and we heard there that Tice signed up to the Fundamental British Values, which never can really seem to be defined, at least in lieu of Christianity, and Ash decided to pick him up on this.
Oh, okay.
And Tice gives a very disappointing answer.
Oh dear.
I'm just interested in something you said, one of your earlier answers.
You said that people who come here should sign up to a single British culture.
What is that single British culture?
I suspect different people will say it differently.
Then it's not a single British culture, is it?
No, but actually, the culture of a nation, that's who we are.
It's our heritage, it's our history, it's our values, where we've come from.
Those who've grown up here, born here, lived here a long time, and one of the reasons we're most respected around the world Is because of our sense of fairness, our sense of decency, our sense of compassion that we've touched on, and actually where we come from.
But that sense of fair play and our role in the development of the world, and what we've given the world, the incredible successes, the industrial revolution that helped billions more people live longer, happier, healthier lives throughout the world.
That's partly because of what we developed in this great country.
With the greatest of respects, you haven't answered my question.
Lots of countries have fairness, lots of countries have compassion, lots of countries have had various industrial revolutions.
You talked about a single British culture today that immigrants should sign up to.
Can you define that single British culture?
And more specifically, the better, please.
Well I can repeat exactly what I've just said.
There's probably not actually that constructive.
I'll try again.
There's a sense of fairness in the UK about who we are and that's which is incredibly respected.
Our legal system is one of the most admired because it's perceived to be fair and I know it's a little bit quaint and people take the mickey but here's the thing.
We invented the game of cricket, and the game of cricket is competitive.
There's a bit of banter, but actually there's a real sense of, is it in the spirit of the rules?
And there's something uniquely, I accept slightly quaintly British about that, you may or may not enjoy cricket, but it is part of who we are.
That sense of fairness, that sense of decency, but also that sense of hard work, and based on, based on, you know, you've asked a question.
Based on that Christian ethos of who we are, where we've come from.
Okay, I'm going back to single British culture.
You've come up with fairness, which lots of countries have.
You've come up with... And lots don't, for example.
Lots don't share... Hang on a second.
No, no, you have interrupted me, Richard.
No, Richard, you've just interrupted me.
Come on.
Lots of people don't have the same views about how you treat women and how you treat other minorities.
Okay.
We are exceptional.
Let's get onto that.
There are plenty of people in this country who have views on women, who have views on gay people, views on trans people, that I passionately disagree with.
I don't think that they should be booted out of the country and I think they should have a right to live here.
Isn't one of those British values that you talk about tolerant?
Yes, absolutely.
Aren't we tolerant of different kinds of people?
I think we are.
I think we're very tolerant.
That's part of the British culture.
That's why people, to reduce divisions or the risk of divisions, you've actually got to say to people, these are our core values.
If you want to come and enjoy living here, sign up to those values and then we can all embrace, progress, develop and grow together.
That's a fantastic thing.
But when you're trying to define, like forgive me, this idea of a single British culture, you come up with values which I think do exist in awfully large swathes of the world.
And in many large swathes of the world they don't respect women, they don't respect the minorities and you've got to accept that.
That's what we're really good at and we should celebrate it.
So are you saying that people that live in a society that we would consider to be coercive shouldn't have the experience and opportunity to live in one like ours, where there are those freedoms, there are those protections for minorities, there are more opportunities for women?
No, I'm not saying people shouldn't have that, but fundamentally, the role of government is to look after the citizens of the individual nation, and for immigration to work for everybody, so that it works for the immigrant, and it works for the existing citizens.
Then you get the best of all worlds.
But what I'm saying is, I believe the best chances of that is it's got to be in terms of the right quantity, so that people can be absorbed, integrated, and sign up to those values.
Because if you go to a nation and you don't believe, for example, We can't be too divisive.
We must protect our women and precious gays.
So do we have to deport the TERFs because they think that women should be treated in a superior manner to men?
Yeah.
And that's a good framing because we should actually be very paternalistic towards women because of the inbuilt physical difference.
Which is literally what the TERFs are arguing.
I don't want to treat women and women equally.
They are different.
Yeah, we want to treat them proportionately.
That's what justice is for, Richard.
I also think as well though, and obviously Sarkar's line of questioning there is incredibly dishonest, but I do think she does, I hate to admit it, she does sort of have a point.
Oh yeah.
And the point is this, that Richard Tice, precisely because he still feels the need to operate within a certain politically correct, progressive paradigm, we even use that word progressive, that he's intent on defining what it means to be British purely in terms of the values you hold, purely in terms of ideas.
And this is, in my view, the weakness in civic nationalism, is that because it It defines belonging purely in terms of a set of synthetic propositions that you assent to.
There's no reason why someone who's a complete foreigner can't equally assent to that and then become part of us.
And it also leads to very intuitively troubling implications where you would have to admit that a Nigerian, say, who holds who holds to every single one of Richard Tice's preferred values is if one of those values is democracy and if one of those values is tolerance and if one of those values is diversity that person would have to be more British than someone like Lord Bolingbroke from the 18th century because he didn't believe in any of that yeah
and so when when when um belonging isn't rooted in in in a sense of an ancestral connection to something a shared history a shared heritage over which ideas can differ like you can be like you can there will be there will be people who know people who know about our history people who will would have sided with Cromwell in the civil war there might have been other people who would have sided well probably not Probably not Connor or me, or probably not any of us actually, but there would have been others who would have sided with King Charles.
But they were both a part of this country.
It was a civil war, and so you can't define what it means to belong to a country purely in terms of values that people hold, because values are different.
And what Ash Sarkar is doing is exposing that weakness in Richard Tyson's civic nationalism, which is why we should ditch civic nationalism.
And the worst part about it is it gives Ash Sarkar a much stronger position to advocate from because she is a communist.
She believes in the mass undifferentiated abstract universal human, and that's what she's trying to bring about.
And that's what all of her questioning is leading towards.
And this is why she sounds so goddamn smug about it, because she knows she's on more firm ground than Richard Tice is, who's one foot in each camp.
Right, if I may finish with 30 seconds, you said that Ash Sarkar might be lying in there.
She says she is!
She openly admits to lying, right?
I'm not joking.
On the thing?
on this.
British about that.
You may and may not play enjoy cricket, but it is part of who we are.
That sense of fairness, that sense of decency, but also that sense of hard work.
So from listening to Adaranke was that, quite understandably, she seemed very reluctant to give any credence to any argument that could undermine the primacy of the right to move.
And I've got a great deal of sympathy for that.
I, too, like to do contortions to defend the thing that I want to defend.
And I think that one of the things that maybe we didn't quite get to is how important is that right to move?
Is that what you think?
I like to do contortions to defend the thing I want to defend.
Literally admitting to manipulating the framing to manipulate you into agreeing with her.
Either that or it is a rare moment of self-knowledge and realizing that she is as prone to the, what's called confirmation bias, as the rest of us.
But I...
It may well be that she's just openly admitting to being a sophist rather than a Socratic.
I'm going to side more with the sophist, but point being, the BBC wants open borders, the right have no representation and Richard Tice is too soft to get my vote, so do something about it.
Reform, please.
Moving on then.
So the old media is signing off.
Literally.
The entire edifice that is What we consider to be the old paradigm, the legacy paradigm of media, for example, journalism, television, radio.
I mean, you saw they'd lost 1.2 million viewers.
Well, everyone's losing listeners, sorry, on the radio.
Radio stations are going down the tube, as are television stations, as is print journalism.
This is just one example here.
News media jobs in 2023, they lost 8,000 journalists.
Across just the Anglosphere media, there's been another thousand in 2024 so far.
So this was LA Times, this was Vice, this was Jezebel, this was all of the progressive outlets just being shut down because no one's actually reading them.
Not even just progressive, this is across the board.
So this, I mean, I don't doubt that being unrepresentative of the general population isn't helping these people, but it's not just on one political side.
I mean, you brought up Vice.
Interestingly enough, that's going to go offline completely.
Their website is going to shut down.
I mean, they would never print a magazine, as far as I'm aware.
The website's going to shut down and the entire organization is going to get mothballed, and so Tim Pool will probably buy it.
And have it redirect to Timcast or something like that, which would be nice.
Um, but anyway, so let's, let's move to television in the UK because there's a lot of squabbling over television news stations in the United Kingdom at the moment.
And it's kind of pointless because they're all going to die and they're all losing their money.
So as you can see here, the TV ad market has plunged 13% in the last year.
Sorry about this.
I've got a horrible cough and I've had it all week.
The collapse is driven by a sharp slowdown in linear TV advertising.
And so what that is, is just direct adverts on TV in between the programs.
I have heard about this behind the scenes.
I spoke to a producer yesterday at a network and he said that everyone over at ITN, which have a massive budget, are running rounds like they're chickens with their heads cut off because all their advertisers are driving them.
So it's not just like GB News ad boycotts, it's all of terrestrial news.
Yeah, we'll get to it.
And this is not mitigated well enough by a 5% growth in video on demand, so streaming services.
So the streaming services are not growing in line with the collapse of broadcast television, which is interesting.
It's almost 3 to 1.
Uh, difference.
So that is, I think just an interesting thing.
And so we can look at, uh, just various outlets.
This is from 2022.
Sky's revenue was down by nearly 10%, um, which is a lot.
Um, I mean, they were getting 20 billion a year as a total thing.
Um, and of course then they had to, uh, go on and cut a thousand jobs as they tried to move from their skyboxes to the internet, just like everyone else, because technology is A changing force and there's nothing we can do about it.
As you said about ITV, massive, massive losses.
Their profits fell from 501 million in 2022 to 193 million in 2023.
Down to a fifth?
Well, about a third.
193 million in 2023 down to a fifth well about a third I've lost about half well just over half but that's massive Um, they reported a severe decline of 15% in linear advertising, uh, and they are performing better in the digital market, of course.
But again, it's, uh, not anything that anyone's happy with because this is the end of an era.
I, again, I don't think the leak programming and series of scandals with presenters has helped the public image either.
No, but it's not about that.
Um, it's just the advertisers are making rational calculations about the market and saying, well, people just don't watch this.
We just don't get the sales because there are just not the numbers of people watching television as there are on various streaming platforms or YouTube or wherever else.
Um, Murdoch's News Corp are really hammered at this point.
Um, this is just shocking.
Uh, so they, uh, The year before last had 760 million turnover.
in fact, it was, yeah, the year before last, had 760 million turnover.
Last year, that fell to 187 million.
75% of everything they did.
It's just straight down the tubes.
And so again, just to be very, very clear, this is an extinction level event for the old media.
Like we've been saying that it's coming for years because the trends have all been decline, decline, decline.
And they've made cuts in line to try and stabilize themselves.
And then it's just plunging off the edge of a cliff.
One of the real concerns of that as well is that whereas before, um, the place to be a dissident was purely online because you weren't going to be invited onto any of these channels.
Now that all of these channels are migrating online into our space, I think that regulatory bodies like Ofcom are going to pay attention to that, and they will notice it, and they will have to notice it.
And as such, outfits like Loadseater's outfits, like the new Culture Forum, could be in serious peril.
Yeah, and this is what the online safety bill is about, in pretext, but it doesn't actually regulate independent websites.
What it regulates is video sharing platforms and social media platforms.
So that means we have the difficulty, I think, what's going to happen with the Labour government, who are going to go further and faster, is that Rumble will be shut down in the UK as it is in France.
Quite possibly.
Has it already been shut down in France?
It's banned in France.
Because it won't comply with the government's broadcasting regulations.
The French have always been quite, well not always, but the French are quite dirigiste.
But I didn't know that.
Yeah.
And so I view this as a step down the road to eventual, essentially, Ofcom regulation of the internet space.
Yeah, because they're drawing, as you said, their move to more online off of broadcast television to escape Ofcom.
They're going to draw the eye of Sauron over to us.
Yes.
And speaking of which, Talk TV are doing exactly that.
So the Guardian characterizes Talk TV as a right wing.
No!
Right-wing news channel TalkTV, and this was launched by Rupert Murdoch's newscast, they are simply going to stop broadcasting on television.
Well, they're doing more than that.
Go on.
So, I've spoken to people, and it was described to me by a producer over there as, quote, the Hunger Games right now, because they hired, under Rebecca Brooks' initiative to do TalkTV and get Piers Morgan on for how many hundred million, put his face on every bus stop, they overspent and underperformed.
And so they brought in a lot of Credentialed TV executives from ITN and the like.
Now they've got lots of people's salaries to pay but absolutely no broadcast outlet.
So they are cutting all of their broadcasting team except for the digital team.
So only the people that run the websites and do social media clips are the ones that are staying.
So they've got a skeleton crew and they might keep a couple of jobs open but Some of the most senior people in the business that moved over there are now having to fight each other for the last few roles.
And that's also a terrible idea because if you're transitioning and closing down, and everyone knows they're going to be made redundant, they're meant to be resenting each other and trying to out-compete each other, are they going to have any loyalty to ensure a seamless transition?
Lots of people really, on a personal level, expressing their worry over there.
And they should be.
Because it's just become apparent that The financial viability of a terrestrial or Sky TV station, an old TV station, just isn't in existence anymore.
It's medium and message as well, because I've always scratched my head.
I was trying to ask people this when they were setting it up, because for those who don't know, I actually used to work with, I used to do a Monday Night Show with Kevin O'Sullivan.
And their channel was very prominent during COVID because they were the only ones that really were willing to question lockdown, especially before GB News even launched.
And I was just saying that Piers Morgan was full-throatedly for vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and BLM protests.
So why have you made him your flagship figure?
Because they're a right-wing channel.
Exactly, and so lots of people just abandon... Leaning into conservatism by hiring Piers Morgan, yeah.
Yeah, and so they've abandoned Talking Drones, and then they went to GB, and then they found that a bunch of GB presenters are gone, and so now where are they being chased to?
As you said, the internet.
Hello, everyone.
Worried about us being regulated, I guess.
Yes.
I mean, they've got some interesting statistics.
In December 2023, TalkTV only reached 2 million viewers for the month.
We get something like 6 to 8 million views a month on this channel on YouTube, and that's not including any of the other places we put the show.
So it's an interestingly very, very small number.
GB News is on 2.87 million.
Sky News gets 8.5 million.
And the BBC gets 11.4 million, which is interesting.
I'd be interested to see how they calculated that as well, because of course they run BBC and Sky on Wetherspoons televisions and airport lounges and things like that, so I wonder if the numbers are being slightly fudged.
Because of course, not being funny, at the peak times Farage, Wotton, Headliners were out competing all the shows in that slot as well.
I think that's the case of simply having a particular spike at that time.
It's not that there's a consistent audience share that is committed to these channels.
So let's go to GB News, which is a place that I'm I'm sympathetic to and I know lots of the people there.
I'm friends with lots of the people there.
I like them.
I appreciate.
And a lot of people are very angry at GB News because they aren't as based as people would like.
But of course, GB News operate within the straitjacket of Ofcom.
And I am very aware that this is something that hems them in on all sides and they're being particularly targeted.
I was going to say there's something like a dozen but it turns out it's 13 open investigations because of ideological conflict.
Ofcom itself is an ideologically liberal broadcaster and so any non-liberal perspective that wants to get represented, well, it falls foul of the tripwires.
bring Ofcom into the conversation.
But GB News is not doing well.
They're operating at a massive loss of 42.4 million in the year of ending at May 2023.
That's enormous.
$42.4 million in the year of ending May 2023.
That's enormous.
And so they have a total channel deficit of $76 million.
I think, so one of the strategies that I do know that they're doing, Neil Oliver is being the first one to be moved over because his show has been targeted routinely by Ofcom complaints for ideological reasons, including a Conservative MP and an anti-Semitism policy trust who have accused him defamatorily, I think, of being a Holocaust including a Conservative MP and an anti-Semitism policy trust who have accused him defamatorily, They're moving...
his show to be pre-recorded and then the other half of the show is going to be put behind the digital paywall which isn't going to be subject to offcom i wouldn't be shocked if the whole channel starts moving there as well which will see coals and and i agree like patrick christus and martin daubney absolutely great guys fantastic stuff i've spoken to them all the time they said look i want to do this that and the other i feel constrained and And I don't blame any of them, the hosts at least, I don't blame any of the hosts for sticking with it and trying to push against but being hemmed in.
I do think however some of the executives have taken some excessive Pandering to the crowd who never gonna accept me by ousting the likes of Calvin and Dan.
I mean, quick story.
I was on there on Saturday.
We had to write a monologue.
Had to be two minutes.
Mine was subjected to three rounds of editor reading to ensure offhand compliance, and they didn't clip it, which has never happened before.
They're very scared.
So what's interesting is that GB News, through advertising revenue, has only managed to accrue 6.7 million for the year.
There was quite a well-organized boycott movement when it first launched, and I think that spooked off advertisers.
I don't know how they sought to remedy that.
Some advertisers came back, some didn't, obviously.
But I think that what it's done is reduced the desirability of advertising space on GB News.
So I imagine they can't charge what they would otherwise be able to charge.
I don't have any particular information on that.
I'm just making an educated guess on it.
Sorry about all this coughing.
And so this is, like I said again, an extinction level event.
These things won't go on forever, and so at some point we're going to see these things implode.
I mean there is a virtue though to being prudent.
I don't think there's any virtue at all in self-immolating.
If GB News is operating within the Ofcom paradigm, and it has to do so by law, there's no virtue in getting the whole station closed down.
But that's why there should have been a much more concerted effort on the part of the Conservative Party to make sure that that's not the paradigm in which their ideologically friendly broadcasters have to operate in.
Well, they should in the first place.
Of course they should.
Well, the Culture Secretary, when asked if Ofcom is unduly going after GB News, bear in mind two or three of our colleagues currently have shows on there, Laura Trott said it's working as intended.
Yeah, well, this is the thing.
Far more important than what any particular Prime Minister does while in office is whether or not their influence is so transformative that they end up Directly or indirectly binding their successors.
For example, I know quite a bit, more than most English people, about Hungarian politics and I think that this should be Viktor Orbán's main goal at this point.
Not so much trying to get this bill through now, but trying to make sure that every single thing that happens in Hungarian politics for the next 50 years has to take place within the Orbánite paradigm.
Tony Blair succeeded in that.
He did succeed in that and Margaret Thatcher also succeeded on the economic front in making sure the post-war consensus was demolished and Blair had to operate within that paradigm and likewise the Conservatives since Cameron, probably even before Cameron.
No doubt.
felt the same need to do the same thing.
And even worse, not just operating within the Blair paradigm, but trying to move it leftwards, like trying to outdo them.
I think we're going to get to a clip later of Rishi Sunak saying that diversity is one of our unloved strengths.
But the point being, Ofcom will ideologically hem in GB News from doing anything that would head rightwards.
But anyway, so GB News is in pretty bad trouble, I would say.
And so there's a reason that Paul Marshall is pumping 41 million pounds into GB News to cover the operating costs.
So he is a hedge fund manager, is putting up his own money to keep GB News on the air.
How long this can go on for is anyone's guess.
This is why I hope not hate trying to pound him, because credit to Paul, I mean, setting up UnHerd, which can be wavery, but I've got friends who write for them, supporting Winston's show.
He's now gone independent.
He's done good bits.
And so he's clearly a threat to the power structures.
But how long can you keep propping up something that's being attacked from It's not that they're not good people, it's the problem is they have a marketplace that is not in favor, it's not an expanding marketplace for television, and they are intrinsically controlled by what is essentially Enemy action.
There is an active will against what GB News is from a power that has complete control of them.
Ofcom, I'm going to do a longer video on Ofcom at some point, but Ofcom was founded by Tony Blair.
It's explicitly a liberal institution and it's funded by the fines it takes from Various organizations.
And so they have a direct, two direct incentives to target GB News and find them as often as they can.
And not the BBC?
And not the BBC.
Which is very interesting.
Why don't the financial, obviously I understand why the ideological incentive doesn't operate on the BBC, but why doesn't the financial incentive operate?
It does, but that's the thing.
The financial incentive does operate, and so that's what makes the lack of financial penalties on the BBC.
You mean you need to redouble your efforts elsewhere?
Yeah, but it also shows the ideological edge that's cutting.
For example, what's her name, the fat, disgusting comedian?
Oh, Joe Brand?
You've narrowed it down.
No, no, that does actually narrow it down.
You knew exactly what I meant.
When she said that she wished someone would throw acid in Nigel Farage's face, no fine.
Really?
Yes, no fine.
Very suspicious because you've got every incentive to find them.
That's obviously a call for violence, even if it's counselling a joke, but it's totally discretionary for our part.
Or is Lawrence Fox saying he wouldn't do something?
Exactly, whereas Lawrence Funk saying, I don't think I'd like to court that young lady.
Is that what he said?
Is that a verbatim quote?
A verbatim quote is, I wouldn't want to shag her.
That's right, yes.
That seems more like it.
But even then, that's not a threat or anything like that.
That's just him being a bit rude.
And that was cause for a massive Ofcom investigation, three people losing their jobs.
Yeah, well, they found Dan Wharton guilty of not pushing back hard enough.
Yeah, yeah.
Insufficient resistance.
And so the point being, the financial incentive is there, present on both sides, but of course the ideological incentive makes sure the blade only cuts one.
And therefore, GB News are basically, I think, doomed to fail.
I mean, they, in the Financial Times article, they suggest that existing investors are expected to have to inject further funds into the broadcast this year to cover its losses, says a person close to the situation, and I don't see how that couldn't be the case.
It has to be the case.
This causes very serious problems for the conservative minded person.
And I'm speaking at more of a psychological level than a philosophical level at this point.
Because conservatives instinctively want to see their institutions, see the institutions they've inherited as places of refuge.
They don't want them to be sort of tribalistic battlegrounds.
And because, whether we like it or not, I mean, Ofcom is now an inherited institution of sorts.
It's difficult for people with a conservative temperament to want to, even though it's a revolutionary institution, it's hard.
Conservatives haven't quite, to my mind at least, they haven't yet realized that we're living in a post-revolutionary era.
And as such, the only way to be conservative is to be counter-revolutionary.
They haven't grasped that yet.
One thing I think I would emphasize to conservative people is that you have t-shirts sold on Ofcom.
So don't be afraid to throw them out if they're a bit worn through.
And Ofcom is an explicitly evil organization that's trying to destroy you and everything you love.
So it needs to go.
Quite.
Okay, on to the final bit then.
There we go.
Thank you, John, you're very intrepid.
Happy International Women's Day, everyone!
In order to celebrate, we've got three blokes sat around the table telling you why the Manosphere's wrong about marriage.
This has been a discourse that's been ignited recently between the Daily Wire types and the Sovereign Bra types, the people on the more sensible side of the whatever table.
Not that there's ever a sensible side to that particular podcast, and the inheritors of the manosphere, and I belabor that point because there are different generations, and the new types are the likes of Pearl Davis, who we'll be hearing from, Myron Gaines of Fresh and Fit, Andrew Tate, suspicious number of Islamic polygamists.
I almost feel like there's a bit of a Motton Bailey here for saying that, oh, all women are the problem, and this is why we should be a conquering warlord with multiple concubines, but also don't go towards monogamous Christian marriage.
Seems to be a bit of a pipeline here, but I wouldn't, you know, suspect anyone of being untoward.
Before we start, I think it is important to put a bit of a standpoint of epistemology forward.
I mean, Karl is, after all, a postmodern traditionalist, so we have to understand that our values are not timeless, but particularly contingent.
You're married, four kids.
Correct.
Yep, you're a Catholic, you certainly want to get married and have a bunch of kids, and I've got a girlfriend with baby rabies, so I think we're all living our values out here.
I think it's relevant because we will see that perhaps some people are either Not living their values out or are making a particular political prescription and giving advice to their audience who, for fairly justifiable reasons about divorce courts or breakups, might be resentful.
They are insulating themselves from risk aversion and saying this is the way to go when actually it's founded from personal insecurity.
That's not an attack.
I think that's actually true.
Now, what stemmed this was that Andrew Clavin and Pearl Davis had a quick conversation, and I just want to go through the different positions put forward by Clavin, who's a happily married Christian in his 60s, and Pearl Davis, who's a Manisfit influencer, but as far as I know, Pearl is unmarried, no kids, so let's just listen to their positions.
Now, I got a home, I got a mother of my children, I got wonderful children, I got companionship, I got love.
You know, many wonderful things that I got in getting married, but I'm not sure that as many guys are getting that today.
But you seem to be saying that even if you get that, you're kind of getting a bad view.
What percent of women do you think are marriageable under the age of 35?
Debt free, no tattoos, no sex work, in shape.
Uh-huh.
What percent?
You think it's smaller?
Well, you tell me.
No, these numbers were confirmed by an actuary.
Uh-huh.
It's called A World Without Men.
Right.
5%.
5% you think are marriageable?
What percent of men are marriageable?
No, no.
70% are overweight, just by that logic.
So what percent of men are marriageable?
No tattoos, not overweight?
Well, we're not measured by the same things.
Uh-huh.
Why not?
Because men and women, I mean, you know this, men and women are different.
Men and women are different.
Okay.
But then that kind of brings me back to the thing you were saying about men and women.
I don't know.
It just, at that point, it doesn't seem as good to me.
The idea that men are better at everything.
Men and women are different.
So they do different things.
But the idea of marriage not being.
Even, I'm sorry, go ahead.
Well, the idea of marriage not being a good thing for men.
This is something we get hit on at the Daily Wire all the time because all of us, all of the main male talent at the Daily Wire are not just married, but devotedly and happily married.
And so we get people yell at us and say, well, you're disconnected from the culture.
And my thought about that is, well, shouldn't you be more like us instead of us becoming more unhappy in our marriages?
If men are not supposed to get married, what is a man's life supposed to look like?
I don't say they should or they shouldn't.
I think every guy has to decide for himself.
You guys' options are going to be different than a different guy's options.
I'm not here to tell men what to do.
But I think using a blanket statement telling men to get married young without fully understanding women today and the laws is not the wisest.
Right.
Well, people who marry should.
In a business deal, you would never sign a contract in business that the other party is paid to leave.
It would not be wise, right?
If me and you were to do a business deal together, and if I break the deal, I get your children, half of your stuff, and I can ruin your reputation, you would never do it.
And it's not uncommon.
30% of divorces are malicious.
I just thought it was a fascinating club.
Interesting, yes.
It's difficult to know where to begin.
So clearly Pearl isn't completely wrong in saying that the landscape is different for our generation, Connor, than it is for the generation, whichever boomer bracket Andrew Clayton falls into.
I don't watch the Daily Wire all of the time, but I would imagine when they say men should get married, they're not saying men should get married indiscriminately and undiscerningly.
They're saying that all else being equal, it is a good idea to get married.
They're holding it up as an ideal.
They're holding it up as an ideal, and that means that both sexes, being different, as they are, Pearl's right about that, should be They should be demanding and calling forth the best in one another.
They should be trying to compliment each other.
And that seems to me to be a much better recipe for how we should try to cure the ails of the sexual revolution, talking about the way in which men and women can both encourage and call forth virtue from one another in the service of solidifying that sacrosanct ideal that is marriage.
That should be our message.
We shouldn't be embracing a sort of zero-sum cynicism.
Well, that's the important thing there.
So you're advancing a position of ambiguous complementarity, and so are the lads at The Daily Wire, because Clavens baptise into, I don't know if he said Episcopal, I think he might be, um, Walsh and Claven, uh, not Claven, uh, Knowles are Catholics and Ben Shapiro's Jewish, and so they've all got their discerning criteria for being of shared faith, shared values, shared commitment to the same trajectory of life.
And even though Poehl seems to recognise that men and women are different, She's holding them to the same standards and saying that women are inferior on these metrics.
This is why she talks about marriage like a business contract rather than a covenant.
She's saying women aren't upholding their half of the bargain because if they are to compete on the same grounds as men, then they will be inferior.
This is exactly why when women enter the workforce, they needed the pill in order to compete on economic parity with men so they would take less time out of work and they'd offhand their children to a daycare and the like.
So even though Pearl is saying men and women are are different.
She's saying, when assessed on the same metrics, men are superior, and that's the difference, rather than, well, they're not even being compared on the same metrics.
And of course, under that logic, you can't really justify entering that contract with an inferior business partner.
The problem as well is that when she makes the point that marriage is a risky proposition for men, she is actually appealing to a sort of egalitarianism there, where she says, well, well, why should a woman be able to take half of your stuff?
Well, in a fair world, it is implied that a woman wouldn't because she's a strong, independent woman who doesn't need a man.
And actually, this is a patriarchal holdover from an earlier pre-feminist time.
And so, the only solution that she'd have would be an anti-traditional one, which is contradictory to what I think she's actually advocating for, for women.
It's playing into the ratcheting effect, making us universal unisex standard consumers, rather than having the paternalistic approach of, well actually, if a woman were to be kicked out of abusive marriage, let's say that's the predominance of divorce is pre-no-fault, then she would need a means of economic subsistence.
But that's the point, isn't it?
The no fault divorce is really at the heart of this issue.
It's like, no, if you get married, you've got to have a serious reason to divorce, which is probably why some of the 80% of divorces are initiated by women.
If no fault divorce didn't happen.
So if you were to say the law was changed, so initiation of divorce for no reason was to leave you without a claim on resources in the marriage, then it wouldn't happen.
I wrote once before that the manosphere like conservatives who I think understandably but wrongly misinterpret and misread the manosphere or the red pill dating sphere as these are sort of, they're reviving conservative ideals, they are sort of re-enchanting our disenchanted world.
I don't think that's true at all.
I think that what they're doing is much more like Like offering a loveless how-to guide on navigating a post-moral world.
So really, people like Pearl, people like Myron Gaines, people like Andrew Tate, people like Justin Waller, all of these people, they don't speak in terms of a sentiment, but they don't speak in terms of us having any kind of The whole idea of the red pill space is that we are basically, you know, we're stranded on this isthmus of the middle state and we are not really called to anything higher.
All we can do is sort of rummage around acquisitively on this meaningless flat ball of celestial dust and as such, you know, marriage begins to be spoken about, as Pearl does speak about it, in terms of business deal, in terms of acquisitiveness, rather than in terms of sanctity and dignifying the human person.
Yeah, especially with epistemology as well.
I know I'm throwing red meat to you here.
This is the perfect example of Oakeshott's practical wisdom versus technical knowledge.
He doesn't know anything about it.
Exactly.
Clavin talks from experience saying that my wife has enriched my life, I've got beautiful children, I wouldn't be where I am without her.
And Pearl says 49% of billionaires are divorced.
It's one of the few defensible uses of the term lived experience.
That's why I said we need to start with standpoint epistemology.
Frankly, I don't think Pearl's really bringing her own standpoint in here and I will show her standpoint later because she did once confess to it.
Also something, and look, I don't hate Pearl.
I don't.
I've spoken to her once before in a very short clip where I said, and I brought up this affiliation at the time.
I see a little bit of insecurity in her, she's admitted to.
My problem with Pearl is with her affiliation with friends like Tate, Myron Gaines, the other Islamic polygamists who I think are using the Manusphere to advance their personal ideological and religious convictions to personal gain.
And also they all rely, as we said, on the egalitarian logic of feminism, even though we revile feminism, because they don't tell men not to sleep around, They just say, oh, because women are doing it anyway, you may as well do it.
Well, you're relying on the contraceptive pill, which then made men and women equal in the first place, so you're doing nothing to escape from the paradigm.
But your universe does not exist without that step change in technology and without the moral revolution that went with it.
Yeah, quite.
Also, she's pulled this number from an interesting place.
So I did a video with Dan on the economics of dating apps.
The secret about dating apps is that you can succeed on them despite perverse incentives because Dating apps have a incentive to keep you single, because obviously they don't want to lose two customers at a time, but if you're a put-together bloke, you're very discerning in your criteria, you will end up meeting someone.
Hello.
So Dan cited the book of numbers here, and he actually got lower than 5%.
He got 0.5% of women of marriageable prospects.
Oh, okay.
But I also have to also quibble with some of these numbers, because, okay, obese and overweight, there's a sliding scale here.
BMI isn't always correct.
Yes, there are lots of obese and overweight women, particularly in the United States, but also it doesn't mean you can't lose the weight.
Worthless degree, again, fairly good.
It doesn't mean she's unattractive, necessarily.
You know, a woman who's got...
Wouldn't Kelly Brooke technically have a high BMI?
I'm thinking like sort of Penny Morden sort of stuff.
She's not thin, but she's, you know, not an unattractive woman.
And also the debt point...
Pretty Patel, you know?
Anyway.
Don't you get AA going.
Oh, no, it's Dan, isn't it?
Speaking of...
Yeah, and then the debt point, it's like, okay, pretty much everyone has financial debt.
I understand that the scales are larger in the US because their student debt system works in a very different way.
And not being funny, who's going to pay that back?
The petrodollar is going to go kaput before then.
This is what love is all about.
I love it.
It's about willing the good of the other.
It's not about indulgence.
And so, presumably, if you find yourself in a loving relationship in which, whether it's a woman with her husband, he's slightly overweight, or it's the husband with his wife, and she's slightly overweight, there is a way of, like, calling that person to something higher than they're currently achieving.
If we completely rid our sexual life and our erotic life and our agapeic life from any ideal of what human beings could be, and I'm not saying a fantasy, utopian ideal, just a real humane ideal of what we can be.
If that's just completely written out of the picture, then all you are left with is precisely the kind of cynicism that characterizes the red pill sphere, and which they are frankly monetizing.
They're monetizing the misery which has resulted from this step change in technology, which has resulted in a revolution in sexual morals.
The thing to be done is to try and reverse that, not to... Accelerate it.
Yeah, accelerate it and just enjoy ourselves while we can.
I do kind of hate the materialistic aspect of all of this though.
I mean, you know, when I fell in love with my wife, I wasn't thinking about any of these things.
I was, you know, in a period of enchantment where you aren't thinking rationally, you're engaging in a kind of fairy tale.
That's different from saying you're thinking irrationally.
Reason is transcended.
It's not that reason is absent.
Well, it kind of is.
It's not really about reason.
It can be, but should it be?
Well, it's not whether it should or shouldn't.
When you're genuinely in love with someone, it becomes something else.
And it's like living in a fairy tale, rather than worrying about Oh, that person has a tattoo on their arm or something.
You're obviously not in the magic if you're worried about those things.
Because what you're thinking is that together you make something that is unique and special and will transcend all of these things.
And that's what Andrew Klavin is trying to say.
He's like, look, my life is golden and rosy.
With my wife in it.
And Pearl's like, yeah, but what about her bank balance?
What are you talking about?
This is, this is the thing.
It's the manosphere.
Uh, I think since pickup artistry, frankly, has been an ideology of risk management.
It's, it's, it's a fear of loss and of rejection and of being insufficient.
And I think this is born out as well of men not having present fathers and communities.
So actually there is a void there where online instruction is needed to cultivate a sort of sense of vitality and confidence.
But then, as you said, there's a perverse profit incentive to keep these men in a state of arrested and resentful development, sitting there paying to insult the OnlyFans models that go on whatever, rather than getting out and getting a girlfriend and achieving escape philosophy from said manosphere.
One of the perfect examples of this that you cite in your piece is actually Myron Gaines.
Now, I'll skip over this clip, go and watch it in the description, but essentially in this clip Myron says, even if you find a nice virginal Christian young girl, you can never be sure that she won't just up and leave you because of the incentives of the divorce courts and because of how much money she can take from you.
I have cited this Obscure Rumble channel because a week ago when I put this segment together, Myron's YouTube channel was up.
Actually, Fresh and Fit have been taken off.
Oh, have they?
Quite interesting, yeah.
They've been deleted as of the last couple of days.
I found it out this morning.
But here's an illustrative tweet.
So Myron Gaines is responding to Sovereign Bra here, who I rather like.
He's a very good Twitter warrior.
Sovereign Bra goes on Whatever quite a lot, and he says, this is why men and women shouldn't sleep around, and he's... Is Sovereign Bra that guy there?
Yes, yeah.
Him.
I think he's a Christian chap, isn't he?
Yeah, yeah, I think he's Eva's fella.
So, Myron Gaines responded saying, Jesus can't save these hoes and neither can you.
Your trad cons need to realise feminism is here to stay and isn't going anywhere.
Adapt to the new normal or keep getting married by the church and destroyed by the state.
I mean, that's not an irrational thing to say.
It is if you're operating outside of the Christian paradigm, which Drew and the rest of the Daily Wire guys aren't, because you have that sentimental shared interest in saying something.
What he is is the atomised man making rational decisions in the post-liberal world.
Sort of.
He's also Islamic.
So, I think this is the hidden hand coming in here saying, abandon Christianity boys, get rid of it, don't engage in marriage, also, here's Islam.
Well, he seems to have abandoned Islam.
This is one of the things that when I wrote my piece about these gentlemen, there it is, yeah, very kind of you.
When I wrote my piece about, one of the things that I came up against was the fact that I was making an argument that these, the manosphere was fundamentally anti-traditionalist, anti-conservative, and anti-transcendent fundamentally, and was...
They had much more in common, say, with, I think I cite Nietzsche and Machiavelli, and who was the third one?
Darwin, than they do with, say, Plato or Augustine on love.
That's clearly the case.
I constantly come up against this idea that Islam isn't exactly short on commands.
I mean, there are lots of ideals advanced by Islam.
Great, many of those ideals.
But it seems to me that one thing that I do find slightly odd about Maren Gaines and Andrew Tate is that their loveless ethos, their highly acquisitive materialist ethos is as much in conflict with Islam as it is with the sort of things that I am trying to counter them with.
In there you said he's an unwitting disciple of Rand more so than he is of Muhammad and you pointed to a thing where he was asked by a girl what would happen if you got in a car accident and you could no longer take care of this woman because if she is meant to be so indomitably impressed by you because you've amassed so much wealth and you've slept with so many women and you're gaining her with your attention.
What happens if you're no longer able to go out and acquiesce resources?
Because that's the only foundation of the relationship.
Yeah, and you're right in here.
The aim, of course, was to test the limits of Myron's all-consuming belief in self-interest against his moral intuitions.
And rather than conceding there is something to be said for sacrifice or avoiding the challenge altogether, he said, I understand that as a man, my duty is to provide and protect.
And if I can no longer provide for that, then I'm virtually useless.
And that's just the cold reality of the world.
The women, in other words, would be more than justified in abandoning their helpless husband.
Most tellingly of all, he said, this is how it is in the animal kingdom.
Oh, well then, if it's good enough for the animals.
Yeah, we are more merely mammalian and transactional, and there's absolutely no sentiment.
Now, if you are a man, is that situation you want to end up in?
Is this the paradigm you want to adapt to as the new normal, or do you want to seek an alternative that is more sentimental?
That actually, if one of you is stricken down by grief or unchosen debilitating illness, or if you have children together and one of those is taken from you, Do you want your relationship to just end on merely monetary reasons?
I mean, that just seems really cold to me.
And so, this is what I'll finish on.
This is why I'm saying that this is all a risk management strategy.
I think it's advanced by men who think that they can monetize off of other men who are not as capable of getting goals and more afraid of rejection, like Myron and Tate.
But someone who I do think is managing risk, and it's actually kind of sad, is Pearl Davis.
I have this link here because, again, I had this in the show notes.
This video was removed in the last week.
This video had about 2,000 views.
It's a very old video by Pearl.
I tracked it down, unfortunately, on the subreddit.
So weep for me, because I had to encounter Reddit.
This is a video that Pearl uploaded from her car years ago that explains why she watches Manosphere content.
And it's made me very sympathetic to her, actually.
Today, I'm going to talk to you guys about A topic that I've been asked a couple times.
Um, a lot of guys on the channel, they'll say, how are you so reasonable?
How, or even girls, they'll ask me, like, how can you listen to this man talk about all these women being average?
And all these women, um, you know, um, not deserving these great guys, whatever.
And I have one, one answer for you.
Low self-esteem.
From a young age, I haven't thought highly of myself.
I never thought that I deserved a lot, to be honest.
I never thought of myself as a queen.
And I never thought of myself super highly.
I'm gonna just be honest here.
From a young age, I was what you call humble, okay?
Most of my friends, right, were generally, like, more attractive than me.
Like, if you look at my closest friends, especially when they're younger, right, you know, the weight starts to play a part when you get older, but especially when you're younger, I was never the hot friend.
Now, I'm not saying I never had female privilege.
It's a thing, you know?
But most guys, even the average guys you guys talk about so dearly, if they were interested in me, they would ask me about my friend first.
And if that didn't work out, then, then they would come crawl into me.
So, Yeah, I would say low self-esteem.
That's the main one.
And yeah, being humbled.
It's actually really sad.
It is quite sad, yeah.
So I, again, I think that she's involved herself in the sphere as a kind of risk mitigation strategy because, unfortunately, because of her upbringing, she hasn't felt deserving of a man compared to the other conditions that she's competing with women on.
So she's trying to stigmatize that playing field, change the conditions and make herself more certain.
You can see where the resentment against other women comes from.
there.
Even if a guy was interested in her, he'd go to her friend first, get rejected, then come crawling to her.
So it seems that the Manosphere not only stigmatizes sentiment, and as you've rightly pointed out, creates a series of conditions that leads to the abolition of security and love.
But also, it's a strategy for people who are fundamentally insecure to project their insecurities out into the world and castigate an entire cohort of women just because they've been badly burned, I don't think that they compete.
It's a covert competition strategy.
And so, again, on International Women's Day, we don't hate all women.
Actually, they're not all that bad.
Some of them are still alright.
And getting married might do you some good.
With that, onto the video comments!
Saturday the 9th of March is the birthday of Tony D. His presence is much missed but he does plan to return when his busy life and dog grooming allows.
On Sunday he hosts a Hollywood hot take stream that is well worth a view.
Conveniently it sits neatly after the Viva Fry stream.
He would like to remind everyone that his Pioneer books are available at very reasonable prices on Amazon and you may catch him on tour in the New Jersey area.
So, uh, Tony D and Little Joan, uh, used to do a video comments.
Uh, so people who pay 30 pounds a month to subscribe to us can send us video comments and, uh, he sends us a load.
And then I can't remember what the reason that he had to stop was.
Um, but he, he had stopped for whatever reason.
Uh, and he he's got fans who miss his, uh, reliable commentary.
Yeah.
We have a, we have quite a dedicated cohort of people over here.
Akira Toriyama has unfortunately just passed away.
He was the creator of Dragon Ball and he left a magnificent, positive mark on the world and inspired many artists after him and created many fans.
This is very sad.
I'm very sad.
I didn't think I would be this sad.
But he's important.
And I'll leave some notes written by the creator of Naruto and the creator of One Piece.
Yeah, Harry, John and Jack, all big Dragon Ball fans, they were sad this morning.
The thing that always made me laugh about Dragon Ball and all this sort of anime stuff, because I didn't watch it and that.
I never watched any.
It's a Stone Toss comic of the black girls that was looking at Little Mermaid, rubbish, and went, oh, finally, I feel so seen.
And then it's all the black kids sitting around the TV set pointing at Goku going, oh, my God, he's literally me.
I never watched it, but I appreciate it's very popular.
Aspirational in the 90s, I suppose.
Yesterday, I forgot to mention where I actually was.
So, I'm rectifying that.
This is Manitoba.
It's the fifth province to join Confederation in the Dominion of Canada, which we now just call Canada.
In my opinion, it's one of the nicest provinces, but of course, you know, I was born here, so... It's only got a population of about 1.1 million, but it's quite large, and it's got a lot of farms.
Really nice!
Even in the winter.
You're making impressive inroads transatlantically.
Ah, yeah.
We've got a sizable American audience.
Yeah, clearly.
We've actually got a sizable female audience as well.
Even more surprising.
Helps with the physiognomy, I guess.
It is, genuinely.
So, I was pretty rough on Reagan in an earlier video, and I just wanted to say that, like, obviously he had his good points, because we just generally don't appreciate just how bad the Carter years were, both domestically and foreign policy-wise.
You know, Reagan did try to at least stabilize all of the, you know, decline.
The main problem is he stabilized it.
It didn't actually roll much of it back, although he did actually went out on the foreign policy measures.
He was the first one to pass no-fault divorce legislation when he was governor of California.
He was also pro-mass immigration.
Can I say something quickly?
I don't mean to besmirch Reagan and Thatcher as individuals, but I do think, and this is one for another time, but as a proposition for now, I do think that the Anglo-American conservative movement would be in significantly better condition if the paradigmatic figures which loomed large in the imagination of conservatives today were instead Nixon and Enoch Powell.
Yes.
If they weren't congenital liberals.
Yeah.
But the problem is, is the height of the Cold War, it's an ideological world.
And so liberal ideology finds its voices.
Sure.
Yeah.
A lot of modern sickness is a unique product of Americanism, which is to say that America is uniquely a propositional nation.
Long to the ethnicity of American, you need only agree with the political supposition of life, liberty, and hot rods are cool.
This is in contrast to almost every other country in the world, which is a nation-state, which is a political body of, for, and by a peculiar ethnicity, with its own intrinsic and unspoken moral character.
America, being the dominant cultural hegemon, have unknowingly exported their cultural presuppositions of the world.
And I think this, specifically, is Carl's universal asset.
It's the radioactive decay of the failing American experiment.
Yeah, that's correct.
A summary of my views on it.
Quite close.
I still think that this idea of America as a propositional nation is not original.
It's basically, that trope is a creature of the 1960s.
No founder would have agreed with that.
But also, it's also not true.
Oh yeah, quite, that's what I mean, yeah.
It's not true, but it's even more insidious in the European context, but in America it's not even as though, well yeah of course America's a propositional nation, but we're not.
America originally wasn't either.
Well Kaufman's book, White Shirt from the First Chapter, charts since the 60s, particularly JFK, popularised the we're a nation of immigrants phrase.
It just took off like a rocket because they wanted to ideologically assimilate more people.
But before that, When they said moral and religious people in John Adams talking about the Constitution, or when they said we hold these truths to be self-evident and they're talking about the Creator, when they said freedom of religious worship, they meant freedom of Christian denomination.
They did not mean Hinduism or Islam or even atheism.
Some, well, some of the founding fathers maybe, but like John Locke did not want atheists in the country.
So, you know, different, different suppositions held by a homogenous group do not play out over time.
I don't know if any of anyone else likes to play around with those nanograms on Google where you can put in key phrases and see about their traction over time.
Since the 1960s in the, in the United States in publications as an app, austerity has gone down precipitously.
Well, and at the same time, the nation of immigrants has gone up.
The thing is, the idea that America is a propositional nation is obviously not true, because America is riddled with communists who don't agree with the proposition, and you don't render them un-American.
It goes back to the Bolingbroke example I gave earlier.
Exactly.
If that's the case, then California is not an American state.
You've got a lot of Americans that are suddenly agreeing with you.
Okay, now take the steps to eject them from the Union, because they're not Americans.
But that's not going to happen, and that'll never happen.
Because fundamentally, this is just another mythos, and I guess one of the problems with all mythos is that it's just not true.
And this is just your untrue mythos.
I do not think the Democrats will replace Biden for one simple reason.
It will be admitting weakness, and they can't have that.
They will do anything to retain their power.
Anything.
I think he's right.
I think they're afraid of, because one of the things about the left-wing narrative is it's all at all times correct.
It can never admit a failure.
And if they do admit a failure, then the whole thing starts unraveling.
So why wasn't this wrong?
Why wasn't this wrong?
All of the steps become wrong because it's got no corrective mechanism built into it.
Unlike a more sort of non-ideological position where it's like, well, we'll try that and we'll see if that works.
Um, they, they speak categorically about every single subject.
This will work all the time.
Uh, certainty is the primary drive that underpins it.
And if one thing becomes uncertain, the whole thing becomes uncertain, the whole thing collapses.
Uh, I think he's right.
I think they probably will be forced to run Biden unless Biden literally collapses.
Did you watch the State of the Union?
I haven't seen it yet.
Okay.
So I listened to it on the way into work.
Um, Biden is actually falling apart.
I'm surprised his jaw didn't rot off like the end of last crusade.
That's all the commentary I saw.
He kept flubbing bits.
Trump-truthed at one point.
The drugs are clearly wearing off.
Get back on Twitter, Trump!
The rest of it was just an intersectional wish list.
And we want to pass the voting rights out.
We want to pass the Green New Deal.
So they are trying... There is absolutely no self-correction mechanism.
They're just layering the hyper-reality of everything's fine on top of a republic that's about to fractionate into two.
Last video comment.
I think the Lausere set up a foundation for a political party.
I don't mean run.
I mean, set up a foundation for people to create one.
Don't look at me!
You guys understand the problems, and you understand who the British people are, so I would suggest creating a roundtable to create a manifesto for people to run on.
I think a good name for actually a party, if you did start one, would be Britannica.
Not something to return to, but something that you are.
A party that stays.
Good framing.
It's very good framing.
Britannica's not bad, actually.
The only hesitations I have at the moment are, is it worth setting up the party now or after?
Because at the moment, I don't think the soil is... The current election is a sort of foregone conclusion, genuinely.
And so, is it worth inheriting the soil rather than trying to plant it in something deracinated?
I mean, it really depends when the election is in the year, I would say.
If it's in the end of the year, possibly it's worth it.
If it's in the next few months, probably too soon.
But either way, I think afterwards there's going to be a loss of fertile soil.
So we've got a couple of super chats and we've got a couple of minutes before we have to wrap up.
Sean sent us $10.
Sorry here in Canada if you have any kind of crime charge, you cannot have a passport which is required to go anywhere.
I cannot go to the EU, UK or USA for just a few.
As an immigrant, I can be disadvantaged.
I mean, in the UK, I don't think... Doesn't prevent you from getting a passport at all.
No.
Um, Windpill Seeker sent us two.
Uh, Conservatives are arrogant when they believe the opposition is dumb.
They want to destroy capitalism with the- I don't know what that is.
Cloward, Piven, Strategy and Economics, and the Repressive Tolerance Hub.
Again, I- I- I don't like the framing of it.
They're using repressive tolerance.
No, they just hate white people.
They just hate the family.
That's the window dressing.
That's the post-hot ideological rationalization trying to legitimize the fact that they just want to wheel power against their enemies.
Repressive tolerance, sure, is a useful phrase.
Yeah, but repressive tolerance is just the left-wing equivalent of the friend-enemy distinction.
No, it's not.
It is.
No, no, Schmidt, you've misread Schmidt, genuinely.
Schmidt is metaphysical.
It's not just merely, like, crush your enemies.
Right.
Yeah.
Couple more before we go.
Andy Anonymous.
No matter how awful the world gets, it gives me hope that at least one Lotuses host knows the date.
Thank you very much.
I did see that name.
You bastards for my ears.
That's all I'll say.
Nick Taylor.
Why do institutions think the migrants will be the useful idiots?
They already have established cultures and hierarchies and once they have their foot in the door, they will concentrate.
I may be a bigot, but at least I'm not condescending.
Well, as we have learned via Lee Anderson, just noticing patterns and deciding to notice the undesirable consequences of government policy is itself Hate speech and extremism, we're all going to be labelled that.
Right, I think that's our cue to wrap up.
Harrison, thank you very much for coming in.
Do you fancy talking through your veritable links?
Oh, well, I suppose, well, you can see, well, can people see this?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, well, first of all, you should read the European Conservative, not just the stuff that I put out, but the European Conservative generally.
A very well put together magazine, lots of essays, analysis.
And interesting content, like a real rarity, and of course, watch deprogrammed on the New Culture Forum every Thursday at 7 o'clock.
Yes, most recent episode was actually me and you.
It was, yes.
You stepped in for Evan who was in Canada.
Yes, it was a very good chat, so thank you very much.
For everyone still listening, if you're listening live, we do have lads hour and a half an hour where we'll be discussing the Dino question.
If you haven't signed up for premium already, I mean it's £5 a month, you can go and interact with us.
What are you doing?
You're missing out on all the good content.
Also, this keeps everything up and running, so come and support us.
Yeah, and tell Ofcom to come for us too.
Thanks very much, we've had a lot of fun.
Harrison will be joining us in half an hour.
Until then, we'll be back on Monday.
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