Hello and welcome to the podcast of Loat Seaters, episode 1056. Today, the 4th of December, 2024. I'm your host, Connor, joined by Harry and Stelios.
Hello everyone.
Howdy ho, neighborinos.
You get the best content at Lotus Hooters, folks.
And today we're going to be discussing how Rupert Lowe is becoming Britain's Caesar, South Korea declaring martial law for, what, a few hours, and how online discourse is mostly worthless, except for us, of course, because you can subscribe to LotusHoters.com.
There's always an exception.
We are sovereign, we declare the exception.
Today, three o'clock...
I hope not like the South Korean president.
Well, we'll see how that panned out.
Today at 3 o'clock, it is a Wednesday.
You'll be watching Thomason Talks, I hope, if you are subscribed to lootsheets.com, which isn't worthless discourse.
There's no hope about it.
They will be.
What else do you have better to do with your time?
I will send Harry to live personally at your house, in your walls, and he will remind you every Wednesday at 3 o'clock that Tomlinson Talks is on.
This week we're discussing how Britain's immigration system is broken, so you're going to get a full breakdown of...
Well, one thing that I'm going to discuss is the Home Office decided to produce a report on its various asylum accommodation.
Some of the findings of the report are just staggering.
We're run by idiots and traitors, but anyway, you'll be able to watch that if you're subscribed to the website.
This is the report that I looked into a little bit as well, wasn't it?
When was that?
A few weeks ago, I did a daily video on it, so you should check that out as well, although I'm sure we'll go a bit more in-depth here.
You should definitely watch the daily channel, which I should have been doing, because I would have known that.
Do we have any other announcements, gents?
Any messages for the audience today?
A message of love.
Yeah, I was gonna say exactly that.
Stelios and I love you.
Connor, bit indifferent.
You can still win me over.
You can do better.
You really should do better.
You're enough.
You're enough.
Anyway...
Without further ado, into today's stories.
Looks like Britain's found its Caesar, ladies and gentlemen.
I don't want to jump the gun too eagerly, because I think we've all been fairly critical of a certain rhetorical softening over at Reform recently, and it turns out Reform's MPs are fairly critical...
In turn, but one MP has risen above the rest, and that is the MP for Great Yarmouth, an obscure seaside town in the east of England, a man by the name of Rupert Lowe, a 67-year-old former businessman, farmer, used to own a football club, staunch libertarian who's now coming round to matters of demographic reality and what kind of policies are needed to deal with migration in Britain.
And having spoken to Rupert, I can vouch for him.
As a former Hoppian, whenever I hear, like, libertarian, I'm like the Civil War meme.
What kind of libertarian?
Lowe's certainly coming round to the passages of Hopper that we once traded back in our Michael Knowles book club some time ago.
Also, since I'm the closest to libertarianism, he also has my approval.
Yes, well, he's...
I recommend...
I'm going to be mentioning some clips later, but I recommend you go and watch his brand new interview with Winston Marshall, a friend of mine, sure of Carl's, who...
Winston originally spoke to Nigel, and that's where we got those clips of Nigel Farage saying, I'm not going to mass-deport illegals, but I'm also not going to give them amnesty, so they're just going to sort of stay in the country as illegals, I guess?
And also, we can't politically alienate Islam, because by 2050 we will lose.
What does winning look like, Nigel?
They're not fond of me asking that question, but there you go.
Rupert Lowe instead has gone on the Winston Marshall Show and he's said all the things that you would want to hear, for example, about market reform and government corruption and abolishing quangos and unleashing individual entrepreneurialism, but he's also very realistic on questions of demographic change and the need to deal with migrants.
And we start with this data.
So this data...
Has been collected over the preceding weekend from the 1st of December.
Nice Christmas present as Advent kicks off.
Turns out we've now crossed 20,000 migrants being recorded crossing the English Channel in a single year.
Obviously more will have slipped through the net.
The line is going up under Labour's watch.
It's not quite the 2022 record, but it's up from last year despite the adverse weather conditions in October.
And we're seeming to become an island that battery farms foreign criminals because thanks to Rupert Lowe's Questions being posed in Parliament because each parliamentarian gets a limited number of questions they can have every day.
I think it's 20. Rupert's making full use of the 20 every day to get us the data to report on.
We found out that a quarter of foreign criminals have re-offended after they've been released from prison.
Why are any foreign criminals being imprisoned here, or even released from prison, why aren't they just instantly being deported?
So, a total of 10,012 offences were committed by foreign criminals who were released into the community, but who avoided deportation in the year to March 2022, which is the latest year for which figures are available.
Bear in mind, last year, according to the Organised Crime Index, run by the U.S. Department, Government.
The UK was the number one place for foreign criminals in all Western Europe, so we can only assume that number's gone up.
This was an increase of a quarter on the previous year's 8,021 offences, according to the Ministry of Justice data released through Rupert Lowe's parliamentary question.
That's a 25% increase.
Yes.
From 8,000 to go to 10,000.
It's almost exactly 25%.
Yeah, that's because of the Boris wave of immigration, which was over 80% third world migrants at record numbers after he'd just put the entire country under house arrest for COVID. Don't you just love Boris Johnson?
Reform's just hired one of Boris Johnson's campaign advisors, by the way, Tim Montgomery.
Tim Montgomery, in August, was saying that Matt Goodwin, chief spokesman for Reform, had something sulfuric about him and was saying he was peddling divisive rhetoric about immigration.
So, a bit of a weird selection, but there you go.
Reform, very split camp at the moment.
In the past four years, which data was available, a total of 38,868 offences were committed by foreign criminals.
So nearly 40,000 crimes committed by foreign criminals who had already been released from prison...
After committing another offence.
The figures show that in each of the four years, from 2018 to 2022, about a quarter of foreign criminals re-offended after being released from prison.
In the year 2 March 2022, 3,235 foreign criminals committed a further offence out of a cohort of 13,486.
We have at least 13,000 foreign criminals in our country that are re-offending and imprisoned.
Why?
Why are we battery farming foreign criminals?
Why are we battery farming AIDS patients, as was revealed recently?
AIDS has gone up 50% in the last year in Britain, mainly driven by African migrants.
If the line goes up, it doesn't matter what the line is measuring, it's good.
Yeah, quite.
That's certainly the mentality of the Labour and Conservative governments.
We've got some more data here.
Can you imagine the civil service meeting where they walk in and you go at the Home Office and go, good news guys, AIDS is up!
Woo!
Yeah, there you go.
Boom!
Break out the champagne, boys!
I just want a sensible country instead.
I'd much prefer that.
So this is the data that's published in The Telegraph because of Rupert Lowe.
Ministry of Justice revealed that, obviously, a quarter of foreign criminals went on to re-offend in the UK after being released from jail and are still in the country.
This is the number of 3,235 and the 25% annual increase.
Over the four years of data, the Ministry of Justice revealed that they're responsible for around 40,000 crimes.
Rupert Lowe, the Reform MP for Great Yarmouth, who extracted the data from the Ministry of Justice, said, Everyone who commits a crime should be deported.
Why are we tolerating this, particularly when we see the re-offending rate so high?
So Rupert Lowe's been doing the Lord's work by making use of his daily questions in Parliament, and he's making very strong statements about foreign criminals being deported.
And you might think, oh, okay, maybe he's just saying the foreign criminals in jail who've committed violent defences.
Well, turns out, a bit more than that, which is quite nice.
But anyway, look, these are his questions.
In Parliament, he asked Dame Andrea Eagle why these traitors get knighthoods and damehoods, I don't know, but there you go.
Whether or not she'd released the data, and she committed to releasing the data alongside the publication of the ONS statistics, which Keir Starmer said had proven that the Conservatives ran a deliberate open borders experiment after Brexit and subjected us to nearly a million people net migration every single year.
Damien Driegel basically forgot to publish this data, so he didn't let it go.
He chased it up with a letter accusing her of misleading Parliament, which would lead to significant consequences if the Speaker were to apply penalties for misleading the House of Commons.
And then he got his data and published it.
And he went a bit more granular on his Twitter.
You should be following him on his Twitter because he has constant Twitter posts about the data.
It's just the man presenting the data about how this country is going down the drain.
And he says...
In response to my questioning, the Ministry of Justice said that between April 2018 and March 2022, there were 38,868 re-offences from foreign national offenders, including the following crimes.
555 sexual offences, 11,852 thefts, And 4,418 offences of violence against the persons, so assaults.
This is just recorded crime.
The actual number of crimes committed by repeat foreign offenders will be far higher.
If our establishment had the courage to do what's right, these crimes would never have happened.
It's a disgrace.
We need to be deporting these people in huge numbers.
If you come into our country and you sexually assault a woman, steal or physically attack someone, you're gone.
No questions asked.
Goodbye.
Did somebody just say mass deportations?
Because it sounds very much like a Reform MP just went off script and said mass deportations.
That's because he did today.
We need mass deportations of foreign criminals.
Now, I remember a certain someone was invited to the Reform Conference and said that they should be doing this on the stage at Reform Conference and got a cheer from the Reform Conference goers.
And then Nigel Farage ruled it out on Stephen Edgington's interview a week before Reform Conference and then immediately ruled it out on Winston Marshall's show.
Richard Tice has come out and said, yeah, mass deportations of foreign criminals.
But then if you listen to the full interview, as I did this morning and I pulled this clip...
He didn't just say that.
Winston Marshall then goes in and says, okay, what about illegal migrants?
And Rupert Lowe says, yeah, they should all be, if you come here illegally, you should be sent home.
We should intercept you and send you home.
And Winston said, yeah, but it's not just about the people that cross the channel when you intercept them, but you know who they are.
We've got 1.2 million illegal people there.
And Rupert interjects and says, no, no, it's more.
And we need to do it anyway.
And also, and this is a point of contention for reform, Rupert Lowe doesn't say we need net zero migration.
Because that is the reform line.
This is concocted by Richard Tice saying we need net zero migration, which means that for every single person going out every year, we need a person coming in.
So that's still about 500,000.
Like an exchange program or something, I imagine.
Yeah, we're just a national way station and we can't prevent the demographic bleed that is happening to the country.
Rupert Lowe says, no, we need a two-year total freeze on migration.
And he then says, we should be learning from Sweden.
Winston Marshall specifically says about the payment programs to encourage legal migrants to go home, and Rupert Lowe says we should be learning from them.
And that's a good start, because if you were to go for the total freeze for two years, I wouldn't even necessarily say that you would need to create...
Well, I mean, obviously it would be beneficial, potentially, to do that, because there would be a number of people who take it.
Again, for me, it would be the freezing of benefits for foreign nationals.
And he is totally on board with that.
Yeah, there you go.
And that would create, with the total freeze, that would create a net reduction.
That would be a net migration out of the country as a result of that, which would be a fantastic start.
Exactly.
So all the people that are not economic contributors and are just here for benefits handouts will go home, or the people that are not economic contributors will turn to crime in order to support themselves, and you're a foreign criminal, see step A. We force you into the socioeconomic factors, and then we deport you.
But isn't that a bit sad?
What do you mean?
That things have come to this, that instead of saying that, well, some people shouldn't be here, they are pushed into crime and they say, okay, but you need to have committed a crime for you to be sent back.
I sort of get what you're saying.
What I'm saying is that it's sad that there hasn't been any preemptiveness.
Yes.
There hasn't been any preemptive policy.
Yes, quite.
But with the sorts of policies that we're talking about, the likelihood would be that we would be losing, as a start, all of these people who are only a net drain to this country.
And outside of human rights lawyers, the kind of like Keir Starmer, for instance, outside of those people, what moral, economic or practical argument could you have against that?
There's none.
And this is the thing.
This is what I think Lowe definitely understands and is courageous enough to say.
And this is what I was prompting Reform to say for some time as, let's say, a critical friend of the party who's spoken to some of their MPs, lots of their organisers, I know some of their candidates, watch our show, including becoming an enemy of some of the top.
Well, yeah, like this.
I thought I'd draw attention to this to show that there is a real divide within reform, and I don't think I insulted Richard Tice here, but I did write an article for The Critic when Ben Habib renounced his membership when they started bringing in more conservatives, including Dame Andrea Jenkins, who have had on my show, is a perfectly nice person.
And they started distancing themselves from cracking down on radical Islam, or just Islam proper, and announcing mass deportations.
And this was coming particularly from Tice and Farage.
And I was saying that I can't support reform in its current form until it stops estranging its voters, because I wasn't plucking this out of my backside.
There are prominent people, not just online commentators and people on Twitter, but prominent people within Westminster, where I spend a fair bit of time, That are questioning reform as the heir apparent and the inevitable opposition, and are saying, is Nigel the right man to lead?
Now the moment you've got those questions, you're no longer the presumptive king of the rights.
You need to start ensuring that you're putting out strong enough messaging so that people aren't questioning your position.
And instead, Richard Tice, who I didn't at at all, still follows me, I believe.
Richard Tice felt the need to say this was delusional garbage.
Didn't address any of my points, when my point was that you're limiting your growth potential, and instead cited his new statistics about rising memberships and rising in polls.
And when I said there was no need to resort to ad homonyms, he then doubled down and said the article is garbage so I call it out.
Again, I don't want to insult Richard.
I appreciate his rhetoric on the likes of the Manchester airport attack and his willingness to bring a private prosecution against them, but if you look at the likes to comments ratio, there were more comments than likes on this, and quite a few thousand people saying, well, if you talk to Connor like this, are you talking to all of your supporters like this?
The thing is as well, it shows a certain lack of backbone that he immediately resorts to ad hominem attacks and then resorts to a number of non sequiturs to the arguments that you were making.
Here's a load of statistics, also with the strongest in parliament on immigration and net zero at the moment.
Well, sorry, but Keir Starmer himself has basically neutered some of that recently with the speech that he gave about immigration the other day, which was obviously part of the point of giving that speech in the first place.
To contain populism, definitely.
I do not think that you can trust him, just to throw that out there.
And similarly, it's not difficult to be a harder line than Parliament on immigration.
Parliament are the ones who have let this happen, along with the civil service.
So it's very all well and good to right now be the hardest line, but if the hardest line is currently being pulled back...
Since Nigel Farage's interview that he gave recently, how are we going to be sure that you're not just going to keep pulling back and pulling back and pulling back?
There needs to be a bleeding edge of the Reform Party that needs to continue to push as Lowe is doing.
Yes, exactly, and that's why I think, despite Richard Tice counter-signalling me as a critical friend, I think we should absolutely reward and encourage Rupert Lowe with the praise that is due When he, seemingly, goes off script from what Nigel and Tice have been saying, and says with sincerity, what I think we all want to hear.
Rupert Lowe is also doing excellent work on other stats, so he decided to make use of his questions to press the Home Office, and he said, I questioned the Home Office about their official procedure to inform local residents of illegal migrants being housed in hotels near them.
It is official Home Office policy not to tell the residents.
Quote, I follow Rupert Lowe and I really
like his work and I'm going to say two good things about him.
First of all, it seems to me that he works more than he speaks.
And I haven't seen him scolding the audience.
And a lot of people, at least according to my understanding, vote for reform because they think that the traditional parties don't represent them.
So it doesn't look good when people from reform talk down to their base.
And I think that essentially what is interesting here is that people need hard workers because there are many eloquent people.
There are many people who can phrase a criticism, but at the end of the day what matters more is action and it's important to see in the character of a politician.
If they're a hard worker or not.
Because some politicians are really, they seem to be in it more for the campaigning, more for the spotlight and the limelight.
But Rupert Lowe at least seems to me to be a hard worker.
And the limelight has come naturally derivative of his hard work, not because he's trying to push himself forward.
And if there's one thing, and sorry Harry, I didn't mean to cut you off, if there's one thing that reform lacks at the moment, it is policy.
Like reform, did you know this, doesn't have a policy department.
It has one guy who has not yet had the sufficient time to formulate a proper policy document after the contract with the people.
Which they need.
Which I think is a source of confusion why Rupert Lowe seems to be saying something different to Nigel Farage.
And I think lots of people would rather Rupert Lowe's policy than Nigel Farage's and Richard Tice's.
And so what Lowe is focused on, as well as getting this information for us, is formulating policy.
And those policies are very popular because they're basically what Trump won the election on.
Well, two things in response to that.
First of all, it's good to see him clarifying these things, because it does clarify and confirm the suspicions that we all had, especially after the recent controversy in Altringham, where the...
Oh, does he go on to...
No, I just mentioned that there.
Oh, there you go.
Because obviously they were moved into a hotel in Altringham, which was right opposite a school, and then very, very close, within a few minutes, walks to other schools.
The first that the residents of Altringham heard about this was them showing up.
Them showing up, and then to try and get any extra information and details about it, they had to go to a public meeting with the MP who surrounded himself with police security, at which point every question they asked was returned with, well, that's above my pay grade.
I can't tell you that.
Oh, the information that we can tell you, though, is that they're not on the NHS. Don't worry, they're getting special treatment instead that's going to cost you even more.
There you go.
And the second thing, what you were talking about then about the policy department, that's interesting.
I've only seen this discussed by the man himself, so I can't be, you know, you'll have to take his word for it.
There's the, well, formerly anonymous poster on Twitter called Northern Variant, called Pete.
I know Pete, yeah.
Yeah, and I believe that he has said that he actually drew up policy proposals on behalf of reform that he offered to them that were rejected by them.
He seemed to imply that it was due to personal animosity that some of the members shared with him.
So I don't wish to disrespect Pete, and it could very much be the case for me, which is where Richard Tice reacted the way he did.
The messenger and the message are sometimes not distinct, and Pete is a fellow autist.
And doesn't always understand the boundaries of social negotiation.
This is not to disrespect the man.
He is intelligent.
And the way he has presented his policies, I mean, he has presented a sort of 100,000-word document, which makes it very dense to go through.
I do know that he met with Ben Habib, and Ben was very receptive to Pete, and they've been very friendly since.
I don't know if he's met with anyone else at Reform, so I can't necessarily disclose that.
Well, that's just information that he shared on his public profile.
But the interesting thing from that, let's dislocate it from just Pete North, I find it interesting that not only have they marginalised conversations about policy, but they won't even bring in outsiders who are doing policy for free.
I mean...
At the Lotus Eaters, we're a sort of nexus of guests sometimes.
Why have they not spoken to Paul Moreland about demographics?
Why have they not...
I've just done an 8,000 word article on how the Home Office is infested with Muslim activists.
Why have they not just pulled for free data from that?
Why have they not spoken to Charlotte Gill about her Woke Waste series and how much money has been spent by...
The Arts Council and the British Film Institute and the National Lottery to abolish charities.
I know Rupert Lowe's interested in this stuff, but it seems that reform head table are not pulling together all the brightest minds that are doing this work for free, so they don't even need to pay them, to crowdsource this wisdom, like the Trump team did.
Well yeah, people are seeing with the reform, they're seeing a potential insurgent party which is open to certain levels of entryism at the lower levels right now.
They're a new party, they need people to fill their ranks and they need people to fill those practical purposes as well.
So people are offering because they want to provide any help to provide an alternative to the Tories and to Labour.
So, reform, obviously being practical and intelligent about it, needs to take those people who are willing to do the work for them and put them to their best uses.
Yeah, and those people, their best uses, probably not even an MP. I mean, I never want to be a bloody MP. And I'd rather you just lived up to your potential and became an effective political movement on behalf of us who are interested in these ideas but don't want to stand at the despatch box.
And all they've got to do is listen and be a bit more receptive to criticism, and they might be able to.
And I think Rupert is very much that.
I'll finish on some more stats that Rupert's been gathering for us.
Rupert, next week, thanks to his questioning of the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Michael Goves, former department now Angela Rayners, is getting a nationality breakdown of lead tenants on the Housing Register, Council on Social Housing, later this week.
Now we do know, thanks to the work of Robert Jemmerich and Neil O'Brien, and this is the Centre for Policy Studies paper, that certain ethnicities and nationalities are massively overrepresented.
For example, 72% of Somalians in Britain are on social housing.
There's lots more from Africa, Jamaica, Ghana, Afghanistan.
It's not until we get the middle of the pack that you get the UK, so per capita we are vastly underrepresented.
In our own social housing stats.
So I wonder what the updating housing stats will be like, because I think this is based on the demographic data from the census.
It's probably even a couple of years out of date.
Yeah, this will be at least almost five years out of date at this point.
Something like that, yeah, before the Boris wave.
He's also looking at the NHS and benefits too.
He said, in 2023, 816,036 Department for Work and Pensions calls were translated, costing £4.56 million.
So just on translation fees every year for foreigners to claim taxpayer benefits, we're spending nearly 5 million quid.
Fantastic.
Really like that.
NHS e-referral data reveals that 8% of NHS patients can't speak English, requiring millions in translation fees rather than AI or just making them speak English.
Now I have to say this because it's again about Rupert Lowe.
He had the debate with Ash Sarkar.
I was going to mention that.
Please do.
What kind of point was she raising there?
She was brilliant in responding, but she was saying essentially that the NHS isn't spending enough because translators are required for people who want to feel better if they hear the medical personnel speaking in their own language.
So Ash Sarkar's stated position is £500 million per day is not enough for the NHS. Yes, because she is a subversive race communist.
She's literally said she's a communist.
Well, if that's the stated position, I only have to ask, what would be enough?
A billion per day?
Three billion per day?
Yeah, it's an endless, bottomless pit that drains money from everybody's pockets.
It's the Mr. Waternoose position.
I'll sacrifice a hundred thousand million before I let the NHS die.
That's the opinion.
And Rupert Lowe correctly assessed in that debate that she was a disingenuous bad faith actor and he just said, no, you learn English or you go home, that's it.
Boom.
Frankly, I can't imagine Farage or Tice being as hardline.
And that's why he's risen to the top.
He's also found out that...
In questioning the Department of Work and Pensions for their universal credit stats, that about 40% of the migrants from 2022 to 2023 and 2023 to 2024 are on universal credit, which means benefits.
So this immigration is an economic boon argument.
No, 40% of them are on benefits, and about 60% of them, according to the Office for Budgetary Responsibility, went on skilled worker visas, so the only ones that actually come in to work, are net fiscal detriments.
So, he's procuring all this data for us to prove, again, yet again, what we already know, that immigration is a cultural, demographic, and fiscal cost to the country.
He's also found, after the farmers' protests, because he is a farmer and he's heavily aligned himself with them, that he's requested the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office take steps to ensure that not a single penny of British taxpayer money is given to overseas farmers, because it was revealed that about 500 million a year goes to farming subsidies in places like Rwanda for low-carbon farming, while we're taking that from British farmers and confiscating their land.
They told him to get stuffed.
They said they refused to do so.
The official development assistance brings in other direct benefits to UK farmers, apparently.
And he says, I don't care about farmers in Brazil or Rwanda.
I care about British farmers.
As a farmer myself, I can safely say that the vast majority of farmers who prefer this foreign aid are spent on agriculture in our country put British farmers first.
Very good.
And there's literally something like we give them all of this money to see if Rwandans can grow tea.
Yeah, something like that.
Does the ODA, do they shrug and say this will benefit Britain somehow?
It's because, like Labour Cabinet Secretary Gus O'Donnell once said to David Goodhart in The Road to Somewhere, he, when he was at the Treasury, lobbied for an open door as much as possible immigration policy and greater foreign aid because he believed his obligation was to global well-being.
This is what Stelios has mentioned a number of times.
If you're going to be saying that we need to help the poor, they're seeing it from a global perspective, even the poorest Britain is comparatively wealthy compared to the poorest African.
Yes.
So therefore we need to transfer the poorest Britain's wealth to the poorest African.
Yes.
And on one final statement, we've all been concerned about Nigel Farage pivoting from his Trevor Phillips Sky News interview during the election campaign where he's citing Henry Jackson Society statistics where they said three quarters of British Muslims, particularly young British Muslims, didn't believe that Hamas did anything wrong on October 7th, and 52% want a blasphemy law, to saying to Winston Marshall, the vast majority of British Muslims are on our side, they're peaceful and law-abiding, and we can't alienate political Islam because by 2050 we will lose.
Well, Rupert Lowe's pointed out something on that front.
It's not normal to see armed security police at Christmas markets and events.
Not normal to have security guards at dance classes.
It's not normal for pockets of unknown foreign young males to appear all over the country.
None of this is normal.
We must not get used to it.
So, it's not far right causing this.
It's a particular cultural subset of immigrants that are causing all of this crime and this insecurity.
And Rupert Lowe's not too afraid to call it out, nor is he too afraid to say that we need mass deportations of foreign criminals, illegal migrants, and those in prison, and the re-offenders, in order to achieve it.
So, congratulations, Rupert Lowe.
You are fast becoming the rising star of the British right, and we will watch the rest of your career with great interest.
Right, we've got some rumble rants, gents.
Yep, I'll pass over that stuff while I read these.
That's a random name.
The solution to the UK's fertility problem is simple.
Expel the barbarians and a lot of British, real British, expats will return along with their kids.
Your rulers just need to grow a spine.
I mean, quite.
It's hard to justify bringing children into a culture if you don't know that the culture is going to impart in schools and institutions your culture onto your children.
Using that logic, we can also sell this to Spain and Portugal.
I think that's valid.
That's totally fine.
Scan lines.
If you encourage immigrants to commit crimes so we can send them back, won't this encourage them to commit crimes that may lead to the death in their country so they can hide behind human rights further?
I think that's poorly written.
I'm not encouraging any immigrant to commit crime.
I don't encourage anyone to commit crime.
I'm saying that if anyone does commit crimes, because they're not economic contributors, and so they turn to crime to support themselves, we can deport them as a foreign criminal, because you should deport foreign criminals, and that's a perfectly reasonable application of the law.
Also, I'd be happy to abolish human rights and the Keir Starmer understanding of them.
Absolutely.
That's a random name.
Funnily enough, if that were done, every bad metric would go down and every positive metric would go up.
The fact that almost none of your leaders want this says all you need to know.
And he says reform our containment.
Well, I don't think that's fair to characterise when Rupert Lowe, clearly, doesn't agree with that and there are lots of good people within the reform.
I can understand the concern about the top tier of the party.
I don't think it's conscious containment.
I think it's a mixture of fear and misplaced liberal sensibilities.
Boomerism.
Sadly so.
So, again, I'm not trying to be ad hominem towards the top of the party.
I'd like to encourage them to live up to basically the standard that Rupert Lowe has set.
Two more.
Sorry.
It could also have a conservative temperament into it because they may think they have gained some things and they don't want to lose them.
And they think that right now maybe it is too early to risk.
It's one view.
As I've said, I agree with the Rupert Lowe approach.
I'm just trying to add this to this.
I thought you were going to suggest that they were like, well, Islam is now a British tradition that we need to conserve.
They do genuinely think that Muslims care about quote-unquote family values more than they do about the advance of Islam, so therefore they might win them over with family values.
I hate to tell you what they do in families over in their countries of origin.
Yeah.
Freddie65, good morning, God bless you all.
Same to you, sir.
Thank you for the $10.
DragonLadyChris, did I hear that right?
£500 million a day, that's £182.5 billion annually.
That's insane.
Yeah, go follow the account Days of NHS Spending.
I know the chap who runs that, and he's a very nice guy.
You will be astounded just how much the NHS costs.
Also, I think the cost that's been projected for next year, £24 to £25, is going to be something like £193 billion.
So actually slightly more than £500 million a day.
It's just a third-world Ponzi scheme.
Not just a string.
How can we help Rupert Lowe?
I say positively reinforce everything he's doing over on Twitter, because lots of politicians pay attention to their Twitter feeds, and I think he does.
And $5.
In-X-E-O. Tice thinks he's right-wing, but he really isn't.
Well, I fundamentally disagree with Tice's policy prescriptions, and also I think his conduct to me wasn't particularly fair.
But anyway, Stelios, please take it away, sir.
Right, we are going to talk about South Korea and one of the major failures of all time in politics because this reminded me actually of some videos I watch in failure compilations.
It was one of the least, most amateurish attempt to impose martial law.
Fail army South Korean version.
Yeah, exactly.
What was this?
Literally, what was this?
What were they thinking?
Right, so we have...
A few identities ago, Stelios has staged a few very successful coups, so he's the guy to ask.
You need to call me Harry.
We need to talk about stuff.
I think you'd actually look incredibly stylish if you dressed in sort of Pinochet fashion.
You could pull off the...
We need to bring Kate's bag.
Well, I don't know.
Let's see what happened and talk about that later.
Right, so this was the moment martial law was introduced in South Korea.
And the South Korean president said, I declare martial law to protect the Free Republic of Korea from the threat of North Korean communist forces, to eradicate the despicable pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people and to protect the free constitutional order.
He said in a televised order last night in Korea, which was a night here in the UK. There were several hours difference, but it literally happened yesterday.
So what he said essentially is he vaguely accused the opposition Which now is the party that won the elections on the 10th of April, and I'll explain to you in a bit what the tension is.
He said that they have communist tendencies, that they are pro-North Korea, and that he has to declare martial law in order to combat their evil and devious ways.
Isn't the newly elected government profoundly anti-feminist, which has prompted the 4B movement?
Am I thinking of the correct ones?
Well, I think that it's a little bit more complicated.
His party was the right-wing party.
He won the 2022 presidential election, but he lost the 2024 national assembly election.
So what has happened here, as you see, is that the North Korean parliament has 300 seats, the government has 108 seats, the opposition has 192 seats, and the Democratic Party has 170 seats.
Right, so the president is now kind of a lame duck.
It's not exactly a lame duck, but you'll see that there is a huge gap between the president and the parliament, which they call National Assembly, and this has been a recipe for disaster.
Right, so what we can say from here is that the Democratic Party is winning and it's not that exactly that he had a landslide win in 2022. So he competed against the leader of the Democratic Party and won by 0.73%, which is a really short margin.
So he didn't have exactly a mandate that was based upon a landslide.
And also, it was a sort of rage vote.
He capitalized the rage that had captured South Koreans.
Is this the incel rage?
It's arranged about a lot of things.
It has to do with the gender policies of the previous government.
It has to do with the economic policies of the previous government.
It was the incels.
And it also has to do with some scandals, because there have been lots of scandals, some of them really gossipy.
They have a huge gossip value, some sex scandals in South Korea, and they took advantage of it.
I can see you simmering, just holding back the gossip right now.
I mean, we're in the news business, Harry.
This is true.
Right.
So what happened was that he didn't have a strong mandate, and now he lost the 2024 National Assembly election.
His party lost it, and this has caused lots of friction.
Also, a lot of people are saying that his wife has been involved into several scandals.
And that the opposition party is sort of making moves into the National Assembly to prosecute him and his wife.
They are accusing her of receiving gifts.
Reminds me of some people.
I'm not going to name names.
And also manipulating stocks.
So there are several accusations.
Right, so let us see what the martial law implies.
So there has been a really interesting account by Yejin Gim.
I think I pronounced it correctly.
Apologies if I do not.
She has just 83 posts, but she just amassed a huge following yesterday because a lot of people were essentially reading her thread.
And she had a massive thread.
And if you see here, she says a lot of stuff.
People agreed.
And she is talking about what the martial law implies, which involves a massive violation of civil liberties.
So I'm not going to say here.
Okay, so let's scroll down a bit.
So she's saying that this is the first martial law declared in the Republic of South Korea, which the last one was in 1979. There have been several martial laws declared before, but this is the first in the sort of Republic era of South Korea.
Right.
And she says here, for instance, the decree number one says all political activities are prohibited, including the activities of the National Assembly and local councils, political parties and political associations, as well as assemblies and demonstrations.
Essentially, it's control of the media.
They say all actions that deny or attempt to overthrow the liberal democratic system are prohibited, along with fake news, manipulation of public opinion and false agitation.
All media and publications will be under the control of martial law commands.
Strikes, slowdowns and assemblies that incite social disorder are prohibited.
All medical professionals who are on strike...
Or have left their medical posts, including medical residents, must return to their duties faithfully within 48 hours.
Violations will be punished.
And also measures will be taken to minimize inconvenience to law-abiding citizens, excluding anti-state forces and those seeking to overthrow the system.
Right, so what happened here is that we had the police trying to prevent people from walking into the National Assembly.
We see here some footage.
But it was a sort of half-hearted attempt.
Here we also have footage of the army storming into the Parliament through the parking.
They're running into the parking.
They're approaching the South Korean National Assembly.
Not in a hurry, are they?
Not exactly.
Yeah, it was entirely half-hearted.
Yeah, they didn't believe in it.
And that's one of the issues that, you know, obviously I'm not saying that this is what should happen, but...
People sort of know that if you are to carry something like that through, you need the support of the army.
You need an army that is enthusiastic with you.
The army doesn't seem to be at all enthusiastic with them, right?
They are storming into the...
We see footage here of them storming into the parliament.
They're breaking glasses.
Some people have described this as the reverse January 6th.
You see here footage they're breaking into the parliament.
We have...
Sorry, Connor, you were saying...
Why do they need to...
This is a very stupid question.
Why, if it's been placed under martial law, do they need to break into the windows of the park?
Why don't they use the front door?
Because there were many people inside, and the MPs were actually trying to prevent...
They were barricading the front door.
They were barricading the front door here.
Here we have the leader of the South Korean opposition party, Lee Jae-myung, I hope I pronounce it correctly, who is circulating a video in social media and he says essentially that this is just a really wrong move and that the president has acted without a mandate and it is sort of illegal.
And that there is no support and no basis to the accusations that they are pro-North Korea.
Right, so there was a voting...
Process.
The army couldn't provoke it.
I see Harry is sort of laughing here.
I don't know why.
Maybe you have a meme in mind?
It's not that I have a meme in mind.
I think this entire situation is a meme.
The president declares that he has executive authority and has declared martial law, and then the people who he's supposed to be saying are not in power anymore say, actually, we voted, we're in charge, and you're not.
And then everybody shrugs their shoulders and says...
Okay, guess we tried.
It's the most polite East Asian version of the coup.
Yeah, this is poor showing.
But I must say, because I'm a constitutionalist and I really like reading about constitutions and stuff, they do have a...
Constitutional clause that says that the Parliament can outvote the executive order if the majority votes for it.
So it's not that it was a coup on the side of the Parliament.
The Parliament is going to vote in favour of being out of a job.
Well, that's interesting because...
They've got the Ultimate Uno reverse card.
No, because it has to do ultimately with how you go about it and why you're doing it.
So, for instance, one of the major questions people had was, is he going to be a Cincinnatus or a Caesar?
Turned out, neither.
He was entirely...
He was a wet fart.
He's like an Alagabalus.
He's dead.
A huge F. Right.
So they voted 190 against zero.
And even people from his party voted against it.
Right.
So we have here a really good post.
It says, if you want to summarize the entire turn of events, this is the video.
And just look at it.
It shows how half-hearted the army was.
Guys, this was the first footage I saw of this, right?
I went on Twitter last night, and this had already been going on for two hours, and I see people, coup in South Korea!
Coup in South Korea!
They're overturning the government!
And I look at my phone, and this is the first video that came up, and I was like, there's a salaryman!
A salaryman is beating back the army!
You just know you, Da Man, from the military.
I found that hilarious because I think that it was the perfect momentum crasher.
There was a momentum of the soldier, I'm going to overthrow the Republic because I was ordered.
And then the guy said, no, just turn around.
Okay, fine, let's go.
A middle-aged man holding headlines.
I'm going to go back and watch TV. He's just like, no.
Yeah, so there are lots of people who rush into it and say, no, we need to end martial law, overthrow the...
Harry, I'm a populist.
I like this.
Why do you want to spoil the fun for me?
I'm not spoiling the fun for you.
I'm just thinking, no wonder the women in South Korea aren't attracted to the men, if that's the best that they've got.
I mean, come on.
Sorry, the guy with the...
You're not even willing to overthrow the government for me?
How badass is it if you're actually taking a video with your phone and a soldier comes your way, tries to take it and just throw them...
No, I'm assuming the soldier is the young man who doesn't have a girlfriend.
Right.
Do a 180 degree.
Do a U-turn.
The middle-aged man is probably married with children already.
The soldier who's the young man, no wonder he can't get a girlfriend.
Right, moving on, there was considerable confusion and we see some of the potential beneficiaries of the martial law were starting contemplating their benefits.
And we had people asking, do we have to go to work?
Are we going to university?
Is it time for a day off?
He declared a bank holiday.
Right.
So we have here the army just completely demoralized.
Not exactly, maybe.
It's not like they were enthusiastic about it.
They just go home.
Perhaps a stiletto heel march like the American army do might encourage some morale among the troops.
Yeah, so this was incredibly amateurish.
Perhaps the president of North Korea wants to offer South Korea apology, wants to subscribe to Lotus Eaters and check the Machiavelli's discourses on Levi Part 1 symposium that we did.
I like how you apologized to me as if I was South Korean.
I also like that Stelios is advertising his own series as, you want to really know how to overthrow a government?
Watch Symposium.
I'm just making...
I'm not saying that this should have happened.
I'm just saying...
I'm making a purely hypothetical.
If you want this, then you need to do that.
I'm not saying...
I hope not you should be watching.
Stelios is not giving government advice on how to overthrow it.
No, I'm not.
But as I've said, I am a constitutionalist and I believe in the constitution and I don't like absolutism.
You know this.
We know this.
Right.
Either way, this is the most low-T overthrow of a government I've ever seen.
Yeah, so we had really the plunging of the South Korean won against the US dollar after that was declared.
But then when it was revoked, things started looking better a bit.
And essentially, why did this happen?
It's too early to say.
And I don't want to be non-cautious.
I want to be cautious about it.
But essentially, it seems to me that there are three contingencies, three scenarios.
Number one, his rhetoric was sincere.
He actually believed that there has been a pro-North Korean faction in the parliament.
Number two, he wanted to completely divert attention in order to cover up something else.
Number three, it's both.
I really don't know.
I don't want to speculate because I'm really new into this.
I'm just laying out the facts.
Okay, we've got a couple of rumble rants.
There's one from WMMA Scene Now.
I don't know if that's a reference to something.
Many of the photos and videos of the South Korean coup are fake, according to them.
None of them show any snow outside when Seoul had record snowfall last week.
I can't comment as to that.
I have to say that the only thing I can comment on this is that some footage was not from yesterday.
I have seen some footage that was community noted and it says that this isn't from yesterday.
Yeah, the accounts that I saw were that there were quite a few fake photos going around, but all of the ones that Stelios has shown, I didn't see anybody debunking them.
Yes, and then there's two from Wesley, each for $5.
Nothing protects freedom quite like martial law.
Well, I do think that if you really did have a communist element within your government, you could take reasonable measures to exercise them, and that would need to be very illiberal.
However, it doesn't seem that this was either properly exercised here, or that the pretext was all on the up and up.
And number two from Wesley is I thought South Korea was declaring martial law until the Johnny Somali situation is taken care of.
I did see a lot of people joke, what's he done now?
I saw Josh say that Johnny Somali's been causing trouble in South Korea and all of a sudden they're declaring martial law.
Coincidence?
Diversity continues to be our strength.
Harry, take it away.
It was a great question.
Thank you very much.
So, I'm going to declare at the outset of this segment that by even engaging in the discourse and dialectic that I am about to, that I am engaging in hypocrisy.
I am a hypocrite in doing this.
Because I am fulfilling the other end of the dialectic which I say that people should not engage in at all.
But I am allowing myself to be a hypocrite so that I can warn other people that yes, online discourse, most of it, is completely worthless.
That's not to say that there isn't useful discourse that goes on online, but the vast majority of it, particularly centred on Twitter, is complete rubbish and should be stepped up.
Not only for your mental health, but for the health of discussion itself.
So I'm going to qualify this by saying that there are a few points of worthwhile discussion that you can have anywhere, but particularly online.
The first being that you can connect useful political actors together and facilitate real-world political action through that.
You can develop and discuss useful and practical ideas, so policy proposals, these sorts of things, you can test them.
You can find news online that you wouldn't necessarily be able to get anywhere else through the mainstream.
There are independent journalists that work on platforms like Twitter and like YouTube who report on things that the mainstream media want to keep away from you.
So that's all good.
And similarly, you can have insight into specialist subjects like history.
The best content I always find on platforms like Twitter are people going through history as long as they know their stuff.
You can find some great stuff on there.
And finally, something more personal to me would be discussion of Art, like music, films, games, poetry, literature, theatre, anything like that, because I believe that art is the expression of the soul and the way that humanity connects with the metaphysical reality that is outside of our material grasp.
So there are a few things I would say worthwhile discussions can easily be had.
But the problem is that Twitter in particular, and a lot of other online platforms, but Twitter specifically, incentivises bad communication and outrage farming for clicks in a way that completely diverts all attention From those useful forms of discourse and useful conversations that people can be having.
And sadly I have to say that it has got, in my opinion, worse since Elon Musk took over.
For two reasons.
One, monetisation, useful as it can be, has encouraged the sprouting up of lots of outrage farming accounts that post novel rubbish for the sake of getting attention or just outright fake news for the sake of getting attention because they can monetise it now.
And also...
The fact that on Twitter, right-wing Twitter in particular, all the Groypers were banned or heavily censored.
Since they have returned to the platform, they have made many conversations that I have seen indescribably worse through their presence.
That's not me saying that their principles or ideas necessarily require censorship.
That's me saying that their conduct and behaviour in any conversation...
Generally, drags the entire thing down into the mud.
This is why I never check comments.
I just pull the pin on the post and walk away and let that grenade detonate.
No, that's fine, but the discourse that goes on underneath them is real and does happen and does have effects.
So, to address the first thing, the slop that gets out.
Josh has had his total slop war recently with accounts like Inevitable West, and he's been doing a very good job because the problem is with a lot of the slop that gets posted.
And again, you could accuse us occasionally of posting slop.
We do have the new Daily Channel now, but we have incredibly high-quality slop, if you even want to call it that.
This is the premium pig trough.
Okay?
You can go to Twitter for your inevitable Wests that's full of grade Z rubbish.
Here, you get the triple S good stuff.
Alright?
Do you agree with me, gentlemen?
Yeah.
I mean, I second what you're saying about Twitter.
Yeah.
I think that it has gotten much worse.
I will say, and I'm addressing this because this platform and others do take a lot of the information that we get off of Twitter and a lot of discourse on the online right centres around the platform, which is why I'm focusing on it so much.
So you need to find a way to kind of make your timeline hygienic and avoid this stuff to avoid being taken down unnecessary corridors.
Exactly.
And I want to say that I have personally been attacked by a Twitter mob, like the ones that you mentioned.
I actually tried to put forward something to promote discourse on a topic, and no one cared to read what I was saying.
Everyone was just projecting things upon me that I never said.
And there were also threats.
I mean, I don't mind.
I think I should start doing what you were saying about the comment section, particularly when it's negative.
But also, at the end of the day, it's just people who are...
Who are often, let's just say angry, and they don't want to engage with the points.
I will say as well, and this might be controversial, but I think that prior to Elon Musk's takeover and the expansion of...
Well, the removal of a lot of the censorship guards that were on the platform.
Not that I agreed with them, certainly not that I agreed with some of the really questionable material that was freely available on the website and also the involvement of organizations like the FBI. But the fact that it wasn't quite so easy to just say anything you want in any way that you wanted meant that the people who did post on it did have to refine their arguments much more and avoid unnecessarily baiting for outrage.
So there was a bit more useful discourse.
In my experience, what I saw, it has ramped up.
I do think the financial incentive encourages slop, and it also encourages coordination between the slop accounts.
And unfortunately, and I admire Elon's purchase of the platform very much, he has amplified these accounts himself with just, wow, that's crazy, without needing to Check it.
I will step over the conversation about censorship a little bit because I don't agree with those parameters.
What I will suggest with people how to use Twitter is to usually I find the most successful nourishing content is actually off-platform stuff.
So if you're linking to other articles, you've got Screenshots of statistics from credible outlets.
You've got clips from longer-form podcasts with people making solid points.
People's sub-stacks where they put a lot of work into.
This is the only stuff that I really post.
I don't really get engaged in flame wars unless certain MPs decide to come for me.
And the only other thing that I will credit Twitter with is the innovative nature of Anon accounts who can use the system to its own advantage.
I'm thinking of RFH on one end and Cunley-Druckport on the other end.
Both make some hilarious...
I'm not expecting an RFH shout out here, but fair play.
She makes some great points.
That's your perspective, alright.
But yeah, that's the sort of worthwhile discourse that I'm talking about, because the anon accounts like the ones that you're talking about, RFH excluded, do generate meaningful and interesting discourse.
Even Kunle Drukpa, with his memeing, genuinely highlights excellent research and often acts as a sort of centre of mass for a lot of the genuinely great independent anonymous journalists that exist on the platform.
So I'll give absolute every credit for that.
I have to say also that I'm not pro-censorship.
And in a way, this is something that it was inevitable to happen.
And I think that Twitter with Elon is a massive experiment.
And you do get a lot of bad accounts, you know, throwing away sensationalist nonsense.
A lot of the time, it's the same video that they are reposting.
The problem is that Elon is constantly reposting a lot of this, and he is giving a massive boost to some bad accounts.
But we also have community notes.
Yes.
No, that's absolutely fair.
But for me, the absolute...
The prime example of the slob is something that has been addressed on the Daily Channel.
And I hate this, but I will bring it up.
It was the wifejack meme and the frenzy of discourse that surrounded this.
Now, my main problem with this is that for all of the controversy that this meme brought up, it is a horribly unfunny and mid-meme.
It is annoying things my wife says.
Fantastic.
We all...
Wow, it's so relatable.
Who cares?
I don't need to know that.
But if you're going to spread it, why does it have to be so controversial?
Because it's been around for ages.
It pops up every so often, reignites the same controversy over and over again.
It drags the conversation away from more interesting subjects.
Because for the past two weeks, the only thing people seem to have been talking about is this...
And, in doing so, I think, if there are infiltrators and bad actors who operate within our spheres, doesn't that just go to show how easy it is to drag some otherwise very deepened intellectual thinkers into this kind of deluge of nonsense, worthless discourse?
It shows how easily led people are as a mass, even when, supposedly, it is a dissident and intellectual mass.
Well, I must say, I have not experienced this phenomenon for the last two weeks whatsoever, because this entire discourse hasn't come up on my timeline, so it might be...
You're a lucky man.
Well, it might just be a function of your timeline.
No, this is on my following as well.
Not just going on the For You or anything like that.
Yeah, it's not on my following either.
It might just be the people that I follow.
But still, the people that I follow, I do try to actually cut it down to people who engage in worthwhile discourse.
So the fact that it still managed to find its way there anyway has been very frustrating.
And also the fact that some of those people, on one side you had the Groypers who revealed an incredibly disgusting, gross, anti-family streak where within days a lot of them were posting borderline fetish material.
I don't want to ask.
It was sadly being shared as screenshots online of people going, oh my god, can you believe they said this?
Well, you're amplifying it by asking that.
And then on the other side, you had the simps.
The simps saying, oh, it's cute and it's endearing.
No, it's not.
The whole point is that it's not cute, it's not fun, it's not endearing when your wife says, oh, where's that thing?
I put it somewhere safe.
Where is that?
I don't know.
I think you do have to learn to laugh about it a little bit, because otherwise...
No, it's annoying.
No, it is annoying, but you also have to accept sexual difference, otherwise you become frustrated by it, and you become the kinds of people that can't accept it.
You have to accept it, but you don't start to turn it into something that you enjoy happening.
Oh, it's so nice, it's so lovely when she forgets where all of my important things are.
It's so nice when she takes four hours to get ready for something after I only took five minutes.
Those aren't things that you enjoy, they're things that you tolerate in a relationship, right?
You don't romanticize them.
You acknowledge that if you want a proper, well-ordered society that's based around families, those are mundane things that are going to have to come with it, right?
You don't romanticize it.
I really found some of the simping on the other side quite annoying.
But either way, that was the absolute prime example of slop.
But then, you also get, muddying the discourse even further, I'm not going to say everybody involved in this is a bad faith actor, and I'm not going to say that you guys have to agree with me here, but I, understandably,
nobody's going to be surprised like this, have come to the conclusion, in my judgment, that James Lindsay is, at this point, a complete bad faith actor when it comes to engaging with people to his right on the political spectrum.
I do not think that he engages in any kind of worthwhile discourse with this anymore.
What he has kind of become, for a subset of people, is almost like a cult leader.
Where, to me, what he has done is he throws out very, very complicated sounding mumbo-jumbo, quoting a lot of different sources, oftentimes badly quoting them.
And then you as the audience are expected to think, wow, I have no idea what he's talking about.
That must mean he's smart.
And this has, sadly, caught a lot of people off, and then they go, okay, well, if he's so smart and I can't understand what he's saying, I must have to continually go to him for information so that I can better understand what he means and be smarter as a result of that.
And then they get snared into his kind of grasp.
I know I'm making him sound very evil and nefarious, but I do think that it's kind of the behaviour that he engages in.
Because if you listen to the actual content of what he says, for instance, in this trigonometry interview, when he's trying to explain what the woke right is, which is his big crusade for a while...
Most of it's nonsense, and the bits that aren't nonsense are the bits that he's cribbed from the philosophers that he's criticising that he says that he doesn't agree with and you shouldn't listen to.
So in this, he's trying to accuse the woke right, which almost certainly he thinks I am, probably thinks you are as well.
I don't know about you, Stelios, but you've been critical of him in the past as well, so he might even lump you in with that.
Well, I don't want to stop your point when you tell me I have to make some points here.
So first of all, I think yesterday James Lindsay had a feud with Karl.
Again.
Again.
And I wanted at some point them to come and talk together, but it seems to me that Lindsay and his followers were rude to Karl.
And I've publicly defended Karl.
If you want to see my last post, I'm defending Karl, despite the fact that I disagree with him on the theoretical, intellectual point he raises about Marxism and liberalism.
So it seems to me that what happened was that Karl responded with a tweet that was in good faith to a post by Konstantin Kissen.
And a lot of people started making fun out of Karl.
And at some point, Karl obviously started reacting to it.
And it's understandable, but he didn't start it.
And I get people telling me, well, you need to be intellectually honest.
Well, just look what Karl said and how people reacted to him and look at the time on Twitter.
Now, when it comes to this, it seems to me that we have two tribalisms.
And in a way, they are reinforcing each other.
And essentially, this is precisely what I try to stop by making a semantic post and by saying, we need to essentially think about this concept in this way and just diffuse the debate, diffuse the situation.
And a lot of people that was not from Lindsay's side really dogpiled on me.
So I have to, and people from the James Lindsay side did back me up on that issue.
So they had my back.
A lot of people from another side, they didn't, maybe because they stayed silent or because they participated into the attack on my post, which was exactly what you described in the beginning.
It was someone making The discourse, trying to put forward something in discourse and getting dog-billed by lots of people, some of whom are essentially some of the main crusaders of anti-slop.
Well, that's my point at the beginning of this.
What I want to say here is that yesterday the attack on Karl was rude, immoral, and counterproductive.
And yeah, that was wrong.
The point of the anti-slop thing, that's why I describe myself as a hypocrite at the beginning of this, right?
Because the dialectic is slop versus anti-slop.
There is a point where going anti-slop becomes its own form of slop, if you keep going on about it.
So I'm just trying to address it all here, and then I will try to avoid talking about it as much in the future.
What Lindsay tries to do, not exactly with a woke right and kissing, and my concept of it is not theirs.
I have explicitly said so.
It's attitudinal, and a lot of the people who dogpiled on Carl yesterday, they act like the woke.
That's actually what Lindsay says, though.
Have you watched the interview?
I haven't watched that interview.
It's just about the behaviour.
Literally, he added to the prefix woke.
I have my independent views.
People can go find it.
I don't want to start an argument, but to disagree with you, Given that woke to me, I think is best summed up by Tucker Carlson's gay race communism, I don't see it as being useful to attribute the term to a set of behavioural standards, more a set of actual beliefs about society, how it functions.
I have specifically said if you focus on the beliefs, it makes zero sense.
Check my post, rather than just becoming a screeching Karen, acting masculine, hiding behind layers of anonymity.
Right.
Either way, to address this, I'm not going to go through the clip.
And also, just let me say, the attack of kissing on you was wrong.
Oh, that was fine.
That was a little bit of fun.
Well, yeah.
Either way, this shows the poverty of James Lindsay's thought right here, because immediately in this clip, the first thing he does when Constantine Kisses asks him, what does it mean?
He says, well, it's a really broad, vague and poor term.
Okay, why are you using it then?
Well, it's because he is engaging in othering, he's engaging in tribalism.
He lists a load of philosophers that he doesn't like and lumps them all together, so he lists Carl Schmitt, Julius Evola, and James Burnham.
He clearly hasn't read them.
Because if he had read them, he would understand that Carl Schmitt's idea of friend-enemy, which he constantly goes on about, is not him prescribing that as the operating mode of politics, he's describing it as being the natural operating mode of politics, and James Lindsay himself is engaging in it in this clip and through use of the term.
He knows that people here woke and they think bad, so he's sticking it onto people to the right of him he doesn't like, so they think they're bad as well.
It's that simple.
Schmidt and Evelle don't have much overlap there.
I've read Evelle.
I really don't like him, actually.
I know that some in our spheres do really like him as some kind of Italian mystic.
I find his thought to be convoluted at best.
Also, Burnham, excellent political theory, neocon.
Neocon who actually did a lot to damage American culture through his work in the 1950s through the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
That's another discussion here.
But he calls Tucker Carlson woke right.
Again, he's got disagreements with him, so he's just...
Throwing the label out to try and stick it on people, and then he explains what he calls the woke right narrative of politics since the end of World War II. Which sounds a lot like my articles on the subject, which I've actually spoken to Constance in private about, so I do wonder if James has read them.
Yeah, but he basically says, oh, there was the post-war consensus following the end of the war, which has an operating principle of never again, never again, both in terms of a war on such a grand global scale, also on the persecution of the Jews, erects a cordon sanitaire around it, and has the expulsion of right-wing non-interventionalists from US politics, as conducted by Bill Buckley.
But the thing is, when he describes that, he tries to make it sound like it's some nonsense rubbish that's thrown out there.
That's true, well-documented, and Bill Buckley and others like him from the National Review...
Frank Meyer, specifically.
Frank Meyer.
He's a former liberal who said that the right is too hostile to liberals and libertarians, therefore we must disavow the Barry Goldwater types, the Pat Buchanan types, and focus more on fusionism.
This was documented by Yoram Hazoni, by the way, who I know James doesn't like, but he himself is Jewish.
And when James says one of the defining characteristics of the woke right is to blame everything on Jews, you're gonna have to tell the guy who says the post-war consensus and fusionism exist, who is a practicing and observant Jew, that he's blaming everything on the Jews.
Well, interestingly, when he got into this discussion and disagreement with Dave Smith on Twitter as well, Dave Smith, who I actually really like his show part of the problem, it's very good, he was disagreeing with him, I think it was on the Israel-Palestine conflict, because Dave is a very, very principled anti-war guy.
Right.
So, because of the fact that he wasn't all-in on support for Israel's action in Gaza, James Lindsay responded to him saying, well, I know you're Jew-ish.
And Dave Smith is Jewish and was like, what the hell do you mean?
Do you think I'm some kind of self-hating Jew or something?
I think Dave Smith's also a converted Catholic.
James Lindsay isn't Jewish.
Why does he consider himself an authority on policing the bounds of what isn't Jewish?
It was very strange behaviour.
On this, what I think he's saying is that if you take the woke, you see that they have several traits and they have a tendency of finding one group and blaming everything on that group.
And he says the same way that leftists are doing it for white, straight males, a lot of people on the right are doing it for Jewish people.
Tucker Colson isn't doing that though.
But what is the issue with this overexpansion is that sometimes you become the very problem you try to combat.
Because if you try to constantly say you're advocating liberty and you're defending liberalism because that's what he says.
You have to also practice what you preach.
You can't just constantly avoid entering the discussion.
Constantly name-calling people.
And...
And we all know that whenever we have several taboo terms, it's very easy for people to do and demonize.
So, for instance, it is a fact that some people are too trigger-happy to say that criticizing, for instance, Israeli foreign policy is antisemitism.
Yeah.
If there is a sort of tribalistic approach towards the concept of the woke right, some legitimate criticisms could be seen as antisemitic or woke right.
Well, that seems to have been what he was throwing at Dave Smith, because there is a big difference.
Yeah, but this is a scare.
That's an alarmism that is excessive vigilance.
Excessive vigilance can be as bad as no vigilance at all.
There you go.
Whatever utility the term has, and I don't think it has any personally, he has expanded it to the point where he's accusing people of, like, Dave Smith, basically calling them anti-semitic.
He also calls them woke fascists, and so if he was to lump Dave Smith in there, who is an anarcho-capitalist libertarian who believes the state itself is immoral, And Oron McIntyre, who is not a Catholic as well, despite Lindsay accusing him of wanting to...
Trying to summon an angel?
No, summon a Zoroastrian demon in the guise of something.
That was it.
Makes much more sense.
None of these people hold any of the beliefs that he would ascribe to fascism if he had read fascism proper.
So he is engaging in what Eric Kaufman would call fascist scare, which is indistinguishable from the left-wing scare tactics that the woke actually use.
Okay.
I mean, if he wanted to understand more about what fascism actually is, he would be well served to go to the Jewish author Paul Gottfried's two studies on it, fascism and anti-fascism.
But he wouldn't do that because he's already branded Paul Gottfried as woke.
What?
Yes.
Oh, I'm just confused.
I know.
By the way, going back to the original point on the whole neocon thing, again, people like Bill Buckley worked alongside James Burnham, ironically enough, to start National Review, kicked out the John Birch Society from the right wing of US politics for being too extreme, by which he meant free market, non-interventionists, let's not get involved in foreign wars.
And then later on in the 90s kicked out other people of a similar bent like Pat Buchanan by accusing him of being an anti-Semite.
Well also, sorry, but on the post-war consensus thing, Rusty Reno has a great book on this.
He's an editor of First Things.
It's called Return of the Strong Gods.
I believe you and Dan spoke about it before.
Theodore Adorno, a member of the Frankfurt School, worked in American universities to develop the concept of an authoritarian personality.
That fed into denazification, and he said that...
Anything as innocuous as the nuclear family was itself leading ineluctably to fascism.
James has for the last six years talked about how the Frankfurt School were responsible for woke.
So if the Frankfurt School had an influence on American culture leading to the woke cultural revolution which parasitized the liberalism of the post-war era, How is James Lindsay not pointing to the post-war consensus leading to WOKE in that?
Because the post-war consensus, and I'm not disagreeing with you, the post-war consensus is a very abstract notion.
Not really.
When people are blaming it without specifying exactly which part, because there are many consensuses.
But the people that he's categorizing...
There isn't just one.
The people he's categorizing as woke right are pointing to specific parts.
For example, me, when he's dismissed as Carl Schmittian before...
I've written multiple articles on how the legacy of the post-war consensus, as set up by Winston Churchill, because he's often criticised as the architect of the post-war consensus, Winston Churchill would not have agreed with the extension of the ECHR and the UN Refugee Convention to, let's say, all the anti-Semitic mobs that are chanting Free Palestine when it was originally conceived of To protect Jews that had been expelled from Europe back to Nazi Germany.
That is the post-war consensus and its institutions being set up for one purpose and exhausting its purpose in another fashion.
That's a very specific charge.
But then he says, but the post-war consensus doesn't exist, and it's just a catch-all...
I'm pointing to specific examples there, and he would dismiss that as woke right.
Yeah, and what I want to say, and without wanting to take much time of Harry's segment, is just one thing.
We have debated many times liberalism and all sorts of stuff.
I've debated also Karl, Dan, We have had really good and high quality conversations.
Sometimes they were a bit heated, but you'd expect that.
But none of them disintegrated into what happened yesterday.
Just name calling.
Just name calling.
And I will say this, because I'm consistent and because my attitude, I am focusing on attitude, this kind of just name calling does seem pretty woke.
Just constantly not engaging into stuff.
Well, people have pointed out that if James Limsey says that it is a purely behavioural attitude, then he does engage in it through this kind of behaviour.
Either way, for my example of the post-war consensus, just examine the Cordon Sonnitaire and the facts that we had a perfect example of it earlier this year in France, where the National Front Party was about to seemingly win the election, and the Liberals aligned with the Communists to keep them out because anything to the right of Mao is Hitler equals the Holocaust 2.0.
That is, to me, what the whole post-war consensus seems to be focused on, is preventing any step to the right that could be seen as a snowball effect to get Hitler to.
Either way, moving on, in support of this, he wanted to prove how woke we all are by getting the Communist Manifesto published in a Christian nationalist publication.
So this was published in American Reformer, and I'm sure they do good work.
I've never heard of them before.
Many people hadn't heard of them before.
So for being a flagship publication, I think that's kind of not qualifying it for them.
But he says in the article that he links here, to put the conclusion out before I explain myself, I figured a good way to test the woke right for wokeness would be to submit a little hoax essay to what I presume is their flagship publication, American Reformer.
To produce this woke right hoax, I took a couple thousand words straight out of the manifesto of the Communist Party by Marx and Engels and lightly, lightly modified it into a woke right critique of liberalism, which the so-called woke right hate.
They published it, the Liberal Consensus and the New Christian Right, which you can find here.
And you'll see that they've added a little editor's note here where they explain exactly why they published it and their response to this.
So first of all, James, that was incredibly reddit.
Two, let's see what they had to say.
Editor's note, the following article was written by James Lindsay, who, as an avowed atheist, he's written two books on why believing in God is stupid, by the way, which is why he gets invited to Christian speaking tours, is not eligible for publication in American Reformer.
However, Mr. Lindsay originally submitted this article under the name Marcus Carlson, which was supposed to be very clever.
He is kind of funny.
Either way, Lindsay used a passage of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, stripping out its ideological substance but retaining its powerful rhetorical structure.
This was intended as a hoax, but it is seemingly poorly conceived given the undeniable power of Marx's rhetorical approach, as Lindsay himself acknowledged.
Everybody, critics of Marx or not, knows that, yeah, the Communist Manifesto, really great piece of rhetoric.
It's an effective piece of writing, yeah, whether you like it or not, which we all don't.
But also it's a pamphlet.
And I want to say this about right-wing critics of Marxism.
You can't base your knowledge of Marxism on the manifesto.
No, you need to read much deeper than that.
And also Peterson sometimes gives me the impression in his debate with Zizek.
He was constantly talking about the manifesto.
I think he's read more than just that.
Yeah, I mean, more is required.
He should have consulted Zizek's work at the time.
More is required.
But it carries on.
While we were unaware of its authorship and motive, it's still a reasonable aggregate of some new right ideas repackaged with the effect of rhetoric, and we have corrected its authorship properly to credit him.
We've published hundreds of new and less established writers over the last three years and our readership has grown exponentially with a lean editorial staff.
Gotta say congratulations to you guys.
Lindsay's exploitation of our high trust approach demands that we adopt a more restrictive screening process going forward.
That's disappointing.
Congratulations, James.
You might have actually prevented some aspiring writers from getting published in a decent publication right there.
Well basically you exploited the good faith nature of Christians who themselves, like I try to, exalt truth as a principle that isn't just instrumental.
I'm not shocked that an atheist would think lying doesn't actually carry any moral consequences.
But also, again, this is just another reheating of the hoax that made him famous in the first place.
Except this time, you know how the most famous one, I think, was that he changed out some words from Mein Kampf and just replaced the word Jew with white man?
And that was about all the editing he did, and it got published in some woke journals.
Feminist journal, specifically.
Yeah, feminist journal.
Well, guess what?
It wasn't just as simple as changing a word here or there.
If I scroll down here, as you'll see, he basically rewrote the whole thing.
The stuff in red is what he's rewritten.
Wow.
So, yeah, can you even say that he just changed it?
Oh, they published...
It's what he reframed.
Yeah, they published the Communist Manifesto, except you changed most of the words, you changed all of the context, which changes the complete meaning of it, which again means that what you're not writing is the Communist Manifesto.
You're writing something completely different, with a completely different intention and metaphysic behind it, except you're just using similar rhetoric.
But something to note, for instance, I think that this isn't the case for the first sentence.
It says, a rising spirit is haunting America, the spirit of a true Christian right.
That's a red line, but it doesn't seem to change fundamentally the meaning.
But I appreciate what you're saying.
If I was an editor looking at this from somebody who'd submitted it, I'd gone, oh, that's a nice homage.
You would just think, being as Connor has pointed out, that you're a bit high trust here, that what you're looking at is somebody who's chosen to write these ideas in a proven, effective rhetorical style.
Also, spirit and spectre are completely different words, and spirit has a specific meaning in the Christian context.
And, yeah, sure, it's similar sentence structure, but actually changing the words changes the entire meaning.
Because, for example, if we were to say the 1965 Civil Rights Act was discriminating against white men, then James Lindsay would call us woke right, even though it's true.
If we change the word white to black, it wouldn't make any bloody sense.
So it turns out, words actually have meaning and completely change the context with which you are speaking.
That's a shock.
But Carl, as you mentioned, got into a bit of a tiff with him, but I think this was the most important part to show, again, how poor James Lindsay's own rhetoric and his own thought is on these subjects, where James said, the fact is the fact, a leading publication on the so-called woke right published the exact same logical structure in much of the same language as Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto when it favoured their confession.
So Carl points out, doesn't mean that they're both communist arguments.
I want to say something because people completely neglect overlaps in this case.
So, for instance, one of the criticisms that I had people saying was, Karl doesn't distinguish between conservatism and Marxism.
No, he does.
It's just that in his mind, they overlap in some cases.
It doesn't make him a Marxist.
Also, to a level of abstraction, you could say that this characterizes all politics.
All politics disintegrates into groups with different interests battling each other.
Fighting for power, yes.
Exactly.
So once you abstract some elements, there is a common story there.
Just by showing the common story, you don't say that much.
But I have to be also fair to this.
It's just I haven't read the piece.
At some point I'll read it.
I want to see what's going on.
Either way, so my point in all of this is that there is a lot of worthless chatter that goes on online.
And there are also a lot of bad faith actors who will use rhetorical tricks and magical thinking to try to lead you down dead-end alleyways.
Okay?
So what you need to do if you're going to engage with it online is to make sure to be prepared and make sure that you are effectively set up to sort the wheat from the chaff because sadly the ratio there is about 20-80.
Excellent.
Let's go on to the video comments.
Sorry that took so long, Trent.
Yeah, we'll do the video comments first.
Helped someone last week who had slid on ice, gone into the kerb, bust the wheel and didn't have the tools to put the spare wheel on, so here's a reminder.
Make sure your tie iron is the right size and that it's long enough for you to get it off.
Think about getting a long bar, make it easier.
Make sure you have the right jack, nowhere to put it and make sure it actually lifts the car high enough.
And last of all, make sure that your spare wheel is pumped up and that it's actually right for the vehicle.
The Northern accent just really completes the pragmatism on display here.
That's all good advice.
Excellent.
Next one.
A couple of notes for the show.
So Harry did a good segment the other day on the crazy leftist guy on Twitter, and he was a bit confused as to why the guy said that Elon Musk was a drug addict.
It's probably because Elon Musk was prescribed ketamine for use in battling depression and anxiety.
And then the other thing is that on the podcast with Ben Habib, GH Warg left a comment that I wanted to signal boost, which I think he deserves because I kind of like his takes.
Okay, we will let Carl know about that.
It was good to see Ben on, actually.
I think we could have pressed a tiny bit more on the reform stuff, but obviously there's such time constraints to the podcast that perhaps another appearance.
I saw the clip that went up on the Daily Channel, and he seemed like a very interesting guest.
Ben's a good friend.
I'm seeing him later this week.
I think that if he were leading the...
Oh, right, piss off.
I think if he were leading the movement in this country, we'd be in a lot healthier place.
Because he's very sincere and receptive to criticism.
So, there we go.
We've got some rumble rents.
Marmline1.
Angry Stelios is very entertaining to watch.
I hope he's entering his Alexander the Great era, and I'm here for it.
There you go.
He's going to have to dye his hair blonde for that.
Yeah.
Don't cast pearls before swine, my friend.
Don't listen to the comments.
They're not worth it.
I don't like seeing you annoyed when you don't need to.
This is the thing.
Yeah, I mean...
It's alright.
I never forget.
Okay.
Bobobad.
It feels like this segment is a cautionary tale about becoming someone like James Lindsay.
Being terminally online and having too much arrogance to change or challenge your preconceptions and chasing demons.
I will say, regardless of me disagreeing with his philosophical points, which are thin, he needs to just get off Twitter.
Because all he does is reply to people constantly.
And it will drive you mad.
Threadnought.
He also needs to stop reading so much Marxist theory because he's starting to talk like them.
Wokeness slash socialism is a religion for atheists who can't live without religion but don't want to appear to be hypocrites.
It has original sin, a prayer, higher power, ritualistic human sacrifice, etc.
Maybe I need to do a show on this because I actually really disagree with the wokeness as a religion take because it's usually perpetuated by people who think that religion as a box is the problem and just needs to be done away with.
James Lindsay.
Yeah.
Or my friend Andrew Gold.
I disagree with him on this.
You're correct.
And the same goes for liberty and rights.
Hmm, okay.
Well, we should hash that out.
There you go.
Well, clearly, as he admitted, he doesn't really have much of a definition of it.
Discourse on X.
Two rules.
Remain calm and polite and bring receipts.
It drives the leftists into a foaming frenzy.
Yeah, this is what I do when I post.
That's a random name for $1.
The only deep, pertinent, productive political discourse I engage in are haikus such as this one.
I'm not reading that out. - Samson found it amusing, though.
I can hear him.
I'm sure he did.
Please don't put that sort of stuff that gets in trouble.
Also for $1, Fart Whiff.
Great name.
It says, Hit that thumbs up, you nerds.
Thanks, Dad.
A couple of comments before we wrap up.
From Garlic Goblin, I find it amusing how Rupert Lowe was a last-minute surprise at the general election, but he's rapidly becoming the most valuable MP in the Commons.
Also, fair play for being grown up enough to do a fair, positive appraisal or reform MP after your recent run-in with Tice caught up.
Well, yeah, the party is not one homogenous blob.
It's clear that there's dissent within the ranks.
There are wonderful people working there.
And my critique that Tice responded to, let's say, personally, needlessly...
It wasn't an attack.
It was trying to encourage reform to live up to their potential and actually it will just help them win.
But hopefully the message got through even if the messenger was shot.
Afray Bentos for every Haitian.
I'd love to see the figures on how many highly qualified or otherwise skilled young native British men have left for Australia and America.
That's actually a question that could be posed to Parliament.
We should get the data on that for our brain drain.
I'll forward that along.
Harry, or Selyos, actually.
Yeah, Selyos first.
Come on.
So, I do read the chat because it's you.
Aww.
Right, so Derek Power, if I listen to K-pop non-stop, I would start an insurrection to...
Very good.
Yeah.
Alex Ogo, I couldn't work out whether I should take seriously the threat of communism angle when the president invoked martial law.
Then I heard a translation of a protester talking about maintaining solidarity.
Communism confirmed.
Omar Awad, even if you are 100% sure they wouldn't pull the trigger, the clip of a woman trying to wrestle a rifle from military personnel was shocking to me.
I can't imagine the amount of privileged armour she must think she's wearing that it would protect her from an accidental discharge.
I saw that Financial Times polling where they looked at the gender gaps between men and women earlier this year, and South Korea is the most radically feminist.
I would be fascinated to know, if anyone can link us to resources, what the hell is going on there?
Yeah, and Sophie Liv, I'll read that carefully.
I'll check.
Thank you.
And Kevin Fox says, And South Korea thought Johnny Somali was a useless troublemaker.
If the leader wanted popular support, he would have been better off just having Johnny Somali being given a public birching to get the populace on side and ditch the martial law idea.
Harry, do you want to do a couple before we have to wrap up?
Yeah, Theodore Pinnock.
I've said before, woke right is just a phrase used by right-wing liberals, outraged that conservatives, non-liberal right-wingers exist to attack them for daring to not be liberal by accusing them of being the same as the woke authoritarians, conflating wokeism with illiberalism.
It's just a gate to keep in technical.
I will say as well, James Lindsay, I would not consider right-wing.
Also, yes, all wokeism is illiberal, not all illiberalism is woke.
And just one thing to say, if for anything, you could see it as a pejorative.
If you call me a shitlib, I'm not going to say basically that, okay, that's not a sensible term because there isn't a form of liberalism that abides by crap.
Come on.
I love you, man.
Someone online says, Lindsay stared into the abyss for too long and it melted his brain.
Certainly comes across like that, but I also think if you read cynical theories, there are some bits near the end of that that show what his actual views are, how he would like society to be run, which I do not agree with.
George Happ, the woke right doesn't exist, but the retard centrists are very much a thing.
Their strive to be a neutral observer of both sides is pushing them towards making absurd comparisons like Lindsay did.
also when you're trying to only ever occupy the center space we've seen over the past few decades that inevitably means that you get drawn left and left and left and left because that's where society the cultural tides go and finally the bonsall bomber says harry's lotus eater's daily slop is the top tier slop as he puts on a tie for his home recordings you're damn right we've got to enforce standards around here Very true.
I'm glad my colour revolution on the Lotus Eaters dress sense since I started two years ago has finally come to fruition.
The long march, ladies and gents.
Well, thank you very much, boys.
I thought it was a good, fun show.
We will be back tomorrow at 1 o'clock for the regularly scheduled podcast.
If you are a subscriber to thelotoseeaters.com and you're watching live, you can go over in 25 minutes to watch Tomlinson Talks or you can watch it on Catch Up.