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July 10, 2024 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:41:14

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #953

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	Hello and welcome to the podcast of Lotus Eaters episode 953 on today Wednesday the 10th of July I'm your host Harry, joined today by Bo and our returning guest Harrison Pitt.
	Say hello Harrison.
	Hello chaps, hello gentlemen, how are you doing?
	How are you doing?
	Good to be with you.
	Yes, and today we're going to be talking about the real reason for mass migration, which is successful penalty shootouts.
	Clearly, that's the reason.
	I think the ratio's a bit skewed of what, is it eight players for every million or two people you get into the country, but as long as we win the footy it's alright.
	We're also saying nuts to NATO, interested on that one, and the exceedingly pointless civil war that's currently going on in the Conservative Party.
	That's my view at least, yeah.
	Well, that'll be interesting.
	We've not got much else to say before then, other than we've got Rumble Rants going on, so if you've got a bit of spare change, which I know you've got, I can see it sticking out of your pocket right now, then please send it in to us so that we can answer your questions.
	Anything else to add, gentlemen?
	Would you like to poor shame our audience, Harrison?
	On what grounds?
	On any ground that you can think of, really.
	I see no reason to be snobbish.
	We'll see what happens as we get into the segments.
	Tomlinson talks after this.
	Oh yeah, Tomlinson talks after this as well.
	I believe him and Carl are still in America right now, but this is one that we've prepared in advance.
	So check that out once this is done.
	Anyway, let's get into the news then.
	So, the footie's on at the moment.
	Is it?
	I don't know if you've noticed.
	I don't know if you've been anywhere within 50 yards of a pub recently.
	Probably 300 yards of a pub over the weekend.
	You might have heard it.
	You might have known that the football was on.
	And I'm going to preface this immediately by saying I don't watch football.
	I don't normally care about football.
	You what, mate?
	Are we going to have to take this outside, son?
	No, please.
	Harry's like a foot taller than me, like a hundred pounds heavier.
	He's a big guy.
	Well, you know, thanks.
	But anyway, so yeah, I don't really watch the football.
	I don't know much about football, but I do know what the media always says about the football.
	And I always know the media reactions whenever football happens at the moment with the England team, because the England team has a number of people who are of mixed or just outright foreign ancestry.
	On there, and that always turns into the story whenever anything goes right with the football.
	From what I can tell, there's a few things, which is that you're only allowed to be a nationalist when it comes to football, when it's football series, and the only nationalism that you're allowed to be a fan of when it comes to the football is that you're allowed to be proud of the fact that your country is strong in its diversity and inclusive to people of all backgrounds.
	This is the modern narrative and the football seems to me to be a way in which the media likes to continue to push that and in fact the football is Gareth Southgate the manager?
	Yes, that Gareth Southgate the manager likes to push it as well because he's unapologetically woke and he wants the team to act as a media arm for diversity.
	We did a segment a week or two ago where even Sadiq Khan was making noises about the St George's flag should probably be kept to a minimum, even during big football tournaments.
	How did he feel about this kneeling last time?
	He probably loved it, didn't he?
	The ritual humiliation of that.
	He probably loved it, even though he's obviously got nothing to do with George Floyd.
	Yeah, they would like to even dial down the small amount of national pride you're sort of allowed during big tournaments.
	Even that, a lot of them would rather we didn't.
	Okay, so if they did that, what would be the reason for most people to even watch the football then?
	If they can't wave the St.
	George's flag and just be proud of themselves and happy and go out for a pint and enjoy themselves, what's the point?
	The love of actual football?
	From my limited experience, you don't go to the pub to watch the football to sit there in perfect silence.
	Nursing a single pint or maybe even a sherry.
	That's not what you watch the football for.
	I was in the pub over the weekend, I wasn't even watching the football, I was spending some time with friends, but I could hear everyone constantly.
	I was trying to get around the corner, away from people, but it was deafening.
	It's strange though, it's almost as if rather than cheering on, you know, footballers drawn exclusively or primarily from the native population, increasingly it's like cheering on mercenaries in an army rather than...
	Rather than actual native members of that people.
	But it's also a total waste of patriotic energy in my view.
	And I'd also add, Harry, that it's not just the case that they make the football all about this sort of woke guff when the team does well, as indeed the team did do well against Switzerland.
	And I think all five players have some kind of ancestral connection to a place other than England.
	And this is why they were touting it as an example of You know, the virtues of diversity in action.
	It's also when things go badly.
	They will also find a pretext when things go badly.
	In 2021, when it actually so happened, and I wouldn't want to make too much of this, but if they're going to make a lot of it when things go well, it seems natural that people are going to respond in kind.
	I think in 2021, two players who happened to be black were the ones who missed the decisive penalties in the final against Italy.
	I believe it was three, looking back at the reporting that was going on back then, but I might be wrong.
	I remember, so it might have been three, but the two that I remember were Bukayo Saka missed a penalty for England and Jordan Sancho who's mixed race.
	I think it might have also been Marcus Rashford as well.
	You're right, Marcus Rashford.
	I remember there was a mural in Salford that got defaced after it.
	But then they focused on the really, really negative reaction against those black players, and even though many of these negative comments that later transpired were drawn from places as remote as North Africa, it wasn't as if people were railing against- I think it was also lots of Italians.
	Lots of Italians, lots of people other than- And they're the ones who beat us!
	Indeed, lots of people other than native English people.
	Being openly racist against these players, and only about 12 comments, if I recall, or something like that as well.
	But they will also make a meal out of that, so it's very much a case of heads, diversity wins, tails, white people lose.
	There's no way of winning.
	They'll always find a way of shoehorning race communism into the picture.
	It's interesting that you mention the old reaction from back then, because I wanted to just remind everybody of what the reporting was at the time.
	And it's very interesting, because even if you go on random industry websites like this ILM from 2021, they look at Gareth Southgate's leadership style and they say, what can we learn from this?
	What can we learn from Gareth Southgate's management of the English football team?
	And if you go down, one of the things they highlight is equality.
	We can learn equality from it, and they quote him saying, it's in our duty to continue to interact with the public on matters such as equality, inclusivity, and racial justice, while using the power of our voices to help put debates on the table, raise awareness, and educate.
	So, again, rather than being purely a team playing an international sport, trying to seek glory for its home country, it's a political tool.
	It's a mode of propaganda where they go, look, here's a bunch of foreigners on the team, but they're doing it in your name, therefore they are of that nation in the first place, therefore diversity is our strength, etc, etc, etc.
	And it's interesting to see how far this went, where even business websites were Trying to promote it as well.
	The thing I will say is that the concept of let's kick racism out of football is very old.
	I remember being in the 1990s it was already a slogan.
	People like John Barnes were talking about how they talked about racism in football back in the 70s or the 80s.
	Well Southgate was playing for England back in the 90s wasn't it?
	Southgate?
	Yeah, yeah.
	He missed a penalty in Euro 96 famously.
	Correct.
	He waddled it over the bar.
	So he was within that environment and that sludge already back then.
	He seems to have just carried it on into the modern period.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I don't know why he's so woke.
	I guess he's just weak-willed.
	Just, you know, Jedi mind tricks work on him.
	I don't know.
	He's a footballer.
	Right, he's not a political philosopher, he's not a sociologist.
	But apparently they're treating him like a business magnate.
	He lacks the intellectual resources to resist against trends, is basically the point.
	He's leadership style.
	Sorry, what leadership style?
	It's just Gareth Southgate.
	There's no leadership style.
	It's just him saying, yeah, I pick these guys.
	He's also been gifted with, it must be said, both the native British players and the mixed race players included, a very, very gifted generation of England players.
	I suspect any manager would have done pretty well with them and he indeed has not won a trophy yet.
	The furthest he's got is to the final in Euro 2020.
	We got to the semis, didn't we, in the World Cup?
	I think we did, wasn't it?
	No, not in the most recent World Cup.
	Maybe we did.
	I can't recall.
	No, we didn't get to the semis in the most recent World Cup, but in 2018 we got to the semis and lost to Croatia.
	I mean, later on today, I think we're playing the semi-finals.
	Against the Netherlands.
	Yes.
	So we'll see how that goes.
	I've got my fingers crossed, of course, but I fear they'll be a bit too strong for us.
	I'm not of course.
	This is the thing for me though, so unlike you Harry, I don't know about you Beau, but it sounds like you know quite a bit about football and I naturally love football, but I never get excited over England anymore, in part because of the attendant sort of woke politics that comes with it.
	I just have no time for it.
	I actually am one of those people who goes to the pub and sits in the corner and watches it quietly and enjoys it as a sporting spectacle.
	There's no sort of nationalistic fervour for me anymore.
	So you're watching it purely for the technical expertise being shown?
	Yes.
	As a fan of wanky technical guitar playing, I can kind of respect that.
	I have a similar thing.
	I love football, it's been a big part of my life since childhood.
	I actually did an interview with Matt Latisse, the famous, living legend, Mathieu Letissier.
	One of the greatest penalty takers of all time actually.
	And that's on the website if anyone wants to check that out.
	But I've got a similar thing.
	Back in, it must have been the very early 2000s, can't remember which tournament it was.
	It was the last time Michael Owen was playing and he blew his knee out in the middle of the game.
	And we did badly in that tournament.
	And ever since then, I obviously still watch them and still interested and still cheer for England and everything.
	But ever since then, so I was in like my early mid-twenties, late-twenties, something like that.
	Yeah, I don't get as excited as I used to.
	When I was a teenager or a kid, big tournaments, the World Cup, it was the most important thing in my life.
	It was so important to me.
	I was so happy when we'd won.
	I was genuinely, emotionally distraught when we'd get knocked out.
	Well, I'm just not like that anymore.
	Now, I watch the game, cheer if we win, tut when we concede, all that sort of thing.
	But yeah, I don't get... I keep it in perspective.
	I'm not... Yeah, maybe it's just because I'm older and more cynical now.
	I don't know.
	But you say going to the pub.
	I was actually in the pub with Devon Tracy, aka Atheism is Unstoppable at the weekend.
	What a name!
	Yeah.
	We're mates.
	In IRL.
	You mean THE Devon Tracy?
	It's just an excuse to go a bit mental when you score a goal though, isn't it?
	Oh yeah, that's what I was hearing.
	When I go to West Ham and we score a goal, you go berserk.
	And there's not really much window to do that in civilised life, really.
	Literally jumping up and down, screaming at the top of your voice.
	When do you get to do that as a civilised, human, grown-up man?
	Other than when your team score.
	Absolutely, but I will say, given that the both of you are saying that your enthusiasm outside of those small moments has drained someone, it is a shame that the overt politicization of the whole thing has really drained some of your energy for it.
	Because it should be something.
	This may sound a bit cliche, it should be something that's a bit more universal than whatever the political hotbutt topic at the moment is.
	Yeah.
	But it's been made very, very political through the actions of Southgate and through the actions of the media as well, and through just the realities of day-to-day life in England and the rest of Britain at the moment.
	And like you said, Harrison, even when they lost, they had to try and turn it around into something where it was still hitting that same point.
	Diversity is strong.
	We lost, but it was because of Possibly because we weren't diverse enough.
	Obviously our strength hadn't fully found it.
	The basic formula, if I can just very quickly, from my understanding is this.
	If we win, that's proof that diversity is a strength.
	That's quite an easy thing.
	And particularly if the black players do well in an outside sense, as indeed they did against, as indeed against who did we play?
	Against Switzerland.
	If we lose and there's a backlash against um certain players even if the backlash isn't actually racially motivated as in most cases it isn't it's usually just personal abuse i'm not saying i support that but it's not racially charged personal abuse then it proves that the native population is irredeemably racist and therefore merit exactly the kind of replacement that makes diversity worth celebrating when we win so it really is a catch-22 situation that's why you should hate the media indeed
	so but but this article is a perfect example of what we're talking there because it's from two years old says inkland may have lost but southgate's team shows us the nation we can be from this presumably native scot i assume um Which is interesting because... Sorry, I've just seen it.
	He's saying the practical and moral argument that our diversity is our strength has long been made and this team proves it.
	Again, they lost at the time, but even so they still have to spin it.
	They have to spin it into being something aspirational.
	Don't worry, if the rest of England looks like this, we too can be second place in everything.
	This is the aspiration that we're going for.
	The same way that I believe what was it the Tories in the lead up to the election were saying about how we are the second biggest soft power.
	In the world.
	This is not aspirational.
	This is, oh, you can be first of the losers.
	If you adopt all of my terrible, insane, progressive attitudes to everything, you can be second best.
	Oh, fantastic.
	I'm sure, you know, that's what Cecil Rhodes, that's what the entire empire was about, right?
	Lord Curzon was always seeking second best.
	Clearly.
	What a reference.
	And this article's got some interesting things.
	It reminds everybody about the Danny Boyle Olympic Opening Ceremony, which thank you for reminding me of that absolute travesty.
	They point, he says here, there were naysayers, particularly those who condemned the diversity and inclusivity projected by it as woke.
	Still, most others are proud to see a presentation to the world of not exactly who we are, But again, this idea is aspirational, we're on the way there, but we're not quite there yet.
	talking class but but again is this idea is aspirational we're on the wave there we're not quite there yet the multicultural revolution is a never-ending project really It's a permanent revolution.
	Some white boys haven't had the common decency to disappear yet.
	So, mission not accomplished just yet.
	There's still a bit of pale, pasty skin on this team, so...
	I don't know, we're not quite there yet.
	But he goes on to say, you know, as a British black Londoner, son of Windrush generation, I find it has never been so easy to support an England team.
	It's northern, southern, black, white, mixed heritage, young, it's experienced, it's multi-denominational, possibly.
	It has players who excel at their jobs and earn a fortune doing them, but try in various ways to ground themselves in the lives of the society in which they are a fetid part.
	They do good things.
	We read about them in tabloids.
	They do stupid things.
	We read about them in tabloids.
	Blah-de-blah-de-blah.
	Some of us has long made the practical and moral argument that Britain's diversity is an extreme.
	So, he's just saying that, yeah, the point of this team, as it exists right now, is purely propaganda.
	Yes, you can go to the pub, you can cheer, you can scream when they score a goal, but what you're really supposed to be taking away from it is not the excellence being displayed on the football pitch, is not the union that you get with the people around you as you're taking in the moment, is that you should look at it and go, diversity is our strength.
	Diversity is hammering that point home.
	Diversity is our strength.
	And you mentioned the racist abuse.
	Obviously, when it turned out that they didn't actually score, the story became, well, it was so terrible of the natives of this country, even though they weren't really the ones doing it when people looked into it.
	And they know that this is another worry, this Euros as well, where people have been saying, Well, they better do better this time, because otherwise the same thing is going to happen again, and we might not be the perfect diverse nation that we're trying to be.
	It's funny as well, again I can't remember all the details, it's fairly hazy, it's 2021, but in sort of the footballing punditry world, including the amateur pundits who exist on Twitter, who are often much more insightful, it must be said, than the professional pundits like Gary Neville, although I do quite like Jeremy Carragher, I think his analysis is usually pretty shrewd, but in any case,
	Most of the complaints were not directed at the three black gentlemen who missed, they were directed primarily at Southgate in particular because I think it was Marcus Rashford in particular, it might have been Jordan Sancho as well, they're both usually quite good penalty takers in football matches so he brought them on very very late in the game with roughly about two minutes left so that they could take penalties.
	You might say oh that sounds like a sensible tactical move, it's actually not because usually You have an advantage in football if you've already been playing for about an hour, you've got into the groove and you're going to be much better taking a penalty.
	These guys would have had quite cold feet, they wouldn't have really got into their groove yet.
	And so most of the criticism was directed at Southgate, veritably white, for that tactical blunder.
	And again, for the other part of it, with Southgate being unapologetically woke, I believe the intention was also to put the more diverse parts of the team at the forefront and put them into positions where they could potentially fail, because if they succeed, well, then you can turn it into the national story.
	And that's what they've been trying to do because over the weekend we had the Switzerland game.
	I believe we scored most, if not all of them.
	We won.
	We scored all of them.
	We won.
	And then you get articles like this.
	Paul Elliott reveals his pride as five footballers of black heritage smash racial stereotypes.
	Is there a racial stereotype that black people can't take penalties?
	Not particularly.
	No, not at all.
	No, that's not a thing.
	That was just a very confusing part of this headline.
	When we did digging, we found out that actually in North Africa there may be one, but not in these eyes.
	Really?
	Honestly, it was extraordinary.
	There was a whole sort of spectator editorial where they went into these, who are these people on Instagram, these shady characters on Instagram who are sort of accusing the black players of missing because they were black, and a huge proportion of them came from North Africa.
	Really?
	I recall that.
	I see what you're saying, right.
	I'm sure those sorts of stereotypes will exist there.
	I thought you were saying that North African players are worse at taking penalties.
	Thank you for inviting me to clarify that.
	Very helpful.
	Thank you.
	So you can see again, they say, one of the lines from here, no amount of off-field work, being the media appearances and all of the propaganda they push in the interviews and such, is as powerful as the sight of five England players of ethnic heritage firing their country into a European Championship semi-final.
	So again, remember, If they lose, diversity is our strength.
	But really, if they win, diversity is REALLY our strength.
	We've never been stronger.
	At the moment, let's see how the semis go later today. - To me, just really lame, really pathetic, that it's any tiny thing, you know, like we invented everything.
	And when we score a bunch of penalties, aren't we great?
	As a race, as an ethnicity, just constantly blackwashing other people's history and things.
	It's really pathetic.
	It's really weak, I think.
	No, I agree with you.
	And again, it shows the fragility of the whole multicultural project, which is this group, the media seems to treat it as this group, needs constant BSing.
	Constant BSing, because they're, as a group, so insecure that if they're not constantly being BSed, they'll what?
	Go crazy and start being violent?
	You don't need a relentless diet of propaganda to establish as a truth in the nation that kittens are cute.
	If this was so self-evidently true, they wouldn't be constantly feeding us with these, as you say, this constant BSing, this constant gaslighting.
	It's the same problem with the whole multicultural project being a never-ending project.
	Well, if it was so strong and so naturally self-evident that this is just the best and most efficient way to order a society, why does it constantly need the nudge and the pressure of social engineering?
	Why does it constantly need an enormous media and bureaucratic apparatus to even keep it semi-functioning?
	Why does it have to be that you need hate speech laws to stop the natives of European countries from protesting against it?
	If it was really all it's made up to be, why would you need any of that?
	Think about it, it's so weird, you know, five English black lads score some penalties.
	In Germany, one time.
	So everyone from St.
	Louis to Cape Town can pat themselves on their back for having roughly the same amount of melanin in their skin.
	Like, what?
	What are you talking about?
	What nonsense!
	Nonsense!
	But again, one of the interesting things is this has been pushed for the This Is Why We Need Migration.
	This was one that was going about, let's see, it's got a little over 2,000 likes, this meme.
	England doesn't win without immigration.
	And it takes out the names of all of the people who have immigration background who are on the team.
	The interesting thing, again, showing that this team really isn't very native.
	At all.
	Which is very interesting.
	But also it's the fact that, well, if we didn't have all of these people, I don't mean to sound harsh, there would be other people to fill those slots.
	Of course there would be.
	In the same team.
	Who might be just as good, they might be a little bit worse, they might be better.
	You don't know because you're talking about a pure hypothetical.
	But I've got to say, I don't know how the selection process works for who gets into the England team.
	But I can't imagine... Gareth Southgate picks them.
	I very much doubt, given how much of a political operator he is and how highly politicized the team is, that he's done a really detailed survey of every team in the entire country to pick out the absolute best of the best.
	I'm sure he's, obviously he's picked out, from what you're saying, some very, very, very good footballers.
	He's spoilt for choice, frankly.
	He really is.
	Yeah.
	But consider this.
	It's probably working in the same way that it worked in university admissions in America for a long time.
	You've got two candidates.
	Both of whom are about equally qualified.
	If one has ethnic minority background, you basically add five points onto them and choose them.
	I would imagine it's something like that.
	It's a classic thing.
	England has suffered from what I'm about to say for decades.
	They will nearly always pick, with a few exceptions, the sort of the most famous, most well-played players, regardless of really if they're in form and stuff.
	For example, Rooney towards the end of his career.
	Yeah.
	It was just a slam dunk that he'd get picked, regardless of anything.
	If he's fit, he gets picked.
	He always played kind of crap for him.
	I mean, he scored tons of goals, but...
	Often he would play poorly.
	In tournaments he didn't tend to score as many.
	Often he would play poorly for England and there's someone like Matt Latisse where he only ever played for Southampton.
	He never played for Man United or Liverpool or whatever.
	Never got an England.
	He got like nine England caps or something tiny like that.
	He never had the England career he deserved because he wasn't a big enough name And this is what's happening now.
	It's happened for decades and decades.
	They pick the most famous ones, really.
	The ones that play for the biggest teams.
	Not necessarily a pure meritocracy.
	But there you go, it's not an exact science.
	I'm sure the meritocratic way of operating has been diminished slightly in this sort of post-Floyd era in the England team.
	But I will say one of the things that makes the England football team different from Harvard admissions is that it's a much more public process in which the vast majority of the nation, or a huge, significant minority of the nation, feel they have a very personal, emotional stake.
	And so, for example, someone like Foden, who is a white player, has had such a wonderful season at Man City that there would just be an uproar if Gareth Southgate for woke, on the grounds of woke criteria, did not pick him.
	And so Gareth Southgate has much less manoeuvre than the Harvard admissions department do when it comes to watering down meritocratic standards, I would say.
	But I'm sure it's had some effect.
	I can't really dispute that.
	You guys are helping me along with this quite nicely.
	But again, I'll just say that from a layman, from somebody who doesn't really know much about all of this, I would be shocked if there weren't political considerations into the choice of the team.
	Because, I mean, Southgate has all but said that there is, and the media is treating it like there is.
	And here's one of my favourites, this clanger from Diane Abbott.
	Everybody's favourite.
	We all know that she's an intellectual giant of British politics.
	Giants of the English football team.
	Meanwhile, Reform is complaining about immigration.
	I mean, mainly illegal immigration.
	How do those things connect, like really?
	That's a bit of a strange comparison to make.
	But again, the whole argument that's being made here is football good, you want to do well in football, throw open the gates to your country, make sure you've got open borders, and then you might win a trophy.
	Look, the first thing that's worth saying is that we won the World Cup in 1966 without a single mixed race or black player in the team.
	Just a detail.
	The second thing I would say is that I'm very happy to sacrifice a slight drop off in sporting achievement, even assuming that this Immigrant infusion is necessary.
	I'm very happy to sacrifice a slight drop off in sporting achievement in order to have a more unified national culture, which would necessarily have to include its demographic underpinnings, which is, you know, the more homogeneity you have, the more likely you are to be a cohesive national culture.
	So if we could get rid of race politics tomorrow, because it would have no purchase in Britain, because we were as homogeneous as Japan, and what we did as well as in Japan in national tournaments, which is to say not very well, That's fine with me.
	No, absolutely.
	I mean Diane Abbott's basically saying, she's a non-secretary really, she's basically saying that there's a few black lads in the first England team, so endless Bangladeshis and Afghanistanis.
	Just an endless stream of those then.
	Now where are they in the team?
	Yeah.
	Are any of these guys from Somali backgrounds?
	I don't think so, no.
	Then why are 72% of the Somalis in London in social housing then?
	Why do we need them?
	Why can't we make distinctions?
	Even if we do want to, even if we do want to, you know, have some immigration policies slightly weighted in favour of having, you know, people who, I think most of these chats will probably be from West African descent.
	Fine, but just say that and make these distinctions, be open about it.
	It really does show, actually, now that we've spoken about this, that even somebody like Diane Abbott really does see the entirety of the immigration debate about the natives versus what is essentially just a giant organic biomass of brown foreigners that are completely undifferentiated from one another.
	It's just the Englishman versus everybody who's not from Europe.
	All of whom get on notoriously well.
	Not just brown skin, but immigration in general.
	So we really, by rights, should have somebody in the team that's an ex-Albanian convict.
	Really, shouldn't we?
	To be fair.
	Where have you pulled convicts from?
	Or are you just thinking, well there's no chance of getting an Albanian who isn't an ex-convict?
	Is it not the case that a lot of Albanians that come here are cocaine dealers?
	Are criminal Albanians?
	I think we now have an agreement with Albania which means that many of them do actually get returned.
	It's one of the few successes of the Sunak premiership that he managed to negotiate that but it is true and it's very interesting.
	Someone pointed out that the tickets to just fly from Albania to Britain is much, much, much, much, much cheaper than going through the illicit smuggling routes which means that the only people who were not I do think we've gone a little bit off of what the topic of this was.
	We can always get onto Albanian criminals somehow on this podcast, can't we?
	pay the more hefty fee and that could only be that their passport would be rejected because they probably had a criminal background Right, right But I do think we've gone a little bit off of what the topic of this was We can always get onto Albanian criminals somehow on this podcast, can't we?
	And we didn't talk about the technical side of football at all I think there was some mention of it but again, it's not my wheelhouse So thank you both for carrying this segment for me.
	Let's move on to NATO.
	Oh, okay.
	Samson wants me to read the Rumble Rants and he is my god, so I have to obey his commandments.
	We've got two so far, so thank you both for sending these in.
	sending these in.
	One from Hewitt76 for $5 says, being proud of our own mediocrity is Britain's genuine national sport.
	Yep.
	That's what we've been reduced to, really, isn't it?
	You didn't catch it, did you?
	Yeah, just saying that being proud of our own mediocrity is Britain's genuine national sport.
	Yeah, that's what we've been reduced to.
	It's all we've got left.
	Old Gil needs this!
	Oh, you gotta cut old Gil a break here!
	And the Shadow Band for $5 says this conversation isn't part of ice hockey for some reason.
	The last I heard about ice hockey, didn't one of the black players... Hello, is my microphone working?
	Very good.
	Correct me in the comments if I'm wrong, but didn't one of the black ice hockey players recently accidentally slice someone's neck open and kill them in the middle of... Murdered him, yeah.
	Yeah.
	Perhaps accidental manslaughter, but I think...
	Yeah, it was a truly disgusting incident, yeah, unbelievable.
	Yeah, that's a pretty awful thing to have happen.
	Yeah, it's terrible, terrible.
	Yeah, ice hockey's a brutal sport, from what I'm aware.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was bad.
	That was real bad.
	I wonder, actually, I should Google after this, whether that guy got prosecuted for that.
	Because most commentators, I'm not a big ice hockey guy, said that doesn't happen.
	You don't accidentally throw your skate up blade first at like six foot in the air at someone's throat.
	It basically almost never ever happens.
	And hit them right where it needs to for them to bleed to death.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, that was horrible.
	Yeah, that was pretty awful.
	So that's the only thing I really know about ice hockey, but thank you for sending that rumble chat in.
	Let's go to the next segment.
	Okay, I thought we can talk a little bit about geopolitics.
	Talk a bit about NATO.
	It's NATO's 75th birthday.
	Didn't you know?
	And so to mark that, Putin dropped loads of bombs on Kiev yesterday.
	I don't know if it was actually to mark that.
	Were those birthday streamers?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it was pretty bad.
	I mean, maybe hit a hospital and dozens of people died.
	And of course, Absolutely terrible and disgusting, but I thought we'd talk a bit about it because there's a big NATO conference going on.
	Talk all about what Sleepy Joe says about it, or rather what his State Department and Pentagon handlers tell him to say about it.
	And what he remembers after they've told him to say.
	Right, yeah, what he mumbles, what he parrots through a mumble they've told him to say.
	And Sakhir, our Prime Minister, what he says about it.
	Before we go into all of that, I thought I could just talk a little bit about the history of NATO, because I fear a lot of people out there might not really know too much about it.
	And I've got my own take on it.
	We don't pretend to be completely unbiased here at Loadseater, so I have got my own view.
	And I'm not really, well I'm not a fan of NATO.
	I don't know about you guys, if you've got strong feelings about it one way or another.
	But the headline is, for me, It's sort of outmoded, it's sort of a relic of the Cold War, and something happened when the Cold War ended, when the Berlin Wall came down in 89, and when the Soviet Union collapsed in 91.
	Something should have profoundly changed with NATO, and it did, but the other way, rather than sort of disbanding itself or winding itself down, it sort of dialed itself up, if anything.
	So I thought we could just talk a bit about NATO and then look at Keir and Joe and what's going on with that summit.
	To give my own perspective, uninformed compared to yours as it probably is, it seems to me, looking at it right now, that NATO is more of an organisation to ensure and expand American influence in Europe
	And that according to some of the more convincing analysis that I've seen, mainly from Professor John Mearsheimer, who's an excellent international analyst when he's been appearing on different shows like Piers Morgan and then shows like Judge Napolitano, that NATO expansion eastward, particularly potentially into Ukraine, as was being discussed, continually getting closer and closer and closer to Russia's borders,
	It's certainly part of it.
	It's an element of it, no doubt.
	No doubt.
	Also, if I do a quick chronological rundown, so at the end of World War II, Joe Starling, Uncle Joe, found himself in control of all of Eastern and Central Europe, even beyond Berlin.
	All of that part of Europe that we started the war to save, right?
	Yeah, we went in to liberate Poland, didn't we?
	We failed to do that in the end.
	So, let's be fair, at the end of World War II, You know, the Cold War essentially started immediately, even before actually, in late 44, in early 45, before Mr. Hitler had killed himself and before the war had ended.
	Already there was wranglings between the Supreme Command on our side, the Allies, and the Red Army over who's going to stop where, and all sorts of things.
	It's already started really.
	So at that point in time, 1945, or the two or three years after 1945, It's absolutely not a crazy idea to think that Western Europe and the United States would benefit from some sort of treaty of cooperation, to work together against, frankly, let's be honest, a very aggressive expansionist Soviet Union under Stalin.
	That's, that's not, that's OK, right?
	That makes complete sense.
	Stalin would have had, did have, designs on pushing further.
	At one of the big conferences, I can't remember if it was Yalta or Potsdam or somewhere, someone said to him, I think it was in Churchill's British delegation, they said to him, you must be quite pleased, really, with the way the Great Patriotic War has ended for you.
	You find yourself in the middle of Europe.
	And he said, well, Czar Alexander in the Napoleonic era got as far as Paris.
	So just that one line alone suggests he did have ambitions beyond where the Iron Curtain finally fell.
	Well, from what I'm aware in Sean McMeekin's book, Stalin's War, he has a lot of documentary evidence to show that Stalin was basically on the edge of going into Eastern Europe by about 1941.
	Right, yeah, well I mean the idea of internationalism, like the Comintern, the idea that communism should dominate the whole world.
	They're explicit about that, right?
	It's a necessarily global ideology and Stalin's own invocation of Alexander I who did indeed get to Paris with the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 when Napoleon had come back from the island of what was it?
	Elba.
	Elba, the island of Elba, that's correct.
	It's true that the Russians got as far as Paris and I suppose that's quite impressive in a way, but the Russians didn't therefore, off the back of that, annex France.
	It wasn't an attempt to transform France completely ideologically in line with one homogeneous ideology.
	They just reinstated the Congress of Vienna and then they reinstated the Bourbon monarchy, that's true, but it didn't have the same sort of Global ideological ambitions as communism.
	And I think a similar thing probably applies to Putin.
	I'm sure he wants Russia to be geopolitically dominant in its own sphere of influence, but the idea that he wants to russify the world in the way that Stalin evidently wanted to communise the world is clearly not true.
	Yeah, Cossacks watering their horses in the Seine.
	Yeah, whether Putin wants his Russian tanks To sort of dominate Montmartre, I don't know about that.
	But anyway, so going back to the late 40s, there was originally a treaty, was it the Treaty of Brussels, where France, Britain, Belgium, Holland and I think Luxembourg had a treaty to say that, you know, if the Soviets do push into Western Europe, we at least will work together.
	And then that morphed into the North Atlantic Treaty, Which is, NATO is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, that's what that means, that's what NATO stands for.
	And the United States got involved, obviously.
	Truman, this is still even before the Korean War.
	And originally the headquarters were in London for a few years, later it became Paris.
	And in the 60s actually, just quickly to jump ahead, in the mid-60s, De Gaulle brought France out of NATO.
	Well, not entirely out of NATO, but they didn't have their troops fighting for NATO.
	So they moved the headquarters to Brussels in Belgium, of course, and that's where it is today.
	That's why it's in Brussels.
	Some people might think, why is NATO's headquarters in Brussels?
	Anyway, that's one of the reasons.
	But we look at the Europe as it was throughout the 50s and even 60s.
	There was the Cold War, the height of the Cold War.
	There was always this endless fear That the Russkies, the Soviets, were going to invade from East Germany into West Germany and then who knows what.
	And that's what the Cold War was largely about.
	Sort of that worry is that they're going to try and take over Europe.
	And so something like NATO made complete sense.
	It made perfect sense.
	It was prudent.
	I think so.
	I think most people would agree.
	It was sort of a no-brainer, almost.
	Okay, so I accept that.
	I think most people accept that.
	But then, as I say, when the war came down in 1989, and then the Soviet project itself collapsed in 1991, perhaps NATO should have rethought its entire remit, even its own existence.
	I mean, there's a famous quote from one of the early founding fathers of it, that the point of NATO was to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.
	It's a funny thing.
	And they're talking about Centurion.
	They're talking about Germany, really.
	Or where the Iron Curtain is.
	So, yeah.
	But things changed after 1991.
	NATO just kept expanding.
	They obviously didn't... Like any power structure, probably, or any sort of living organism, it sort of doesn't want to die, if it can help it.
	If it can expand and flourish, it will try to.
	Well again, the very fact that the point of it was to keep the Americans in, America was able to extend a huge amount of power over Europe in doing so.
	So why wouldn't it want to just keep expanding it?
	America is one of the modern empires, probably the greatest modern empire that's still around today.
	It's hegemon of the world really, let's be honest.
	Yeah, so of course it's going to want to extend its hegemon everywhere it can.
	Right, so why wouldn't it try and do that?
	And it's actually one of the things which weirdly makes, I'm not making a moral comparison, I'm only making a kind of structural and formal one, but it's one of the things that makes NATO weirdly more similar to the Warsaw Pact than it was before because there are all sorts of ideological conditions attached to NATO membership.
	It's not just expansionist in a sort of geopolitical sense, we want to annex this territory, annex is the wrong word in this context, we want to claim this territory, we want to plant our flag here.
	There were preconditions attached like being a democracy, having a sort of liberal system of government and we might think these are good things.
	To a certain extent open borders.
	Was it Kosovo that was bombed in the 90s by Clinton?
	Yeah, one of the NATO chiefs said that the reason they were doing it was because of the idea of an ethnically homogenous state in Europe was an outmoded and outdated idea and we couldn't have that anymore.
	Didn't know about that, but there were times of course when NATO did actually make exceptions and relaxed some of its criteria.
	I mean, the fact that Turkey was admitted, the fact that Spain was admitted, the fact that Greece... there were all sorts of sus cases, but I think after 1991 there should have been... I'm sure Bo is going to get into the details, but
	But a mentality set in that there was a kind of triumphalist unipolar moment, sort of the Fukuyama hypothesis, liberal democracy is clearly the way, it's inevitable, NATO is going to be part of expanding this eastwards and I think there should have been more prudence that kicked in and maybe NATO didn't necessarily have to die but it should have certainly revised what it was about and maybe should have become part of a broader security architecture in Europe which could have included Russia and could have
	you know stemmed the tide of a kind of revanchist Russia on the rise which Putin is clearly manifestational.
	Yeah because there's many layers.
	Each country's got their own army haven't they?
	America if it wants to can unilaterally act.
	As it did in Iraq, for example.
	They get themselves some sort of vague UN resolution.
	Actually, NATO did have a small role to play in Iraq, but they weren't flying hundreds of sorties and bombing all over the place.
	But anyway, we'll get to that in a moment.
	So, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, there was then the war in the Balkans.
	In the early 90s, I mean it was kicking off by 91, 92 and started really happening in 93, 94 through to 95.
	I'm fascinated by that, the breakup of Yugoslavia and those various Balkan Wars.
	There's all sorts of Balkan Wars.
	I've been reading about it, studying about it for years.
	We'll do an Epochs about it, probably a series eventually.
	I find it very, very fascinating.
	It's very, very complicated as well.
	It really is a breakup of Yugoslavia.
	But nonetheless, so in sort of 93, 94, NATO sort of starts getting involved in it.
	And in fact, the first time they did any sort of hot action was in that, since 1949.
	They began in 1949.
	They never really fired any shots in anger at all until the Bosnian War.
	Basically, American, I think they were F-16s, the Black Knights, shot down some Serbian or Bosnian-Serbian light aircraft in the early 90s.
	So right there you can see, just one small example, that something's changed there, hasn't it?
	It's supposed to be a North Atlantic Treaty Organization to check the Warsaw Pact, or to check the Soviets, to check the Russians, but now we're bombing Serbian assets.
	Wait, what?
	What's going on now?
	Because they basically changed the goalposts.
	They basically just started saying, you know, we're about humanitarianism.
	We're trying to stop a genocide, which on the face of it, or not even on the face of it, it is, you know, a righteous thing, right?
	I mean, I'm not saying it's not, but you have changed the goalposts though, right?
	And you know, it probably was the right thing to, if you can, prevent a genocide.
	But still, is that NATO's job?
	If Clinton and John Major wanted to do that, they could have just used the Royal Air Force and the US Air Force.
	Why are they going through NATO now though?
	Yeah, in 1999, a completely different war in the Balkans with Kosovo.
	Again, we just start bombing Belgrade under Blair by that point.
	Things have changed by 1999.
	I mean, they got involved.
	NATO now is involved in all sorts of things.
	Darfur, they gave some assistance.
	When there was Hurricane Katrina, I think it was.
	Anyway, one of the big weather disasters in America, NATO helped out, of all things.
	They were bombing in Libya with Gaddafi.
	Afghanistan.
	Afghanistan, yeah.
	They've got big style involved in Afghanistan, a little bit in Iraq, but definitely in Afghanistan.
	All sorts of things.
	They've got their fingers in all sorts of piers all over the world now.
	And as for just sort of collecting member states, it's like NATO and the State Department.
	It's like the Cold War never ended.
	Because the Cold War was, essentially to boil it down to maybe very low resolution, but what it was, was a battle across the whole world between spheres of influence, right?
	The Soviet one and the American one.
	So every single country in the world, even places like Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia, there's a battle for the hearts and minds of those countries and the economies of those countries.
	After the Soviets fell and the Berlin Wall came down, it's sort of like in the mind of NATO leaders and other leaders in America, nothing stops.
	No, nothing stops.
	Because if you look at the list of NATO members, in 1995 Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined.
	Now just that alone, if you aren't sitting in the Kremlin and you're thinking, wait, Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia, which sticks out like a knife towards Russia, That is a bit aggressive, that is a bit provocative, isn't it?
	And in 2004 was a big moment for NATO.
	I think they called it something like the Big Bang or the Big Boom or something like that.
	Well in 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia all joined.
	Now, how is that not poking the Russian bear in the ribs?
	How is it not that?
	And they're all on the border.
	A lot of them, yeah, loads of them are.
	It's worth mentioning as well, Bo, and linking your previous point and the point you're now making together, The kind of special pleading which you'll get, well NATO is just a sort of peaceful military alliance, it's not supposed to be provocative.
	If they've constantly been redefining their mission throughout the 90s and in the early 2000s, then there was no reason necessarily for Russia not to feel nervous about this Eastwards expansion.
	Oh, and just to clarify the quote that I had a moment ago, so I found it.
	It was NATO's Supreme Allied Commander of Europe, Wesley Clark, in 1999 saying, there is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states.
	That's a 19th century idea and we're trying to transition it into the 21st century and we're going to do it with multi-ethnic states.
	Who said that, sorry?
	Wesley Clark.
	And he was?
	The Supreme Allied Commander of Europe.
	Very interesting.
	Yes, so that's just a complete change of the mission statement.
	Yeah.
	That's not what they were supposed to be.
	That's a new progressive utopia.
	Yeah, it's not sort of old-fashioned geopolitical statecraft.
	It's that, but with loaded ideological conditions attached, which is what I'm saying makes it seem much more like the Warsaw Pact.
	Regardless of what you think of those ideological criteria, maybe you think that's better than The communist one that informed the Warsaw Pact.
	I mean, I'm more sympathetic towards liberal democracy than I am towards a Politburo-style system, but it's certainly a change.
	And what you said, I think it's a very good point.
	Which way round the rationale goes?
	Is NATO just a humanitarian thing to try and keep the peace?
	Or is it actually a fairly aggressive expansionist threat to Russia, whichever way you cut it?
	Again, they make the argument that like... So, last year, Finland joined.
	And if you look at a map, of course, Finland is right there.
	This year, Sweden joined.
	Now, pro-NATO people will say, look, look at that example, look at that evidence.
	We are this strong, brilliant... Even Sweden and Finland want to be a member, because we've sort of got the moral high ground, because we're the good guys.
	But it's, no wait, is that right?
	Or did they only join because Russia's become belligerent and aggressive because NATO has been constantly poking them in the ribs?
	Right?
	It's that post hoc ergo propter hoc thing.
	After it, therefore because of it.
	Like being a cry bully.
	Like poking someone until they throw a punch at your jaw and then you claim you're the victim.
	Anyway, that's my feelings about NATO.
	If they hadn't have been So expansionists really, I suppose, after the fall of the Soviet Union, I saw, it's always stuck in my mind, years and years ago, it must have been the early 2000s, I think Putin had only been in power for about four or five years or something like that, I remember seeing him on TV and it was meant for a Russian audience.
	He was sitting there saying, he was addressing the West and NATO essentially.
	He was saying, look if you don't take the mickey out of us, these are my words, if you don't take the mickey out of me, if you don't treat us like... I'm imagining you on stage.
	Stop taking the mickey!
	You're having a bubble bath.
	No, if you don't, if you treat us reasonably, If you don't treat us like a naughty child that you're sort of trying to keep in line, then I will be reasonable, we will be reasonable.
	You know, I'm not a Stalin figure.
	But NATO and the leadership, they never sort of took that on board.
	They always kept with the program, it seems to me, of the Cold War, is that our global hegemony must keep expanding.
	There's no other way of doing it.
	And they always have some contrived reason to be able to cast Russia and Putin in that villainous role by saying things along the lines of, well, they're an authoritarian, totalitarian state and they have political prisoners.
	They're oppressive.
	They're repressive towards sexual and ethnic minorities.
	And then you have to say, well, you know, of course, political prisoners, nobody in the West Would ever do anything like that.
	Julian Assange has only just been released after years of political persecution and who knows what else goes on with a lot of the journalists over here.
	But still, you know, we would never do anything like that.
	We would never- Meanwhile Trump's drinking from a fire hose of 96 and diamonds may even be more than that at the current time of speaking.
	They're also initiating proceedings against Marine Le Pen in France at the moment.
	Oh yes, yes, yeah they are.
	And there's some Gen 6 guys that were kept in solitary for ages for almost nothing.
	I think some of them might even still be, you know.
	I'm actually not trying to be an apologist here for Putin.
	He does poison and murder journalists he doesn't like, and political opponents.
	He's an old FSB, KGB badass.
	I'm not apologizing for Putin in any way.
	What you're using as a probable cause for why we need to be belligerent is kind of pop calling the kettle black a bit, isn't it?
	I'm just saying the idea that NATO is just a force for good in the world.
	And the Kremlin are the absolute, implacable, evil baddies.
	It's not... It's... It's... There's more nuance to it than that.
	There's more shades of grey than anything.
	Sorry?
	Is there a rumble rant?
	Oh yes, the top one for one dollar from Ramshackle Otter.
	Okay, Ramshackle Otter said, Every time I've discussed the expansion of NATO with Normie friends, they've never heard of the Warsaw Pact, for instance.
	They simply see us as goodies and Russians as baddies.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, learn a bit of history.
	There's loads of YouTube videos.
	I've got a little 10 minute YouTube video explaining it.
	Your average street normie is going to be almost completely cut off from any understanding of history.
	Yeah.
	It's like there's an iron curtain still, you know.
	From skicking in the Baltic.
	Fiesta in the Adriatic.
	Ryan Curtin has descended!
	But when you talk about NATO being nothing but a force for good, again, I have to point out, I recently did the segment discussing the failed peace talks at the beginning of 2022 between Ukraine and Russia when the conflict had only just started and how it was Western NATO allies, particularly people like Boris I recently did the segment discussing the failed peace talks at the beginning of 2022 between Ukraine and Russia when the conflict had only just started and how it was Western NATO allies, particularly people like Boris Johnson, who came in, said that they were going to put all the weight of their particularly people like Boris Johnson, who came in, said that they were going
	Russia actually had quite, was giving a lot of leeway for talks even about things like Crimea, which you would never have expected from somebody like Putin that he was willing to put Crimea on the table even to discuss.
	But Boris Johnson and other blowhards like him decided to come along and say, no, keep fighting, keep fighting, keep fighting, keep fighting.
	And what do we see?
	What was it actually?
	What good has that done for Ukraine?
	It's just got a lot of their menfolk killed, isn't it?
	And their cities, some of their cities pounded to rubble.
	So, I mean, if I was prime minister, I would absolutely keep our nuclear deterrent.
	I would increase our own armed forces, but I would leave NATO.
	I'd be like, no, if Russia does invade Poland or something, or Lithuania, then we'll talk about it then.
	And if America wants to do whatever it wants to do, OK.
	I'm not giving loads of money and materiel and men to NATO anymore.
	It's a Cold War relic thing.
	We don't need it.
	It's actually destabilizing things, in the grandest sense of anything.
	Let me know in the comments if you think that's a crazy, wrong-headed take.
	There you go.
	So just to finish up, because I think we're going over time a little bit, or beginning to, there is this thing going on at the moment, the 75th anniversary summit of NATO, and Biden's there.
	Samson, if you could just click through a few of them, we'll just look at the headlines really, just click through.
	There you go, Biden pledges even more defensive weapons For Ukraine to shoot Russian aeroplanes and missiles out of the sky.
	Which will presumably have to be manned by American troops on Ukrainian soil, so that's great.
	Keir Starmer's asking everyone else to spend more of their money on it.
	Next one.
	Yeah, again, same thing.
	Other people need to spend a bit more money.
	But we, but we, well I won't promise Britain will though.
	OK.
	A bit cheeky.
	A bit.
	We'll see.
	He keeps making weird pronouncements about how much he's going to spend on defence, whether he's going to increase it or not.
	We'll see.
	I suspect they'll make some sort of decision on the policy in the next week or two.
	I think they would have to, but we'll see if he increases defence spending in the UK or not.
	I don't think Keir Starmer has made a single announcement ever that he hasn't immediately contradicted in another interview the day after.
	Well at least he hasn't said we're doing away with our nuclear deterrent.
	Because that was a fear.
	Any Labour Prime Minister, it's a little bit of a fear that they might do that.
	I mean Corbyn sort of basically said he probably would.
	Corbyn said he wouldn't use it.
	He said he wouldn't use it, which makes it completely pointless.
	So coming out of the White House and the State Department and the Pentagon is still this line that just as long as it takes, whatever it takes for Ukraine to, in air quotes, win, I mean what does it even look like?
	It's almost like the nuclear option, and I'm saying that tongue-in-cheek as a play on words.
	If NATO or the White House want to do a regime change in Russia, just do it.
	Stop trying to drag the rest of the world into it.
	Stop sacrificing English-Ukrainian lives.
	Then, if you're hell-bent, NATO, on removing Putin, just do it.
	Then I'll try to see how far you get.
	But also don't do it.
	Yeah, but also don't turn us into World War 3, please.
	Please don't get me and my family killed.
	I wouldn't appreciate it.
	I'd rather not have a nuclear winter if that's an option.
	But this last thing, just say, here's a Twitter post from NATO.
	And sort of, you know, look how Orwellian it is.
	Sorry, is that a woman?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, okay.
	So we've got to the point where Ukraine is going, yes, we will sacrifice our women as well.
	This is what a successful nation does in a war that they're winning, is that they send the women to the front lines.
	Blond-haired, blue-eyed Scandinavian and Eastern European women as well.
	In fairness, yeah, that's a good point.
	It is better than in peacetime when they will sort of flirt with the idea, we need more ethnic minorities in the army, we need more... But once things kick off, all the adverts have like big white dudes... That's true, but also, once this conflict is over, and Ukraine's demographics and population have been depleted, where do you think that a NATO and EU aligned Ukraine is going to be replenishing its population from?
	I don't know what you're suggesting.
	Now, I hate to agree with Guardianista types, but you know, even a stop clock is right sometimes.
	And I'm not a pacifist.
	I think pacifism is sort of wrong-headed.
	If someone attacks you or someone invades your country, you're morally obliged to fight back.
	But just the Orwellian nature of this.
	NATO means not being alone.
	NATO means protecting each other.
	NATO means living in freedom, does it?
	NATO means peace.
	No, it doesn't.
	It doesn't.
	It explicitly doesn't, really.
	And you've got people like this.
	No, NATO means terror.
	NATO means destruction of families, uprooting countries, death and genocide.
	You know, the guy, I hate to agree with him, but NATO means World War 3, loss of independence, loss of sovereignty, fascism, it's a bit far.
	It's not actually...
	Oh yeah, yeah.
	In the Mussolini-style sense of fascism.
	It isn't at all.
	Because fascism was about transitioning to multi-ethnic states for the 21st century.
	That's what... I think that was in Giovanni Gentile, wasn't it?
	Yeah, yeah.
	If you come to mind, quote that.
	It's in the footnotes, I think.
	Yeah, it's an unknown footnote.
	Okay, so that's my take about NATO and a little dig at NATO.
	And I'll probably get some heat in the comments from pro-NATO people about that.
	But there you go.
	Okay, let's move on to our third segment.
	Oh yes, we've got one from Cranky Texan, aimed for you, Bo.
	They say, I almost fell off my chair yesterday when Bo failed to recognise the common enemy of the Communists and the Islamists.
	It's Christians, their culture, and their entire civilisation.
	Well, I did leave that unsaid, but it was sort of implied.
	But no, fair point, and thank you for the 20 bucks they've sent in, appreciate that.
	Thank you, Cranky Texan.
	Yeah, thank you.
	Shall we get on to the conservative civil war?
	The phony civil war.
	Yes, the phony civil war.
	That's crucial.
	Is Peter Hitchens going to write a book about this one?
	Well, probably not.
	The calm before the storm.
	He's always unpredictable at least.
	Well, sort of in the genes, isn't it?
	The Hitchens family.
	I shouldn't have mentioned his name.
	You're getting some trouble from him at the moment aren't you?
	No, no, no.
	I'm not personally and I'm not looking forward to the app later on on Twitter so let's just carry on.
	Right, right.
	Apologies in advance for bringing up the Conservative Party and for bringing up the election.
	I don't know if people are bored of election talk but as everyone knows there is now a Tory rump of just 121 or so MPs left.
	You can see the The rough breakdown on the map there, much depleted from their 2019 achievement under the political realignment built by Boris Johnson and then immediately betrayed by Boris Johnson and just about everyone who had a hand in what's gone on in Britain over the last five years.
	But in my view, there's a fight for the soul of the Conservative Party going on, you'll see all sorts of Tedious, slightly platitudinous headlines to that effect in all of the national newspapers.
	But in my view, rumours of a civil war in the party have been greatly exaggerated.
	If there is one, its foregone conclusion, I think, will make it look exceedingly phony and pointless in retrospect.
	And the reason why I say that... How gay race communist is the Tory party going to be after this civil war?
	As gay, race, communist as it is at the moment, which is why it's a phony civil war.
	Oh, okay, so it's just nothing changed?
	Yeah, I think it has a foregone conclusion baked into it.
	Because they could always go a little bit more, couldn't they?
	Oh, they might intensify, but that's going to be the only question.
	Oh, thank God.
	I thought we were dealing with a completely different party for a moment.
	And in many ways I think this makes things a lot easier, but what I'm saying is that And it should become clear over the course of the segment why I think this, but I think as people on the right who are very keen to see, or even many people who are not economically on the right, but people who are sort of culturally and socially on the right and who are sort of patriotic people who care about this country and its people, should not get too invested in the Conservative Party civil war.
	Because I think there's very little to be enjoyed from it as a spectacle, and even less to be achieved from it for people like us.
	And this is because the vast majority from what I've been able to garner on social media and through other mediums, and particularly at CCHQ, the higher-ups, the top brass who really run things, I wish I'd included this in the segment.
	Stephen Edgington sent me a text message, Stephen Edgington of GB News, a friend of both the Loadseaters and the New Culture Forum, sent me a text message the other day asking me to comment on a GB News piece he was rustling up.
	I don't actually know whether my comment made it into his piece, and I didn't include it, but apparently in the course of the election, this was the day before the election, in CCHQ they had all of the trans flag, all of the progress flag, all of that stuff, the office was completely smothered in that.
	So CCHQ is clearly captured and those are the higher-ups, the people who really dictate how things go on in the aftermath of this historic defeat.
	But they, so both CCHQ and people in the sort of centrist dad punditry class seem intent on learning all of the wrong lessons.
	Doesn't look like that, doesn't it?
	From the historic defeat.
	I'm so glad that certain people decided to make a crusade to ensure that the party didn't get zero seats.
	You, okay, you want to make it, you want to flesh out that comment, that's, No, I think I'll leave it.
	You don't want to be mentioned?
	I'll leave that hanging.
	I don't want the ants.
	And drawing all the incorrect conclusions and stubbornly ignoring all of the correct ones.
	And so they seemingly incapable of sober self-reflection, self-examination, self-criticism, the beginnings of wisdom.
	They have instead sort of gone into full-blown huffy teenager mode.
	And so if we can go to the next slide.
	I'm not gifted.
	Oh, here we go.
	It happened almost by magic.
	Do I just click next?
	Is it that simple?
	Yes it is.
	Very good.
	So Tom Jones, whom I like very much, and I couldn't actually, so I'll read it first.
	Watching several Sky News commentators, Joe Johnson, Boris Johnson's younger brother, Andy Burnham, assert the Tories' problem is that they are reform light.
	Are net immigration figures Approaching 1 million, the highest tax burden since World War II and highest spending since the 70s, part of reform's policy platform.
	An obviously correct point by Tom Jones.
	I remember I was watching Sky News at the time as well because I happened to be in Poland.
	During the election and we can't access the BBC so I was part of a group of people who were watching it on Sky News and I actually saw Joe Johnson's comments.
	They didn't make a huge amount of sense at all.
	That's to be expected.
	And I would have drawn up a clip but he's clearly not a huge draw.
	Sky News have not been promoting it on their social media so I've just got Tom Jones's testimony there but I can vouch for it.
	These were precisely the kind of claims.
	That Joe Johnson and other people in the Conservative Party have been making that a kind of imaginary lurch to the right is responsible for the Conservative defeat.
	Where?
	I take this, this isn't the Welsh singer Tom Jones.
	No, no.
	Yeah, like you see people like Rory Stewart.
	Yeah, and all the wets.
	Who voted what?
	Labour or Lib Dem, I think he voted.
	Oh wait, it was Green.
	I think he threatened to, yeah.
	I think it was Green or Labour that he was going to vote for, wasn't it?
	Yeah, just like some weirdo puppet of some shadowy globalist who knows what.
	Yeah, they're basically saying, yeah, the idea that the Tories should go back to actual conservatism with the small c is sort of crazy.
	They need to be more wet, if anything.
	Precisely.
	I mean, yeah, they haven't learned anything then.
	They're sort of kind of deliberately refusing to learn any lessons.
	Totally.
	Then, it seems.
	Totally, and highly adjacent to Rory Stewart, who we'll get more on him later, actually.
	Rory Stewart, to remind everybody, who has a podcast with Alistair Campbell.
	Yes.
	Says everything you need to know right there, doesn't it?
	There you go.
	Well, that's the uni party in action.
	My favourite thing about that is that, so I do sometimes tune into that, because I read The Economist all the time, so I'd like to get I view it as a sort of very helpful and instructive portal into the centrist liberal dad midwit normie mind to watch these sorts of things and to read that sort of material.
	And I always look at the comments as well and it's so hilarious when you see people comment things like, gosh, it's so refreshing to see people who are so politically at odds disagreeing with each other in a really, really amiable way.
	I'm like, oh my gosh, there's a cigarette paper separating those two people.
	What do they think politics is?
	They'll get Gary Lineker on as a guest.
	Contentious debate.
	Again, what you're experiencing watching that podcast is the liberal establishment consensus being fed to you.
	That's what you're experiencing.
	A circle check.
	Sorry, is that a bit too close?
	No, that's fine.
	Go for it.
	David Gawke is making exactly the same point.
	I think he's now actually out of the party but I guarantee you that he will be regarded as one of the sensible figures on the right by precisely the kinds of people who are the top brass in CCHQ and he now writes for the New Statesman.
	The Tories will keep losing if they chase reform votes.
	My New Statesman piece on why a party that needs to recover a reputation for competence and integrity can't win by making big, undeliverable and populist promises.
	And it's worth saying here that low immigration levels, which is obviously what he's referring to there, you know, undeliverable promises, were somehow possible in the 1990s.
	And this is particularly ironic because the 1990s are regarded by people like David Gauke As a kind of golden age, the early 1990s of conservative governance, led by sensible centrists like John Major.
	John Major even wrote a very, very warm, what would be the word, a very warm review of this book that David Gork, Rory Stewart, along with another bunch of wets have written called, oh that's not it...
	Oh there we go, there we go.
	It's called The Case for the Centre Right and if we can go down, I don't know how to do that, you can look at all these Tory figures who've made book chapter... Oh testimonials!
	Contributions to this book and there they all are.
	Oh dear.
	All of these people, David Gork, Key among them, but John Major wrote a very sort of warm review of this book and it's hilarious because by the standards that... It's like looking at a police line-up isn't it?
	I wish!
	By the standards that people like John Major invoke today, and people who like John Major as well, their own sort of 90s paradise was some kind of forthright hellhole in terms of immigration, in terms of immigration rates.
	Because if you go back, how do I go back to the, on the slides?
	There we go.
	Oh yeah, Andrew, Neil versus... No, one more back.
	Oh okay, just back to here.
	Yeah, just look at, I mean, 1990s doesn't particularly stand out as an era of mass immigration there, and yet people like David Gauke will today say that returning to that is undeliverable.
	When it's precisely the period that he deifies.
	They seem to want the stability and culture of the early 1990s whilst keeping the insane immigration levels that we have today.
	Not seemingly, being willfully ignorant that the fact that the two are completely incompatible.
	You had Michael Heseltine on there, the Lord Heseltine, and John Major as well.
	These guys are sort of die-hard pro-Labour guys.
	You think, oh, because they're sort of old-school Tories, they're not necessarily sort of bought into the European project.
	But no, they are, like Kenneth Clarke as well.
	I was like, die hard, die hard, like as much as Blair or anyone, pro-euro and if they could have had it, you know, probably open borders and things.
	Yeah.
	But what I think, where this guy said, you know, using populism, the word populism as a pejorative is just a, just a dirty word, populism.
	I reject all of that nonsense and I'm not having that.
	Because you can have left and right wing populism, can't you?
	You can have, you can have sort of lefty populism.
	So anyway, the word in and of itself isn't, isn't a dirty word.
	Yes.
	But I think what we're missing these days, you know, he described it as sort of undeliverable.
	Where we was talking in the last segment about sort of geopolitics and sort of post-war and World War Two stuff.
	Governments used to have guts.
	They used to have balls.
	They used to have like a vision where we'll change, we'll change the game.
	We'll change the way politics is done.
	We'll change the map.
	Like, we've got, we fear nothing.
	There's sort of nothing we can't do, within reason obviously, within the laws of physics.
	No, we'll do this massive thing which changes the world, it changes the course of history.
	They'll do it, they'll do it all the time.
	Nowadays, the idea of putting, using the Royal Navy to secure the channel, well it's not deliverable, it's not possible, we can't do it.
	Exactly.
	I like how you compare it to the laws of physics as well because it necessarily means that if they're saying that restoring mass immigration rates to levels comparable to the 1990s is almost as if it's on a par with a kind of climactic weather event that politicians just have to react to this.
	This is just the world we live in.
	It's clearly not true.
	These things are eminently controllable and our political classes refuse to control them.
	Our politicians are just a completely different class of person now.
	The sort of people that we're ruled by are the boring managerial types who in any other life would have been completely unremarkable.
	They're weak cowards!
	They're afraid to have a big strong policy that the mainstream media might be angry about.
	They're afraid of it.
	They're scared of it.
	They really are.
	So this idea then that, again, an imaginary lurch of the right was responsible for the He was going to be responsible for the Conservative Party's complete implosion, not as much of an implosion as some of us might have liked, it must be said, but this was unconvincing even before the election.
	I found this interesting, Rory Stewart was on the back foot in the face of Andrew Neil's no-nonsense questioning on precisely this point, and bear in mind this is just before the election, a couple of days before, and Andrew Neil asks I think the salient questions to Rory Stewart, who so often gets away with just In what way have the Tories been too right-wing these past five years or so?
	In what way have the Tories been too right wing these past five years or so?
	Bar the truss interregnum, I'll give you that one, but that was only five days, 45 days.
	In what ways have the Tories been too right wing since 2019?
	I think my major problem, if you forget about Liz Truss, is that Boris Johnson broke what was most precious to me about the Conservative Party, which was a sense of seriousness, a sense of integrity, I think he was a ludicrous buffoon who was casual with the Constitution, contemptuous of Parliament, That's not right-wing.
	That's Boris Johnson.
	Being a conservative for me is not just about economic policies.
	It's about a way of viewing the world, a way of behaving in the world.
	But I still, I mean when I look at the records, obviously in a bad way, but this sort of mantra, Alistair Campbell would go along with it, to your partner, that it's such a right-wing Tory government that it needs to be cut.
	I mean you look at it, we've already talked, taxis at a record level, that's not very right-wing.
	Record public spending, that's not very right-wing.
	Record immigration.
	Record regulation of businesses and life.
	Some of that can be right, some of that can be wrong.
	It's not right-wing, blue in tooth and claw, is it?
	I agree, I agree.
	I mean, one of the stupid things about this election.
	Right, there you go then.
	He agrees.
	He completely falls under scrutiny.
	He's such an empty bag, isn't he, Boris Johnson?
	He's a nothing thing.
	It was all guff.
	OK, you don't like Boris Johnson.
	I don't particularly like him either.
	I actually would agree with some of those criticisms about Johnson being a cavalier buffoon.
	Again, for different reasons than Robert Stewart.
	He would invoke things like prorogation, which is actually a perfectly legitimate constitutional device, maybe used cynically, but it is legitimate.
	But in any case, if he agrees, then why is he contributing books to chapters titled The Case for the Centre-Right?
	It makes no sense whatsoever.
	So this was unconvincing.
	Why didn't he do anything?
	Yeah.
	Why didn't he do anything but make the party more left-wing?
	Why is he now saying, oh we need to go back and make it even more left-wing because it was too right-wing already?
	Indeed.
	So this was unconvinced.
	This again, this is before the election.
	Now it's even more unconvincing now because guess what?
	We actually have dispassionately put together data, not just vibes lacking any kind of detail.
	And I'm going to, well, let me preface this by saying that the really unfortunate thing and the reason why I think this is going to be a phony civil war is that I think this argument made by the Stuart types, the David Gork types, the Joe Johnson types, the Penny Mordant types, the Jeremy Hunt types, relics of the Cameron era, will have a pur- even though they're wrong, they will have a purchase within the Conservative Party because it is no longer duty bound even to pretend to care about the Red Wall voters they so monumentally betrayed.
	From 2019 onwards.
	And so the red wall collapsed in the election.
	We now have that evidence.
	And so according to a deep dive published recently by Focal Data, I highly recommend that people click on the link.
	I've embedded it in the show notes, but it should be available afterwards as well, which goes into all of the kind of demographic data on what happened on the 4th of July, a couple of weeks ago, whenever it was, six days ago.
	So quote from that article, Labour rebuilt the Red Wall with a vote share of 41 percent despite climbing just three percentage points on their 2019 achievement.
	The party won 37 of the 38 Red Wall seats with Ashfield of course, the Anderson seat, going to Reform UK.
	The Conservatives lost all 28 Red Wall seats they won in 2019 dropping 24 percentage points in the process and there's the supporting graphic Undergirding all of that there.
	So that's the Red Wall and that's now completely gone.
	So the parliamentary voice...
	For people who have to impress and please those voters who are so crucial to the 29 victory now no longer exist in the Parliamentary Conservative Party, which is of course very crucial when it comes to deciding new leaders, when it comes to deciding new direction of travel.
	So that is obviously a concern.
	So this argument, the kind of argument that we would make, is not going to have any purchase at all.
	The kind of vague platitudes, you know, hoary platitudes wheeled out by David Gauke are going to be Particularly salient, and this is why because if we look to turn now to the blue wall...
	And obviously the Tories did badly everywhere on the map.
	They lost seats among the blue wall as well, but nowhere near as badly.
	So these MPs, exactly the kind of people who are going to be more closely aligned with wets from the Cameron era like Jeremy Hunt, will be heavily incentivized to make the Conservative Party even more socially liberal, even more metropolitan, and even more globalist at a sort of policy prospectus level and at a kind of personnel level when it comes to selecting a future leader.
	And so these are precisely the kind of people who are going to continue Blaming their overwhelming loss on this sort of imaginary lurch to the right.
	I wonder at what point the Conservatives, if ever, if they go down to, you know, almost nothing, at what point they will spawn a new Robert Peel, a new Thatcher, at what point will they ever win their own heart and soul back?
	I sort of hope they don't.
	Maybe that's just too spiteful but I wonder if it'll ever happen.
	It's not going to happen in the next leadership race, so therefore it won't happen in the next few years at the very very least.
	And so whatever the outcome of this phony civil war that's underway then, whatever the outcome is, is not going to be that decisive because that person is not going to emerge.
	They're gone.
	Who's on the other side of this phony civil war then?
	So we've seen the wets.
	We'll get to it.
	Promise.
	Alright.
	I mean Suella Brabham and obviously you've got these people in this party who are maybe we have our certain views about how we can get to that in a minute but there are people on the party who sort of code right-wing and they are going to try and benefit from this moment as well and whatever suspicions we might have about Suella Brabham's own personal motive whether she was an effective Home Secretary or there are all these criticisms which can still be made I readily grant that.
	People like Robert Jenrick is going to try and make a kind of right-wing immigration restrictionist pitch as well, I would suspect.
	But the question is, is there any point in having this civil war in the first place?
	Because I think his foregone conclusion is so set in stone and it's partly because of data like this.
	So I'll just read out.
	Quickly because I think we're sensitive on time as well.
	So again from focal data again well worth reading.
	The Liberal Democrats won a majority of blue wall seats with the party picking up 23 of these 43 seats that were won by the Conservatives in 2019.
	Labour's vote share 17% did not move one bit but the party gained nine seats.
	Again the story of the night.
	Labour is not particularly popular.
	They're benefiting from people staying at home, people not voting Tory, voting reform, whatever it might be, with the Conservatives reduced to just 11.
	So there are still 11 Conservative MPs, which is 10% of... 11 too many.
	11 way, 11 too many, who are going to be wanting to impress these sorts of voters.
	And yeah, so I think the argument that people like Stuart and Gork and Amber Rudd and all of these people make is going to have a particular purchase, not just because of those 11 MPs, but certainly they're going to have more purchase than would be the case if there was a kind of huge red but certainly they're going to have more purchase than would be the case if There are some people, it must be said, rather than just being relentlessly negative, who do seem to get it.
	Again, the point is it doesn't really matter that much.
	Miriam Kate lost her seat, but she put out this on X, a perfectly shrewd remark.
	The Conservative Party must be honest about what happened.
	Our voters stayed at home or moved to reform.
	That's clearly the lesson of the night.
	They didn't go to Labour.
	Labour's vote share was not at all impressive.
	The future for the party does not lie in liberalism or progressivism.
	We must be firmly conservative, lean into the realignment of 2019 at a policy level, not just at a personnel Johnson loving level, if we want to win back our base.
	We also had Robert Jenrick, who I think, who did hold on to a seat and who I imagine is going to try and be precisely that kind of Peel figure.
	My point is that I don't think he will succeed and I don't think he happens to be that person anyway.
	who said, we have just suffered our worst ever defeat.
	We lost because we failed to deliver the strong economy, NHS and border, we promised.
	Slightly less guns are blazing than Miriam Cates.
	To recover, we must defend all that we got right while confronting what we got wrong.
	Again, it's quite corporate CEO type pros and cons stuff.
	But he does get the fact that it was a failure to deliver rather than making promises which are overwrought, which is what David Gork's trying to say.
	And then obviously, no surprise to see that Eric Kaufman, one of the shrewdest observers in the business and a friend both to this show and to the New Culture Forum, perfectly grasped by the Tories, lost him monumentally.
	He actually quotes data from this Focal Data page that I keep saying people should read and they really should.
	The Tories held their Remain vote and lost much of their Leave vote.
	Look at that monumental difference between them holding the Remain and a 42 point drop among Leave voters.
	Astounding that there are still Tory voices calling for the party to move to the cultural left!
	That speaks volumes, doesn't it?
	It really does.
	That is the betrayal that people felt.
	Just right there.
	Totally.
	Totally.
	It's interesting that Leave voters seem to have gone over to Reform, yes, but also to Labour.
	Yes.
	And that Remain voters weren't as enthusiastic about Labour according to those views that he was putting there as well.
	Indeed so.
	Labour are there for the taking.
	That's what surprises me about people still seem to like people like Suella Breverman or Preeti Patel.
	It's like, no, they were Home Secretaries and they flooded us with foreign Fifth Columnists.
	Dooming us to a sectarian future.
	Something maybe nightmarish.
	That was done under Preeti Patel and Shweta Breverman.
	Oh, they tried.
	It was the Home Office that wouldn't allow them to.
	I don't care.
	No, that was your job.
	That was your remit.
	To go to war with them then.
	And you failed.
	Well that's the one that I always bring up, Soheila Braverman.
	She may have talked tough when it came to actually wrangling all of the people in the Home Office to do the job that they're paid without a tax money for.
	She couldn't do it.
	Rishi Sunak's massive promise to stop the small boats.
	You didn't stop the small boats in any way, shape or form.
	So that's what you get.
	Precisely this and the fact that those are the main reasons for their defeat becomes so obvious when you look at the map electorally and sort of tease out certain trends.
	So Reform UK came second in almost 100 seats across the country.
	It's remarkable isn't it?
	It's extraordinary.
	It's great.
	Brilliant.
	Roughly two-thirds of lost Tory seats had a reform vote larger than the swing away from the Conservatives and then Matt Goodwin also draws out many key lessons including this one in a in a substack post.
	Tories lost the working class.
	I'm not going to read all of it but um where was I going to read from?
	I was going to read from but while Boris Johnson the Tories in 2019 won over more than half these voters this year they only won about one in four of them with Nigel Farage and reform now making major inroads and winning nearly as many Indeed, across Europe, blah blah blah.
	The Tories, in other words, are back to being a party that is most successful, here we go, among the economically secure middle class, having lost the earlier unique opening among the working class.
	This does not bode well for the party's future, given Labour's and also the Lib Dem's and Green's appeal to middle class graduate liberals.
	And at the other end of the spectrum, Nigel Farage's strong appeal to the working class.
	This competition for working class Votes will be a major point of debate among the looming battle for the future of the British right but as we discovered precisely the kind of people who are left over in that parliamentary rump have every reason to chase those sort of Labour voters, those Lib Dem voters and those Green voters and they're going to sort of turn up their nose at Farage voters and they're unlikely to be willing to fight a civil war on their behalf within a party let's put it that way.
	It's the net result of all of this Kemi Badenoch Yes.
	I wasn't going to mention her here because she sort of warrants special treatment because she's a very strange one because she's one of those people, along with Swellow Braverman I would say, who kind of codes right wing but should be suspected.
	I actually think she's more suspicious than Braverman.
	I think Braverman is a little bit more sincere, though potentially ineffective.
	Focusing on Brabham for the moment I'll just truncate this a bit.
	So no doubt with her eyes on the Tory leadership contest Phyllida Brabham has now declared kind of an all-out war.
	Having won her seat she is called on the Tories to abandon quote-unquote liberal conservatism and rustle up a quote credible offer for the voters they lost to reform UK.
	So she gets it at a kind of electoral level and she even said in a recent Natcon speech at which both Carl Benjamin and Conor Tomlinson of course present at the moment.
	We Tory ministers nominally in charge of the system completely failed.
	The progress flag flew over our buildings as if they were occupied territory.
	I wanted to scrap the unconscious bias training, which basically taught people how bad and racist Britain was.
	I was told that I was on the wrong side of history by my senior civil servant.
	I don't say this to boast or curry favour with you as an audience, but to starkly confess my failure.
	I couldn't even get the flag of a horrible political campaign I disagree with taken down from the roof of the government department I was supposed to be in charge of.
	So she's all out declaring war, and she's clearly eyeing up a kind of, at the level of rhetoric at least, Maybe at the level of substance as well.
	Sort of right-wing takeover of the Conservative Party.
	But the point is, I don't think this is going to happen.
	That's a bit weak, isn't it?
	Yeah, that's very weak.
	It's disingenuous.
	Yeah, you could.
	You could have fired your top diplomats.
	Just because the Guardian and probably the Mail would say, oh, she's gone too far and they think they're a tyranny.
	No, she could have grabbed the Home Office by the scruff of the neck and forced the government's policy through.
	She didn't do it.
	She didn't do it.
	I don't think she'll get a second chance either, and this is the point.
	I love that the message seems to be, support me, I failed.
	If you want strong leadership, don't look for me because I'm bad at this.
	Meanwhile, of course, and the reason why I think even if she were to have a second chance, well, she's not even going to get a second chance at succeeding, is that both, as I'm sure viewers will know, Carl Benjamin and Conor Thompson have recently been suspended for the Conservative Party.
	So they seem intent seriously on learning all of the wrong lessons.
	I don't think Swell of Bravman's bid, whether we think it's sincere or not, is going to have any kind of purchase.
	So I think that this stuff is a gift to any truly patriotic movement and aiming to supplant the Tories over the next five years In my view though, the Conservative Party is an irredeemable political organism, certainly not worth fighting a civil war for.
	There's nothing to be salvaged.
	And once this phony civil war is over, we should waste no time devoting our energy towards more productive pursuits, and indeed, if necessary, towards more productive infighting.
	Wonderful.
	I will just point out regarding the Carl and Connor thing, it's been pointed out by others but just to have it on record on here, I think what might have really done it in for both of them, Carl especially, was calling that the party that they were members of get zero seats.
	That might have done it.
	Connor, fair to him, called for maybe five or six seats.
	But calling for destruction of your own party might be why they kicked you out.
	It might have irked a few people down at CCHQ.
	Yeah.
	And let's try and get through these video comments as quickly as possible then.
	Turn the volume up please, Samson.
	I can't hear you.
	Oh, there we go, try again.
	Pressure points to release the sinus headaches, the congestion, maybe eye strain.
	Take your power fingers, bring them to the inner corners of your eyebrows.
	Let your head hang off of them.
	It might feel sore.
	Once it's less sore, keep moving your fingers along the inner bottom ridge until you are At the outer corner, where you drag your fingers down behind your ear, down your neck, and now see how you feel.
	So that was pressure points to relieve headaches and such, but I think that was an excuse to flip us off for half a minute.
	I actually have had sinusitis once, which is an infection of the sinus, and it was my upper sinus, which is a lot smaller, and it was terrible, so anything that can help with relieving sinus pressure, some people out there, it was like something was trying to burrow out of my head, some of the worst pains I've ever had, so I'd actually appreciate any advice on that.
	Oh, there you go.
	Give that a try next time.
	Yeah.
	Let's go to CS Cooper.
	Hey, this is a request to Carl and or Connor.
	When you get onto Timcast IRL, can you make sure that he reads my superchat?
	Because I spend a lot of money on superchats to that guy and he never bloody reads them.
	And my meme must infect his show.
	Come on, guys.
	Don't be greedy and keep me all to yourselves.
	One personal note directly from me to Mr Cooper is I'm working on polishing one of my novels for him.
	It will take weeks more yet, but... Hey, there you go!
	If you're watching, dude.
	It'll be published by the end of the year.
	On Cape Breton Island lies the village of Louisbourg, which in the 18th century held a large fort and harbour from which the French raided New England shipping.
	Earning it the name the American Dunkirk, Louisbourg was captured by New England colonial forces during King George's War, the American theatre of the War of Austrian Succession, which was returned to France in the highly contentious Treaty of Isle Chapelle from Madras in India, souring British-American relations and instigating ideas of independence.
	Very interesting tidbit there.
	If anyone's interested, I do have an Epochs episode all about Clive.
	Clive of India.
	Where that gets mentioned.
	That exact thing gets mentioned.
	That our Carnatic War's in India and we're trading off stuff with France.
	Very interesting, if complicated, bit of history.
	I went to a castle in Wales last year.
	I forget which one it is, but it's got the full display of everything that Clive of India brought back with him.
	Oh, right.
	Okay.
	In Wales?
	Yes, in Wales.
	It's really interesting.
	So I'd recommend, if you look that up, I can't remember the name of the castle, but it was a really good castle as well.
	When I worked for the council, I learned that the very tips of wind turbine blades go supersonic, which really messes with bats.
	But they built them anyway!
	When we were buying a house, we almost bought one with bats in the loft, until we learned that we would effectively be entering into a contract with the bats, because they owned the loft in perpetuity.
	If there are bats there, they own the place.
	You're merely a tenant, and you can't play loud music or turn the light on up there without it being an actual crime.
	Bloody hell.
	Interesting point, yeah, there's all sorts of laws in place about bats.
	It's funny she said, yeah, it's absolutely true.
	If you find bats, if you're trying to buy a property and there's bats in it, walk away, look for something else.
	It's just going to be a pain in the arse.
	Too much trouble.
	Forever.
	Yeah, you can't screw with bats in this country.
	I live in a town in Ontario that has complained of having its Pride Crossing vandalised.
	In the build-up to June, the local authorities took it upon themselves to repaint the crossing with the Progress Pride markings.
	Not satisfied with that, they also dug up and resurfaced the crossing only before laying down the paint.
	Notably, this is the only time I've known a road to be closed and reopened for work precisely on schedule.
	Well, predictably, within days it had been defaced, and only a few days into July, and we're right back where we started.
	However, this is a notable climb down.
	Oh, yeah, actually, that's interesting.
	Well, the pride flag, okay, there's the pride flag, the rainbow flag, okay, right, but then those other chevron-shaped colours, aren't some of those about intergenerational love, i.e.
	paedophilia?
	Like the light blue and the light pink?
	The light blue and the light pink I'm pretty certain is the trans flag.
	Some of the colours do represent intergenerational love.
	I don't think they've gone that far.
	There might be some variations but I know the blue and the pink is trans and the other colours have nothing to do with sexuality whatsoever.
	It's just here's black and brown people as well for some reason.
	Just shoehorn anything you want in there now.
	On the subject of labor not having a long lifespan because they don't have a popular mandate, I have to observe that the communists took over Russia without a popular mandate either and maintained power for 70 years simply through brute power politics.
	Labor could accomplish this pretty well just by, you know, jailing all of their main opponents, releasing all the actual criminals, amnestying all the illegals, and importing another billion for good measure.
	Yeah.
	It's actually remarkable.
	When you look at what Lenin did after the October-November revolution, it's... I mean, that is ballsy.
	We're talking about governments having balls.
	It's just kind of crazy.
	It's just like, yeah, just send men to just take that building and hold it, and that one and that one.
	Now, all come and see if you can take it off of us, out of our cold dead hands.
	Nobody could.
	Brutal three.
	That's it.
	Brutal three years of a war.
	Yeah.
	I have a simple question.
	Do you guys think we will have a World War III?
	And that question comes from one place, not from geopolitics, because you could examine that all day and say yes or no, but from a psychological perspective.
	To think that we almost expect there to be a World War III is like a self-fulfilling prophecy that we will, that we must.
	And I don't like the idea that we must, but it seems to be the case.
	Couple things I'd say.
	One, I think the Cold War and the remnants of it that we still deal with now is World War 3 in one sense.
	There's not World War 3 as in massed tank divisions and nuclear exchanges.
	There's all different types of war.
	And I think also another thing to say, another angle on that, is that maybe in the next generation, or now going into the next generation, the mass migrations we've seen into the West particularly, and America and Australia and something, That will have some appalling fallout eventually.
	And again, not massed divisions of men, not massed tank columns or nuclear bombs or anything, but there'll be a type of World War that will maybe end in some type of a World War 3.
	I don't think the big powers will nuke each other, or at least not in the near future anyway.
	I can't really say, all I can say is that I hope it doesn't, but our leaders are frankly insane, so I worry.
	There was a time when England faithfully obeyed the Lord and we were put far above the nations with our glorious empire.
	Now we do not obey the Lord and, well, we labour in vain, our food is fake and we don't know what a woman is anymore.
	As if we were putting together a ten-point manifesto for cultural change in this nation.
	Then let's keep God at the middle of it, otherwise the work is in vain.
	Have we got any more?
	There we go.
	We're a little over time.
	Samson, what say ye to a quick extension so we can read a few of the comments?
	All right, we can do a few.
	So I'm going to say I'm going to read some of these ones and we'll go three each for the segments.
	So some of the general comments that have been left have been a few people, Jamie Lovey, Reece Simms, saying that they've received their Islander magazine today in the post and they're really liking it.
	They're impressed with the aesthetics and the actual quality of the articles.
	So really glad to hear that those who've received it so far are enjoying it.
	People saying that we've got a great line-up today, I certainly agree with you.
	I'll go on to my segment, Nugubu Nationalism.
	Chris Stams, don't forget that while women were winning the Euros, the media, especially the BBC, were crying because there weren't any black players.
	Well, that just goes to show the real priorities, doesn't it?
	From an account strangely titled, Harry and Josh are in a secret relationship.
	I didn't realise we were keeping it secret.
	A few black people are a good start, but I don't see any disabled representation on the English team.
	Exceedingly disappointing.
	Well, we're going to need to shape that up perhaps for the next Euros.
	No wheelchair users in the first team.
	It's not on, really, is it?
	Someone should be fired.
	No, it's absolutely terrible.
	And Harry eating a KFC bargain bucket all by himself.
	I think that's Bolsonaro pilled right there.
	Saying, so mass migration is bringing us more goals, more Turkish barbers and more kebab shops.
	That's a Dino's dream right there.
	That's right.
	We're living the Dino dream.
	Dino Maxi.
	It's the Dino's world and we're just living it.
	The Dino doesn't require those people to be citizens.
	And on kebab shops, you don't need to import the people.
	The recipes are available online.
	This is true, but the Dino doesn't really understand any of that.
	He lives in blissful ignorance.
	If explained to him.
	As long as it's there for him and he's happy.
	Would you like to read some of your comments?
	If he wouldn't mind, go ahead.
	Well, do you want to...
	Okay, okay.
	I've got it, okay, okay.
	Cynthia Paul says, "Completely agree with Bo on the subject of NATO." Oh alright, I thought I'd get really bad pushback, maybe I still will.
	In my view, oh thanks for that, in my view all NATO, and especially USA and UK, seem to have done in the past 30 to 40 years is to poke their noses into other people's business and cause a lot of death and destruction by all the wars NATO has perpetrated.
	There's definitely been a shift in the sorts of discussions that have been had about NATO since this conflict started.
	So one or two things NATO have done which are just sort of undeniably good.
	They have done some humanitarian things.
	Just flat out, just straight up humanitarian things.
	So you can't blame them for that, but still that sort of 1% goodness versus 99%... And it's also nevertheless proof of an expansion of their remits.
	Yeah, and still that.
	Quite right.
	Quite right.
	JJWH says, NATO has been largely demilitarized by giving their weapons to Ukraine.
	They have very low stocks of 155mm shells for example.
	Given the lack of manufacturing capability, it will take a very long time to restock, probably a decade.
	Also the quality of troops has markedly declined.
	I have a friend who is currently on a base in the Middle East as a contractor and he's appalled at how far things have fallen.
	Well, yeah, quick thing to say about that.
	A lot of people said, and I probably agree, that lots of material we've given to Ukraine, it was a deliberate thing.
	It's so that they can restock with new stuff.
	It's so that they have their budgets.
	We need to spend loads more money on all new stuff, because we've given away all our stuff.
	It's a deliberate gambit, so they can keep their budgets higher and renew all their stuff.
	They're basically giving Ukraine all the old crap, sort of thing, very deliberately.
	But that thing about shells, yeah, manufacturing shells, particularly how it's the 155mm ones, yeah, I've seen that in a number of places.
	That there's a dearth of shells, we're not manufacturing enough shells, but still we don't, we're probably not going to get into a total war where we need kind of an endless supply of artillery shells.
	If we did, we might be in trouble, but anyway.
	Ewan Baker says, ah, NATO is 75 and it is very much riddled with dementia and needs putting down.
	Yeah, I mean, that's sort of, yeah.
	If I was master of the world, I would just end NATO.
	I would say to Putin, look we're not taking our eye off of you and we'll use the US Army or the British Army or the German Army or whatever if you get out of line too badly but we don't need NATO.
	Don't need it.
	Should I read a couple?
	Yes, absolutely.
	I couldn't agree more with what BasedApe has to say.
	Internet blood sports need to become a year-long module for politics students.
	You can't graduate until you can tell me what Ali Dawa is proud of and what is in Vaush's tax folder now.
	I must say I totally agree with that.
	YouTube is much more radicalizing than the textbooks they rustle up these days.
	Honestly, I don't know what Ali Dawa is proud of.
	Can anybody fill me in?
	I think that's part of what's radicalizing.
	Because I can tell you what is in Vaush's tax folder because that was big news on Twitter a few months ago.
	Californian refugees.
	So to clarify, the lesson the Tories took away from this election is that they lost because they were not left-wing enough.
	Yes, that is precisely the lesson the higher-ups seem to be making and it's the one that's going to inform this phony civil war and is going to seal it for that side in my view.
	Can I ask you one thing real quick?
	Is Gove still the force to be reckoned with in the background?
	Is he sort of the kingmaker still, going to be in the future?
	He certainly likes to think of himself in that way and Kemi Badenoch is his protégé and she's doing quite well in terms of oddsmakers of course.
	And finally, a very poetic comment from Thomas Howell.
	Labour did not rebuild the Red Wall, they just walked over the remnants.
	That's very true.
	Yes, absolutely.
	And that's all the time that we've got.
	Thank you very much for sticking with us in this overtime.
	So we'll see how England does in the semifinals today.
	Fingers crossed.
	Yeah, fingers crossed for everybody because I don't want to spoil everybody's fun.
	I just want to let everybody know that they are propagandizing you, but you already know that.
	Anyway, we'll see you again tomorrow.
	Stick around for Tomlinson Talks later.

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