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Nov. 26, 2024 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:30:18

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1050

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	Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Load Seaters.
	Today is Tuesday the 26th of November and this is podcast episode number 1050. I'm joined today by Bo and Josh.
	Hello.
	And we are going to discuss the dismissal of Trump's Jan 6th case, what would happen if Russia attacked the UK and Walmart rolling back DEI. But we have Before we say this, I have an announcement to make.
	It's my name day.
	People tell me happy name day because we're commemorating the most anti-woke saint, Stylianos of Pavlagonia.
	And here, if you see, basically his patronage is children.
	So he would absolutely loathe DEI, wokeness.
	He would have none of it.
	Your name day, by the way, is different to your birthday.
	It is a different day, because I fell for this.
	I thought it was like a direct translation of what you would call it in Greek, but it's not.
	It's actually the day of the saint in which you get your name.
	Yeah, but we call it name day, so we get twice as many presents.
	Very crafty.
	Were you actually named after that saint, do you think?
	Yeah, that's my more formal name.
	Stelios is a bit more informal.
	It's like saying Jack and Jacob.
	Something like that.
	I knew that about you.
	Should we go to the first comment, please?
	The first segment.
	Comments before we've even done the segment.
	My goodness, people are eager today.
	No.
	Right.
	So, I've got some actual good news, and that is that the insurrection, I hope you get the quotation marks if you're listening, the case against Donald Trump has been dismissed.
	And I was going to talk a little bit about this.
	As well as just talking about the event itself because I imagine that this is going to play a far less significant role in political discourse because my opinion was that a mountain was made out of a molehill for political reasons and those political reasons were to try and hamper Donald Trump's ascent to power and it's too late for that and so I think that I imagine this is going to go away.
	And so let's talk a little bit about the case first because that's the new thing.
	So the judge, Tanya Chutkin, I imagine that's how you pronounce her name, dismissed the case and the case was formally for attempting to overturn the 2020 election.
	And this dismissal follows special counsel Jack Smith's request to drop the charges At the federal level.
	And that is because, of course, he's going to be inaugurated in January.
	And the DOJ has a very old policy of not prosecuting sitting presidents because it looks bad.
	They'll also drop the fight to reinstate the classified document charges as well.
	You remember that?
	The Mar-a-Lago documents, and of course Biden had the same thing where he had lots of documents in his garage, I think, or where he had his car parked.
	And so that's been dropped, and there's not necessarily any evidence that that's going to be reinstated again.
	And so this was...
	Previously dismissed by a Florida-based federal judge and then they were pushing to get it up, you know, to reinstate the case again, but they're not going to do that.
	And it's also been left open as a possibility that once Trump leaves office in 2029, he no longer has presidential immunity.
	And so this insurrection case, I keep on using that word, although it's not formally used in the charges, will potentially come back again.
	Which, to be honest, this is my opinion here, I don't think that they're going to go for that because by that point it's sort of old news politically.
	No one's going to have the political will to pursue it and also Trump's political career will be over by then so his threat will be diminished because he'll be so old that he'll be probably putting his feet up I imagine.
	Or at least not taking a primary role as say the president because he won't be able to.
	I think that basically this is one of those cases that will reopen.
	My guess is that it will reopen.
	I think it's too good for the Democrats not to do it, not to take that opportunity, because it seems to me that this is one of those cases where history is written by the victor, and any time any kind of party wins elections, it's going to revisit, any time the Democrats win elections, they're going to revisit it.
	Even if, you know, it's after Trump, you know, Because he's old now.
	I think they will always have this weapon against Republicans saying you subverted the constitutional order in their framework.
	So I don't think they're gonna...
	I think they'll revisit it at some point.
	It is possible and of course I don't know the future and it was just sort of a gut feeling of they're doing this for political reasons and therefore as soon as it's expedient they won't be interested anymore.
	What do you think Bo?
	I mean, who knows?
	I suspect they probably won't.
	This is like their one chance to try and get him on that, and it's essentially failed.
	Yeah, and the DOJ obviously will be headed by Trump picks from January onwards.
	But then, yeah, talk about 2029. After that, assuming the Democrats get back in, in 29, Would they then change out all the people, which they would do of course, and then reopen this?
	I don't know.
	I think they might use it as a cudgel just in terms of rhetoric.
	Forever.
	But actually bringing charges against Trump who cannot be president again.
	I doubt that.
	But who knows?
	I wouldn't put it past them.
	I wouldn't put it past them because it would be pure vindictiveness at that point, wouldn't it?
	To try and destroy Trump after his political career is over.
	I suppose if his legacy is a J.D. Vance potential presidency and his legacy is also Jan Sixth in their mind, conflating the two together, even though J.D. Vance didn't have anything to do with it, might be helpful from a rhetorical standpoint.
	So there could be an incentive to do that.
	I think they'll use it, it'll go down in American history as a talking point on the left of that time Trump tried to destroy a democracy or whatever.
	They'll never ever stop saying stuff like that.
	Trump took the most armed populace in human history and called them all unarmed to a talk.
	But we'll be talking about the true nature of it, don't worry.
	We did a lot of exclusive work at Lotus Eaters on that sort of stuff.
	But let's hear from the man himself, shall we?
	It was a mass trespass event is what it was, not an insurrection, a trespass event.
	Trump explicitly told them not to trespass, then they did trespass.
	It's not an insurrection, but they'll keep calling it that.
	They just will, they just will.
	So Trump says these cases, like all of the other cases I've been forced to go through, are empty and lawless and should never have been brought.
	Over 100 million US dollars of taxpayer dollars has been wasted in the Democrat Party's fight against their political opponent, me.
	Nothing like this has ever happened in our country before.
	They've also used state prosecutors and district attorneys such as Fannie Willis and her lover, Nathan Wade, Who had absolutely zero experience in cases such as this, but was paid millions, enough for them to take numerous trips and cruises around the globe.
	I love how he kept that in.
	Letitia James, who inappropriately, unethically and probably illegally campaigned on getting Trump in order to win political office.
	And Alvin Bragg, who himself never wanted to bring this case against me, but was forced to do so by the Justice Department and the Democratic Party.
	It was a political hijacking and a low point in the history of our country that such a thing could have happened, and yet I persevered against all odds and won Make America Great Again.
	Now that is a good way to end it, isn't it?
	It's got a good way of words, whatever you say about the man.
	So it's worth mentioning as well, once Trump does become president, if you want daily updates on what he's up to, we've got a new channel.
	It's doing relatively well so far.
	We're trying to post to it every day, just short clips.
	If you want your news on the shorter side and you want to perhaps fill in some of the cracks that we miss out on our main podcast, which you're watching right now, then this is the place to go.
	So let's actually talk about the nature of January 6th, shall we?
	So one of the things that we did and one of the things I'm very proud of is if you remember back to the early days, the Hugo days, we worked together on this Capitol Hill takeover timeline because we didn't want to call it a riot or an insurrection.
	Takeover seemed fair enough, right?
	And the things I wanted to draw attention to are these earlier times here, because we've got these down to the minute.
	So at 17 minutes past 12, Trump calls on his supporters to march to the Capitol for the first time in his speech.
	Some of them leave the ellipse straight away to walk towards the Capitol.
	You know, he's not said to do anything, he's just said to go there.
	By 12.53pm, some Trump supporters breach the outer barricade at the Capitol 20 minutes before his speech at the Ellipse actually ends.
	So Trump is still speaking when this sort of stuff goes on.
	Kind of hard to suggest he's directing it when he's still giving a speech and people are ignoring his speech and doing things that he has not told them to do.
	And then 10 past 1pm, protesters at the Capitol start clashing with the police directly and trying to enter the building.
	Of course, this is a few minutes before Trump's speech has actually ended again.
	It's pretty clear that this is something that happened without Trump and his assent, isn't it?
	And in fact, when it did happen, Trump put this video out on Twitter, previously not owned by Elon Musk, and so this was removed.
	And in fact, lots of other outlets removed this video where he's saying, don't be violent, be peaceful, go home, and he's basically saying, I know you're angry, I understand it, but don't do this.
	And it got to the point where Facebook indefinitely suspended Donald Trump, as did loads of platforms simultaneously, which, when lots of things happen at the same time, it kind of indicates a common origin of those things.
	My guess would be the intelligence services.
	And, in fact, there is evidence of that.
	And it's to the point where even posting the voice of Donald Trump was banned on Facebook for a time.
	A bit difficult to do that now.
	But let's not forget that we went through this period of time.
	And when Elon actually took over Twitter, now X of course, He claimed that there was evidence that the FBI had paid Twitter to censor information from the public, and so there is a clear link here between the intelligence services and social media censorship,
	and we're going to be looking at some of the claims of the fact that January 6th was some sort of trap from The intelligence services, mainly the FBI. And so if you could, say, incite some trouble and then any attempts to calm people's demeanour from the people you're trying to trap get censored immediately in a pre-planned way,
	that would be a pretty compelling way to have some dirt on your political opponent when previously you'd been through, what, four years, five years of trying to dig up stuff on Trump.
	And none of it had stuck.
	And so perhaps there were people who had been pushing for this sort of thing that got fed up of trying to look at his actual life and tried to make something up.
	That's just an idea.
	I'm not saying that is definitely true, but it is entirely possible.
	It's also worth mentioning as well that we had a bunch of exclusive photos.
	There's some photos here from January 5th as well.
	People forget there was a day before.
	It was perfectly peaceful and there were lots of signs showing the kind of rhetoric.
	It was your usual political stuff.
	You know, lots of people who are patriotic, you know, coming out and basically supporting their political candidate.
	I mean, there are some great photos here.
	But one of the things, for example, like they were outside tying nooses for elected politicians.
	I'd like to point out that if you were to use this noose, which is not a functional noose, they would have to be about two foot tall.
	So any, you know, dwarf representatives would have been in danger.
	But yeah, it was a mountain out of a molehill.
	And then you can see the sort of intel people at the top and you can start to see some of the violence because the photographer that we were in correspondence with was at the rear entrance videoing a lot of the, and taking pictures of, a lot of the violence at the back here.
	Which was not the main event.
	It was interesting that this was what happened.
	And so you can see here some of the Capitol Police protecting this doorway.
	There they are, look.
	And you can see that people are just using things like American flags and chairs and all sorts of improvised weapons and then eventually people get smoked out and then they all leave.
	But what people don't mention as well is at this rear entrance, half of the people there are there with cameras recording it.
	And so the number of people involved does get inflated because actually journalists and photographers were massively overrepresented.
	And you can see it to some extent with certain things.
	You can also see here people getting pepper sprayed.
	That's a pretty good shot.
	But yeah, there's people using crutches and things like that.
	This is not a very organised, armed uprising.
	That much is obvious.
	And I feel like that claim doesn't need to be taken too seriously, really, does it?
	Clutchers are not the favourite weapon of Republicans.
	I get the impression it's not.
	So, I wanted to talk about the notion of potential federal government involvement, particularly the FBI, and I think it's entirely possible that there was involvement in inciting this.
	And there are lots of suspicious links.
	I've already addressed the social media ones, but there are also links to informants in specific groups that are linked to inciting things whilst they're an FBI informant.
	And I imagine if you're an FBI informant, You probably wouldn't want to be genuinely inciting violence because they're keeping tabs on you, right?
	And you know they're keeping tabs on you, so why would you do something that you know is against the law?
	I don't buy that they're just doing this of their own volition.
	Unfortunately, there's no irrefutable evidence that I've seen so far, but there is, I think, a strong case.
	And it's also worth mentioning as well that US lawmakers can see information that we're not allowed to see as members of the public, and I'm not even a US citizen, so even less likely for me to be able to see it.
	So what we do know for certain though is the FBI had informants within groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and that a member of the Proud Boys texted his FBI handler during the event itself.
	We know those for certain.
	Which is, you know, perhaps a small sliver of a greater picture, because there's no doubt more to it than that.
	That's just what we've been able to find out for certain.
	And that comes from, of all the publications, the New York Times.
	They had an exclusive about this all the way back on the 25th of September 2021. And...
	One of the people, one of the names that gets thrown around is Ray Epps.
	I'm sure you've probably both heard of him before.
	And I'm going to read a little bit about what the BBC says about him, because this is a pretty good summary of why people think he might be a Fed.
	In footage from the night before the riot, he was seen urging people to enter the Capitol building.
	Members of the crowd were suspicious and chanted back, Fed!
	Fed!
	Accusing him of being a law enforcement official.
	Fair enough.
	The following day, during the riot itself, Epps was seen on another video whispering into the ear of a man who then charged at police lines.
	Epps later said he unsuccessfully tried to calm the man down.
	Of course.
	Of course that's what it was.
	It's also worth mentioning as well, whilst lots of people got considerable prison time, he got 100 hours community service.
	It's funny that, isn't it?
	For someone who's caught on camera inciting it, he's done a lot more than some of the people that are still in jail right now.
	Strange, isn't it?
	Suspicious minds are talking.
	It is, yeah, it's a case of that.
	It's also worth mentioning as well, there was a case in September of 2023 where Thomas Massey was talking to Merrick Garland over January 6th informants, and he basically asked him a series of questions that I'm going to fire through very quickly, but he basically asked him about his knowledge of federal law enforcement activities during January 6th, And I'm going to directly quote here.
	That was your answer to a question to me two years ago when I said how many agents or assets the government were present on January 5th and 6th, agitating the crowd to go into the capital and how many went into the capital.
	Can you answer that now?
	And he says, I don't know the answer to that question.
	You don't know how many there were or were there none?
	And he says, I don't know the answer to either of those questions.
	If there were any, I don't know how many.
	I don't know if there were any.
	And it carries on and on and on.
	And he's basically saying that you've had two years to find out, by the way, this was in reference to Ray Epps, and yesterday you indicted him.
	Isn't that a wonderful coincidence?
	On a misdemeanor.
	Meanwhile, you're sending grandmas to prison, you're putting people away for 20 years for merely filming.
	Some people weren't even there.
	You've got the guy on video who's saying, go into the Capitol.
	He's directing people to the Capitol before the speeches, Massey continues.
	And he says...
	He's at the site of the first breach.
	You've got all the goods on him, 10 videos, and it's an indictment for a misdemeanor.
	The American public isn't buying it.
	And also, there are other people as well.
	So this is Representative Clay Higgins.
	I think he's from Louisiana.
	He says the FBI, their involvement was deep, and not just on Gen 6, but in the days and weeks prior.
	They're not only involved in the actions on Gen 6 from within.
	They had over 200 agents embedded, dressed as Trump supporters before the doors were opened.
	And I'm not sure where he's getting that 200 agent thing, but that might be information that's only available to them.
	If that is true, and I've got no idea, if that is true, if that's even closer to being true, that's an astounding number.
	If it was 12, that would be quite a lot.
	200?
	Really?
	Interesting, isn't it?
	That's sort of madness, if that is true.
	And the funny thing is that...
	Do they count Nick Fuentes in that number?
	I don't know.
	Possibly.
	A quarter of Americans believe that the FBI orchestrated it, actually.
	And again, another quarter of Republicans think that it was justified.
	Which...
	No comment.
	But anyway...
	I mean, if you look at it from a democratic politics perspective, if you think that there has actually been fraud, you have to somehow protest.
	So obviously the means that are used are of paramount importance, but a lot of Democrats are trying to present this as a massive anti-democracy event.
	And I'm talking about the gathering, not the people who trespassed, the few who trespassed.
	They are doing this only from within their own framework.
	Well, there's also, on the topic of framework, I think in 2020, if we cast our minds back, the sort of atmosphere of American politics was fiery to say the least.
	Obviously, you had all the Floyd riots where cities were burnt to the ground.
	And so I think what happened in a lot of people's minds was, well, okay, if these are the standards, we're not going to go quite that far, but we're going to make a bit of a fuss because apparently this is okay now.
	And the problem of people assuming that would be that, yeah, there's a double standard, obviously, and there was always going to be one.
	And it's worth mentioning as well, the people who turned up weren't these extremist revolutionaries.
	We did a huge piece looking at each individual person, lots of the people that were arrested and the information on them and what they did, their backgrounds, who they are.
	Things like that.
	So you can find out who these people are and judge them for yourself.
	I've also spoke to Edward Jacob Lang while he was in prison for his involvement in January 6th.
	And in fact, at one point he was the prisoner facing the most charges out of any prisoner.
	But he's very interesting to talk to, very interesting guy, and definitely worth listening to.
	And I had a follow-up with him in 2023 as well, asking how he's doing.
	And I think he's still holding out for a Trump pardon when he assumes office, but he's never given up hope.
	And I suppose what I wanted to end on is that we shouldn't necessarily forget the nature of this event, because it exposed a lot of things that I think otherwise wouldn't have been exposed.
	There was a lot of attention on it, but the attention is focused on criticizing Trump, and actually I think a lot of the interesting things It's just how much the intelligence agencies interfered with US politics there, because they have their fingerprints all over every aspect of it.
	There's not one where I think, okay, they had nothing to do with that.
	And so that, I think, is the takeaway for the right, really.
	The left set the president for this sort of thing, and the right followed up on it, and I don't necessarily think it achieved anything politically, and therefore I don't think it was a good idea.
	I don't support it like those quarter of Republicans do.
	However, there are lots of lessons to be learnt from this, and I hope that people do learn this going into a Trump presidency.
	I think just in the scheme of things, across history, it's very minor.
	But it's not nothing though.
	We on our side of the equation try and either underplay it or try and describe it in just purely factual terms.
	It wasn't nothing.
	But in the scheme of things, you know, compared to the mob marching on the Tuileries or the Roman mob burning down the Senate House in ancient Rome or something, it's sort of nothing.
	It was very, very civilised and quaint almost, this trespass event.
	At most I would call it disquieting.
	At most, it's like, oh yeah, people could just overpower the cops, whether it's an inside job or whatever.
	They could just walk into the middle of the Capitol building.
	That is a bit disquieting.
	But in terms of it being an actual insurrection, an actual perversion of democracy or a perversion of the Republic or the Constitution or anything like that, No, of course not.
	I wrote an article, I think I called it something like Kamala Harris's fever dream or, oh no, it was more like, I said, the Democrats' Reichstag fire.
	They were trying to use it as like a Reichstag fire type.
	Good historic example there.
	Type thing.
	And it's just, the evidence, the facts are just not there.
	It was an ad hoc thing by some kind of silly trespassers.
	We've got some comments here.
	It was a disquieting but mostly peaceful event.
	Yeah, it really was.
	Ramshashkul Otter says, Axios, happy name day Stelios.
	Thank you.
	And Kalev Knight says, happy name day Stelios, today is indeed a good day.
	Got half the day off, set a new deadlift, personal record, and good news abroad as well.
	And Stelios, the 12th and 16th century synonym for happy, gets gifts.
	Thank you.
	But also you didn't tell us how much you lift.
	Do you even lift, bro?
	But no, I'm glad to hear you're having a good day.
	Okay, shall I just move on to my segment then?
	It's bow time.
	Alright.
	It's the bow show.
	Get ready.
	Well, seeing as our PM, Sir Keir Starmer, seems hell-bent on having a proxy war, if not an actual hot war, with Russia...
	I thought we could talk a bit about what that might actually look like if it happened, a conventional war with Russia.
	Because he does seem very aggressive.
	Colt did a bit on this the other day I saw.
	Yeah, we are in a full-blown proxy war at least with Russia, which is mad.
	Boris and then Rishi and now Starmer have walked us into a proxy war with Russia where, you know, we're now designing, building and selling cruise missiles to Ukraine and then egging them on to use them inside Russian territory.
	That is sort of a crazy state of affairs.
	Right?
	Of course, yeah.
	The border of Ukraine has got nothing to do with us.
	We sort of butted in in a way that seemed very much uninvited.
	And I know that we do enjoy getting involved in global conflicts at none of our business, particularly if we're following in the Americans.
	We like to, you know, puff our chests out on the world stage, perhaps more than we should.
	It's not just us, the French as well.
	Germans have sold them some arms and all sorts of different people, but of course, mostly the United States.
	But yeah, we got the green light.
	Our establishment got the green light from the US establishment, State Department, Pentagon, whatever.
	You know, be in lock stock with our policy and we just are.
	Do you think it's a question of permission or a question of orders?
	Because we talk about autonomous and sovereign states, but people forget the notion of sovereignty, which has to do with maybe autonomy in the domestic, but also someone else dictating your foreign policy.
	So do you think it's an issue of permission or orders that you are going to support?
	I don't know, because I've got no actual insight, but I would imagine it's not orders as such.
	So, for example, if you remember during the Obama years, when the Pentagon and the State Department were gunning for Assad, and they said there was like a red lion in the sand, or a red lion, if he used chemical weapons, they would just Start a massive air campaign against Syria and then who knows what after that.
	And then Assad, they said he used them and Obama immediately goes to the pentacons like let's have a war with Syria then to remove the Assad regime.
	And we, I think it was David Cameron was Prime Minister at the time, and we had a vote in Parliament, because we couldn't just, David Cameron can't just unilaterally just send the whole RAF or whatever.
	He needed Parliament to green light it.
	And we voted against it.
	It was one of the few things that people like Diane Abbott and Ed Miliband have done, which is good.
	It was like, no, no, we don't want any part of this.
	So that's one example of when the State Department and the Pentagon and the war bastards in America, all the hawks, whoever they are, wanted a war and Britain said no.
	Now that is sort of the exception to the rule.
	But there you can say, even if they were given orders, we didn't play ball with those orders.
	Okay.
	I think it's less sort of orders.
	I doubt a general at the Pentagon rings up number 10 and says, you are doing this now.
	I doubt it works like that, but I don't know, it might do, but I doubt it.
	I really doubt it.
	It's just that someone like Boris and Rishi, who's a nothing man, an empty bag, an empty pair of trousers, but someone like Boris and Starmer think genuinely that's what they actually think.
	It is a good and righteous, the right thing to do to confront Putin.
	I believe they believe that.
	So anyway, what would it look like if Russia was to launch a conventional attack on Britain?
	Now, all of this assumes that nukes aren't at play.
	Well, if it's a nuclear exchange, we won't be speculating too long how they're going to invade because it's going to be over pretty quickly, isn't it?
	I'm supposed to say about now that we've got a merch store and the Trump merch is...
	We're going to stop selling that very soon.
	So if you want Trump 24 merch that we've got, now's the time.
	Look at that poster.
	That would look great on your wall, wouldn't it?
	And we'll move on to...
	Look at that mug.
	That would look great with probably not tea in it.
	Coffee, you know.
	Don't have so much tea in America anymore, do you?
	£14.99?
	Bargain.
	Oh sorry, yeah, yeah, that's dirt.
	Well, sorry.
	The Hawks from the Pentagon are telling you to shill the merch.
	I just did an anti-shill.
	I'll get in trouble.
	Let's move on swiftly from that.
	Okay, assuming no nukes are at play.
	If they are at play, yeah, it's...
	I don't think they are.
	I think any fear-mongering that Russia wouldn't use nukes.
	Because, of course, it would become an actual international pariah at that point.
	And we would retaliate.
	That's the nature of it.
	We have got a nuclear...
	We're one of just seven or eight countries that have got a nuclear program.
	And we've got two nuclear submarines, one of which is at sea, hidden at any given moment.
	With Trident nukes on it.
	So we could rain down dozens of nukes on Russia if we had to.
	So apart from anything else, I doubt Russia, highly doubt Russia would use nukes anyway.
	And if they did, they wouldn't use it against countries like France, Britain, America, because we can nuke them back.
	So Swindon is out of reach?
	Well, you don't want to nuke Swindon because it'll be an improvement.
	Well, unless they nuke, like, Cardiff, or, uh, was there another one?
	Yeah, if they nuke Cardiff, Swindon is...
	Look, we don't get incinerated immediately, but, uh, it wouldn't be any kind of fun.
	All the windows would get blown up.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	If they dropped it on Bristol, we'd be in trouble.
	Well, there are already a bunch of mutants in Bristol to begin with.
	There's no radiation yet.
	Some of the Russian nukes are some of the biggest nukes still.
	They're not Tsar bombicides.
	That was sort of a one-off, almost like an experiment.
	But still, they've got both the biggest nuclear arsenal, just in terms of numbers, and also the biggest warheads.
	I do wonder how many of them are actually ready to go, though.
	Or how many of them are sort of, for want of a better word, siloed.
	That's probably the worst word I could have used.
	Well, so, there's one of those things about the Russian military.
	On one hand, you can be forgiven for thinking, oh, it's all antiquated.
	Like, they've got that one aircraft carrier, it's sort of got a steam stack, and it seems really old-fashioned.
	And that their military on some levels, although might have very large numbers of men, isn't actually particularly professional or brilliant.
	So there's one angle where the Russian military is lame.
	But there's another view where it's, and it's probably one I would go along with, and I think most military analysts go along with, is that, no, it's actually really quite good.
	They have been spending and upgrading, and a lot of their stuff is cutting edge.
	I'll get into that in a moment.
	Well, they have been in a conflict for quite some time, which, you know, you can't replace genuine combat experience.
	Although it is also work, you know, to be devil's advocate to my point here, It is worth mentioning that Texas has a higher GDP than all of Russia.
	So, if it comes down to economies as it did in, say, the previous two world wars, then the United States still has the edge.
	But of course, you know, it's more complicated than that.
	Yeah, and also wars are not fought on paper, so sometimes some powers could be on paper, number one or number two, but it ends up that they're not.
	A couple of things to say about that Texas comparison, for example.
	Yeah, you're absolutely right.
	One, I'm just talking about Britain versus Russia here, because if they were to have a war with the United States, that's a whole different thing.
	And yeah, you're right, although Russia isn't fantastically rich, you know, its economy isn't some sort of beer moth like China or the United States.
	Still, they've got enough to be spending on designing brand new long-range bombers and things.
	Brand new, all sorts of brand new missile and weapon systems, countermeasures and all sorts of stuff.
	So, yeah, Texas might have a bigger economy than the whole of Russia, but they've got enough money, enough research and development.
	Which certainly outstrips us.
	Well, let's get into that.
	So, assuming we're not going to have a nuclear exchange with Russia, what would an actual conventional attack from them look like?
	Because we are essentially bombing them.
	Essentially.
	Right?
	We've got other people launching the missiles for us, but there are missiles supplied...
	To them with our advisors and our training.
	We're doing everything but push the button ourselves.
	Right, exactly.
	Yeah, we're giving Ukraine $3 billion a year and apparently, anyway, the line is we'll keep doing that for as long as it takes.
	You know, those Storm Shadow cruise missiles.
	How is that not really Britain doing it really?
	Like you say, it's everything except the guy that actually presses the button.
	So you can, if you just put yourself in the place of Putin or Kremlin planners, for one moment, you would be like, well, Britain is waging a type of war against us.
	Well, you know, people were more than happy to talk about it when it was the Cold War, saying, oh, the Soviets are backing this faction and we need to fight them because the Soviets are backing them.
	That was fun.
	Yeah.
	I mean, so to put that in perspective, three billion, you could pay for 78,000 nurses with that money.
	As in their annual salary.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Or we give over 8 billion a year in foreign aid to countries, even countries like India and China that have got a space program and we haven't.
	And that could buy two more aircraft carriers.
	I mean, as I mentioned earlier, aircraft carriers are a bit old hat, a bit 20th century.
	Get with the time.
	Yeah.
	Nonetheless, when you talk about, because you hear just on the news or on Twitter, you hear billions being thrown about for this or that.
	And it becomes, you get desensitized to it.
	But just a few billion is a gigantic, fantastic amount of money.
	Yeah, I wouldn't say no.
	Okay, yeah.
	So, despite all of this, despite all of the aggression the British government is showing to the Russian bear, we also are cutting our defense budgets.
	We've cut it by 500 million recently, but over the last two generations or so, well, ever since the war, World War II, we've cut back on defence and spending just kind of constantly, little blips here and there, but essentially cutting back to the point now where we've got a very small army, although highly professional, and our navy, although highly advanced, one of the most advanced navies in the world, it's small.
	It is small.
	So we've got two aircraft carriers, which is better than most countries.
	Yeah, but very few countries actually have aircraft carriers.
	Right, yeah, very few.
	Yeah, very few.
	And other than the biggest players, they're usually like an ex-Russian one from the 70s or something.
	I think Brazil's got one and it's like an ex-Soviet thing or an ex-US one that they were just going to mothball or just get rid of, so they sold it to someone like Spain or Brazil.
	Harm it off to the Brazilians.
	Yeah.
	So we've got something in the order of six destroyers and nine frigates.
	That's pretty small.
	I mean, they're cutting edge ships.
	They really are.
	Among the best of the best.
	But that's not very many.
	And they're nearly always deployed somewhere else in the world, not particularly guarding our coastlines.
	So, Defence Analysts say, and there was a great video I must give a shout out to, a great video by Mark Felton.
	If anyone doesn't follow Mark Felton Productions on YouTube, I advise you do that because I think he's a great source.
	He's a fantastic historian.
	A lot of what I'm talking about here is taken from his video.
	But I've seen other people talk about this stuff and a bit about it myself and things.
	So, most say that if Russia were to strike Britain, mainland Britain, it would be in the form of cruise missiles.
	It wouldn't be like they would invade with landing crafts, like Grimsby.
	Thousands of little green men coming ashore.
	They've allied with aliens as well, have they now?
	Oh no, you know the little green men.
	You know, when they invaded Crimea, it was like, they're soldiers.
	I haven't heard that term for such a long time.
	I was thinking, like, UFOs?
	What?
	I know they've got, you know, pretty good technology, but not that advanced.
	When the Russians send in men, but they don't have any sort of formal Russian military insignia anywhere on them.
	Yeah, that's right, because that happened in 2014, didn't it, in the east of Ukraine?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And Russia actually has been fighting wars, small-ish, limited wars, all over the place for the last 20 years.
	There's, like, the incursions into South Ossetia, if you remember that, and fighting in Georgia.
	They go all the way to Grozny, I can't remember.
	But, yeah, so, yeah, Russia have actually got, on some level, a veteran army, which we haven't, of course.
	Well, I don't know.
	We get involved all over the place.
	Yeah, we certainly have our special forces training Ukrainian troops on the ground and stuff like that.
	So anyway, if Russia were to attack us it would probably be in the form, assuming nukes are off the table, cruise missiles.
	So, the reality is, Britain's defences against such a thing are woefully lacking.
	Woefully lacking, which does show, does mean that what Starmer is doing is sort of crazy.
	It's like real brinksmanship.
	If I had to put some money on it, I doubt, I highly doubt, Putin will launch cruise missiles against mainland Britain.
	But if he did, if that did come to pass, there'd be not a great deal we can do about it.
	So, for example...
	To be fair to Keir Starmer, he's doing his best to make Britain so, you know...
	Making the strike targets so unvaluable to strike that it will just disincentivise it.
	It'd be like, you know, why Somalia doesn't have a strong standing army.
	Who's going to invade?
	Who wants that?
	Or Haiti.
	They don't have a strong standing army.
	They're fine.
	Because no one wants to take over it.
	Similar thing here.
	That's basically what Starmer's got going for him, defence policy-wise.
	I'm being a bit facetious, but there is some element of truth to that.
	Yeah, no, I personally think that nothing's going to happen.
	And I think that actually expressing resolution here is a good thing in this.
	And obviously I don't agree with Stalin's policies.
	But I think now the war is about to end.
	So he's just barking.
	And everyone's barking.
	And I actually think also Putin is barking.
	And the people on Twitter who are constantly saying about...
	It's only Starmer who's going to cause World War III or our demise.
	That's actually slop, I think.
	Yeah, I think that the people that try and over-egg that sort of thing are trying to sell a narrative out of self-interest for amping up people and actually the reality of this situation.
	Although, you know, the small possibility of a nuclear exchange is obviously worthy of note.
	I think that actually people are being quite irresponsible with how much they're scaring people, basically.
	And also, if, you know, we're in a situation like that, I'd rather whoever is in power, whatever political party, is actually barking and is more like a war hawk than like, you know, just, okay, let's sit here and have some tea and biscuits.
	I'd rather someone was, you know, more wild with statements.
	Because at this moment, they're not veridical.
	It's more like people barking to each other, you know, I'll bite your ear off.
	Mike Tyson.
	Two dogs are going wild at each other through a fence and someone takes the fence away and both dogs just go quiet.
	Yeah, I mean, as I say, I doubt, I highly doubt Putin will do anything against mainland Britain.
	So this segment is just simply if he did.
	Well, the point of it is to point out how our defence spending leaves us woefully, inadequately prepared for an attack.
	So this is how woefully unprepared we are.
	We have a thing called the QRA, the Quick Reaction Alert.
	So if Russian aircraft were to enter our airspace, what would we actually do about it?
	Well, we've got the Quick Reaction Alert.
	So this is the whole of Britain's airspace.
	Four typhoons out of two different airbases.
	That's it.
	Four typhoons.
	We've got four protecting the Falklands.
	So four for the whole of Britain.
	So I don't think Malay is going to necessarily launch a military invasion.
	I think that's kind of going to sabotage his economic recovery.
	Oh right, yeah.
	Out of RAF Conningsby and RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland.
	And then we've got sort of radar stations, but again there's only three others.
	RAF Swanage, RAF High Wycombe and RAF Bulma.
	And there's also what they call seven other sort of more remote radar bases from the Outer Hebrides down to Cornwall.
	In other words, if Putin did want to We sort of poke our eyes out, so to speak, because we've got no AWACS aircraft either, none.
	We used to have some, but we got rid of them in 2021. So there would be three radar Air Force RAF bases with radars and seven other smaller installations, none of which are defended by surface-to-air missile batteries, none, completely undefended.
	So, with just a dozen or less, a dozen cruise missiles could effectively pluck out our eyes.
	And then there's the four typhoons to take care of.
	And then they've got complete air superiority over us.
	That's how modern wars are now, is you take out the enemy's ability to sort of see you, and then take out their fast jets.
	And if you do that, then you win.
	You basically win.
	So Russia's got the capability to do that easily.
	So they've got a long-range bomber.
	What's it, the Tu-190 is it?
	The Black Jacks, they call them.
	Or TU-160s.
	TU-160 Black Jacks.
	And they're like a long range, like a big aircraft.
	I think that's a picture of one.
	Or that is a picture of one.
	They're massive.
	They look a bit like a Concorde.
	And they can hold 12 cruise missiles apiece.
	Russia's got 17 of those, with 10 more on order.
	They do buzz in and around our airspace by the North Sea fairly regularly.
	I've heard about that a few times.
	Yeah, that's an old Cold War thing.
	We used to do that during the Cold War all the time, kind of constantly.
	They stopped doing it in sort of the 90s really, early 2000s.
	But they do it again now these days.
	So if he, and they go like, they're the fastest long-range bomber ever built, they go over Mach 2, right?
	So if he sent 10 of those laden with 12 cruise missiles apiece versus four Typhoons, yeah, the point is he could take out our early warning systems easily.
	And then it's just a matter of bouncing rubble, right?
	If you wanted to do it, you could take out civilian infrastructure things, things like, because we're an island and we rely on our imports just as we did in World War II, we rely massively on ship imports to us.
	At Harwich and Felixstowe, giant ports, if you blew some of the, just a small amount of the infrastructure up there, or a couple of power stations here or there, We know very, very well from recent history that it doesn't take much at all to profoundly disrupt our supply chain.
	Russia would need to do very little, really, in the scheme of things.
	Wouldn't need to be carpet bombing anything.
	Just blow up a few things.
	Like if they blew up Felixstowe, for example.
	There would be supply chain issues massively.
	I remember in the earlier 2000s, at one point, The Sun wrote an article saying there might be fuel shortages and people were immediately queuing up around the block to go to a petrol station to fill up their car and fill up jerry cans.
	Towards the beginning of Covid, people thought there might be a shortage of things like toilet paper.
	I remember that well, yeah.
	And people just hauled it immediately, go to shops and buy it, and the shelves are empty, just on a hearsay scare type thing.
	So if there really were shortages or really were problems with the supply chain, the fabric of our civil society may well crumble very, very, very quickly.
	Once again, stress, I don't think Putin is going to do this.
	Just to say, if he did, he's completely capable of it.
	I mean, there's not that much we could do about it.
	So, for example, Mark Felton talks about how we could put in missile defences, like the Rapier missile defence system, or we could deploy our small navy on the east coast in the North Sea, where some of their very advanced anti-cruise missile systems would help a bit.
	But if we fired enough of them, we'd be overwhelmed.
	So, yeah, a bit of a worry, really.
	I would like to address the American in the room here.
	And that's not you, by the way, Bo.
	I mean, in the sense of, I couldn't see a scenario where Russia is attacking Britain where the United States doesn't join in.
	Or NATO. Or NATO. We are in NATO, aren't we?
	Well, they would be obliged to at that point, yeah.
	And so I think most of our defence infrastructure has been set up with this alliance in mind and we sort of fit in here and there assisting the United States particularly with our special forces and some of our more specialist equipment and we would rely on them for a lot of that other stuff.
	There's US air bases in Britain.
	I know, yeah.
	To add to this, I mean, I don't know exactly about the NATO treaty and whether the Article 5 would work.
	But okay, that's up for debate.
	But one of the things why I think Putin also has no incentive to do so is because his interest now is to end the war as quickly as possible.
	And resume trade as quickly as possible.
	And the UK is not a force to just ignore, both militarily and economically, but also especially economically.
	So I think basically this is an extra reason why there would be no incentive for him to do it.
	I know the segment is based on the assumption.
	One thing I would say to counter it, although I say it's definitely a good point, is that we've already cut them off in all sorts of ways.
	We're already doing all sorts of embargoes and asset stripping of Russian and Russian assets.
	We've already been doing that for quite a few years.
	He's already outside of that club, if you like.
	Well, I think a lot of things like Russian oil and gas are just being sold on to Europe via countries like India, for example.
	I know Germany was getting some basically laundered fossil fuels via these countries, and so they do find their way eventually, it's just that there has to be a workaround.
	Yeah, I mean you make a good point about sort of NATO or just the Americans, that if Russia did do anything, any sort of hot war actions against mainland Britain, would NATO and the United States just immediately get involved in a large scale?
	Maybe, maybe not.
	I'd like to see some Ukrainians help out.
	I mean, after all the help we've given them, you know, time to return the favour.
	But just if you're simply playing a game of a strategy game, like a Total War game or Sid Meier's Civilization or something, you would want to strike at the factories that were building these Storm Shadow missiles, right?
	Just to stop them ending up in the Ukraine and being fired against you.
	Yeah.
	Now, the last thing to say, I suppose, is that we've got no civil defence capabilities.
	That is, sort of, normal people, the normal populace, understanding what they could or should do in the event of any sort of attack.
	Ever since the war, during World War II, that is, and the Cold War, there always used to be a thing.
	You might have some sort of shelter or...
	Or any sort of instruction about how to behave and what to do.
	We don't have any of that anymore.
	I think some of the better educated ethnic Britons might remember the stories they were told about the war and what was done then and sort of defer to that.
	But I think what would actually happen, particularly with the New Britons, is lots of looting and chaos.
	Instead of all coming together as one and acting in the interests of the greater good and the national interest and that sort of thing, like during the Blitz, it would just be every man for himself.
	Every Bangladeshi for himself, or whatever.
	The greater good.
	And of course, the analysts say that anything like that would be accompanied by some sort of cyber attack as well.
	Which the Russians seem to be.
	So hold the NHS to ransom again and it'll be useless.
	Oh no, our useless health service is useless again.
	Some have accused me of being a Putin apologist.
	Of course I'm not.
	Just because I'm not on board with the Zelensky government.
	It doesn't mean I'm pro-Putin.
	I was on a stream just the other day talking about just TV and films and someone said, why have you got this Kremlin mouthpiece on?
	No, no, Putin is an autocrat.
	He's a tyrant on some level.
	Like, let's not forget Litvinenko.
	He does kill people to stay in power.
	He's a murderer.
	Yeah, absolutely a murderer.
	So, I'm not an apologist for Putin, but yeah, if he wanted to, he could have control of our skies quite easily.
	Which is a worry.
	That's concerning.
	I'm going to blow my nose quickly.
	Okay, Caleb Knight.
	Oh, deadlifts are 80 kilograms, four reps of five, and today's record is 110 on a single rep.
	Good progressive overload.
	Nice.
	Open my calluses because bad grip, but it was a proper rep.
	Anyway, here's a predictable.
	Would it spiral to World War III? Question.
	I don't know.
	Yeah, I mean, I think none of us thinks that it would reach that.
	I think everyone would be glad to see us gone.
	I wouldn't.
	Thanks, Stelios.
	Stelios wouldn't.
	There's no need to go so heavy.
	Deadlifts as well, by the way, just to that person.
	It's like you're just inviting injury.
	Take care of yourself.
	I get it's cool that you say you could deadlift a massive amount but if you destroy your knees or your lower back...
	I do know lots of people that have been injured from doing deadlifts and it is one of those things where you do need to be very careful because they did know what they were doing and they still got injured.
	You need to know how to squat.
	Once you injure your neck or your back or your knees, it's never ever the same again.
	It's not worth it.
	You can't look me in the eyes and say you need to know how to squat and then look at me suspiciously because I laugh.
	But you need to squat to do it.
	It was just the deadpan delivery with the eye contact that did it for me.
	Right.
	So after Trump's victory at the recent US elections, it seems like the tide is turning.
	A lot of people are turning their back on DEI and Walmart has become the last economic powerhouse to do so.
	So that's really good news.
	Now, speaking of the US elections, we are going to have this merge for a little while.
	How is it?
	How long are we going to have it for?
	I think it's till the end of the week.
	It's till the end of the week, so definitely check it out and look at our lovely mugs, our lovely t-shirts, the art of the grill.
	We also have plenty of sizes, small, large, medium, XL, XXL, XXXL, XXXL, just, it's lovely.
	Go to visit our merch.
	The XXXL do not function as parachutes, by the way.
	Exactly.
	You're going to have a mug with this iconic moment.
	Right, so, on to a topic.
	Walmart is about to scrub DEI initiatives.
	And as you see, some people have a particularly visceral reaction to it.
	I think this is one of my favourite mildews.
	That video, that was in, wasn't it at Trump's inauguration?
	Or something like that, where he was sworn in or declared the president.
	I can't remember, it was so long ago.
	But I remember seeing it the day it happened and playing it over and over and over again.
	It's just classic.
	It's also iconic.
	You can enjoy these sorts of silly low-quality moments every now and then.
	Right.
	So let's see what Walmart had on its diverse and inclusion statement last year.
	This is from, I think, September 2023. They say, we believe we're as strong as a company and a country when all people are included, heard, and empowered.
	We expect all associates to genuinely embrace diversity and inclusion so that we don't accept our differences, but celebrate them all the time and within every team.
	Right, so that was last year.
	It's a little bit like Big Brother, isn't it?
	I know the 1984 illusions are probably overdone, but it's not enough that you just say you love Big Brother.
	It's not enough just to say the words.
	You have to celebrate.
	You have to genuinely believe it deep down in your core, in your soul.
	You have to believe it.
	I don't know.
	I think it's way more Machiavellian than that.
	We'll see.
	To build on our work in this space and aggressively drive change inside and outside our company, in June 2020, we announced that we would develop strategies and invest resources to increase fairness, equity, and justice.
	Yeah, because this is genuinely what businesses care about.
	It is a weird development where a place like Walmart is saying, we need to get involved in justice for some reason.
	It's like, we sell you things.
	So anyway, have you ever heard of...
	Equity?
	Have you ever heard of diversity, Josh?
	We want to sell you equity.
	Diversity might be affecting their profit margin after the 2020 riots.
	So some of the good things that they are about to do include removal of inappropriate sexual and or transgender products marketed at children, closing of the racial equity center, removal of the term Latinx from all official communication, racial equity training to be discontinued, removal of the term DEI while ensuring a respectful and supportive environment.
	That seems like a step to the right direction.
	Yeah.
	Removing inappropriate sexual and or transgender products marketed at children.
	Yeah!
	Yeah, that was a crime to do that in the first place.
	I think this is the bare minimum for a company to be able to shop there, removing this stuff.
	It's like, oh right, you're not forcing strange things onto vulnerable people.
	Great.
	So Walmart are putting the woke away.
	Well, it's one tick in AA's column against Aaron McIntyre.
	I want to say I accept neither's framework, generally speaking, but I think they're not going to be put away.
	No, in general terms, I don't think so either.
	Yeah.
	So let me just give you a list here of businesses that have backed off on DEI policies.
	CNN, DoorDash, Ford, Google, Harley-Davidson, John Deary, Tractor Supply Company, Jack Daniel's owner, Brian Foreman, Lyft, Microsoft, Snapchat, Tesla, Wayfair, Zoom, so there are many.
	Just to say quickly, I must say, it would only be to an extent, though.
	Google put in WokeAway.
	Well, it hasn't entirely, has it?
	It might have dialed it down a bit.
	Donated the most to Kamala Harris.
	She's a pretty tangible thing.
	Loads of those companies in that list, I was like, have they...
	They might have dialed it down, but they haven't become based, have they?
	They've also been rebranded, hasn't it?
	Because now BlackRock is trotting out this bridge thing that they're trying to get everyone on board with.
	It's just like, no, this isn't diversity, equity and inclusion.
	This is something else.
	Come and look at our...
	You know, it's bridge.
	It can't be bad.
	Bridges allow you to cross rivers, therefore it's not bad.
	It's not DEI, which is an anagram of dye.
	It's a good thing.
	But it is basically the same stuff.
	It's bridge nationalism.
	So, how did this happen?
	So, one of the catalysts for this is Tennessee filmmaker Robbie Starbuck, who was preparing a documentary about it, about the DEI policies on Walmart, and contacted them, but apparently they seemed to think, well, you might have a point, and they decided to change things, so most probably he is not going to release it, and he makes several announcements.
	He says, Walmart is ending their woke policies.
	I can now exclusively tell you what's changing and how it happened.
	And last week he had a talk with executives at Walmart that he was doing a story about wokeness.
	Instead, we had productive conversations to find solutions.
	So it worked.
	You could say that conservative activism worked and it actually yielded results.
	So I would say this is good news.
	And he says the company also reportedly pledged to end its racial equity center, though the company noted to Starbeck that the program was established in 2020 as a special five-year initiative.
	Five-year plan.
	I see what they did there.
	Exactly.
	Who's the CEO? Joseph Stalin, just wearing a different moustache?
	Also, I must say that I particularly dislike the use of the word discontinue.
	Why not say stop?
	They say Walmart will discontinue the use of DI as a term while ensuring a respectful and supportive environment.
	The company reportedly told Starback.
	Our focus is on belonging for all associates and customers.
	And one other thing that they did is that they used DEI also for suppliers.
	And they said that, for instance, they tried to have a more diverse pool of suppliers.
	And diversity was an issue for selecting suppliers, which is mad if you think about it.
	Because as a company you want to basically give the best product you can at the cheapest price possible.
	So why on earth would a business care about the diversity of the suppliers?
	It got to the point where they had not necessarily Walmart, but other companies, they had signs saying black-owned business, white-owned business, woman-owned business, which, you know, unintentionally based, I suppose, but it's probably not the direction you want to go if you want to make money.
	So it's a good move.
	I think that this is a step to the right direction.
	Although I must say, I think that always the devil lies in the detail and I will specifically be patient and be cautiously optimistic because when they're talking about a respectful and supportive environment, the question is, what do you mean by it and what are you going to do in order to ensure a respectful and supportive environment?
	Because if...
	What they're going to say is that we're not going to stop calling it DEI. We're going to call it somewhat differently.
	Well, that's not a big change.
	The whole thing is to be absolutely clear about what it is that you're doing rather than just saying abstractly and vaguely that I want to ensure respect, support and peaceful coexistence.
	The devil is always in the details.
	It's always a matter of policies, whether it's company policies or the policies of a nation.
	Respectful and supportive of whom?
	Exactly.
	And in what ways?
	The fact that they, Walmart, had their own racial equity centre.
	What a madness!
	Again, in generations to come, I think, I hope, people look back on stuff like that and it will be weird.
	It'd be really weird.
	It'd be like photographs of stuff from the 19th or 20th century which are just alien to us now.
	Like they had that, they did that.
	It's a very strange thing for a society that's sort of obsessed with merit to then have a little blip in its history where it's just like actually we're about race now again for a little bit.
	Just a few years and then we're gonna go back to what we did before.
	It's crazy.
	And here we have, for instance, a really good indication of how our world and our society has completely changed.
	Because, for instance, we have here medical directors are being asked To play a prominent role within the leadership team to promote diversity, equity and inclusion and to help identify and address the effects of racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and other forms of discrimination on the health and well-being of veterans in HBPC and of HBPC stuff.
	So this is for federal positions and a medical director.
	Exactly, yeah.
	So I'm a doctor of racism.
	I'm going to fix your racism.
	I'm going to fix your xenophobia.
	They're apparently not going to be able to fix the ableism, though, because they can't cure that, apparently.
	But also, it shows how DEI people don't care about the outcome.
	And we see this on every sector.
	Let's take the police, for instance.
	The police is supposed to guard to ensure public security.
	For some reason, public security is being...
	our sentiment of public safety is being decreasing.
	People feel less and less public safe.
	But we do have virtue signaling police forces saying, yeah, we are combating diversity and we have a more diverse police force.
	Right, so here we have also a segment that I did with Josh called Queering National Security, talking about one of the last really strong pushes for DEI policies in the nuclear sector, saying actually that the nuclear sector requires more queer perspective in order to heighten the public security of the nation against terrorism attacks.
	This is absolute madness.
	Right.
	And the thing here is that we have a really good...
	DI doesn't work.
	It doesn't work.
	We are constantly saying it doesn't.
	Some people need more of a research to find out that basically we can't have everyone happy and we cannot have a world that is based on saying that everyone should be happy and if they're not happy, the evil reason is racism and all sorts of negative things.
	It just doesn't work.
	And a lot of media outlets were invested into silencing stories that this wouldn't work.
	We have here an excellent thread by Colin Wright, who is talking about how the New York Times and business killed stories at the 11th hour.
	Covering new research on DI pedagogy and its negative psychological impacts.
	And as they say, the study showed that certain DI practices increase hostility, authoritarian tendencies, and agreement with extreme rhetoric.
	Definitely check this thread out.
	And we have here people all across the political spectrum and from all kinds of groups saying that DEI is not working.
	Anyone paying attention knew DEI was toxic.
	A new study shows just how toxic.
	This is from Free Black Thought.
	DEI failed to reduce prejudice towards oppressed groups.
	Increased prejudice against supposed oppressor groups made people see prejudice in interactions in the absence of actual prejudice and made people want to punish perpetrators.
	And also we have Brianna Wu.
	She says that she was actively pushing for this, but at some point data suggested that it doesn't work.
	Right, so I think we should talk a bit about the issue of triumphalism because I think it's a bit misplaced.
	Any kind of triumphalism is usually misplaced because it ignores the historical context.
	Might be worth defining what you mean by that.
	I think I know what you mean.
	Just gloating that we've already won.
	Yeah, we've won.
	And for instance, I have a tweet that seems to me to be the most indicative of what I'm talking about.
	Wait, you mean Piers Morgan isn't giving cutting-edge, insightful political commentary, Stelios?
	There are a lot of people who are pushing forward this triumphalist narrative that says wokeism is dead, identity politics is dead, virtue signaling is dead.
	A lot of politicians are doing.
	You would sort of expect it from Republican politicians.
	I mean, Donald Trump Jr. is doing it, but he's a political actor.
	He's not a journalist.
	Good to see Andy Ngo there saying, no they're not, in the replies there.
	He's also, Piers Morgan continues, says Trump's massive win was a total repudiation of all the far left's progressive but actually regressive crap.
	Common sense will now return to a world that had gone nuts, and thank God for that.
	Common sense never went anywhere.
	Common sense is just a propaganda word.
	I find it really annoying when people say common sense because I think the only thing that's held in common is stupidity, not sense.
	Yeah, so I want to say something.
	It looks like when we're looking at it, we're saying, okay, people must be mad in order to push forward these narratives.
	But I think that there's an underlying logic that if we understand, it may reveal to us that this isn't going anywhere.
	And sadly, it isn't going anywhere.
	And any kind of rhetoric of the sort that wokeism is dead is actually going to have very negative effects.
	It's going to make people less vigilant, less and more prone to rest on their own laurels and say, right, we won.
	Now everything is going to work magically.
	Actually, now it's one major victory.
	I'm talking about Trump's victory.
	But things are really now starting.
	They're now beginning.
	It's the beginning of a cultural victory.
	It's not the end of it.
	Absolutely, yeah.
	I was going to say we've barely begun to push back, really.
	It's far, far, far too early to count your chickens.
	Wokeism is dead, identity politics is dead, virtue signalling is dead.
	Well, not in the cabinet room, it's not.
	Not in Sir Keir's government, it's not.
	When will virtue signalling ever die?
	Yeah, right, yeah.
	Yeah, that'll never die.
	Also, identity politics will never die as long as human beings have genetics.
	This is a nonsense.
	It's like a war on drugs or a war on terrorism or a war on identity politics, a war on virtue signaling.
	It's a war on something inherent in the human condition.
	War on water.
	Yeah, you're right.
	A virtue signaling will never die.
	People will always do that.
	Just accept that it's part of human nature and you don't have to agree with it.
	You can advise people not do it, but don't delude yourself and think it's going to disappear entirely.
	That's exactly why I'm saying that this has the exact opposite effect.
	When you're telling people, okay, right, we won.
	Good won, so there's no more evil in the world.
	No, it's not going to work.
	So it's good if people turn their back to this rhetoric and learn to distinguish between political statements of triumph upon a victory, which are good, but they are not to be taken literally.
	And I think that there is an underlying logic which is essentially the following.
	Wokeness isn't going anywhere because fundamentally it is the perfect tool to divide and conquer.
	And in societies of the Western type, The best way to dominate people both in their nation and country and also in their workforce is to impose a kind of framework where everyone is guilty by default,
	where everyone is so scared to upset anyone else and everyone is potentially someone who is going to be deemed a far-right racist because they didn't look, they didn't say good morning to their colleague or because they criticized the government.
	The most powerful weapon to dominate people because also it's covert.
	You could say that in societies that praise freedom, liberty, reason, wisdom, whatever, and virtue, the kind of infiltration and subversion didn't work when it was overt, but this is covert.
	This is actually covert operation to create, to completely subvert the, you could say, a lot of classical liberal insights by saying that, right, the proper relation of society and of government isn't the idea of having a government that is supposed to owe you, that has obligation towards its people to safeguard their rights.
	It's only permission.
	So what wokeism does is both in the workforce and in people's country, it turns rights into permissions.
	So when you have really subjective rules within your workforce, your workplace and your country, you're at the mercy of whoever is administering those rules.
	That's why I think wokeism isn't going anywhere and people should definitely be vigilant against it.
	Now, of course, one of its surface forms may change, and here we may have some indications about it, but that doesn't mean that the underlying rationale is going to change.
	And we have here some trends of word use in academia.
	And you see, for instance, that after the turn of the 21st century, there's a spike in the word use of terms like transphobia, Islamophobia.
	There's also racism, sexism, and words like that.
	But mostly, if you see, it's transphobia and Islamophobia.
	And this is a good indicator.
	That's not an indicator of support necessarily, because word use just indicates discourse, but academia isn't the place where ideal discourse is taking place, and we should...
	A couple of those graphs are very, very interesting.
	The sexism one, yeah, like sort of third wave feminism.
	Before that just sort of wasn't much of a thing.
	The transphobia thing, yeah, completely fabricated in the early 2000s.
	Just a tiny number of people are actually trans, let alone transphobic.
	Well, people didn't even know it existed back then, did they?
	Well, it's just such a tiny number of people that it applies to.
	But the interesting one is Islamophobia, and I've said this before, I'm pretty sure, and for a lot of the younger people, the Zoomers, don't know this, but before 9-11...
	In Britain anyway, I think in most of the West, Islam was not a big thing.
	It just wasn't a big thing.
	Our countries weren't flooded with people from Islamic countries.
	Islam itself, as a religion, as a creed, didn't crop up, didn't come up.
	Straight after 9-11, people didn't know that usually Muslims don't wear turbans.
	Usually that's more of a Sikh thing, sometimes a Hindu thing.
	Anyway, wearing a turban is not synonymous with being Muslim, right?
	People didn't even know that.
	People were going around in some punitive attacks against people wearing turbans because they thought they were Muslim.
	That's how little Islam had an impact, any sort of day-to-day impact on particularly British, I would say, Western culture and civilisation.
	It just wasn't on the radar.
	I mean, you can see on that graph, look, before the year 2000, almost nothing.
	Almost nothing.
	The guy that owned the corner shop or your doctor might be a Dr Patel or kindly Mr Khan in the corner shop.
	That was it.
	No one talked about Islam.
	No one knew anything really about Islam.
	It wasn't on the radar.
	And that graph speaks volumes to me because that's what I remember.
	Before 9-11 it wasn't a thing and then ever since 9-11 it's like you can't get away from it.
	But the point is that there is discourse about all these ideas and all these movements, let's say, in what are being represented here are not compatible.
	So what wokeness does is it says, okay, we are going to take incompatible groups and we're going to put them in the same area, let's say, whether it's the workplace or it's society at large, and we're going to create chaos and big government will be needed in order to mitigate that chaos.
	And people should never forget Judith Butler saying Hamas and Hezbollah are social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of the global left.
	And why do I say this?
	Because this reminds me of the old Marxist maxim that communists should infiltrate all kind of revolutionary movements and unite them under one goal.
	So this isn't going anywhere and people who are saying that wokeism is dead or identity politics is dead or it's never going to come back, I think that they are seriously mistaken.
	It's good that Walmart is rolling back its program, but people should remain vigilant against these disastrous policies of the sort.
	Anyone who doesn't know, Judith Butler, pure filth.
	I mean, when, again, people look back on the first portion of the 21st century and wonder why the West, or the world to some degree, seemed to have lost its mind, it's people like Butler that did it.
	It's exactly people like her.
	And the people that agreed with her and went along with what she said.
	Is there anyone that embodies sort of boomer chaos than Judith Butler?
	And also, I have friends who you'd say are on the Democrat side, who told me that basically they read it, they tried to give it the benefit of the doubt, the book she has written.
	It's all nonsense.
	It's more destructive.
	She doesn't even put anything positive on its own.
	She just says, other theories aren't perfect.
	Well, okay.
	You really illuminated this.
	Have you seen her lock holes with Slavoj Zizek?
	No, but that was funny.
	Was he touching his nose all the time?
	Yeah.
	It was about to blow my nose.
	The last Russian says, DI is being rebranded to bridge just as Kirsch has talked about it, about it will just be buried deeper within HR document.
	Nothing will change unless HR is disbanded and progressives get purged from orgs.
	I think that's correct.
	Right.
	On to our video comments.
	Let's go to what's the first one?
	All vision insists on using lots of diversity in their stock photos.
	So, the BBC always insists on using lots of diversity in their stock photos.
	I have lots of running jokes on this.
	This is the norm.
	We have all noticed it.
	But have you also noticed where they don't use diversity?
	On the recent topic of euthanasia and assisted dying, I've noticed quite a pernicious trend.
	No diversity in their stock photos whatsoever.
	Only white people.
	It is very clear what is being implied.
	Feel free to have a look yourself.
	Maybe it's all in my imagination.
	They definitely do do that.
	They selectively pick.
	If it's someone in a job, it's a black person.
	If it's someone dying or something unpleasant happening to them, it's a white person.
	And that is pretty explicit.
	Although, to be fair, there aren't nearly as many old black people in Britain as there are young black people in Britain.
	Just, well, for lots of reasons.
	One of which is a lot of them are recent arrivals.
	So they're not going to be that old yet.
	Just because people migrate when they're younger.
	Let's go to the next one.
	I wanted to take this opportunity to extend a hand across the Atlantic and invite our British cousins to join in the American holiday of Thanksgiving.
	Some of our concerns are parochial, like giving thanks for not dying of disease or exposure or hostile Indian attack.
	But some of them cross the Anglosphere.
	For instance, not once this year was any of us persecuted by James the First.
	Happy Thanksgiving, guys!
	To be fair, we have hostile Indians these days as well, but they're not quite the same.
	A bit more similar to Columbus's original intentions, really.
	Do they have PhDs in engineering?
	Yes.
	Not in sanitation, though.
	Or refuse disposal.
	Oh, I'm looking at an onion.
	It's Delios's favourite vegetable.
	The onion of deception.
	It is beautiful from the outside, just like this one.
	But the truth is...
	The onion of deception is rotten on the inside and the only way to know is to peel back the layers of the onion and examine it and you will find the rot within.
	Thanks, California refugee.
	This is exactly what I'm thinking.
	Stage one is utopia.
	Everything is fine.
	We'll work on the next stages slowly.
	Before now, I've talked about the onion of historiography, trying to get to objective historical fact, which isn't actually possible, but still, peel the onion of historiography to try and get to what's true.
	But what I always think of when people talk about the onion of deception now...
	There's a bit in Friends, I think it's when Joey was doing some sort of play and the director was trying to get more out of his performance and he was like, peel the onion of the character in the play.
	But that always comes, whenever anyone talks about the onion of deception, that line from Friends comes into my mind.
	I had to say it at some point.
	I just imagine Stelios biting an onion like an apple and just being unfazed by the fact he's eating an onion.
	We would have the podcast of the Onion Pillars.
	Right, let's go to the...
	Convince Carl to rebrand.
	Let's go to the next one.
	Ah, okay.
	These are comments, okay?
	Right.
	Hey, that video looks exactly like our written comments.
	Do you want to start with your comments?
	I can do, I suppose.
	Oh, they're appearing on the page in front of me.
	John the Trumpeter was a DEI hire.
	Very fitting name there.
	It's weird how the people who love guns didn't bring them in the exact time and place they would have been perfect to overthrow the government.
	Makes you think.
	I know.
	It's ridiculous, isn't it?
	Oh, we've got a rumble chat in as well.
	My favourite gents and a heart, goblins.
	I too respect goblins.
	I am the goblin whisperer of the office.
	Lord Nerevar says, all these cases against Trump are purely to grab headlines.
	They almost always fall completely apart under even the slightest scrutiny.
	Makes one think of the partiality of the justice system, doesn't it?
	Oh yeah, well, I think all of that's going to change.
	And I'll do one more.
	Paul Neubauer.
	Not to mention that the FBI unit was created.
	The Witmarket napping schemes were transferred to DC to do the Jan 6th riot.
	I don't know about that thing that you've mentioned there, so I have to look into that.
	Right.
	Take us away, Bo.
	Okay.
	Jimbo G says, if anyone from the Kremlin is watching, our most strategic target is Birmingham.
	Yeah.
	Dear the Kremlin, if you must drop thermonuclear weapons on us.
	I have a list.
	Oldham.
	Birmingham.
	Whitechapel in London.
	Blackburn, Whitechapel.
	Use a small tactical nuke.
	Rotherham.
	North FC Zuma says, always enjoy Bo's, quote, modern warfare segments.
	Would like to see him do some more.
	How would X-Country versus X-Country go?
	Yeah, I'd love to do that sort of thing.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah.
	John the Trumpeter was a DEI hire, says.
	But Beau, if Britain doesn't go to war with Russia, how else will BAE Systems get all those defence contracts?
	Yeah, there is the worry, always the constant thing of that there's lots and lots of jobs and profits to be made in arms manufacturing.
	You know you see those old propaganda pictures with a really fat cat and they're drinking all the water and a little drip goes to a starved person.
	I like to think of a sort of satire where it's the British population is the fat cat and the poor weapons manufacturers are that starving, skinny creature of a person that is getting that drop of water.
	Adrian Webb says, more likely I think Russia would attack us by subverting our culture and getting us to attack and undermine ourselves.
	Oh wait.
	It's unfortunately the most efficient and safest way to defeat a country.
	Yeah.
	It's covert.
	People don't understand it.
	42% of the time Britain harms itself.
	Right.
	Nazisi Stelios, my wife Steliana shares your name day.
	Happy name day for your wife as well.
	What's Nazisis?
	It's, you should live, you know, live, I wish you a long life.
	Oh, okay, okay.
	Jane Ginger, Happy Name Day, Stelios.
	Thank you very much.
	George Happ.
	Just because some companies are rolling back or hiding their DEI initiatives by renaming them, it doesn't mean that the fight is over.
	The culture war will take years, if not generations.
	So people declaring victory are just lazy.
	All these companies still hate you and don't deserve your money.
	Yeah, I absolutely agree with George Happ.
	It's not like Piers Morgan has much to lose if he's wrong.
	I mean, he's already made his money, hasn't he?
	He lives a very comfortable and insulated life from the consequences of his own opinions.
	But also, when we're talking about culture wars, we're talking about institutions, and institutions just don't guard themselves, they're guarded by people.
	So whenever we're talking about a culture that has good institutions, institutions that we praise, we are talking about that there is a necessity for the population for safeguarding them against subversion, and that will never go away.
	And Piers Morgan is sort of in the same category as someone like Rachel Maddow or Don Lemon in the sense that he sort of seems to be able to be completely wrong, completely shown to be utterly, utterly wrong, and then it doesn't ruin his career and he's not taken off air or anything, he still just carries on.
	Like might once say, oh yeah, I was wrong about that.
	It's like a media cockroach in the sense that they can survive anything.
	Yeah, yeah, right, yeah.
	Like, you know, when he said, oh, I was wrong about Covid at the beginning when I said everyone should cover up and take vaccines and all that sort of stuff, and then a few years later when the worm had turned, he said, oh, the science has changed, so I've changed my mind.
	Oh, alright then.
	Fine.
	Alright then, Piers.
	So that science that everyone else was looking at to make up their minds, that was just, you know, disinformation.
	Matt D says, I kind of put into words just how absolutely crazy and demonic it is that any company should be selling things like chest binders in the first place, let alone market it to children.
	I often try to put myself in the shoes of someone born a hundred years in the future and imagine how I would think about this.
	I think it will be seen as full on evil.
	If, you know, the really wrong side doesn't win, massively at least.
	I absolutely agree with that.
	When you look back and you see the early photographs, say, of child labourers or workers in factories, little seven-year-old chimney sweeps and things, you look at those images and you think, wow, that's another world.
	We really did that.
	I know.
	We should get back to that, yeah.
	If you look at photographs of a lynching, you're like, oh, that's terrible.
	But then when people will look back at footage of maybe Black Lives Matter people accosting random white people outside a restaurant.
	For daring to be white in public and stuff.
	I think, I hope generations will look back at that and see that was an abomination.
	I hope we don't...
	That was a blip.
	I hope, I hope.
	I mean, I've watched Planet of the Apes.
	You know, that's a bad scenario.
	Where's this going, Stelios?
	No, no, it's just, I'm talking about the movie, come on.
	Right.
	And last comment, Richard, Monique and them.
	Divide and conquer.
	It's worked well for millennia.
	DI is going nowhere.
	Subversion is a covert use of power like safetyism.
	Minority rule.
	What a farce.
	I absolutely agree with this statement.
	Right.
	And on that note, our podcast has come to an end.
	You can come and visit us tomorrow at one o'clock.
	We will be with you.
	We will be broadcasting, sharing our views with you about current affairs.

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