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Oct. 11, 2024 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:29:33

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1020

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Time	Text
	Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
	Welcome to the podcast of Lotus Eaters, and I don't even know what day it is.
	It's Friday. What's the date today?
	I think it's the 11th of October.
	It is the 11th of October.
	Thank you. For some reason, my new tablet doesn't tell me what the date is.
	It's not good. Anyway, I'm joined by Stelios, who's just saved me the day, and Harrison Pitt from New Culture Forum.
	How's it going? Good to be back.
	Thank you. Good. And today, we are going to be talking about the case for Kamala Harris, which is being advanced.
	Is there any reason that's up, by the way?
	Samson. Sorry.
	What, the Common Sense Crusade?
	The pub quiz.
	Sorry folks, I'm not quite fully prepared today.
	There we go. Yes, so today we're going to be talking about the case with Kamala Harris.
	We are going to be talking about how Viktor Orban is standing up to the EU and the curious incident of a Nigerian pirate who is now strangely integrated into Denmark.
	I mean, there are cultural continuities, aren't there?
	Oh, are there? You tell me.
	What's democracy in Nigeria?
	I really want to see what you have prepared for.
	It's just really emblematic of everything that's wrong with the mindset that's running the West at the moment.
	But anyway, before we begin, after this podcast we are of course doing a lads hour and Harrison will be joining us for another pub quiz because this was by popular demand apparently.
	I missed the first one. So we'll be doing the second one.
	Lots of audience questions, I understand.
	And I've always been terrible at pub quizzes because they're always cultural.
	It's like, oh, well, who scored this goal in the 1986 finals?
	I don't know. I don't watch football.
	Or who played this instrument in this band?
	I don't know. I don't watch pop music.
	I know this is pop music. So hopefully I'm a bit better on this one.
	And just a final reminder, by the way...
	If I can get the thing focused properly.
	This is the very final day that you'll be able to purchase Islander.
	It's done really, really well and it's a really great magazine.
	I'm really proud of it. And there has been a slight delay with the printer.
	We do apologise. It seems to be a miscommunication.
	But I've been informed reliably that the first batches are actually leaving now rather than two weeks ago.
	So I apologise for that.
	But we will receive our copy very soon.
	Anyway, so, I've always wondered, if the answer is Kamala Harris, what is the question?
	What exactly are we being offered with this...
	Name a talentless politician.
	Are them less talented politicians than Kamala Harris?
	Possibly. Possibly.
	Her VP pick.
	Yeah. She struggled even to...
	Well, she didn't even get a chance to win over the affections of her own state, California, when she was running for that primary nomination in 2018, 2019.
	There or thereabouts, so badly did her campaign go.
	She's purely a DEI promotion, a DEI hire, as we all know, and we're seeing her lack of skills before us.
	The same thing applied in the 2020 primaries as well.
	She dropped out with 5%.
	Nobody liked her, and...
	Somehow, she's got the entire structure of I don't know what you call it.
	The vast Democrat machine.
	She's at the very top of this pyramid all of a sudden.
	And it's just one of those things where she's just continued to fail upward for her entire career.
	So you realize, okay, well, something else is happening.
	I mean, if it wasn't obvious enough with Joe Biden.
	At least Joe Biden had a kind of plausible deniability.
	Well, he's a venerable elder statesman.
	He's got lots of support because he's been in the Senate or wherever it was.
	For 30 plus years, he's been the vice president.
	He is at least a plausible candidate to be the mask of the machine.
	But Kamala Harris so clearly isn't.
	She's not competent. She obviously hasn't done this herself.
	Someone has done this for her.
	And so it was with great wonder that I saw this from The Atlantic for only the fifth time.
	Sounds like it's becoming a bit of a habit, doesn't it?
	That happened to have only gone out and got blind drunk for the fifth time.
	You know, it's not something that's only.
	But The Atlantic is endorsing a presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, because, quote, Hasn't she abused the power...
	Wokeness is all about abusing power.
	Yes. And, I mean, if there's...
	Like, she didn't exactly run a sterling campaign for the Democratic nomination this time, did she?
	No, she was just decided upon.
	But I've decided I'm into some esoteric stuff.
	I see the esoteric message here.
	She's for the Fed.
	She said, freedom, equality, and dignity.
	If you take the first letters, FED, it's for the Fed.
	Yeah, I'd appreciate a bit of a numerological analysis of this as well, actually.
	I put absolutely zero stock in arcane numerology.
	It's funny to see people doing it.
	But what I particularly liked about this is, oh, it's an empty chair.
	Yeah, significant in itself.
	It's very interesting, isn't it?
	But anyway, I thought we'd just have a quick look at this answer.
	It's just preposterous.
	Can I just say something very quickly about the endorsement itself?
	One of the virtues of Trump, there are plenty, a fair few vices as well, it must be said, but one of the virtues of Trump is that he really did trigger the whole kind of nexus of media, cultural and academic elites into having this sort of mask-off moment.
	The Atlantic in the early 2010s was sort of this kind of high-minded, you know, sort of liberal with a small L, Same as the New Yorker.
	Exactly, and there's a reason why they've gone into overdrive like this.
	And so he really has made the media reveal themselves.
	I mean, I even remember watching in 2016, you sort of watch things like CNN, and there was a kind of patina that they were going to be balanced, whereas that pretense has been more or less dropped now.
	Yes, the fancy font newspapers have all had to just simply come out and admit, yeah, we're actually left with partisans.
	Yes. It's not about being reasonable.
	In fact, they make that abundantly clear in this.
	Because the first five paragraphs are them just complaining about Trump.
	We hate Trump.
	We hate Trump. We hate Trump.
	We're still going on about Trump.
	Sorry, were we talking about someone that you were endorsing?
	You know these books where they say reasons to vote Democrat and they have nothing?
	Yes. Yeah, so essentially what the Democrats are going to do, reasons for voting Kamala Harris.
	And it's going to be a Jack Torrance author book where it's going to say she's not Trump, she's not Trump, she's not Trump endlessly.
	That appears to be the core pillar of her campaign, actually, as we can see from this.
	I mean... Apparently Trump has been even more vicious and erratic than in the past.
	The ideas of his closest advisors are even more extreme.
	I don't know. I think Trump's a lot more moderate than he used to be.
	He's a lot less pugnacious with the media.
	Which is a shame because I personally enjoyed that because it was very entertaining.
	But he's pursuing a far-right agenda.
	As I've been reliably informed by the media, Project 2025 will cleanse America of its corruption in a fiery hellstorm that will leave no persons surviving.
	I mean, everything I've heard about Project 2025 has just sounded wonderful, and I'm totally for it.
	But anyway, as I said, the first five paragraphs are just whining about Trump.
	So that really sets the scene.
	Because I always feel that if you have to project something purely in opposition to something else, then the thing itself can't be that important.
	Because otherwise you just tell me about the virtues of the thing that you're promoting.
	And that would, by corollary, become antagonistic to something else, but it would be centred in your own perspective.
	And in their case, it probably would still be a little overdone.
	I mean, they made this positive case very strongly and would continue to do so if he was eligible for a third term with Obama, because he did have a certain razzmatazz about him.
	He was clearly intelligent, fairly smooth, fairly suave.
	And you had all of these very, very, very, as I say, slightly overly complimentary, obsequious pieces.
	But they can't do that at all here.
	It's just pure bitterness and catastrophizing.
	What would you say about Kamala?
	Well, no, there's nothing to say.
	I think that's a good point that both of you are raising because I remember Machiavelli who was saying that the two prime motives of action are fear and hope.
	And when it comes to fear, this is obviously a piece that tries to induce fear in people.
	The question is, everyone does it.
	We could say everyone does it, but when it comes to the positive, when it comes to the articulation of a vision of hope, they have nothing.
	All they have is just empty words.
	Yeah, they'll say, you know, Fed, freedom, equality, and dignity.
	But if you talk to them, they don't know what it means.
	It's also important that we don't attack the concept of fear-mongering too much.
	It's a very left-wing thing to do.
	You're just fear-mongering with your hate facts.
	I mean, they will destroy the world if they get elected.
	Yes, exactly. So it all hinges on whether the fears are well-founded and whether the hopes are well-founded.
	They're both new to be operative.
	So that should be the main thrust of our case, not that they're fear-mongering, but that they're fear-mongering in the most demented, catastrophizing way possible.
	But also in a way that just...
	I mean, normally when you're fear-mongering, there has to be a ring of truth about it, right?
	Okay, well, that person, like Jeremy Corbyn, may well have tanked the economy.
	Entirely possible if John McDonnell becomes Chancellor of the Exchequer.
	I mean, things would be worse than they are now, and things are pretty bad now.
	So it's a plausible possibility.
	But when you have actually quite a glowing record of economic success, prosperity, world peace, and deepening diplomatic ties in different and difficult areas...
	The catastrophizing is a bit more difficult to pull off, isn't it?
	So everyone remembers what the price of petrol was, or the price of food was.
	Everyone remembers how, okay, the media was on fire complaining that Trump wasn't saying liberal things, but there weren't any new wars.
	There wasn't a disaster in Afghanistan where billions of dollars of Military equipment made the Taliban like the fourth biggest military in the world or something like that.
	There are so many things that Donald Trump didn't do and did do.
	And again, it was only four years ago.
	It's not like it's out of living memory or something.
	It's not like it was a decade ago.
	It was only four years ago.
	And so I thought we would get to their positive statement on Kamala Harris.
	Right. So they make their case in advance by just pointing out, hang on a second, we're a heterodox place, staffed by free thinkers, and whenever I hear the term free thinker, I just hear Nietzsche in the back of my head going, yeah, those free thinkers all think the same, don't they? It's the free spirits.
	No, no, no, we believe in every possible shade of gay race communism at this publication, we really do.
	There's no limit to the number of pronouns we are prepared to count on.
	But that's the, again, whenever I hear free thinkers, Nietzsche is very much there going, yeah, that's the problem, isn't it?
	They all think they are all free thinkers because they're all exactly the same.
	And so they say, well, I mean, for some of us, Kamala Harris is just too centrist.
	And for others, they're just too liberal.
	So you're exactly right. So what shade of gay race communism?
	And they literally just admit it.
	The process that led to her nomination was flawed.
	What was that process?
	Does anyone remember how she became nominated?
	Because I actually don't really know.
	Yeah, I remember. Just one day, it turns out they're not having a primary, and Kamala Harris is a candidate, and there was just no debate on it.
	And no one on the left had any critiques of this.
	And those who did, people at Anna Kasparian, got defense-traded from the left, and were told, no, you're a Nazi now, because you wanted an open and transparent process to choose the candidate.
	So, yeah, I mean, flawed is definitely one way of putting it.
	Translation, high-profile Democrats knew that they were going to lose the election and didn't want to run.
	You know, that's definitely an interesting take on it.
	Yeah, remember, everyone was thinking that it was going to be Gavin Newsom, because in the minds of Democrats, he sort of...
	He's a plausible candidate. Yeah, he sort of seems like a plausible candidate.
	I do think there's something to the idea that they were hoist by their own petard in that way as well, though, because one of the edges that we really do have on the left today, if only we leaned into it a bit more, is that they are thoroughly anti-meritocratic, as a matter of principle, at this point.
	And that... It can redound to our advantage.
	We're accepting here that Gavin Newsom, on just purely meritocratic criteria, would be doing better than Kamala Harris.
	But the optics in their own ideological circles of a kind of smooth, tall, handsome, suave wasp supplanting this half-Indian, half-Jamaican woman, who's a DEI promotion, and explicitly so, as Joe Biden said, it just would have been awful.
	And so that's something we should take more advantage of.
	Yeah, the right is much more prepared to countenance disagreement as well, I've noticed.
	There's a bizarre...
	I mean, like, for example, Ron DeSantis was openly challenging Trump last time, and now he's just been folded back in.
	Everyone's like, I don't know, he's still a decent chap.
	But it wasn't something that went without debate or conflict.
	Whereas on the left, everyone just fell into line.
	Kamala Harris has been...
	Well, she's been ordained by the Church of Leftism, however it works in the Democrat Party, and I'm just a true believer and I have to get in and now I have to support her and Tim Walsh, who nobody knew until five minutes ago.
	Oh, but now he's brilliant and we all love him and we're all going to the rallies because if we don't, the other side will point that out.
	It reflects the way in which things, I was talking about the media acting in a more brazen fashion, and Trump has sort of lifted, sort of exposed that.
	The Democrat Party machine is also acting in a more brazen fashion.
	I mean, it's one thing to rig a primary process, which many people would argue happened against Bernie Sanders in 2016.
	Lots of WikiLeaks emails suggested that Debbie Washburn and Schultz behind the scenes was maneuvering for a Hillary nomination.
	It's one thing not to have a process at all, and to have that in clear daylight.
	I mean, I would respect them more if they just said, no, we're going to choose candidates based on a kind of executive model.
	Okay, well, that's not how I think it should be done, but I would at least respect the fact that you have a plan.
	But instead, it's very cloak and dagger, behind the scenes, very shady.
	Again, a very kind of Wizard of Oz, frankly.
	What's going on? Who are these people?
	And... If you ask Elon Musk, he'll say they're part of an international noncing ring.
	Epstein client list.
	But I'm not close to them, I don't know.
	Anyway, so the positive endorsement from The Atlantic comes about seven paragraphs in.
	Which is interesting, because you'd think that'd be front and center.
	But they say, quote, Having devoted her life to public service, Harris respects the law and the Constitution.
	She believes in the freedom, equality, and dignity of all Americans.
	She's untainted by corruption.
	Untainted by an American politician.
	They're talking about folks.
	Let alone a felony record or a history of sexual assault.
	She doesn't embarrass her compatriots with her language and behavior.
	Doesn't she? Okay.
	I mean, she is very spontaneous in her talk.
	I mean, she has the gifts of the orator.
	She cackles like the Joker.
	Yeah, and never changes accents.
	We'll get to the accents in a minute.
	I particularly enjoy her accents.
	She's my favorite children's entertainer.
	It turns out when your enemies are actually not weaponising the justice system against you, you don't have a felony record.
	Yeah, that's weird. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	What a strange coincidence.
	Yes. But I like the, she respects law and order as well.
	Does she, though? Because she took some executive actions to keep people in jail by, didn't she deny evidence or deny the access of evidence to one of their cases and things like that?
	Yeah, so 10 candidates on death row, that was Tulsi Gabbard's main beef, wasn't it?
	Because it seemed evil. Yes, and she also promoted the Minnesota Freedom Fund, euphemistically called, for Black Lives Matter rioters and encouraged people to donate to it.
	I'm sure she's on board with all of these Soros-funded prosecutors as well who think that a certain amount of enforced inequality is necessary to make unequal people equal and trying to avoid disparate impact and therefore selectively enforcing the law based on racial criteria as well.
	Well, she says as much whenever she's caught in a lucid moment.
	But anyway, she won't abuse the power of the highest office in order to keep it.
	She believes in democracy.
	These and not any specific policy positions are the reason The Atlantic is endorsing her.
	And that's interesting because the specific policy positions are something she's flip-flopped on quite a lot.
	She's taken lots of different positions on the border, on justice, on the First Amendment, the Second Amendment...
	Nothing about the 19th Amendment yet.
	But she's been...
	I mean, contradictory is a generous way of putting it.
	Totally inconsistent.
	Utterly... All over the place.
	Yeah, I'm trying to think of ways that aren't too condemnatory.
	Begging the question, yeah. And so I just came away from this going, right, you're doing it because you have to.
	Not because she's going to do anything good, no specific policy positions yet, because, I mean, what is she even offering?
	There aren't any. Exactly. She seems, in fact, at the moment to be stealing a lot of her policy suggestions from Trump himself.
	And so... They end with this I don't think that that's really how Americans generally feel.
	They don't look at Kamala Harris and go, yeah, hmm, hope.
	Also, the person who defeated the Sphinx had a particular degenerate history in his...
	Yeah. Do you really want America to become Oedipus?
	Is that really what the Atlantic is asking for?
	I mean, just where's the respect for mothers and for motherhood?
	And for fathers? Yeah.
	For non-incestuous relations.
	Yeah. Generally. That's it.
	That was it. So, right.
	Yeah. Okay.
	Anyway, so let's hope that the incestuous Democrat Party don't slay the Sphinx of Trump.
	But I thought we'd have a quick look at the endorsements of Kamala Harris, because, of course, she has a lot of endorsements.
	It's very, very interesting.
	So you've got federal executive officials, so of course Joe Biden, former Democrat presidents, Dick Cheney, which seems like something you'd want taken off there.
	Yeah, Dick Cheney's endorsed you and said, well, don't tell anyone.
	Like, Christ on a bike.
	Al Gore, the most correct predictor in all the world.
	America's Cassandra, in fact, I would say, if we're going to use Greek metaphors.
	But then obviously loads of Democrats, cabinet members...
	What's that one?
	Is that called the Intelligence Community?
	Oh, there is the Intelligence Community.
	These are cabinet...
	Ah, I see. Representatives, statewide officials, tribes and tribal leaders...
	Okay, yeah. Okay, reservations and all that sort of thing.
	International politicians, blah blah, newspapers and other publications.
	And again, it's just exactly what you'd think.
	It's almost as if Curtis Yarvin himself has put together this Wikipedia entry in order to vindicate the existence of the cathedral.
	I mean, what are these if not the various different flying buttresses and pillars of what Yarvin calls the cathedral?
	Very much so. And again, when it's international organisations in here somewhere...
	Sadiq Khan. Oh yeah, of course Sadiq Khan.
	The General Secretary of NATO. You know what happened that I found absolutely astonishing and weird?
	So somewhere in Wiltshire, outside the Dorothy Hospice, which is a place where they resell used furniture, they had a huge picture of Kamala Harris.
	So they also endorsed her.
	There was essentially what this is, and again, you can see down the list, it's essentially just a summary of the US deep state.
	This is what we're being given here.
	And this goes all the way down to academics, newspapers, entertainers.
	You can see everyone who is just on this side.
	I mean, I've never heard of half these actors and actresses, to be honest.
	Yeah, who's George Clooney?
	I didn't even see him on there.
	But again, huge numbers.
	And so the question is, what are they exactly endorsing?
	And Kamala herself went on Stephen Colbert the other day and explained to us precisely what she's going to bring to the table.
	It shows that a lot of people, especially independent voters, really want this to be a change election and that they tend to break for you in terms of thinking about change.
	You are a member of the president administration.
	Under a Harris administration, what would the major changes be and what would stay the same?
	Sure. Well, I mean, I'm obviously not Joe Biden.
	I noticed. And so that would be one change in terms of...
	But also, I think it's important to say with, you know, 28 days to go, I'm not Donald Trump.
	And so when we think about the significance of what...
	Sorry, did you want to...
	No, I just said that, you know, I think that this goes without saying, but...
	I like the idea that I wish we could have seen the audience there when she said, obviously I'm not Joe Biden.
	I wonder if there was a kind of... Do we clap that?
	Or are we not allowed? Oh, and then she says the Trump ones.
	Oh yeah, we definitely clap that. Much simpler.
	She's advocating for de-Bidenification.
	She's going to pull a cruise chef and she's going to say Joe Biden was far right.
	That's what she's going to do.
	He did put on the Trump cap, didn't he?
	Yeah. So maybe. There's definitely some low-key sabotage going on there.
	He was very complimentary about Ron DeSantis after she had called him out.
	Yeah, it's very weird.
	But, I mean, we'll listen to the rest of our answer to see how vacuous it is.
	This next generation of leadership looks like, were I to be elected president, it is about, frankly, I love the American people and I believe in our country.
	I love that it is our character and nature to be an ambitious people.
	You know, we have aspirations.
	We have dreams.
	We have incredible work ethic.
	And I just believe that we can create and build upon the success we've achieved in a way that we continue to grow Opportunity and in that way grow the strength of our nation.
	So, for example, my economic policies, I think of it and I've named it as creating an opportunity economy.
	So it's about things like investing in small businesses.
	I love our small businesses.
	Right. So, vacuous nonsense.
	Yes. Just boilerplate.
	Yeah, and Trump has his moments where he kind of goes into a rhetorical...
	And he definitely does.
	But firstly, he seems very authentic when he's doing it.
	Not necessarily honest, but very, very extremely authentic when he's doing it.
	But it is reinforced by certain details and policy proposals in here.
	A pattern of behavior. Yes, exactly.
	So, sorry, she goes, oh yes, well there are my sort of ten platitudinous bullet points, but as for policy, and then she just gives another platitudinous bullet point about liking small businesses, as if that's controversial.
	I also like the idea that she can be considered a change candidate.
	She's the VP. She's currently a member of the government, the second most important person, presumably, in America.
	That would be a continuity government.
	But also a candidate who says she respects people's ambition.
	That's why she's going to tax everyone to oblivion.
	We need opportunity for wealth redistribution.
	But anyway, I personally would be supporting Kamala Harris.
	Were I a Democrat supporter, I would support Trump.
	Honestly, because of her accents.
	Her accents are brilliant. And I don't think enough attention has been brought to them.
	Because she's just so great.
	So she gets, I think, Matt Walsh described as an urban accent, but this sounded like a southern accent to me.
	It's hard to tell. Let's have a listen. And you all helped us win in 2020, and we're going to do it again in 2024.
	Yes, we will. Yes, we will.
	So that's a nice twang there.
	But then you've got this particular one, which I... You better thank a union member for sick leave.
	Southern Black Preacher.
	You better thank a union member for paid leave.
	You better thank a union member for vacation time.
	I like Southern Black Preacher accents.
	They're great. Really great.
	But then what about Latino accents?
	They're great. I love you back.
	LAUGHTER I hadn't seen that one.
	No, no, no, no. But she's just dropped a new accent, which is a Jamaican accent.
	I don't know if you've got this on the thing, but yesterday she was talking about COVID quite a bit with this kind of predominantly Latina audience.
	She was saying, COVID, COVID. But then someone got an image of her in 2020 saying it, and she's like, COVID-19, which is speaking perfectly normal.
	But my favourite one, sorry, is just, she's just dropped the Jamaican accent, which I love.
	Have you no empathy, man?
	You know, for the suffering of other people.
	Have you no sense of purpose?
	More convincing than the Latina one, to be honest, because she's got Jamaican heritage, right?
	Have you no empathy, Matt?
	But anyway, we'll leave that there, because I don't really see much of a positive case for Kamala Harris, except as a children's entertainer, which may well be her next career move.
	Don't you want to save your soul?
	Maybe. Daveyverse says, Sophie DK, ahoy matey, how be ye and your crew faring?
	I feel that that's a reference to something I don't understand.
	But, I mean...
	Don't worry, you'll see about the last segment.
	Alright, let's carry on. Right, so Hungary has assumed the presidency of the EU Council until the end of 2024.
	And Viktor Orban went to the EU Parliament and gave a speech where he shared the vision that he has for Europe with other MEPs.
	And as you expect, we had lots of really nice moments there.
	Orban really made the case for patriotism in Europe.
	And predictably people only had accusations, personal accusations to make against him that he's a Russian asset.
	So just to, sorry to pause, what does presidency of the European Council do?
	Well, it's... Probably not that much, right?
	Not that much. It's a rotating position every six months.
	But I mean, you could say that it has a sort of...
	Symbolic? Symbolic nature, because the president of the EU Council gets to make more speeches and stuff.
	A certain amount of power to define the agenda.
	It's like being leader of the House of Commons in a strange sort of way.
	It kind of gives a strong push for the tone that is being adopted.
	But, as you'll see, a lot of people are just not having it, and they want Europe to be what it is right now, a multiculturalism hellhole.
	Is this more evidence of Europe going far right?
	It depends what you mean.
	Yeah, but, yeah, whatever.
	Well, it was quite clear. Anyway.
	Right, so before we say more about that, we have the Islander magazine, issue number two, as you see here, with $14.99.
	It's a really good bargain, and I think it is the last day where people can...
	It is indeed the last day.
	Yeah, so...
	It will not be reprinted, and you can't get the articles that are in it anywhere else, so do go and get it now.
	So do check it, and also check our lovely merch here.
	We have cups, mugs, t-shirts, so...
	Thank you very much. Don't miss the opportunity.
	Right, let's go here to Viktor Orban.
	So basically he made several key points.
	One of it is we are not members of the EU because of what it is right now.
	We're members of the EU because of what it could be.
	And by that he means a union that respects the sovereignty of member states and the culture of member states.
	And he is essentially saying that right now the EU is ravaged by illegal migration, by the war in Ukraine and also by the loss of economic competitiveness and that this has to change.
	And everything The opposition had to say was, you're a Russian asset, you're a Chinese asset, and everything is okay.
	Right. I mean, I think he's got a very rose-tinted view of what the EU is meant to be, from what he's just said there.
	Well, if it could be unburdened by what has been, maybe we could have a different vision for it.
	Yeah, yeah. Well, I would say that, you know, I agree with you, Carl, unburdened by what has been, but the problem with the EU is that it's just such a legalistic organism, and so much of its, there are so many inbuilt destinations written into its treaties, and they'd be incredibly arduous to have to kind of course-correct at this point and make it more of a confederation of states rather than a federal super-state, which I imagine is what Orban means by, he wants it just to be a confederation of cooperation.
	I don't think that's likely to happen anytime soon.
	Yes, I don't think that was the purpose of it at all either.
	The real sort of idealistic visionaries of it, people like, what's he called, Jean Monnet, who certainly saw it as a kind of way of...
	United States of Europe.
	Indeed, definitely. But to add to your point, there have been voices within the EU who are saying, basically, we need to expand the union.
	And they don't say anything about the direction towards which they expand.
	But it is implicit.
	It's implicit that they treat it just as a managerialist organization that is functioning so as to crush the national identity of the member states.
	But what is interesting here is just with other figures like Milley and Bukele at the UN is that we have to see what these dissident voices mean for the people.
	Because, for instance, I don't know about Orban.
	I don't know a lot about what he's doing.
	I'm not defending everything that he says.
	But what is interesting is that it seems to me to be That he is the only voice within the EU who just calls for sanity.
	He's one of the few voices, let me say, the EU calls for sanity.
	And here we have the Slovenian MEP of European Parliament, Branko Grimms, who basically said that Hungary is peaceful.
	Hungary is safe.
	It's not like the rest of the EU. And we owe to Orban the example of Hungary because Hungary is against the wokeness DEI agenda and also against illegal migration.
	And they have a leader that says that if we are attacked, I will defend my country.
	That's why they hate him.
	You can see, exactly. So I have some clips here where he, from his speech, where he says basically facts are facts.
	Whatever other people say facts speak for themselves.
	And he had some beefs with Ursula von der Leyen.
	And let me just show you some of the things that he said.
	I'll fast forward to 04.
	Just before we begin though, let's just remember who Ursula von der Leyen is.
	She's the president of the commission.
	You didn't vote for her.
	you didn't have any opportunity to vote for her and yet they'll call Victor
	Orban a dictator even though he's won four elections is it?
	Yes. And there was a there's a period of time where he was out of office as
	well not like normal how dictators operate. Very unusual for a dictator to spend
	any time out of office and then get elected back into the office. So just I just
	very I want to make it very clear there are there are people in the
	European Union who take on a dictatorial aspect to their office and it's not Victor Orban
	it is in fact the people who accuse him. Yes, exactly.
	Unelected bureaucrats?
	Yes. Right, so here we have Orban talking about...
	Migration policy. I'll translate and say, since 2015, Hungary and I personally have been engaged in serious political debates on migration.
	I've seen a lot of things.
	I've seen initiatives, packages, proposals that have been greeted with high hopes and all of them have failed.
	He's talking about the multiculturalist dream that everything can work.
	And he says, the only reason for this, believe me, is that without external hotspots, we cannot So what is interesting here is that he says something that is obvious.
	He says that what happens is with a lot of people who are asking for asylum, they come within the union and they stay within the union for as long as their application is pending.
	And then even if their application isn't get accepted, they have deportation orders and a lot of deportation orders expire and are not enforced.
	So he says we need just external hotspots.
	People have to apply from outside the union to come within the union.
	That seems to me to be just common sense.
	And also he says something, he speaks in the language of leftists here, where he says that illegal migration is Europe has led to antisemitism, violence against women and homophobia.
	And says facts are facts, whether you like them or not.
	This is obviously true as well.
	This is obviously true. And Europe is considerably less safe.
	I think that this is demonstrable.
	And we have statistics for it.
	And I will show you what happened also about Germany.
	Now, here we have Ursula von der Leyen, who gave a headline address in the European Parliament today.
	And she essentially had to say that she's going to address three points.
	War in Ukraine. Economic competitiveness and migration.
	And essentially her whole shtick was you're a dictator who is a Russian asset and a Chinese asset.
	Again, I really want to stress no one voted for von der Leyen.
	Yes. She's even considered something of a failed politician in Germany.
	I mean, this is the other thing as well.
	It's not just that being elected has some sort of automatic value.
	It means to an end. It means that there are direct lines of accountability between the decisions you make and whether those are vindicated at the next election.
	And Orban has, whatever you think of him, consistently been vindicated in terms of the policies he pursues.
	He's immensely popular in Hungary.
	And he's completely redefined Hungarian politics.
	And it's really good because we have some hard evidence published by the federal German police about crime statistics in Germany, which is the country of Ursula von der Leyen.
	And here we have her saying, I want to address the Hungarian people.
	We're one family. Your story is our story.
	Your future is our future.
	Hopefully not. Jesus Christ.
	Hopefully not. Genuinely chilling.
	Genuinely chilling. Whenever you hear a German talking like this.
	Yes. 10 million Hungarians are 10 million good reasons to keep shaving.
	If the Hungarian future is really to be defined by Ursula von der Leyen, I don't doubt that 10 million Hungarians might still be around, but how many non-Hungarians will there be in Hungary as well?
	That's also worth considering.
	I mean, when an unelected German is suddenly in charge of Europe, speaking like this, you've got to be worried.
	Your future is our future.
	Yeah, but she's just like, you know, numbering them.
	There are 10 million of you, are there?
	Okay, good. Yeah, and we have here, from the European Conservative, a shocking federal police report that talks about the effects that this vision of Ursula von der Leyen has for her country, for Germany.
	The Germany that gave birth to her and that she is supposed to represent, unless I'm completely mistaken.
	And I'll give you just some very hard evidence.
	This is a report by the Federal Police of Germany that published some statistics, and it says annual crime for the year 2023 has risen by 12%, 12.5%.
	Crime in 2023 in Germany has risen by 12.5% comparatively to the year 2022.
	Non-Germans are six times more likely to engage in knife attacks than German citizens.
	So the total number there was 790,000?
	Yeah. Jesus Christ.
	Yeah, thousands of crimes per day.
	Big country, but you would expect it to have thousands of crimes, but that level of increase in criminality is not acceptable.
	Especially when you get granular with the ethnic data on it.
	Yeah, so they have 2,165 crimes per day on average.
	So the non-Germans, I repeat, are six times more likely to engage in knife attacks than German citizens.
	And definitely they're not six times the German population.
	No. So in violent acts were increased by 10%.
	Sexual violence has increased by 15% to 2,500 cases, which are eight, nine per day.
	Violence in train stations has risen by 11%, and also pickpocketing incidents have increased by 16%.
	Right, so trends bad across the board.
	Yeah, so when Ursula von der Leyen sees this Germany and says, everything is okay, Your future Hungary is our future, and we're just one happy family.
	That seems to me like a bad relative.
	It's a relative that I would not feel particular social bonds towards.
	Yeah, I mean, unless she's vacating her office and letting Orban just take over.
	I imagine the crime rates in Hungary are probably far, far lower, aren't they?
	Yeah. No, they are follow-up.
	Yeah, I bet they are. But you can't explain these numbers and the over-representation of...
	I can't. I'd be called all sorts of names.
	I mean, I wanted to say you cannot explain this without citing the very things that Ursula von der Leyen does not want us to talk about.
	And she thinks talking about consists hate speech.
	Now, here, Viktor Orban basically said that...
	He is being criticized as being a Russian asset, but whether we like it or not, when we have wars, wars must stop, and there needs to be a ceasefire, and there need to be lines of communication rather than just...
	Any of these sort of allegations without any kind of substantive evidence, it reminds me of the kind of worst of 20th century partisanship.
	It's utterly irrational.
	And it's just a way of smearing the opponent.
	Unless they have some evidence that Vladimir Putin has been communicating with Viktor Orban or something like this.
	Unless they have something to say and actually lay at his feet, then it's nothing and you can just safely ignore it.
	But Carl, I think you should consider that Orban is somehow against the woke agenda and I don't know to what extent people can have it.
	Here we have Ursula von der Leyen in January this year saying that she is going to withhold...
	Around 20 billion euros remain frozen.
	They are suspended for reasons that include concerns on LGBTIQ rights, academic freedom and asylum rights.
	Some are blocked under the conditionality mechanism.
	And they will remain blocked until Hungary fulfills all the necessary conditions.
	Just German dictator.
	So unless you turn Hungary into a place that has the severe crime tendencies of Germany, we're not going to give you funding and we're going to block your funding.
	Not just the crime tendencies, but unless you're prepared to transition your children and suggest that all things are equal in every way.
	That's exactly why people look up to Orban and they say that, you know, we want a Europe that respects its children and respects its younger generation and the family.
	And there's another thing because Hungary is constantly being attacked by the EU. They don't want to comply with the EU migration pact.
	The EU migration pact is a pact for the relocation of illegal migrants within the union and they fined Hungary with 200 million euros.
	One of the strange contradictions as well, because these are precisely the sorts of politicians who will claim that this is very culturally enriching.
	If it really was that culturally enriching, surely there would be a scramble to see who could get the most of them.
	It's implicitly classified as a burden if you're relocating them in this way.
	Incentives just wouldn't be necessary.
	I'll show you a very funny response by Orban when he was accused by the other MEP members, the members of the European Parliament and other bureaucrats there, that he has a strong Russian lobby within Hungary that he allegedly...
	So just as a quick pause on that as well, like, why would anyone take lectures from
	the Germans about being Russian assets? So you made your entire country totally
	dependent on Russian energy and then got screwed over by the Americans when
	Russia decided it was going to invade Ukraine. Like, I wouldn't take lectures from them.
	Anyway, ever at all about this subject.
	They've been, sorry, they've just been totally incompetent on it.
	Like, just go shut down, oh, you can't shut down any more nuclear power plants, can you?
	You've already done that. You know, I'm just so done with this kind of hypocritical moralizing from particularly, you know, German politicians, like EU politicians.
	I'm not having it. There are definite national differences in how the Hungarians view Russia and how the Poles view Russia, which are interesting given that they've both got quite similar histories.
	And Poland's probably been more persecuted by Russia historically than Hungary has, but there was obviously the Soviet communism and the putting down the uprising.
	In 1956, and they also put down the Hungarian liberal national revolution in 1848 as well.
	The Tsar put that down too.
	But for whatever reason, the Hungarians to this day take a much more pragmatic view of Russia.
	It's purely kind of tied to the national interest, whereas in the case of Poland, there is much more of a kind of...
	I like my Polish friends, but it's a slightly obsessive over-concern.
	If it helps, I can understand why.
	Yes. Oh, totally. They're very, very close to Russia.
	Yes, I totally... But what I was going to say, sorry, is that I'm in Hungary quite a lot.
	And when I'm at these things, there are far more Poles present than there are Russians.
	I've never actually encountered a Russian at one of these sort of conferences in Hungary where people like Orbán...
	Balazs Orban will speak.
	There are much more Poles who actively hate Hungary and who actively hate Russia and take a very different view on the war to Hungary than there are Russian assets milling around.
	I have a sense you're going to love the next one, the Spanish person.
	Let's see what Orban says here.
	I'll mute him and say, he says, the number of Russians working in Hungary, he says this is pure hypocrisy.
	Last year we issued 3,000 permits.
	That makes a total of 7,000 Russians working in Germany.
	And he says there are 300,000 Russians working in Germany.
	Sorry, I meant Hungary before 7,000.
	300,000 in Germany.
	Precisely my point. My head count at these conferences checks out then.
	There are barely any Russians.
	It says 100,000 in Spain.
	100,000 Russians in Spain and about 60,000 Russians in France.
	I like it. And I'm the one being accused.
	Yeah, exactly. Do not take any goddamn lectures from these.
	They're hypocritical liars.
	And when it comes to hypocritical lying, we have the Spanish head of the delegation of the Spanish Vox Party in the European Parliament, Jorge...
	Buxade. Buxade, yeah.
	And he called the structure a house of demonic hypocrisy.
	And he was really...
	Nice. Checks out, yeah.
	Yeah, he was really...
	He was really funny because he basically said that Germany and Spain are buying oil and gas from Russia and they're playing their game and they accuse Hungary.
	And basically he says leftists, this is not a house of democracy.
	He says this is the house of demonic hypocrisy.
	And he says the rule of law and the separation of powers is destroyed by leftists throughout the union.
	So you can't talk about threats to democracy when you don't Conserve your own house.
	And what I want to say here...
	Why would I ever listen to any of these people on any of those subjects?
	And just to sort of end the segment, he basically says, I'm deeply sorry, but I will not be indebted to you or any of you.
	If we're attacked, I will defend my country.
	So what is interesting here is that we see a different vision, one that, as you said before, wasn't the original vision of the EU, but a vision that could happen, that could take hold within the future.
	You could say that there is no particular problem with having a union that does respect the sovereignty and culture of each member.
	Because let's be honest, Europe isn't as powerful as it was 100 years ago or 150 years ago.
	There are very large players outside of Europe that could play divide and conquer within Europeans.
	But Primarily, they shouldn't use the EU to do this.
	The EU should be the obstacle to foreign interference within Europe.
	It should be the obstacle to dividing and conquering Europeans.
	The problem is, right, the Germans are the obstacle to European...
	Solidarity. Because of this demand.
	This kind of demand. The Hungarians are not constitutionally the same sort of people as the Germans.
	They're not incredibly far left.
	They weren't dominated by liberalism and communism.
	Well, they were dominated by communism, but like They're very much more, obviously, a sort of traditional people and see themselves as such, whereas the Germans are not, and they don't see themselves as such.
	They're very much concerned with being moderns.
	And this kind of intransigence and intolerance towards the differences within the European peoples is the problem of the German leadership.
	It's the German mindset.
	It's this formatting, leveling...
	But that alternative vision of Europe therefore might be helped along by Alternative for Deutschland doing better because they are not slaves of that modernizing tendency.
	But just to add to this, I think that this is very important.
	And yes, hopefully they'll do well.
	And there aren't going to be any deviations of the sort we don't want to see.
	But what seems to me to be particularly important is that now Germany has lost its competitiveness with its net zero policies.
	And whatever happens in Germany, I think we're not going to talk about a German-led EU anymore.
	Well, it depends who's paying the bills, doesn't it?
	Yes. Right now, I think the balance of power is shifting within the union.
	Quite possibly. But still, the EU right now is functioning in a way that doesn't respect the identity of Europeans and their culture.
	Right now, it's always been this way.
	Yes, but we could be unburdened by what has been and see what can be.
	Okay, so let's finish on a Friday afternoon with something a bit fun, shall we?
	Because this is something that crossed my timeline, if we can get to the next one, Samson.
	And it was just...
	It was a very strange thread I began to pull on, and it just came out of...
	As soon as I started looking into it, I realized, oh, this is just emblematic of everything that is wrong with the modern West, and particularly Europe, right?
	And you can see I'm using very strange sources for this, because this wasn't something that sort of hit the mainstream very hard.
	So, in 2001...
	As you can see, Danish ships off the coast of Nigeria had an encounter in the Gulf of Guinea, had an encounter with about nine pirates on a fairly small boat.
	Now, you've probably seen the videos of the Somali pirates taking oil tankers and cargo ships and stuff like that.
	Suspected pirates.
	Yeah, they were just being there.
	There is a reason for suspected pirates, actually.
	Sea milling. Yeah, they were milling in the sea, actually.
	That's exactly right. But anyway, you've seen the video of the Smiley and Pirates, where they, just on a fairly small, speedy boat...
	I don't know anything about boats, so I'm just describing the attributes of it, rather than the name of it.
	They zoom up to a tanker, put ladders up it, climb up it, and then just, you know, I'm the captain now, you know.
	So that's how these things are done.
	And the same sort of thing happens in the Gulf of Guinea, around the sort of curve on the other side of Africa.
	And so this is what happened in this clash.
	One of the four suspected pirates that were captured, I think there were nine of them, four of them got shot, one of them got away, somehow, and four of them were captured.
	One of the four captured, after a shootout with Danish troops, has had to have his leg amputated in 2001.
	Nasty way to...
	In 2001 or 2021?
	Sorry, 2021. Good spot.
	So three years ago, right?
	And this has been going on for three years.
	And so the operation was carried on the Danish frigate Esbern Snare due to the severity of the wounds to his lower limb, according to a Danish admiral.
	Four gunmen were killed and four more captured in the incident.
	Oh, sorry, there were eight of them. Oh no, there may have been another person on board, but there's no trace of him being found, so maybe he fell into the sea or something.
	And the firefight sank the smaller boat, and so the naval personnel had to pick them out of the water and rescue them.
	And the battle was the first time the alleged pirates had been killed by foreign naval forces.
	So they were investigating the small boats that had eight or nine We're good to go.
	Yeah, and so the Danish troops fired warning shots, the men into the air, the men started firing at the Danes, and so the Danes started firing back, and it was something that went badly for them.
	And Danish legal experts, though, the survivors have been charged with attempted murder, but Danish legal experts have said there's a risk that Denmark could fail to secure convictions because it can be difficult to prove piracy.
	I mean, look, we're just hanging out on the sea with a bunch of guns and a bunch of ladders on our boat, right?
	That's not a crime? Is that a crime?
	That's probably not a crime. I mean, you know, it might even be difficult to judge whose jurisdiction this is, right?
	But they were caught, as I said, with ladders on their little boat.
	And so, not entirely sure what to do with this, come on.
	Yeah, I mean, you don't know.
	People have ladders here or there.
	Yeah, they're just sailing around in the sea off of Africa.
	Occasionally people just happen to manifest.
	Yeah, just hanging around.
	In the middle of the sea or something.
	It could happen. And so anyway, this...
	They had a good night out, the previous night.
	We've all been there, haven't we?
	But who hasn't found themselves in a small boat with a ladder off the coast of Nigeria?
	But anyway, so this carried on into 2022, when the Danish were basically forced to release them.
	Sorry, I've got hay fever or something coming on.
	So, the four suspected pirates were detained for six weeks, and after this period of time, they didn't really know what to do with them.
	So they essentially kind of released them back into the wild.
	Because no one would take them.
	I'm joking, this is changing what they did.
	The Danish armed forces had failed to find a country in the region which would take the alleged pirates, so the decision was taken to release the men near Nigerian waters with enough food and fuel to get to shore.
	It's literally how you discover a wounded pigeon.
	I literally do this all the time.
	Oh, really? Yeah, we've got five cats, and so they're forever bringing in shrews or mice and birds.
	Nurse them back to hell for a little bit.
	My wife would love to. Oh, I see.
	You just throw them back out. Yeah. They couldn't prove that they were members of the pirate guild.
	They didn't have the Roger Morley flag.
	I treat these animals just like Nigerian pirates and just release them back into the wild.
	So they put them on a dinghy with enough food and fuel to get to the shore.
	And so it's like, right, okay, they're not our problem anymore.
	But the guy who lost his leg...
	They were like, I can't just leave him on the boat, can we?
	That'd be a bit unfair, wouldn't it?
	You know, this guy can't swim or walk.
	So if he has some blood, maybe sharks would like it?
	Well, no, this was like six weeks later.
	So, you know, I think the wounds would have healed up at least somewhat.
	But, um... So, one of the suspects was taken to Ghana where his leg was amputated, was transferred to Denmark instead to face the charge of attempted manslaughter, because we can't just leave him in the sea, but then he's a pirate, so we can't just...
	We've got to give him a...
	Aversity. Yeah, we've got to give him a trial, right?
	And so the Danish Justice Ministry said they did not feel it was possible to safely release him at sea.
	Sorry, the safety of the pirates is now our concern.
	Great, great, great. And the lawyer of the pirate, because of course he's entitled to a lawyer, every pirate's called a lawyer, says, it just can't be right to treat the four people so unequally.
	Maybe we should have put them in the boat then.
	Equal treatment. But the Justice Minister of Denmark said, no, no, it's fine.
	Maybe it'll deter other pirate attacks, things like that.
	And so they extradited this guy back to Denmark.
	Again, no one would claim him, so he doesn't have any particular support there.
	And the BBC do point out in this that this is actually fairly common.
	Not one-legged pirates, but piracy itself.
	Because the Gulf of Guinea often has tankers with oil and gas travelling through it, and so it's a piracy hotspot, which is of course why Danish troops were there in the first place.
	Political instability, lack of law enforcement, and poverty on the land are other factors which contribute to the increased amount of piracy in the So, he goes back to Denmark, and in Denmark, they basically say, yeah, no, we're not going to charge you with anything.
	So, okay, but...
	I mean, it's an occupational hazard.
	Yeah, maybe. Maybe.
	So, you've got a one-legged pirate in a Danish court.
	He's got then... I mean, I just want to be clear.
	Only a hundred years ago, the punishment for pirates who was hanging...
	Now it's give them money.
	Buy rum. Maybe.
	I mean, I don't know.
	Maybe he drinks rum. Who knows?
	But yeah, so the prosecutors were like, well, he should be in prison for at least a year, right?
	An expulsion from Denmark for 12 years.
	And the judge presiding of the case decided, no, no, actually, the verdict is that he won't be prosecuted.
	And we're not going to really do anything because apparently they claim he didn't fire any shots himself.
	It's like, okay, well, maybe, maybe, fair enough.
	And so instead he now gets to just live in Denmark.
	He's just a Danish citizen now.
	Well, no, he's not actually a citizen.
	But he has an extended permanent...
	Definite right to remain. Residence, yeah, right to remain.
	Which is just crazy.
	So you can try and steal an oil tanker in the Gulf of Guinea and end up getting free money from the Danish government.
	Don't even need to go to the trouble of paying people smugglers.
	Let's hope word of this doesn't get out too much.
	Because for a time, the Mediterranean might seem, oh, it's very quiet, but the Gulf of Guinea is just teeming.
	Well, interestingly, the pirate's name was Lucky.
	Yeah, well. Of course it was.
	But yeah, no, so he's...
	Jackie Jones.
	He was claiming asylum in Denmark, and they said, yeah, I guess you probably are a legitimate asylum seeker.
	Distinctly unheroic, isn't it?
	But you're a pirate.
	I know. You're a criminal.
	What are you talking about? He's not an asylum seeker.
	He's the reason that people seek asylum from people like him.
	Yes. Like, are you kidding me?
	But okay, fine. I mean, I just would just look at him and go, well, I mean...
	Look at him. It's like, look at me.
	I have one leg now.
	Yeah, exactly. I lost the leg.
	How'd you lose it? Well, it wasn't a shootout.
	I was committing piracy, actually, is how I lost my leg.
	But Nigerian pirate Lucky, who lost his leg, has been granted Danish residency.
	The one-legged Nigerian does not want to talk to the press, but his lawyer said that he confirms he'd been granted the permit, and says, I can say that he is happy with the decision, even though he had actually seen that there was no attention at all about it.
	He just wants to look forward.
	He just wants to put it behind him, become a regular member of Danish society, get a job probably.
	Did they give him a pension or something?
	Well, he's going to be able to claim disabilities, and he's obviously able to claim any money that the Danish asylum system gives him.
	But yeah, so, okay, that's interesting.
	So three pirates have been left to fend for themselves, probably out.
	I'm sure they've reformed themselves.
	I'm sure they haven't just gone straight back to a life of piracy.
	And they've taken one pirate back as a kind of pet.
	Look at our one-legged pirate.
	Isn't he cute? What are you doing?
	This is clearly a very odd, eccentric and exceptional case, and that's why we're covering it.
	But there's something so unheroic about unarmed conquest as opposed to just active conquest.
	I actually respect it more in a way if you're just going to try and invade Europe by force in the way that the Saracens would have tried, or in the way that former Muslim conquerors would have tried.
	I know this chap maybe isn't a Muslim, but to illustrate the point...
	Unarmed conquest is just so unheroic, and it puts the society, which is defending itself, in a very unheroic position as well, because at least when you have the barbarians actively at your gate with spears, with infantry divisions, you can fight back, presumably with the consent of your own elite.
	On your side. Whereas in this case, it just gets entangled.
	Our pathological altruism comes into its own.
	Their parasitic attitude to us comes into its own.
	It's not like an eagle versus a lion.
	It's a crippled civilization succumbing to stomach worms.
	It's just so squalid and unheroic.
	It is ignoble.
	Yes. It's very ignoble.
	He now has to be like, yeah, well, I'm pathetic.
	And we have to be like, yeah, we take pity on pathetic things.
	And we're pathetic as well. Yeah, exactly.
	We're not prepared to punish you with your own decisions.
	It's not that you've done something wrong, even if you have.
	We're just going to give you some of our money now because we feel bad that you exist.
	Yeah. It's all so gross.
	I think somehow the state is treated like a god.
	Yeah. Infinite power, infinite mercy, and that no one can, no one will suffer consequences.
	Yeah, I mean, in Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche makes some great points about this, about the strong society thinks that it can just accept parasites and say, well, you know, the punishment itself becomes cruel.
	To the parasites. And so, we'll just take as many one-legged pirates as they come.
	I mean, we're just going to keep taking it until eventually the society itself collapses.
	Like you say, it's very, very pathetic.
	If it was an army, then okay, we lost to an army.
	Fair enough. That's noble.
	You know, there's the... The appeal to heaven, and we were on the wrong side of it.
	Okay, I accept it. But this is just sad.
	And it's the same, it's particularly pronounced with Muslims in Britain as well, or sort of militant Muslims in Britain who kind of hang around Speaker's Corner.
	Their Muslim forebears were conquerors.
	They fought actively.
	These guys are bitching their way to the caliphate.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very feminine.
	Yeah, very feminine.
	Yeah, exactly. Saladin would be like, so what do you do?
	Well, I'm a dependent of the British state, and I complain at them until they give me something.
	Exactly. Saladin wouldn't be very impressed.
	We're not talking about the pirate, are we?
	No, no. Just the general unarmed conquest in general, in all its manifold forms.
	And I've discovered another one today.
	Was he screaming as he was climbing up the stairs, the ladder?
	So anyway, Lucky at the moment is currently in Denmark.
	He's currently receiving benefits, I don't doubt.
	And even the Social Democrat Prime Minister of Denmark is like, what the hell is going on here?
	Even the pantsuit deportation lady.
	Yes. Yes.
	Excuse me. I don't know much about Danish politics, but I'm aware that she's not a hard right figure.
	But if you know anything, do let me know.
	I have the impression that she...
	Someone tried to...
	Sorry. I have the impression that she survived an assassination attempt.
	Did she? Let me check.
	Not by the pirate, right? What a lack of gratitude.
	Davy Jones came out of the ship.
	But she's not happy with this.
	She says, I cannot defend this decision.
	Said Prime Minister Mitt Frederiksen.
	He doesn't belong here.
	If he's here, it's only because of international obligations.
	At least someone's calling it like it is.
	But the point being, there was nothing forcing Denmark to take this guy.
	I mean, they literally released his three mates back into the...
	Like, literally releasing them back into the wild, like wounded animals.
	There was nothing forcing them to do it.
	And so somehow now he's just living in a house in Denmark at the behest of the Danish taxpayer, all because he was trying to be a pirate.
	I found it.
	She was attacked on...
	in June the 7th.
	Yeah, by someone on the street.
	Oh, right, okay. Well, anyway, so that's the curious case of the one-legged Nigerian pirate.
	It turns out that piracy pays if you're doing it against the Danes and probably the rest of Europe, to be honest.
	But obviously this isn't an endorsement.
	I'm much more imperial when it comes to how we should punish pirates.
	We've got loads of comments now, so I'll go through some of those.
	So Bald Eagle says, what happened to the last time Germans said they and the Hungarians were one people?
	I don't think it ended well for Europe as a whole, enough the Russians as a world power afterwards.
	My history repeats. I don't think Hitler was quite as soppy as that, was he?
	No, but yeah, I mean, he wasn't...
	There is a distinct hint of Anschluss about Ursula von der Leyen's statements, though, isn't there?
	One of them were one people, it's like...
	Yeah, but it doesn't apply in the case of Hungarians, though.
	We need to expand the Union.
	Well, I mean, there needs to be more place.
	Yeah, the EU is a very expansionist bloc, which I don't think is good.
	But it's not one that expands on the basis of shared peoplehood.
	AllMyTom says, could you gents take a crack at pronouncing the word squirrel, please?
	Squirrel? Squirrel.
	What's Greek for squirrel? Skiurus.
	Ooh. Nice.
	That's exactly how I expected it, actually.
	It's really close.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's squirrel, but a Greek ending.
	Yeah, yeah. That's cool.
	Davey Bear says, For the Danelaw, looks like they're back boys.
	Yeah. Keith says, Oh my, now the pirate can have a peg leg.
	A true swashbuckler. Yeah, and that's the thing as well.
	There was something genuinely thematic about it.
	Yeah, he can actually get a peg leg, or a modern robotic leg.
	I don't know what they have. But again, there's something truly pathetic.
	I don't know what this guy looks like.
	I couldn't find a picture of him. I'd like to see him.
	Yeah, I would like to have seen him, because I'm picturing a long-drawn silver type, but with Danish women being like, right, sit here, and he's just sort of defeated...
	You know, with his little peg leg in a waiting room to be seen by bureaucrats.
	He's just got a stair lift in his Danish social housing that goes two miles an hour down the street.
	Because the reason that pirates are mythologized is there is a kind of heroic majesty about it.
	It's like, no, I'm repudiating all of the civilizations of the world.
	I'm going to patrol the high seas and take what I can using the force of arms.
	Power its way of life. Yeah, there's a distinct will to power in it that's respectable and heroic and masculine.
	And self-reliant. Self-reliant, yeah, exactly.
	And also unacceptable. Yeah, and so you just know that this one-legged pirate has been sat in waiting rooms waiting to see bureaucrats to sign off.
	Can you sign on this piece of paper?
	You know, we set up a bank account for you, so you get a stipend of like 200 kroner a month or whatever, and you'll live at this dress, here's the keys, and it's just so pathetic and domestic.
	You know, it's like, I thought you were a pirate, you know?
	There's something about it that's just so gross, and...
	There's something, like, anti-human about it, right?
	There's something, the system, no, we've captured everything.
	We've captured the pirates, we've captured, you know, there's nothing outside, like, very much nothing outside our reach, and I just despise it.
	Just stupid. It is also stupid, yeah.
	Dog Breath says, Somali John Silver is the perfect example of why you absolutely 100% ensure there are no survivors.
	It's so pathetic.
	Anyway, let's go to the video comments.
	So I'm more angry than most about what's happened with these hurricanes and the
	response that the government, namely the Democrats, have had to all these red
	states get beaten up by these hurricanes. The reason I'm more angry is because I
	know that they could actually stop the hurricanes from essentially being
	hurricanes. Right so this is bringing up the question of weather control.
	How do you feel about that?
	I don't have strong views on this.
	I know that you've had my friend and a friend of the show, as I understand it, Lewis Brackpool, on who does have definite views on this and has done a lot of digging, a lot of honourable work.
	I have not done it myself, so I don't have a view.
	But after 2020, I'm not axiomatically against any kind of theorising in these sorts of directions.
	Well, we covered this on the podcast a few months ago because Dubai regularly do cloud seeding.
	This is just something that's...
	I mean, you can go look at their website, and they've got a How Cloud Seeding Works website.
	Because, of course, Dubai, a deeply dry country, requires as much rain as they can get.
	There had been a storm that had flooded Dubai, but this wasn't the product of cloud seeding.
	It was just the product of... Lucky weather.
	But it is something that they do.
	And so I'm getting very tired, I suppose, of this knee-jerk reaction.
	They can't control the weather.
	It's like, well, there's lots of weather modification technology.
	Like this from 1963.
	And it's totally reasonable that we would try and do something.
	If there's some terrible weather coming, yeah, if we've got the technology to do something about it.
	Or if, for example, you live in a desert and you've got the technology to generate rain clouds, yeah, of course you should use it.
	The problem is when it becomes a little bit more conspiratorial.
	I don't think the Democrats are trying to flood and destroy Republican states.
	Although now I said that, if someone was going to do that, it would be the Democrats.
	Is the claim generally that the weather is being weaponized in order to cause these hurricanes, or is it that it's not being used to prevent them?
	Well, I mean, this particular one would be, it's not being used to prevent them, but...
	I mean, that would be more plausible to me.
	I don't think either of them are particularly plausible.
	I think the first is very implausible.
	Yeah, but...
	Your point about the Democrats...
	I did see an article on the BBC yesterday that was, no, the hurricane wasn't created by, you know...
	The Democrats, this is just a natural thing.
	That gets my suspicions out. Yeah, well, that was it.
	I was like, wow, what an odd thing to say.
	Because it just hadn't occurred to me.
	But apparently there was... People were like, oh, no, there are lots of people saying this, and I just hadn't seen it.
	But I can understand why there's so much suspicion, because, yeah, the Democrats are so inveterately partisan at this point that I wouldn't be surprised if I found out they were modifying the weather to hurt Republicans.
	I wouldn't be shocked.
	Yeah. I mean, I don't think people can control the weather to such an extent.
	Is there an old Superman movie where there's a villain that controls the weather?
	Because in Greece, we had the conspiracy theory that there was around at the time that Merkel was having a machine of a sword and said, you Greeks have nine months of sunshine.
	Here's some bad weather for you to punish you for the...
	That was the conspiracy theory.
	Yeah, I mean, I don't believe it.
	I believe the intent was there.
	Just watch a James Bond movie.
	You see the villains and what they want to do.
	But again, the problem is that the conspiracy theory sounds in some way plausible because the people who they're accusing genuinely hate their opposition.
	They're gerrymandering the electorate.
	They're changing the demos, so maybe they can change the climate as well.
	Maybe they're changing the... But I don't personally buy either claim.
	Could I please ask people from the chat to quickly tell us if there's a Superman movie where there's a villain who controls the weather?
	Thanks. Let's go to the next one.
	I really enjoyed Carl talking about the little squirrels that he raised when he was younger.
	That's the kind of content I think that we should see more of.
	So I was just wondering if a bit more of that could be put on rotation.
	Are you going to be expanding your female audience, Carla?
	I think is the subtext of that question.
	The squirrel whisperer!
	When I was about 13 or 14, basically I found some baby squirrels.
	We found their dead mother or something, a big squirrel.
	And these tiny little baby squirrels were just in the bush as I was walking with a friend.
	And someone came along with a dog and chased two of them off for some reason.
	Me and my friend picked up these two, and they were very passive.
	We literally just picked them up and they were just sat in our hands.
	We carried them home. And his parents wouldn't let him keep his, but my parents were a lot more of a soft touch, so I took them both.
	And so, yeah, we had a hamster cage.
	One of them died because it choked on a sunflower seed, which was genuinely tragic.
	It was in my hand. I'm there crying, and there's nothing I can do about it, and I buried it in the back garden.
	But the other one got big and we released it, and...
	Back in the wild, and it was adorable.
	My mum had a big wax jacket that had a very well-lined inside pocket, and in the morning you'd come down and pull open the jacket and it'd be there curled up in your pocket.
	And it'd be like, yeah, it's squeaking because it didn't want the light in its eyes.
	Very wholesome. Absolutely adorable.
	The best bit was when it had full run of the hallway and the stairs.
	And so when I came home from school, you'd hear the back door go.
	You'd hear this... Because it'd run down the stairs, and I'd go into the hall to hang up my coat.
	And it'd run up your leg and then run around your stomach, like, happy to see you.
	Because, you know, there was a door on.
	I tried to get my mum...
	We had some pictures of, like, me on the stairs feeling nuts and things like that.
	Hadn't been able to find them. She couldn't find them time for the podcast.
	Ah, I see. I'll ask her to continue looking, though, because I would actually like to tweet them out to prove that I'm not just making this up.
	I swear to God, this is true.
	But it was really adorable, because, you know, it played games with you.
	It was actually quite a good pet.
	I don't know why we don't keep squirrels as pets.
	And the thing is, there's a red squirrel as well.
	They don't have grey squirrels on the continent, apparently.
	It's just in Britain, we're being colonised by the squirrels.
	Well, of course, you grew up in Germany, didn't you?
	Well, for part of it, yeah.
	So, yeah, I'll see if I can do more squirrel-related content.
	I don't know how much I can do.
	You can cram it in. Yeah, but let's get to the next one.
	And for today's Lamyentation, we look to Mr.
	Spock... Who reminds us that it is easier for us as civilized men to act like barbarians than it is for them as barbarians to act like civilized men.
	And somehow, David Lamy, queer Stalin, Rzi Sunak, Labor, and the Tories as educated people fail to understand that the barbarians they welcome in uncontrolled by the thousands do not adopt the ways of civilized men.
	As Mr. Spock would say, their assumptions are illogical.
	To criticise or comment on there.
	Obviously true.
	Let's go to the next one.
	Rain, rain, give me all them rains.
	No, my mama's fuckin' lame, I'm a have them rains.
	One nigga roll him all in, one nigga find him.
	One nigga bring him all the darkness and bind him.
	I said, lordy, lordy, I'm the lord of them rains.
	Lordy, lordy, I'm the lord of them rains.
	So I have been watching The Rings of Power.
	Did he put that together himself?
	I doubt he put that together himself.
	But I have actually been watching The Rings of Power.
	It is atrocious, but the only good thing about it is actually the relationship between the dwarves.
	So, I can't remember the male dwarf's name, but Deesa is the black wife dwarf.
	But they actually have a really good relationship because there's actually some chemistry between the characters.
	So they're the only good thing about it.
	The rest of it is just atrocious.
	I think...
	He'll be ambushed by that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, but Russian does that.
	I think we should have Russian Garbage Humans send us mandatory video every week.
	Oh, is he a regular? Yeah, he is.
	He has the talent.
	You know, the force is strong in him.
	I can say.
	But yeah, a bit ambushed is definitely how I feel.
	Benjamin says, love to catch you live.
	Well, thank you, Benjamin. Arizona Desert Rat says, something positive about Harris?
	She laughs like a donkey.
	Is that positive? I suppose she does a bit.
	It is kind of weird how she just seems to be caught off guard all the time, and so the laugh is a kind of aggressive way of defending herself.
	It's like, no, we're laughing, we're laughing.
	It's like, yeah, but this wasn't really funny.
	She's also so lacking in substance, she's in need in every single filler she can get her hands on, and one of them is to talk about being a middle-class kid, growing up in a middle-class family, and another one is to cackle for five seconds.
	I mean, that's five seconds. Honestly, she should just really continue on with the accents, because accents are always enjoyable.
	Everyone loves a good accent. So whatever she does, she should just switch accents, code switch accents.
	Because then it would really distract from the total vacuity of everything she's saying.
	That's another potential diversion tactic, yes.
	Are we going to the comments now?
	Yeah, yeah. Because I want to say that the audience corrected me.
	Oh, was it not? I was thinking of Mr.
	Freeze from Batman, where he says, tonight's forecast, a freeze is coming.
	Remember? I watched a YouTube video the other day about the death of the dinosaurs, and he'd done a poll on his own channel.
	What wiped out the dinosaurs?
	The Ice Age. Yeah, a third of the channel thought it was the Ice Age, because of that Batman movie.
	It's like... But also, there was a James Bond movie where, you know, there was a guy who had a satellite on space.
	Right. All these are very exotic.
	I think he took some diamonds from a belly dancer's belly button or something and he put them together and had a weird red ray and just was about to burn the world.
	Maybe that was the world is not enough.
	I'm not a big Bond guy, so I can't tell you.
	Oh, come on. How? Just, I don't know.
	Just doesn't really resonate with me.
	What about yourself? I've watched two Bond films.
	I've watched Skyfall and I've watched...
	Oh, no, I've watched Skyfall, Casino Royale and whatever the most recent one was called.
	Sorry, Stelios. I'd like to Bond over this.
	I'm ultra-shocked right now.
	Sorry. Maybe I would like it.
	I've not seen it enough. I watched all of them and I was re-watching them.
	They were the first movies I started watching.
	I'm happy for James Bond to be kind of an ambassador for English culture.
	If you don't know who your ambassador is...
	You don't know who the ambassador for Greek is.
	Look, all I need to know is he's doing a good job.
	And if people come away with a good opinion of us thinking of James Bond, that's fine.
	Totally fine. But no, I was just never a fan.
	Andrew says, one of the things I resent most about the left's messaging is how they try and present themselves as the resistance.
	Despite having, I mean, the endorsement list for Kamala Harris was just, like you say, it's the cathedral.
	It just comes out and reveals itself.
	So, yeah, having all of that behind them is just, it's not persuasive.
	And the thing is, I see them making this point about Elon Musk.
	It's like, he's the world's richest man.
	It's like, yeah, and he's gone rogue.
	You know, he's not the establishment, and it's very obvious he's not the establishment, which is why you're constantly...
	Like, Joe Biden had loads of investigations into him and things like that.
	It's like, why are you doing this?
	You know, he's the only person really doing anything interesting in America anymore.
	Like, he's the one who's actually advancing frontiers.
	And the Democrats are like, oh, God, I have to stop this guy.
	It's funny, Kamala Harris talking about dreams and aspirations.
	If you aspire to a great big wad of a welfare check, then yes.
	But if you want to, as you say, be truly fasting, which is part of the whole sort of promissory note of America, you want to expand our frontiers and our knowledge and settlements on Mars, you don't want to know if you're not on board with the DEI policy.
	Yeah, and nobody looks to the Democrats for that.
	No. For that kind of spirit.
	Nobody thinks that that's what they think.
	They're very downward facing.
	And honestly, he says, the fact that the media hates Trump was the reason I came to support him almost a decade ago.
	In hating him, at least the media will do their job and scrutinize him.
	I actually tried to bury news about the Democrats.
	Yeah, I mean, it was Trump's response to the media.
	A storm that was one of the things I most found appealing about him, to be honest.
	The fact that it was just unrepentant.
	Someone online says, I do think they'd do that in Republican states.
	Furious Dan says, Well, the thing is, like, there's just not much to say.
	She's such an empty vessel that it's just kind of embarrassing watching themselves be like, yeah, we're for Kamala.
	Not because of any policy, because what would you say?
	Warlord Wututai says, I hope AI generated images of Trump as the Sphinx.
	Absolutely sweet Twitter following this article.
	Someone has already done one.
	Samsung, can we pull that up?
	Because it's in the doc.
	I don't know whether we can get that out.
	But yes, the Trump Sphinx.
	But again, the Democrat Oedipus.
	I don't know if I'm bored with it.
	Hector says, notice how Kamala and Waltz pander to every demographic.
	Wow, white people, tacos, her weird accents, collared greens, etc.
	Trump just speaks to them as if they're all equal.
	That's another thing I love about Trump, his complete lack of filter.
	He's just unable to mediate himself, modulate himself, depending on who he's talking to.
	He just talks like Trump. He can be at a Vietnamese food chain or he can be with the world's most famous billionaire in the form of Elon Musk and he speaks in exactly the same way.
	There are no idiom shifts, no accent shifts.
	He does have the common...
	What is that? I both walk with kings nor lose the common touch.
	He genuinely does have that. Oh, yeah.
	And again, you saw it from the McDonald's on the silver plates.
	They ragged him for that.
	But the thing is, when you saw the footballers coming in, they were like, oh, brilliant, McDonald's!
	I love that so much.
	Anyway, Omar says, EU bureaucrats also want to protect their countries.
	Sorry, I misread that.
	Country clubs and Martha's Vineyards.
	The NIMBYU, that's good, are quick to act and very effective when it's their interests at risk.
	Yeah, I mean...
	The Great Sphinx of Trump, yeah.
	I think AI could do better, though.
	It needs workshopping, but promising first prototype, yeah.
	And again, you know, what do the Sphinx ever really do wrong, apart from meet people?
	But yeah, no, I find myself not even one to countenance and engage with, well, maybe we should have a debate about the EU. No, the whole structure is irredeemable.
	This can't be reformed.
	It'd be a gargantuan task.
	And you'd have such an entrenched opposition that it's just...
	I'm just for leaving it.
	Well, so I think...
	I don't want to go on... I don't know how much time you have, but I think that the architects...
	A distinction needs to be made between the architects of the EU who were very idealistic about building not even really a United States of Europe, but a kind of very, very strong federal progressive super-state and who wanted to abolish and crush national identities...
	But the reasons why member states wanted to join were actually quite pragmatic and non-idealistic and very rational and tied to their national interests.
	But over time, the kind of idealistic impetus of the EU has overtaken that.
	And so people like Orban find themselves in a strange position because on the one hand, it's pragmatic to be part of the EU for funding reasons, yet they've got all of these pressures existing now.
	I think what it would take is a complete sea change in terms of people's mentality within
	the EU and it would have to be spearheaded as the EU itself was because it doesn't really
	matter what Jean Bonnet thinks unless the Germans and the French want to get together
	and do a coal and steel agreement.
	So if the political complexions and the political loyalties and the political leaderships of
	Europe as a whole were to shift, particularly in the most important countries like France
	and Germany, then you could possibly get a sea change happening but it would have to
	be, as you say, gargantuan.
	It would have to be revising everything that already exists because the current legal framework has an inbuilt destination and it is not a happy confederation of cooperative nationally sovereign states.
	The very principles upon which it was founded would have to be changed.
	And those are written into law.
	Yeah, absolutely. And these are not just...
	Nice ideas.
	Yeah, nice ideas that we pay lip service to.
	Yeah, no. Like you say, they're written into law.
	It's on a set of rails, and you're going along whether you like it or not.
	Yeah, I mean, they're responsible for their own right-wing populism.
	I mean, every one of the Western countries that is getting this is responsible for it because it's a natural and rational reaction to what's been done to us.
	Roman Observer says, is an eyepatch an update for site?
	Where can I download it?
	Is an eyepatch an update for site?
	I feel there's a reference there I don't get.
	I don't get it either. I know, right?
	There's no justice for Nigerian princes turned pirates.
	Danny says, I thought it was quite light-hearted, the Nigerian pirate.
	I thought it was funny. No, it was a light-hearted framing on a serious matter.
	Well, yeah. The problems with the asylum and migration systems of Europe are not really because of one-legged Nigerian pirates.
	No, no. Like you say, he's a very edge case that was kind of caught up in it.
	Yes. Bleach Demon says, we need an EU Department of Pirate Health and Safety.
	They really are the most threatened workers doing jobs the white Europeans just won't do.
	That's a good point. Very few white European pirates anymore.
	Maybe we should be training more of our own pirates.
	I mean, what would be the argument against?
	That's the question. Paul says, they need to give the pirate a peg leg and a parrot.
	Well, we don't know that he doesn't have a parrot, given that he's from Africa, but we definitely know that he didn't have a peg leg.
	I mean, he can probably afford one now.
	Someone online says, what's the charge?
	Sitting on a boat? A succulent Chinese boat?
	Yes, exactly. Anyway, Harrison, where can people find more of you?
	Oh, European Conservative, essays and articles and the like.
	On YouTube, European Conservative, I do a show called The Forge, monthly, sort of long-form discussions with interesting people.
	The next one with Curtis Yavin is out next month.
	The one just before was with Ayan Hirsi Ali.
	And every week on the New Culture Forum with Lotus Eaters' very own Conor Tomlinson doing NCF deprogrammed as well on the New Culture Forum on YouTube.
	Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us.
	Thank you for having me. And we will be back in half an hour for Lad's Hour, and we'll be doing a pub quiz.
	And if you missed that for some reason, which you shouldn't do, we'll see you next week.

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