Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eases episode 1057 on the 5th of December 2024.
Hope you're all doing well.
I'm your host Harry, joined today by Josh...
You're right there, Josh.
Oh, thank you.
There's not another Josh hiding behind you.
There's not.
Although, if you could find a better Josh, that would be much appreciated.
I've been trying to find a better Josh for many years.
And also, Beau.
Alright, how you doing?
Otherwise known as Ragnar Lothbrok at the moment.
And we also, behind the desk, have a very special guest today.
That is Mickey Mouse.
Do you want to say hello, Mickey?
Hello, everyone!
I hope you all had fun with that.
Today we're going to be talking about the Kenyan killdozer demolishing Haiti.
Is this like an international relief effort?
We've just sent in a man with a bulldozer to bulldoze the whole country.
Well, as it's about to be Christmas, I wanted to have a nice sort of positive segment, and I think the destruction of Haiti is something we can all get behind.
It's basically a giant landfill.
I can't think of any complaints.
We're also going to be talking about the collapse of the French government, which I think we'll figure out which collapse this is, because it's happened quite a few times, and then I'll also talk about how everybody hates Kemi.
Anything else we'd like to announce before we start, gentlemen?
Have a nice day.
Yes, alright then, so let's get on with it.
Okay, everyone knows that Haiti is not the best place to live, really.
I think that's fair to say.
And particularly since 2021, they've been very unstable.
Not that they were great before, and we'll look at that.
But in 2021, President Juvenel Moise, I think, was assassinated.
I think that's how you say his name.
Not like he's going to correct me.
He's dead.
And they've had a rotation of temporary rulers.
One of them went to the UN and drank from the water jug.
It was brilliant.
But what's happened is that armed gangs have sought to fill the power vacuum, and supposedly they've seized up to 85% of the capital Port-au-Prince already, so it's not looking good.
And let's remind ourselves of what Haiti is like.
Here is February of 2017, so even before the government collapsed, they were eating dirt.
And you can even go all the way back to, I think this was 2008, Where rising prices, or prices fall, and they're eating mud, or something or other.
Who cares?
What's the price of mud these days?
I don't know.
It grows in the ground.
Well, it doesn't grow.
And this suggests that you might actually be able to go to Haiti and sell mud to a Haitian.
You know that stuff you walk on?
That dirt?
Well, in Haiti, it's worth something.
First the Haitians, then we get the Eskimos.
That's right.
Sell the mice.
See what you're up to.
It's got to be dire straits to be eating mud.
I know that in the siege of Leningrad, or in Mao's Great Famine, Mao's Great Leap Forward, which resulted in a terrible famine, yeah, there's certain types of quote-unquote mud that you can eat.
But of course it's...
It's a horrible thing, yeah.
I'm being a bit facetious here.
I think what they do is they mix it with butter and maybe one or two other things.
Maybe sprinkle a little bit of salt in there if you want to be fancy with it.
The thing is, it's still terrible for you.
You still die slightly less quickly of starvation.
Apparently when you're starving to death, it's painful.
It really hurts.
It's actually a painful thing.
You don't just get a bit weak and then get drowsy and then fall unconscious and die.
No, it's really, really, really slow and apparently painful to the point where you'll put anything in your stomach, things that you know you can't digest, just to stop the pain, to try and stop the pain.
That's what they're doing it for, is to take away the pain from the hunger.
It's a terrible, terrible thing.
So you see conditions like this in Haiti of the streets and this is just open sewage flowing through the streets, lots of rubbish.
It's not exactly a modern paradise, we can say that.
While I was doing research for this segment, this is a bit of an aside, I noticed that there's a phenomenon of carrying around sticks like guns.
And you actually pointed me to this photo, Harry.
And at first I did think this was a rifle and I looked at it and I was like, hang on a minute, that's a stick.
Yeah, you kind of glaze over the image the first time and assume, oh, he's probably holding an AK. And then you look and you go, wait a second.
He's literally just, at least he's practicing good trigger discipline.
He's got his finger off of the trigger there as well.
What's the point of that?
What is actually happening?
Why would anyone do that?
Well, obviously there's a photographer right in front of him.
Do you reckon he was posing for the camera?
Who knows?
Or does he just walk around like that in the hopes that nobody notices?
Mm-hmm.
But my point in showing this as well is just the conditions of Haiti aren't the best.
And there's another stick here.
There's a lady holding more of a log, really, than a stick.
She looks nice.
Yeah, she looks friendly, doesn't she?
And also there was a marginal case here.
He was sort of just holding a stick.
But it was just a weird thing I observed.
I had to show the world.
But they do have actual guns, and lots of gangs holding them.
I wonder if I can scroll down a bit.
Yeah, there's AKs, and if you could zoom out a little bit, Samson, we can see that they've got more modern rifles as well, and there is a significant gang problem, and these gangs are armed, so the sticks are slightly misleading.
But I think that the gangs probably hoover up most of the guns because they look in pretty good nick, as far as I'm aware.
Maybe I'm going to get called out and just like, no, they're not.
You know, I'm not the biggest expert.
We're English.
Yeah, exactly.
You can't expect us to know these things.
I've shot more guns than most Englishmen, to be fair, so there is that.
I mean, you only need to shoot one gun.
I've shot many.
I've shot every variety.
Not every single gun in existence.
Well, you have been on holiday where you get to shoot guns.
And I've shot them here.
But, anyway, you may be familiar with General Barbecue.
I'm not.
No.
You don't know General Barbecue?
No.
What rock do you live under?
I'm in Swindon, so...
You'd be surprised to learn that's not his Christian name, because guess how he got it.
He wasn't christened Barbecue?
No.
Okay.
That would be a hell of a christen.
His real name is Jimmy Cherizier, I think, but he's called General Barbecue, and he is alleged to be the most powerful man in Haiti now, and he is a gang leader, and a very violent one, it seems.
But that was March of 2024, and he also said that he would take part in talks if invited, but warns that foreign forces will be treated as invaders.
And this is called foreshadowing.
So there have been some new developments as well.
This is somewhat old news.
This is March of 2024. But child recruitment in Haitian gangs is apparently at 70% amid rising violence and poverty.
This is UNICEF talking about this.
And apparently half of the country's armed gang members are now children.
So we're getting some proper Central African behaviour here.
And not only that, but the children who aren't in gangs are also being displaced, with 21,000 Haitians being displaced in just two weeks.
I think there are only 12 million people in the country as well, so that's a pretty high percentage.
Well, I don't know.
I think that it's just the places where the gang violence is going on, you just can't stay there, can you?
There's lots of shootings.
There's not a mass movement of people across to the Dominican Republic or anything?
Well, it's not necessarily the Dominican Republic they're going, because they built a big wall.
Oh, walls do work!
Oh, walls do work!
Oh, okay.
A friend of mine recently went on holiday to the Dominican Republic and said he had a lovely time, but there is still quite a lot of crime that goes on there, and that it is mainly committed by Haitians.
I'm not surprised.
So, General Barbecue, in his strategic genius, recently carried out a raid, and that resulted in 28 of his gang members getting shot.
And do you know what genius strategic move he did before carrying out this surprise raid?
He announced it on social media.
My enemies don't have Twitter.
I don't think he posted it on Twitter.
TikTok then?
I don't know.
Yeah, sorry.
Why only General Barbecue as well?
Why not make himself Field Marshal Barbecue?
Admiral Barbecue.
Yeah, High Admiral of the Fleet Barbecue.
I bet he throws a great party though.
I'm guessing he immolates people, burns people.
Is that why he's called Barbecue?
You're about to explain the origins of his name.
I've not actually looked into it.
Well, I mean, I'm only guessing that, yeah, he probably has cooked and eaten people, or at least cooked them.
I've heard it rumoured.
Mickey Mouse is confirming yes.
But it could also be that he is a mean host.
You know, he's very good at cooking up a barbecue and he's gained a reputation.
Who knows?
Just don't ask what the meat is.
That's true.
So going back to October of 2023, the United Nations voted in favour of an initiative which a Kenyan-led security force would keep the country as stable as possible on behalf of the UN. And Kenya sent over 400 police officers and,
as of recently, a further 600, so 1,000 Kenyan police officers, to Haiti, which isn't a big country in the first place, To help the domestic forces police the streets, because, obviously, it's not going too well.
And now I'm going to have to go on a littler side and talk about the Killdozer, because, of course, that's what you all want to hear about, isn't it, really?
You're all here for the Killdozer.
I know.
That's true, yeah.
But we've got some Killdozer action.
Oh, we've got some Killdozer action.
So, just to give you a quick rundown, the person you need to know in the Killdozer story is Marvin Heemeyer, who owned a muffler shop in Granby, Colorado, and his troubles began when a concrete factory was approved next to his business.
Which blocked off access to his muffler shop as well as cutting off the sewage services and he opposed the construction and appealed the building and wanted new access roads to get to his shop but unfortunately the local authorities ignored all of his efforts.
And then he basically said, well, if that's what you're going to do, over the course of 18 months, he transformed a bulldozer into an armoured vehicle with steel-reinforced concrete and bulletproof glass and placed external cameras on the outside of what has now been known as the Killdozer to be able to see outside of his, basically, a tank.
You know, like a sort of ad hoc tank.
And then on the 4th of June 2004, he used the Killdozer to demolish 13 buildings linked to those who had harmed him, including the concrete factory and the city council building.
And the SWAT teams tried to intervene, but the Killdozer couldn't be stopped.
And the rampage only ended when his vehicle got stuck in the foundation of a basement, and it couldn't move out of there.
And then eventually he took his own life while he was stuck in the kildoes, or apparently it was very hot in there as well.
And no other lives were lost in the incident.
I think he'd sealed himself in there.
He had, yeah.
Because he knew going in this was the last thing he was ever going to do.
And his final words were sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things.
Which is quite a good last word.
But here's a little clip of it, look.
There you can see it, inaction, demolishing a building.
Other than himself, I like that there were no fatalities.
It's like Terminator 2, when he's under orders not to actually kill anyone.
Mm-hmm.
No, I don't approve of killing people.
No, right.
Controversial, I know, but...
What a moderate you are.
I know.
Bit wet.
For a complete amateur job, well, it wasn't amateur, it was obviously new welding very well, to create something like that with external cameras and things.
It looks quite cool as well.
Look at all the steam coming off of it as well.
But this has obviously entered into the public consciousness.
People refer to him as the last American folk hero.
That's other people, definitely not me.
I would never advocate for this sort of action.
It reminds me somewhat of that man who hijacked a plane that had been left unattended from an airport, no one was in it, and then spent two hours flying it around and doing loop-de-loops in it, while speaking to the air traffic control, explaining, I think, if I remember the story correctly, that he had applied for these sorts of jobs and positions before, but had been denied them over and over again, probably off of the basis of DEI hiring practices.
What?
It was a long time ago, Harry.
DAEI has been in place a long time in America and then decided to fly himself into the ground and take his own life that way.
It reminds me...
Is that deliberate?
Yeah.
Okay.
Count Dankula's got a video on that as well, actually.
Okay.
Well, you can see that lots of people vary.
This is obviously a variation of the Gadsden flag, and there's another one here.
Don't make me do unreasonable things.
And people share this, as well as memes like this one.
Trump makes Killdozer, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
This is, of course, a bit of commentary on the fact that lots of Trump appointees...
Out to destroy the department they've been appointed head of, and fair enough.
Good thing, really.
And there's even, in development, a game that is being produced that Samson told me about this morning that I didn't know, but apparently quarter four of 2025, mark it on your calendars.
But anyway, enough of this setup.
On to the Kenyan Killdozer, because that's why we're all here, right?
So, the Kenyan police launched a surprise attack on barbecue, and what they did was they took their very own killdozer to his headquarters, and their killdozer has a flamethrower mounted on the front, which is pretty cool.
So here's the only video I've been able to find online of it.
Oh, that's...
It actually looks similar in design.
It does a bit.
It does look like a bulldozer.
If it's got the thing there...
If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?
You can hear the gunshots in the background.
There's another vehicle here that it's being filmed from.
But this is supposedly General Barbecue's headquarters.
So these are anti-barbecue forces?
They are, yes.
With flamethrowers on their way to cook General Barbecue.
The barbecue has become the barbecue.
I've seen pictures on the inside of the original one.
It doesn't look very nice.
I wouldn't want to be inside it.
They didn't weld these guys in, did they?
I don't think so.
I think they've got them out again.
To be fair, I don't think American SWAT teams are equivalent to Haitian gang members.
Not quite yet.
Give it a few more years of DEI. There you go.
So...
There are lots of articles here talking about them demolishing his gang headquarters, but the one thing that they wanted to happen didn't, because he escaped the ambush.
He managed to escape the killdozer.
I don't know how, because it was so subtle.
But he's still on the large, still grilling to this day.
Haiti's like an open-air video game.
There's constant chaos, people are battling in the streets, you literally have a big boss bad guy called General Barbecue, and at the end of the level he manages to get away after you've stormed his base.
Are we sure this isn't like Far Cry Haiti?
Yeah, they're missing a trick, really.
They could just cover the real-life stories that come out of Haiti.
Get Wycliffe Jean over there, that's what I say.
He'll sort everything out.
Who's that again?
That name rings a bell.
The recording artist, Wycliffe Sean.
He's also like half Haitian or something.
He was in Fugees, wasn't he?
He was in the Fugees.
Okay.
He's done some songs, maybe quite a few years ago now.
He ran for president of Haiti years ago, or tried to, and didn't win or was blocked from being able to do it.
But I say he could sort everything out.
He could sort everything out.
They need some kind of ruler at the minute.
Well, he's what, like some kind of rapper and singer, maybe they can go over and get him to sing some soulful music to them, calm everyone down.
Or maybe switch to some disco, get everyone dancing.
So, the Associated Press and many others have been reporting that this was sort of the last hurrah in the current efforts, the Kenyan-led efforts.
To capture barbecue or kill barbecue and restore order to Haiti.
And they're sort of not sure what to do now.
I'm going to read a little bit from this.
The government is anemic.
The UN-backed mission that supports Haiti's understaffed police department lacks funding and personnel and gangs now control 85% of the capital.
Then on Wednesday, another blow.
Doctors Without Borders announced it was suspending critical care in Port-au-Prince as it accused police of targeting its staff and patients.
So that's another complex aspect to the narrative, including threats of rape and death.
It's the first time the aid group has stopped working with new patients since it began operating in Haiti more than 30 years ago.
So it might get even worse in Haiti than it already was as well.
And in fact, it's got so bad that the UN has evacuated its staff from Haiti as of late November because the gang's control is basically almost total.
So General Barbecue is sort of on the way to becoming the de facto ruler of Haiti just by military might alone.
Well, might is a strong word.
Hmm.
I mean, as long as they don't try and invade the Dominican Republic or anything.
I would be surprised if that weren't.
I don't really care all that much about the wellbeing of a load of Haitians.
Is that horrible of me to say?
Well, I would rather them live in a more civilised way than...
That's not gonna happen.
Not unless we send the French back to Haiti to administer...
Well, I don't think they've got necessarily the political will, because Macron has claimed it was the Haitians who killed Haiti, and do you know what else he said?
I mean, that's true.
He also called Haitians complete morons.
Every so often Macron comes out with something that makes me go like, I want to like you for this, but you're Emmanuel Macron, so I can't.
And he's not wrong.
The average IQ in Haiti is 67, and Jeremy Kaufman breaks down.
With an IQ of 67 or below, the average Haitian, or over half the country, That is enough to be a below average janitor.
So not even a good janitor.
A quite bad one.
And he said this is the level of intelligence of poor urban areas in America.
And that is, again, a bit of foreshadowing.
And that's why they needed to be dropped into Ohio.
Because, of course, many Americans will be concerned about the sort of civilizational level in Haiti because, of course, there are things like this.
So the Biden administration, obviously, when they were still doing things, ran an advertising campaign in Haiti on how to leave Haiti and come to the United States, and apparently 600,000 listeners listened per broadcast, and they have a population of around 12 million.
That's massive.
An IQ of 67 is disastrous.
If people think about what you just said there, that you're unable to understand cause and effect.
So, without any exaggeration, that is sort of the level of a beast or something.
If you're 67, then you probably won't be able to read or write.
Can't really take instruction.
I know the US Army have a minimum IQ, because if you can't take instruction, you're no good to anyone.
And if you're illiterate as well, if you can't understand cause and effect, what is that?
What are you supposed to do with that?
You can't really do a lot.
It's one of those situations where I don't see any way out, really, other than sort of walling it up and waiting to see what happens.
Put a load of phone cameras in there.
That's true, yeah.
Turn it into a game show.
Raise some money.
Raise some money, put it towards supplies at least.
I don't know.
What, air dropping more guns for them?
A bit like one of those Battle Royale video games, you know, the supplies drop from the sky.
Even a sheepdog can understand cause and effect, right?
To a certain extent, yeah.
To a certain extent.
But, of course, in the US, you have lots of Haitian migration.
There's apparently just over one million Haitian immigrants living in the US, and apparently three-quarters of a million of them came in just 2022. So it could be that there are even more than that after the last...
This was the 2023 American Community Survey.
And so we know how many of them came across in 2024 because there were all those Haitians in Ohio, weren't they?
They're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs, that one that Trump was famous for saying.
And so there is obviously a very human cost to this that is bore by the surrounding countries that they emigrate to.
And so, although I don't agree that they should be allowed into these countries in the first place because, you know, they're not going to do any good, I think there's also a point of concern that if Haiti fails and there are just waves upon waves of Haitians coming into your country, that is a very real threat, isn't it?
The Haitian Migration Proclamation is no good to anybody.
What's funny?
Nothing, actually.
And the final thing I wanted to end on is that now there is a critical mass of Haitians in America, they're now trying to install themselves into the foundation myth of the United States itself.
And this is a Haitian here saying, Senator J.D. Vance is wrong.
He's now actually Vice President-elect J.D. Vance.
And Haitians aren't a drag on this country.
We have been building America from the very beginning.
So there were Haitians, apparently, in Native American tribes.
Or maybe they were there on the Mayflower.
Pont de Sable, Sable, whatever, the Haitian founder of Chicago.
Beau, can I get a fact check on that, please?
Did a Haitian found Chicago?
That's also a weird claim to fame, considering Chicago is one of the crime capitals of the United States.
Well, only parts of Chicago.
That's true.
You'll never guess which.
Is it the ghettos, by any chance?
Bang on the money there.
Yeah, well, Google says it's true, so it must be true.
And we are part of this nation's progress, he says, and my family's story is just one thread in that tapestry.
But my point being here that Haiti is bad and you don't want it coming to your neighbourhood.
We've got some comments here.
Let's have a look-see.
I demand a Christmas version of the intro and outro music.
That's not a bad idea.
Samson says next week.
Bo, glad to see you're feeling better.
Thank you.
That was Dragon Lady Chris.
It was going to be on on Monday, but it was under the weather.
Of course, yeah.
What's this?
Jean-Baptiste Point Disable recognises the first permanent non-native settler of what would later become Chicago and is recognised as the city's founder.
Source some book from 2005. So BS then.
It sounds like BS to me.
So, Daveyverse says, Mr. Barbecue the third was found to have cooked a victim and ate a piece of them to intimidate a rival, fought to, did this one more occasion, only on one recorded case.
So, you know, you eat one person and it follows you around wherever you go.
You cannibalise another human being one time.
And it never leaves.
Come on!
They don't say gang leader barbecue, do they?
They call me General Barbecue because I ate someone.
To be fair, if I eat somebody, does that come with the general title?
Do I automatically get qualified as a general?
That's how we recruit generals in Britain.
We only hire cannibals.
You have to eat the other people applying for generals.
That's how you harness their power.
I don't mind cannibalising people as long as I've got a decent barbecue sauce to go with it.
That's my line in the sand.
I get some reggae reggae sauce.
Nice centrist position there.
You and the Papua New Guineans.
You're both moderates, both wets, clearly.
Boba Bad says General Barbecue announced on his Fortnite server that his flash mob would do the gritty on government forces but was handily repelled by twerking Thanos and Goku and a new character Killdozer I might actually play Fortnite if they add Killdozer in and a question for Bo if you're stuck in Haiti which would you choose between two big knives with chains a big axe you can throw or a massive sword red tattoos are mandatory of course Got
to go with the sword, really.
Can you not get a gun?
Yeah.
Why is gun not a choice there?
Ideally a belt-fed M60 with endless ammo and a bipod, but I'll take the sword.
The best I can do is a stick.
Is it in the shape, the vague shape of a rifle, though?
It will be, yeah.
Okay.
Okay, you might be able to scare some off.
I like the specifiers you can throw the axe.
You can't throw any of this.
The sword's not throwable, but the axe, you can throw it.
They come with throwing permission.
At which point, you've not got a weapon and you're screwed.
Yeah.
So yeah, that's my third choice, is the throwing axe, the throwing hatchet.
No, a sword, a decent sword, like a decent samurai sword or something.
That's a formidable, formidable weapon, I would say.
I'd just get Claymore.
I'm glad we're settling the important questions.
No, no, no.
Yeah.
Yeah, but you're big enough to actually will declare your property.
Yeah, that'd be awesome, though.
You remember those scenes from Game of Thrones where, like, the mountains cleaving people straight in half?
Do that, except it's a gang of, like, four or five Haitians coming at me all in one swipe.
That'd be awesome.
Literally clearing swathes through the crowd.
Anyway, what were you talking about with France?
Oh, yeah, can I get the mouse then, please?
Of course you can.
That wasn't far enough.
There you go.
What did I do there?
You opened a new tab.
Samson, took me out.
Beau's going to figure out his segment here and now.
He's going to start Googling.
Okay, so...
France has fallen again.
What time is this now?
Yeah, for like the umpteenth time.
No, it hasn't formed, but their government has collapsed.
So I thought we could talk about that, because it's, you know, not the biggest of deals ever, but it's worth mentioning at least.
Just double-checking, this was the coalition government that formed explicitly to keep Le Pen out, right?
Because it was a coalition of liberals and communists to make sure that they didn't get as much representation as they needed.
So I was going to save that point towards the end, but it is the crux of it, so let's just say that now.
The only reason why the government was so doddery in the first place, why it was so easy for it to collapse at all, is because it is a government built on foundations of sand, basically, isn't it?
I mean, there's no majority of any given faction or party in their lower house, their assembly.
So France has both a prime minister and a president, doesn't it?
And so Barnier was the prime minister.
Macron is the president.
So let's make that clear right away because in Britain and in America we've got a different system.
Obviously their president is the head of government and the head of state.
Here our prime minister is the head of government and it's the king that's head of state.
In France their president Macron is the head of state, not the head of government.
So, in other words, the whole point of saying all of that is that their Prime Minister, Michel Barnier, and his government collapsed.
But that doesn't affect Macron.
Well, not directly.
Macron's not going to be, isn't ousted as president, head of state, or anything like that.
It does make his political position more tenuous than it already was.
But this doesn't mean that Macron is going to go, necessarily, in the immediate future.
But we'll talk about what repercussions it will have for his career.
Anyway.
So Bernier, if anyone remembers, our American audience might not, probably wouldn't, but Brits might, that he was the lead, one of the lead EU negotiators when we had Brexit.
So he is sort of an arch pro-European type.
No wonder Macron chose him to be his Prime Minister.
So, the story is that what happened is he was doing a budget, and it was just extremely unpopular by everyone else.
There's three main factions in France, in the French Assembly.
There's sort of the pro-Macronist centrists, sort of left-of-centre, centrist types.
There's sort of the more left-wing.
What's that called?
It's the new popular front.
And then there's Le Pen's right-leaning, semi-right-leaning.
But of course the mainstream media always call them far-right.
Well, it's confusing as well because all of the parties in France are economically left-wing.
There's no economically right-wing party in France.
It just varies on the social dimension.
I can't even speak.
Le Pen and National Rally are not particularly all that right-wing.
Yeah, they're socialistic.
They're certainly not far right.
That isn't, well, by the old school use of the definition, far right, they're not.
But of course the mainstream media always say that, don't they?
Always.
Nonetheless, the left and the right, the New Popular Front and National Rally, both were against Macron's leftist centrism, and that's what Barnier represents, just trying to carry on whilst France falls off a cliff in all sorts of ways.
Macron and someone like Barnier just want to keep going with that, and they've had enough of it.
So he released a budget where he was trying to actually, from what I gather anyway, trying to do something mildly prudent.
He was trying to reduce the French deficit, national deficit, to the tune of 50 odd billion pounds.
God knows what that would be in Euros.
So he was actually trying to do something mildly conservative with a small c, fiscally speaking.
But neither side was particularly happy with that.
And so when it became clear that he wasn't going to be able to sort of get it through, even their lower house, the Assembly, he just sort of used emergency powers, quote-unquote emergency powers measures, to force it through.
So it hadn't been voted on and agreed by the Assembly.
And so that was sort of, that was the final straw for a lot of the people in the Assembly.
And so they had a vote of no confidence against him and his government.
They needed 288 votes and got 331. So in the scheme thing, it's not even that close.
They got it quite easily.
And so he is obliged to resign, which he's done.
He'll still be caretaker Prime Minister for a fair few weeks now, commentators are saying, while Macron picked someone new.
But, you know, this hasn't happened in France.
This is a fairly rare thing, this, to happen in Western countries, in France, certainly.
It hasn't happened since the 60s.
It's 60-odd years since something like this last happened.
It's quite some time in politics, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's quite embarrassing.
Obviously, it's quite embarrassing, isn't it, when you have to resign?
I mean, he's French to start off with, but it's bad enough.
Yeah.
Well, I think also I'm going to revel in his humiliation because of his role as the negotiator for the EU in Brexit.
And what I can remember, at least, he was a bit of a stick in the mud.
Yeah, he was a complete dick.
Yeah, he's no friend of ours.
He's no friend of ours.
Absolutely.
No, he would have done anything or everything to undermine our ability to leave the EU and did.
So his term as Prime Minister was only three months long.
So again, an embarrassment for him and Macron.
Yeah, a bit of a fail.
Okay, so Le Pen said that it was, quote, the only dignified solution to have a vote of no confidence in him.
She said that the budget was toxic for the French and there's simply, quote, no other solution.
To this.
So, another point to make about France is that the last election they had, the one we mentioned, where it was a stitch-up, really.
Bit of a stitch.
I mean, a legal one, but still a stitch-up to keep...
Yeah, they stayed in the bounds, but what they did was sort of...
It seemed sort of, in a moral sense, cheating.
But even though it was acceptable within the rules of French democracy, they basically colluded with one another to...
Kick out Le Pen's national rally from any constituency.
They had a chance of winning by selectively removing candidates.
This is the point of a lot of European democratic politics in the first place, right?
It's the whole idea of the cordon sanitaire.
Just keep the far right out.
Keep Hitler 2.0, which is obviously Le Pen.
Marine Le Pen was going to send them back and do all of those evil Nazi things.
That's the whole point of it.
Even if it would just be like a baby step maybe in the direction that you think could lead to Auschwitz too.
Stop it.
We need to ally with communists over and over and over again.
Well, they push this far-right thing all the time and they call people far more extreme than they actually are to make, this is my personal theory, to make the people who would otherwise support them think that they're going to be more radical than they actually are.
And I think actually a lot of these politicians in Europe, these so-called far-right politicians, Are actually not far right at all and in many ways are sometimes actively left-wing.
Like, people were saying Georgia Maloney is fascist and extremely far right and she's still increasing immigration, still not done anything about it.
Well, there's two purposes for that sort of thing.
I think one, yeah, it's to push some people away and I think it's also to try and trick people into a form of containment because people are so sick of how European politics have been going for so long.
If you tell someone that, oh, you can vote for a radical, they go, thank God, I want radical solutions to the problems that we've got, and they vote for them, and they get neoliberalism as usual.
So in the last election, it was, Macron called it a snap election, hoping to sort of undermine or undercut Le Pen and national rally, and yeah, even though it was legal, yeah, there was all sorts of leftist coalition Anyway, the net result of all of that was, as I say, there's no majority of any single party or faction in the Assembly, which means that there will be some sort of a stalemate in their legislature.
And at the first possible opportunity, legally, under the French Constitution, isn't until summer next year.
July is the first possible time.
So, in other words, the whole time between now and then will probably be a bit of a shitshow for the French government.
Macron will pick someone else and he'll be as weak as can be.
He'll be like a Barnier type figure, try and do things, won't be able to.
If he tries to force anything through, he'll probably face another vote of no confidence to the tune of 330 odd people ousting him.
So it's just going to be a holding pattern and stagnation for French government until summer next year, if another election is called at that earliest possible opportunity, which doesn't necessarily have to be.
Macron could just hold on for longer if he wanted to, if he's happy to watch his country just burn and disintegrate and implode, which it seems he is because that's what he's been doing ever since he ever got into power.
It's also worth pointing out that when he called that snap election, he was actually quite unpopular in the polls and everyone was saying at the time, what is he doing?
Why is he doing this?
So obviously he knew in advance that he'd arranged this agreement with the far left to keep the pen out, who actually got the most in the popular vote as well, despite coming third in the election in terms of seats.
I think it was something that was arranged because they had a few rounds of voting and after the first round I think it became very very clear that Le Pen was going to get through and so they tactically took certain seats where the leftist vote would have been split between the centrists and the communists and then tactically removed some candidates to try and force them out so the leftist vote could be more concentrated.
That is exactly how it went down.
And it's just, again, nothing actually illegal or unconstitutional, but scummy, and highlights the fact that there are just those types of loopholes to be taken advantage of.
It's a point of democracy, really, isn't it?
Just like in Germany, anything or anything will be done to keep the AFD out.
Any sort of weird coalition to prevent AFD from gaining power at all costs.
Just like they tried to do with Gert Wilders in Holland.
It's funny that, because in Germany, obviously, they're trying to ban the AFD, and with Wilders, they only agreed to the coalition if he wasn't their prime minister.
So they've actually got someone who wasn't a politician as prime minister to make the coalition work.
Dick Schoof, that's his name.
Pardon?
That's his name.
One more time?
Dick Shoof.
And you know the same would happen here if reform got...
If there was no clear leader and reform was wet as they are, if they were able to be in a position to try and form some sort of coalition government with one of the other parties, they would just refuse to and form any sort of coalition, no matter how nonsensical it was politically, ideologically, to just keep...
The far right out of power.
Even though they're not in the far right.
I reckon they might go into coalition with the Tories.
Maybe.
Well, there's so many ex-Tories looking to them already, aren't there?
It's basically just like an extracurricular club for Conservatives, isn't it?
At this point, the Reform Party.
It's like the naughty step for them.
It is, yeah.
You've been naughty.
Sit on the naughty step.
Sit with Nigel.
Alright.
Um...
So Barnier himself said, he basically said, look, I haven't done this out of spite or anything.
France actually needs this budget.
Come on.
He's quoted as saying, we have reached a moment of truth, of responsibility.
We need to look at the realities of our debt.
I did not present almost exclusively difficult measures because I wanted to.
That's a fair point, actually, isn't it?
You can't really fault it for saying that.
Yeah, yeah, it's not doing it out of spite, obviously.
I give him some credit that he's trying to do what he thought was the right thing, I suppose.
I mean, I have some recommendations personally, but there's going to be a lot of unemployed bureaucrats.
So Macron apparently is going to address the issue this evening, I believe.
He was on some sort of state visit to Saudi Arabia, and he was on his way back because his government has fallen.
And so, probably the last thing to talk about and mention is, what does this mean for Macron himself?
Well, it is sort of politically damaging, of course.
Not only does it mean that whatever government he puts together next will almost certainly be extremely weak, It is sort of a death knell, isn't it?
The bell is tolling for the end of his political career, right?
I agree.
Macron has proven to be a bit of a cockroach though, hasn't he?
Yeah.
He's weathered a lot.
He seems to always manage to scrape through somehow, so...
Yeah.
People saying, obviously the questions come thinking fast, don't they?
Mr Macron, Mr Macron, what does this mean for, are you going to resign?
You know, trying to put, people like Le Pen, and even the far left in France, trying to put pressure on him to just resign.
This is so embarrassing, surely you should resign, do the right thing.
But he's just saying, no, of course, no, no way, of course not.
He's the type of politician, like most politicians really, will never give up on the game until it gives up on him.
Would never resign unless he absolutely had to.
He said it was sort of, what did he call it, make-believe politics that he's going to resign or that there will be a new French president in the next few days or weeks.
I like to think of it as being forced to resign is humiliating and if you're egocentric enough to assume the highest office in your country then you're probably going to avoid that as much as possible even if it makes you hated it's better than admitting defeat and I think that's the psychology that often plays on the individual's mind but of course it's never just up to them and whether they want to do it or not there are lots of forces that determine whether you stay in the position Having
to resign purely out of political humiliation is quite rare.
In America, for example, it's only ever happened to Richard Nixon.
He was almost certainly going to get impeached and then probably have to face a trial.
So instead of that, he resigned.
He's the only one.
You know, you take someone like Tony Blair, he sort of resigned, but it wasn't the same thing.
It wasn't out of political humiliation as such.
It was because he'd had all sorts of deal.
There was some sort of, he should have moved aside even earlier, really, for Gordon Brown.
And so just to be so humiliated in a political sense that you have to resign is rare.
And I think most politicians would rather just crawl on as a lame duck, just crawl on with a really, really weak government and just pay out your time rather than that.
That's sort of the worst it could be.
To have to do that.
I imagine there must be a bit of a sunk cost fallacy of, well, I've come this far, so, you know, how much more worse can it get?
France is already burning down and imploding and ruined in all sorts of senses, so what's another six months matter?
And really France ended in what?
1789, would you say?
It's been all downhill since there.
Also on Nixon, wasn't it just Watergate that forced him to resign?
He made a big mistake there.
He was forced to resign in all the scandal of spying on people's phone calls.
He should have just passed the Patriot Act.
Actually, it's legal for me to do that now.
It's fine for me to do that.
You can't do that anymore.
You don't get people resigning for spying on people anymore.
It's just like, yes, I'm spying on you.
Do you have anything to hide?
Why are you concerned about it?
They sort of gaslight you.
It's like, yes, I'm watching you.
Always.
Well, it wasn't just the Walter Gate...
That's Josh, personally, actually.
It wasn't just the Walter Gate break-in.
If anyone's interested, there's a multiple-part series on the YouTube channel, History Bro.
Who's that?
It's just an excellent history channel.
Yeah, this is an independent review.
This is not affiliated with anyone on this panel.
No.
But there is a multiple part series on there all about Watergate.
And it's not actually really the break-in.
It seems like Nixon didn't directly audit it.
It's that he lied about it.
It's that he said he had nothing to do with it.
Didn't know anything about it.
Didn't set the FBI to try and call off the CIA or all those things.
And those things were shown to be liars.
That he had lied to the public on camera multiple, multiple times.
So really, he really should have just admitted it and then made it law that he was able to do that.
Yeah.
America's a better place.
Okay, in Le Monde, a leading French newspaper, someone who's very close to the national rally leadership, an advisor to them, said of, he's talking about Barnier, but also basically talking about Macron's time in power.
That he's, quote, a fallen Republican monarch advancing with his shirt open and a rope around his neck up to the next dissolution of Parliament, i.e.
up to the next election.
That, yeah, Macron is now just, he's just waiting, it's just a stay of execution, this really, politically speaking.
And so he's done, right?
He will almost certainly lose his position at the next election, whether it's in July next year or whenever it is.
Because he's already incredibly popular, and this is just another straw on the already broken camel's back, really.
Of course, being sarcastic there, he's very, very unpopular, isn't he?
I mean, he's been there for quite some while now, hasn't he?
Quite a few years now.
Yeah, he's going to need to move aside, let someone else do it.
Was it 2015 he got in?
I can't remember the exact date, but that sounds about right.
That feels right.
And look at how well France has been going since.
So maybe next summer will be Marine Le Pen's time.
Maybe.
We'll see.
She can let us down.
2017, apparently.
Oh, okay.
Alright, a few years off.
A lot of bad innings for a French president.
There's obviously no de Gaulle.
Still got his head on his shoulders, that's a start.
It is embarrassing that over the past few days there have been all of these headlines about us.
South Korean coup, Macron, French government collapse, and it's all just so disappointing when you start to look at the reality of this, isn't it?
Just all a bit boring.
Everything seems to collapse and reassembles itself as neoliberalism again, doesn't it?
South Korea has the most low testosterone failed coup I've ever seen in my life.
Sort of milled about, didn't they?
Yeah, they got pushed back by middle-aged bureaucrats, and France is just like, oh, okay, no economic reforms here.
Switch a few people around, sort of.
Okay, so a few comments then.
DragonLadyChris says, That's probably actually true, to be honest.
Are you saying something remotely positive about the British government?
It doesn't have to be either or.
They can both be equally abysmal.
No, I think we're still better.
Him in the second stream, though, that's funny.
The Argevin Empire will make the king the king of England and France.
We'll make France great again.
Yeah.
As was ordained by God.
So that's a random name, says, In 2016, I was called a Nazi by my dysgenic French classmates for being openly pro-Trump.
They were pro-Macron and hated white people despite being white.
French?
Questionable.
Well, if you're pro-Macron, then you obviously hate yourself, don't you?
Also, the previous comment was a God of War reference.
The red tattoos and the weapons.
The knives on the chains.
I've not played good at all, I'm afraid.
The first three are great.
The fourth one was hyped up, praised critically, not as good.
I don't really game much, I'm afraid.
I haven't got a good enough computer.
Been playing Stalker 2 quite a lot.
Started playing Silent Hill 2 recently.
PS2 emulation, thank you very much.
Yeah, the last game I was really into was San Andreas on the PS2. That's gotta be, what, 20 years ago?
Yeah, 20 years ago, 2004. That is a good one, though.
It is a good one.
I've got a dusty Xbox 360 somewhere.
My older sister let me play San Andreas when I was about 8 years old.
That's some foul language, isn't it?
I didn't know you had an older sister.
Half-sister.
Okay.
She's 17 years older than me.
And that was one of the, you don't tell dad I let you do this, alright?
LAUGHTER Yeah, yeah.
So again, he didn't resign, but chose not to run again.
In fact, that's the reason why Dick Nixon got in.
Yeah, Dick Nixon.
He did win in a massive blowout.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, LBJ was extremely unpopular.
And what was that?
Dogbreath III? Interesting name.
I have long thought that we should have let the Germans keep France in 1945. Everything else in the post-war order, the exact same, but Germany, you know what?
There you go.
It's alright Poland, we got you, but France?
You can't have any real country of your own, but we'll let you rule France.
Yeah.
Well, you've got a lot of leftover Prussians that we're kicking out to make way for West Poland, so just put them in France.
We're going to split your country up between the Soviets, the Americans, and the British, but your government in exile can rule from Paris.
How about that?
Yeah.
There you go.
That would be great.
Anyway, so, there's been some startling developments in British rhetoric recently, political rhetoric, that being that Keir Starmer has decided that he's a nasty far-right populist of the kind that he would have arrested and put in prison just a few months ago.
He's been watching our podcast, I think, because he's coming out with all of our talking Certainly his advisors seem to have.
And it does not help that the Tories...
Hello.
Yes, hello Keir Starmer's advisors.
Please tell him to release those people from prison, if you're watching right now.
The other thing is that, obviously, the Tories voted in as their leader, Kemi Badenoch.
On the basis that she was qualified, in the same way that Kamala Harris was qualified for VP in 2020, that she was black, tick, woman, tick.
Anything else that she did, anything else that she said, any of her beliefs, don't matter.
She was a black woman.
That was enough for the Tories.
The problem was, that was a huge mistake.
That was a massive mistake.
Because right at the time that they do that, Keir Starmer decides that he is a far-right populist, that he's going to send them all back, and that he is now just a British nationalist.
He would have been very good friends with Griffiths back in the day.
Nick Griffiths.
Griffin.
Whatever his name is.
Who cares?
And you can see this from some of the rhetoric he's come out with recently, like just this morning he made a speech where he said that the Tories deliberately opened Britain's borders to cover up the extent of their economic stagnation, which is absolutely true.
Again, I hate Labour, I hate Keir Starmer, I think he's evil as I've made very clear in some of the segments that I've done recently.
Problem is the Tories made it so easy for him to do all of this.
There was 14 years of utter ruin and chaos in this country, where they promised this, we got that, they promised lower migration, we got higher migration, they promised Brexit, they get Brexit through, then we get untold numbers of migration that we'd never experienced before in this country, after we'd also already been having record-breaking migration.
For decades.
We switched Europeans for sub-Saharan Africans, Indians and Middle Easterners.
Pakistanis as well.
Throw that in there.
Because, of course, importing lots of Indians and Pakistanis simultaneously.
Populations that are obviously known to get along very well.
Elite human capital, you might say.
Yes.
Yeah, so we didn't make any improvements there.
So the Tories presented Keir Starmer with an open goal.
And the problem with Kemi is that she was one of the people pushing for all of that, specifically in 2018, and Starmer and the Labour Party have been going at her for it.
So, most interestingly, Labour Party's official Twitter account released this attack ad just yesterday.
We got this wrong.
In particular, I'd like to thank the Home Secretary for removing the annual limits on work visas and also on international students, both of which I lobbied for...
Reading!
Reading off her phone, reading!
So, yeah, back in 2018, Kemi Beidnot was saying, great job, you've removed these limitations on certain visas, for work visas and for international students, mainly so that she could help get in a load of Nigerians, because, spoiler alert, she is Nigerian.
And presented Labour with a massive open goal here.
Because there's footage of her doing it and praising the people that did it.
And she even said that she was a lobbyist for it.
And then in the most recent PMQs from yesterday, sorry, the most recent PMQs would be today, but yesterday, Keir Starmer hit her again for it.
Mark contrast to behaviour in the last 14 years.
And she talks about immigration.
Record levels of immigration under the previous government.
Nearly a million.
And she was the cheerleader.
She was the one urging on the removal of the caps for work visas.
She was thanking the previous Home Secretary for the work that was done.
She championed it.
She advocated it.
Record numbers of immigration.
It sounds like Keir Starmer's going to defect to reform soon, isn't it?
Yeah, Keir Starmer's got his Homeland card coming in the post right now.
It is odd to see, though, isn't it?
It really is.
That shift in the Overton window that it's simply...
I mean, not that long ago, you just would not have seen a statement from the dispatch box like that.
The idea that it's a given, that it's an unspoken given that giant migration is negative or bad.
Not that long ago, a few years, two years ago or something, or a year ago, that would not have happened.
And now, you know, the unspoken thing there is that that's certainly bad.
You don't even have to define it as being bad.
It's just like, obviously it's bad.
Well, he basically opened Pandora's box the other last week when he made that speech saying that it was an open borders experiment.
Where he went, yeah, all of the things that we were arresting people for a few months ago, all the populists have been complaining about, it's true.
We admit it.
I'm in government now, I've got access to all of the records, I know who did it, and they did it on purpose.
So everything that people have been complaining about is completely true.
Also, the unspoken bit is that Keir Starmer was also very much in favour of that for a long time, and through his legal career, check my Keir Starmer's Evil History segment for it, he made sure to try and keep actual terrorists who'd gotten into this country, in this country.
So Keir Starmer is not innocent of all of this.
Keir Starmer is just as guilty as everybody else, if not more so because he wrote the playbook for human rights lawyers on how to keep these people in this country.
He also was part of a landmark 2003 case that made sure that asylum seekers could claim benefits in asylum whenever they want.
If they got into the country, they didn't have to claim for it immediately as soon as they got in here, as soon as it was reasonable.
They can just wait whenever.
It's completely disingenuous that now he's worried, now he cares about us having been flooded by strangers.
There's definitely the machinations of Tony Blair, possibly, going on in the background advising this.
But it serves two very good purposes, which is one, it completely undercuts the Tories, because they can't make these arguments anymore when they have a literal immigrant in charge of them.
Well, the Tories might even try and flank Labour to the left.
If Keir Starmer is positioning it, I wouldn't put it past him.
It's what they're best at.
You're being mean.
Now you're the mean party, Keir.
And the second thing is it also undercuts reform.
Yeah.
Other than some people, like it was highlighted yesterday with Connor's segment, like Rupert Lowe, Keir Starmer's rhetoric essentially has been to the right of both of his main opposition parties since he started doing this.
And it's what Blair used to do and made him such a good political animal.
And of course...
Sorry, Josh.
I was just going to say, although I know Starmer and Blair's relationship is strange to the point of perhaps no contact because they've directly and publicly...
Sent out potshots at each other.
I imagine this could be something that's happened organically in Starmer's camp himself.
I also wouldn't be shocked if maybe he has gone back to Blair and been like, listen, my poll numbers are at record lows.
I might be the most unpopular Prime Minister ever after only a few months.
I do need your help.
Comes crawling back.
They all go crawling back to town.
As I say, but of course I don't believe any of it.
No matter how strong the rhetoric is from Starmer, until I actually see the streets and towns of this country have less foreigners that obviously come straight over, Until I see that, I don't believe any of it.
I don't believe any of it.
He could stand at the dispatch box or go on news night or whatever and talk an extremely tough game.
Way, way stronger.
He could say, I promise to deport millions of people.
Until any of it happens, I don't believe it.
I simply don't believe it.
Well, they've been trying to highlight some of the improvements since their government came in, like the 20% reduction on net migration since last year, which, hate to give them the credit for it, probably is more to do with the sort of Home Office changes that were made under the Tories earlier this year.
They also wanted to highlight, oh, we've sent 10,000 people back.
Drop in the ocean.
Yeah, it is a drop in the ocean.
And one of the ways that they're going to be clearing the asylum backlog is also going to be absolutely fast-tracking it.
We've covered how the Home Office itself, the Asylum Decision Maker's system, the office-based quota system that it's set up, incentivizes them to just rubber-stamp them straight through.
And the asylum seekers know this, the refugees, the illegals, they know this, so they know how to game the system.
Either way, it's made it very, very easy.
Even a few weeks ago, people were talking about how Kemi Badenoch is not going to be the leader that the Tories hope that she is, and that was very obvious.
Let's see some of the second-order effects, or the direct effects, of her lobbying for less restrictions on student visas, for instance.
So this was a BBC report that came out on Monday, sorry, or Tuesday.
Talking about universities enrolling foreign students with poor English, BBC investigation fans.
So I'll just go through some of the info here.
So it's talking about a woman called Yasmin, that's not her real name, who came from Iran to study for a master's degree at a university in the UK, but she was shocked to find many of her students had limited English and only one or two was British.
That's what we want in our prestigious universities.
How is it possible to continue this coursework without understanding a British accent or English properly?
was a question she asked.
Most students, this investigation found, paid other people to do their coursework, and some would pay people to register their attendance at lectures for them.
Could you be any more dishonest?
My experience was that most of the foreign students who didn't speak English were Chinese, and it was basically an open secret.
You went to Bath, right, and you see lots of Chinese students hanging around Bath.
Yeah, and I mean, for my course as well, it was one of the best in the world.
And so you've got to wonder, hang on a minute, how did they qualify to get into this very competitive course, very difficult to get into, and they don't even speak the language that the course is taught in?
And then I realised, oh right, everyone knows, and it's just a money-making operation.
And they basically give them a passing grade and send them home.
And one of the lecturers just stated explicitly, like, listen, I know how this works.
You know, as long as you're here and you're competing for the top grades, that's the important thing.
You know, the university's got to pay its way.
Something along those lines.
As foreign students, their fees are, like, what, three times, twice, three, four times?
Well, £30,000, roughly.
For one year.
It says here explicitly, fees for overseas students studying England have no upper limit.
So you can charge as much as they're willing to pay.
It says postgraduate fees are not capped, so a master's degree at an elite university could cost 50 grand.
It doesn't even need to end there, but that might be where they've just said it for right now.
Do you know how much I paid as a domestic student who also had good grades that bumped it down for me?
Four and a half grand I paid for my post-grad, yeah, for a year.
So that's not much, actually.
The university's making a lot more money from these people.
Joe Grady from the UCU, which represents 120,000 lecturers and university staff, says it's an open secret, just like you were saying from one of your lecturers, that students who lack English skills find ways to come to the UK to study.
About 7 out of 10 students studying on master's courses in England are now from overseas.
7 in 10. Far higher than on other types of higher education course, and Yasmin, it says, paid £16,000 for her course on international finance at a university in southern England.
She later found out that of the 100 students on most of her modules, maybe 80 or 90 of them bought assignments from so-called essay mills based overseas.
You even have them recruiting in Britain.
What was it?
It was advertised as an article writing business.
And then I did some digging on the business and looked it up.
This is before I came to work for here.
And yeah, it turns out it was trying to write essays for university students.
And that's why they're being all coy about it, is that you're basically writing it for the students.
And the amount you get paid also is contingent on the grade they get as well.
And these people are supposedly, you know, they'll be going on to careers, presumably, in these kinds of fields.
In China, yeah.
In China, or maybe they'll stay over here if they've taken a medical course and you're supposed to believe that they're qualified now.
Well, there's the idea of chain migration, that once they've been here a few years, you're just allowed to say, well, I'll bring loads of my family over here as well.
I looked at the data for this and...
I think it was 65% go back home and then something like 30% off the top of my head.
I think it was something like that.
No, I think it might have been 33% or something in that order of magnitude have a short-term visa and the remaining 75% of that initial 35% actually stay on a long-term basis.
So there seems to be a significant number of them.
There's new information from the migration observatory that shows that that's going up.
Just that chain of things.
So you come over here from a foreign country and then you don't even necessarily attend.
You can pay someone else or somehow just fiddle it so that someone else...
To do your assignments.
And then the actual work itself, doing the essays and things...
You pay someone else, or you could probably just get AI to do it now, right?
Probably go on AI. Oh, yeah.
Write me a decent article, a decent essay about XYZ. So, like, what...
That's highlighted in this article as well.
Apparently, the AI is so good that it can defeat current anti-plagiarism software as well.
So you can just get it past all of the safeguards, because there are no safeguards.
The only safeguard that would matter is that the lecturers know that they do this, but the lecturers are also incentivised, because the university's like, we're making loads of money off these people.
And they're probably lefties as well, because they are lecturers.
It's also worth mentioning as well that some of these plagiarism softwares have false positives because I remember they had software even when I was there many years back.
Because I was writing a paper that was quite neuroscience-y and jargony, there are lots of turns of phrase that are pretty stock and so it actually flagged it up as being like 40% plagiarised even though I'm just like, I'm just using the language of my discipline.
I did write this.
You can copy and paste any section and you won't find anything like that.
I'm so old.
It was before AI when I was an undergrad, so there was no possibility.
Well, there was no AI then either.
But my lecturer said, oh right, actually, that's pretty common to get that level of percentage.
When you start worrying, it's like 70% plus.
But then that also begs the question of, couldn't you use an AI and just rewrite and fiddle some bits around it?
Either way, it's actually illegal to do any of that.
It says here it's a criminal offence to complete work for a student which they pass off as their own.
Yasmin, the centre of this article, said that she told her tutor what was happening and he did nothing.
So again, the only safeguard that seemingly shouldn't be able to be bypassed because it's, you know, a human being doesn't care.
Okay, okay, shrug your shoulders.
A Russell Group University professor who taught at several universities and wanted to remain anonymous for this article...
Said that he told the BBC that 70% of his students at master's degree level over the past five years did not have sufficient English to be on the course.
They couldn't speak English well enough to be on the course.
They're on the course anyway.
The professor's told us that he had to adapt his teaching technique, I bet, and so students even use translation apps in class.
But the universities are making huge amounts of money off it, so who cares?
Thank you, Kemi.
Thank you very much for that one.
Some other information that just came out.
Most popular boy's name in England and Wales.
Can you guess what it's going to be?
Mohammed.
Yeah.
How many years in a row is that now, I wonder?
It might have been that way in certain cities, but across the whole of England and Wales, the ONS shows here, that it's actually gone up.
So it was probably two or three, but you can see here it's gone up.
So it's only just, as of last year, hit the top spot.
Are we proud, gentlemen?
This is what Alfred fought for.
We fought back the Vikings, created a global empire, beat the Germans, Mohammed.
Well, to be fair, they're not particularly creative in the Islamic world with their men's names.
They've got basically Mohammed, Abdul, and a few others, and that's about it.
Aren't all Muslim men supposed to be called Muhammad?
Whether it's your middle, it could be your middle name.
One of your names should be Muhammad, I think.
Or boys.
Either way, it is still an alarming.
It shouldn't be in the top hundred, let alone number one.
It just shows that there is a mass of Islamic foreign men in this country who should not be here.
Deportation's a lot easier when you just go, M. LAUGHTER Well, there we go.
Got a good list.
M, U, there they all are.
Got them.
And then there's also the figures that have come out from the ONS again.
Well, actually, it was Rupert Lowe who found some of this.
Callum posted, of course, his graphs, because Callum loves his graphs.
2022-23, 1,218,000 new foreigners allowed in.
Almost half a million immediately signed on to Universal Credit.
41% of them.
Thank you, Kemi.
Thank you very much.
And then, again, one of the problems with all of these figures that we have is even the figures that are released to the public are questionable and constantly being revised.
So recently, as part of that 10,000 people who were deported, so-called deported, which was all part of the headlines because, of course, Labour wants to take a hard stance against migration.
You use the deport word, everybody knows, okay, we're hard-line against this, right?
Right.
Weren't really deported.
So apparently 600 UK Brazilians had been deported earlier on in this week back to Brazil.
Brazil themselves actually say no, it was part of a voluntary scheme.
They deported themselves.
Yeah, so they chose to deport it.
So maybe Labour is not actually going as hardline as they would like you to think.
It's also not the Brazilians that are causing lots of problems either.
Yes, that's true.
But still, they should go back.
And then you get the information that came out recently, the Migration Observatory pointing out that the data is constantly being revised upwards.
So in 2023, we saw that it had been revised from about 700 and something thousand to 906 thousand, which meant that Labour could brag that they'd reduced it by 20% when they released their figures for this year of 728 thousand.
But also, it now believes that net migration in calendar year 2022, which was originally published as being 606 thousand, still far too much, was in fact 872 thousand.
Yeah.
So can we trust the figures that have been released this year?
728,000 net, still far too much even if they want to brag about it being a reduction.
Can we trust that five years from now, two years from now, next year, they're not going to say actually it was over a million?
Actually, it was this however much.
It's ridiculous.
They are hiding all of this from you.
They say it results from the ONS receiving more complete travel data and adding tens of thousands of Ukrainians who had been missed in the data due to an error.
Just an error can miss the data and mean that all of a sudden, oh, sorry, we just found a little over 200,000 extra people in the country.
Doesn't fill you full of confidence, does it?
Bottom line is, regardless of the number they give you, is my town or city centre flooded with foreign people that don't speak English and apparently aren't doing any work and are a menace?
Well, yeah, it is.
They are.
And just to finish off as well, they point out here as well, emigration also did rise, driven by more international students leaving the UK. However, international students have also at the same time become more likely to remain in the UK after their studies.
Referring back to what you were talking about.
And are still departing at lower rates than in the past.
In the year ending June 2024, the UK granted 198,000 graduate visas to former international students.
An increased share of students have also been switching into long term work visas that offer a path to permanent status.
That's why I don't particularly buy the argument that if we just stop the bleeding, just stop all new people coming in, that it'll be fine because in a few years most of them will leave.
I don't think so, no.
If you didn't have to, why would you go back to Bangladesh or Pakistan if you didn't have to?
Well yeah, it's obviously still better here than there.
Yeah, of course.
It's easy for you to just sign up for benefits and then do who knows what on the black market.
Even if we cut off their benefits, it's still better here.
Still way, way better.
There's only one solution, is that we're going to have to nationalise Deliveroo.
Change the hiring status.
Either way, there you go.
So thanks for all that, Tories.
Thanks for all that, Labour.
Thanks for all that, Kemi.
Starmer, I don't trust you as far as I can throw you.
Now we're off of YouTube, I think that what needs to happen is that we need to not only deport these people but take their assets to pay for the money they've taken out of the system, otherwise it's just a legal raid on the British people.
You know there's that argument of we'll pay people to leave?
Absolutely not.
Yeah, my view on that is no way!
Not a penny!
They'll pay us back for their deportation.
Not only will they have to pay for the privilege of being deported, we'll take their possessions if they've taken money out of our system so that they've at least covered the cost of what they've done.
And if they're a foreign criminal, I'm happy to take all of it.
I don't care.
Another thing that really grinds my gears is, you see it everywhere in Britain, is adverts for money transfer.
Send money home.
Send money back to Nigeria or Bangladesh or whatever.
But I thought this was their home.
I thought they're just as British as the rest of us so surely this is their homeland now, right?
It's like that bloody, what's her name, that Reem woman who last year got really upset because she posted that she was in Morocco and was like, so nice to be back in the homeland.
Oh, but I thought you were British.
I thought this was a wee thing that whenever you're here it's wee, wee, wee, but then all of a sudden you go over back to Morocco and that's home and it feels so nice to be home.
Well, why don't you stay there?
She's a despicable scumbag, obviously.
She posted as well that, what was it, without immigration, Britain would be nothing, or something like that.
And then I posted loads of pictures of all of the beautiful buildings and the lovely countryside that we had long before there was any immigration at all.
To be fair, she's right.
If it weren't for those Saxons and Jutes and all sorts coming over, then we would be nothing, maybe.
We'd still be something.
Ah, Celts.
I'm a Celt, thank you very much.
You've got mostly Celt in you, you weirdo.
I'm 89% English, thank you very much, which still is very Celtic either way.
It's way after that anyway.
Britain in the 16th, early 17th century was no big shakes.
By the 18th century we dominated the world, so it's not even really...
It's not like the Jutes and the Angles and the Saxons.
That's like well over a thousand years before that.
It's their...
Descendants?
It's actually British English people that...
I'm just making the joke.
If they hadn't come over, we wouldn't have descended from them in the first place.
Actually, Harry.
It was all those Moroccans...
You can get your fedoras afterwards, alright?
It was all the Moroccans in the 18th century which transformed the British Navy into a world-beating...
Yeah, yeah.
It's all those Moroccan industrialists.
That's what it was.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's some rumble rants here, so we should go through them before video comments.
That's a random name.
It's the same thing here in Quebec.
Lots of foreign students who speak no French or English.
When I was in uni, you would know if a subcontinental had been in the bathroom because of the giant turd on the floor.
If only Stelios were here, he'd love that.
Yeah, probably actually true.
Dragon Lady Chris, I edited a paper for a friend of mine, just fixing spelling and grammar and the like.
The instructor gave it a C because, quote, It's too good.
She was sure he had plagiarised it, but couldn't prove it.
That's the sort of crap I would go nuclear on.
I would take them to tribunal and stuff over that.
Well, I mean, honestly, from my own time in university, I hated most of the lecturers anyway.
Because it was so easy, especially for the girls, to brown-nose the lecturers, right?
Especially when it came to that final year.
You see all of the girls brown-nosing all of the lecturers, getting all of the support for their projects, and you just get left in the lurch.
So I immediately just learned, basically, oh, this is how politics works, is it?
I noticed that in my master's course even.
You would get the girls saying, so what would you argue in this essay?
Just trying to figure out, because they would be marking it, what argument they're favourable towards.
It's like, you slimy bitch.
I blame the lecturers more.
It's a story as old as time, isn't it?
University lecturers...
Lecturers, more like.
Yeah, lecturers.
Trying to get some action off the undergrads or the younger, good-looking postgrads.
Yeah, of course.
And I also remember the most BS petty thing.
So obviously I did like a media degree and you study different types of acting and the differences between them are incredibly minute and you have to be very specific in how you mark them out.
So I was talking about one thing in an essay and said, oh, well, this is this particular kind of acting.
And then the lecturer replies when he marks it like, Actually, no.
No, it was this incredibly well-related and basically indistinguishable type of acting, but it's that instead.
So you've got this wrong, so I'm going to mark you down for it.
Oh, yeah.
Good, yeah.
If a lecturer doesn't like it.
Yeah, because it's mainly at their discretion what mark they give you, roughly.
If it's a humanities-based thing, because I did humanities, I did classics, right?
Ancient history.
It's almost entirely at their discretion whether they want to be nice to you when it comes to marketing or not.
Yeah, terrible, terrible really.
Yeah, also they all got a bit of a feel for me within a few months of my first year because I realized very very early on into my first year I'm not learning anything that I don't already know because I, you know, worked for a few years and when you work in a call center you end up getting a lot of free time.
So I just google stuff And I knew a lot of media trivia and also just how a lot of media works and media analysis from that.
So I'd be the guy answering all the questions right in the lectures when they would put questions out to anybody.
And they just got sick of me.
They got sick of me already knowing the answer to everything.
So they just decided they didn't like me from that point onwards.
Sorry, you're too good a student.
You know too much, so we're going to punish you for it.
Thanks, dickheads.
In my master's dissertation, I did a form of statistical analysis of binary data, and the person marking it is just like, I've never seen this before, and you seem to know what you're talking about, so I'll just mark it as if it's correct.
I mean, I'll take it.
It was correct, because I was incredibly pedantic about how I went about my data analysis, and was very thorough, and did pay attention a lot at that stuff.
But still, the principle is that they just sort of took me at my word that I was right.
So it's like, well, it kind of feels like you know your stuff, so I'm just going to say you're right.
Which doesn't feel like objective marking.
Either way, carrying on, Ryan Hinnigan says, In the Arabic tradition, your middle name is your father's first name, regardless of gender, makes tracking paternal lineage very easy.
Good to know.
Occupant42, if they can call voluntary re-migration deported, can't we just deport them and call it emigration?
Good question.
Yeah, I mean, it's all about media perception, right?
Perception management.
Repatriation, I think that's better.
You're sending them back to their home.
You know, deported might sound a little bit scary.
Repatriation, they're just going home.
There you go.
Just going home.
Get lots of where they belong.
Not here.
Anyway, let's go on to the video comments.
In the summer, I like to touch the flowers.
In the summer, I like to watch the bees.
In the summer, I collect berries and fruits.
In summer, the garden is green.
When winter comes and dream about spring.
That was very nice.
Yeah.
Any more, Sanderson?
Oh.
We were told that we were going to meet with the Home Office and Serco.
Nobody showed at all.
We watched this one the other day, haven't we?
But this government, infinitely worse.
And I don't think they care about us.
You can't avoid talking about this without it becoming a political discussion.
It's not just a community thing.
This is across the country.
And there are more and more people like us and more hotels.
So when does it end?
What's the plan for the future?
We've seen that one already.
I hadn't seen it.
That was Altringham.
The Altringham community recently, one of the hotels has been appropriated by the Home Office for migrants coming in, and the hotel is directly opposite a primary school, and there are two other schools within walking distance with only a few minutes, so people are annoyed.
It's also where that information was coming out about, oh, they're coming in here and getting NHS, and the people at the community meeting were like, no, no, no, they're not going to get the NHS, they're basically going to get private healthcare instead.
So everybody there is furious.
And Rupert Lowe found, through speaking to the Home Office, that the Home Office's way of going about it is they just don't tell communities when they're about to do that sort of thing.
Got it.
That softly spoken, well-meaning chap who's a Nazi, got it.
Oh, yeah.
I'm glad that you can cut straight through the BS. Alright, next one.
I never married, mainly because, despite being attracted to women, I find their minds utterly impenetrable.
The reaction to the new Snow White had me thinking of the superior but lesser-told tale of the Sleeping Beauty.
I've never come across this analysis, but I think that perhaps it's a tale that describes women who are mollycoddled by their parents and start their lives out in a sleeping state, unawake to the world and often throwing up a shield of thorns around them through which the prince must battle to hopefully reveal the princess within.
Increasingly, however, there tends to be a hysterical Catwoman.
That was actually a very good analysis there.
I like that.
I've not seen that analysis of Sleeping Beauty either.
The new Snow White dwarves look like nightmare fuel, don't they?
They're horrifying.
Yeah, they're weird looking.
They should have just got Peter Dinklage to play all seven of them.
That's what he would have preferred, right?
He's like, I'm the only dwarf in Hollywood.
Dwarf mafia.
King of the dwarves.
I mean, he is slightly taller than most of them as well.
He'd tower over Warwick Davis.
Warwick Davis would be his court jester.
It's a dwarf hierarchy.
There almost certainly is.
Let's go on with the written comments.
Destiny's Love of Sausage says at this point Haiti is just one giant Far Cry game.
I can't wait for Lord Miles to lead an uprising against General Barbecue.
Baron Von Warhawk says Haiti needs to ban tactical assault sticks.
They need common sense stick laws to keep them out of guys like Barbecue.
Lord Nerevar says, amazing that even Kenyans are capable of better architectural design than the Haitians.
I mean, the trail behind that thing is better than the rest of Port-au-Prince, right?
That's true, yeah.
And finally, Wallard Wututai says, referring to Richard Russell, a.k.a.
the Sky King, who stole a civilian airliner, flew it around for a while and then crashed it into a mountain.
It's been widely reported that when the air traffic controller said that Alaska Airlines would probably give him a job if he successfully landed the plane, Russell said something like, yeah, right, I'm a white guy.
Yeah, see?
See, I thought so.
I thought so.
Thank you for clearing a lot of that up, by the way.
It's a very interesting but very, very sad story because, as far as I'm aware, he was actually really, really good at flying it as well.
Again, he was, you know, doing loop-de-loops and all sorts of tricks.
Although he did crash.
And he did it on purpose.
Did he?
Did he, though?
Is that what he said?
He did a big, like, sad send-off to the airline controllers.
Oh, really?
Yeah, he said, you know, like, it's something like, it's time for me to bring it down now, and then he crashed it on purpose.
That's depressing.
It's a very sad story, but everything before he killed himself was kind of cool.
You can say that about Nirvana.
No, you can't.
Oh, that's going to be out of context, isn't it?
Do you want to go through the...
Okay.
Cole's underground cache of irradiated Freybentos said...
Brilliant.
That's a great name.
With this amount of chaos, disgusting quote-unquote food, unhygienic streets, and having to speak French, it was only a matter of time before their country fell apart.
Hang on.
Am I talking about France or Haiti?
He's here all week, people.
Yeah, that's the legacy of the French there.
Macron was actually wrong.
They adopted French culture.
It was France all along.
Matt D says, I looked at BBC News for the first time in ages to read about France.
They're not even pretending anymore.
They just talk about the left and the far right in the same sentence.
It's just shameful.
Yeah.
Yeah, far right.
It's honestly anything that is remotely right of sort of centre-left is the far right.
That really is exactly what it is now, isn't it?
Well, many people that are getting called far right would have been leftists in about, I don't know, 30 years ago.
They're 90s liberals, mostly.
Yeah, it's ridiculous.
Like Farage's, for example.
If you look at Marine Le Pen compared to her own father, she's well to the left of him.
Yeah, right.
Because Le Pen actually did say some...
Pretty controversial stuff.
Which one?
Well, her dad.
Geordie Swordsman says, Time to take Gascony whilst the frogs are distracted, boys.
We can do a cheeky chevalier as a lad's weekend.
Yeah.
Sounds like fun.
Yeah, it does sound like a good time.
Get the longbows out, lads.
Lord Nerevar says, To be fair, France should be used to falling by now.
It's pretty much a non-stop trend since 1789. Yep.
That France must totally collapse every couple of years.
One of these days, we should move on in an exit.
Or at least restore the Bourbon.
Thoughts.
Yeah, they'll probably be better off as a monarchy.
And it would annoy your average French person to have a monarchy forced on them.
So that's worth it in and of itself.
Just to annoy your average Frenchman.
Even though, you know, I'm not a big fan of Charles, it'd be even more insulting to them.
Someone said earlier, didn't they, bring back Kevin's second stream, the Angevine Empire.
Yeah.
Rule France as a monarchy from Buckingham Palace.
Just to annoy French people.
That'd be great.
I love that idea.
Geordie Sortsman again says, My best friend's going to be having fun when he visits with very lefty French in-laws for Christmas.
He'll be desperately suppressing the urge...
To not drop the I'm breast friends with some more fanboy conversational hand grenade into the middle of the Le Pen, Satan or Lucifer discussion.
Take it away, Harry.
Do you want to go with mine?
Alright.
Alpha of the Betas.
Starmer's open borders bad speech smacks of desperation for a historically unpopular government.
It's a pivot and a distraction.
Actions speak louder than words and we will never see action.
It's obviously cynical red meat for the plebs.
I won't believe it until Keir Starmer starts physically punching people in the face saying you need to go back.
Until he personally deports Kemi Badenock himself by hand.
He needs to go full John Prescott and make contact with the electorate.
It's actually got her in plastic cuffs and leading her personally by the shoulder onto an aeroplane to Nigeria.
Yeah, as a big press shoot, right?
With his armband.
No, I'm joking.
Tech heresy.
Regarding labour and immigration, Starmer can hammer her over and over about the numbers and her support, but it's labour activists in every department that are making it impossible to actually cut off the tap or deport people, even criminals.
Yeah, it's a rhetorical ploy for PR. Freybentos for every Haitian.
That'd be a waste of Freybentos.
This sudden flip on immigration supports my theory that Richard Spencer and Keir Starmer are, in fact, the same person.
Do you reckon Richard Spencer...
They do look similar.
They do look very similar.
Do you reckon Richard Spencer's where he's just put some temporary hair dye on, makeup to make himself look less old?
Nose peg.
Makes him talk like that.
Yeah, yeah, there you go.
Keir Starmer talks, isn't it?
Like he's got a peg on his nose.
Uh, Korax, Harry, when you were talking about Starmer sending them back, you sounded like you meant he would try and send Kemi back.
Maybe he will.
Maybe he will.
And I've just gone away from that for a moment.
Uh, it would be a novel method of cheating, but I wouldn't put it past him.
And, uh, Peter Harvey, when it all started, the British universities were seen as the creme de la creme.
With such news, you wonder if anyone will ever want to willingly hire someone from a British university in a foreign country.
Well, maybe they will, because they'll all have fake degrees from British universities, so it'll all be part of a big racket.
I think in many ways, actually, it's a positive thing, unintentionally, in that there's a lot of credentialism going on, and there's still some of it to some degree.
See what I did there?
But I think it's going to come to a situation whereby people are actually judged based on their actual merits rather than what their piece of paper says, which I think is a better state of affairs.
Accidental reintroduction of meritocracy.
Yes.
Maybe.
And before we finish, we've got one more rumble rant come through.
Bubba Bad says, Breaking news from the Lotus Eaters right there.