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Dec. 18, 2024 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
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The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1066
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Hello and welcome to the podcast of The Lotus Eaters, episode 1066. What an important number for English patriots.
On the 18th of December 2024, I'm your host Connor, joined by Carl and Harry, and we are discussing the increasing calls for deportations in the UK and Germany, Labour's never-ending plan for democracy, and why the Millennials are supporting the United Healthcare CEO shooting.
That's going to be a bit of a mix.
I've seen quite a few.
Okay.
Okay, excellent.
Before we start, we've got two announcements.
First of all, Carl, we've got the little statues.
Yeah, so two lovely people called Ava and Sarah have made the presenters these little statues of us, represented in different ways.
The other ones are in the office, I guess.
But thanks very much.
This is a really, really sweet thing to receive, and we'll really appreciate them.
Yeah, Harry's looked uncannily like him.
It was a weightlifting Victorian gentleman.
I'll take it.
I'll take it.
I was only missing the top hat.
I got Roman console, which...
Okay, great.
Thanks.
There you go.
I got Ken in the mink coat with the headband, which...
Perfect.
Apt.
Everyone was quite happy with them, basically.
Thank you very much.
They're very sweet.
Yes, thank you very much.
And if you do want to send us things, we have a PO box that you can find on the website.
Spread the Christmas cheer.
Speaking of Christmas cheer, my show is going to be at three o'clock and it's not going to be very cheerful.
I'm going to start probably a three-part series.
Speaking of Christmas cheer, we don't have any.
If you subscribe to the website, you'll get important things like this, which is, I'm going to do a three-part series on the Tavistock Clinic because...
Reading through a lot of the documents, court cases, work by Hannah Barnes, and various stats over detransitioning that we had well in advance of the cast review, which means nobody supporting this had any excuse.
There's some really harrowing stuff in there, like the fact that someone that used to work at the Tavistock Clinic also used to work at children's homes in Rotherham.
Yeah, not gonna be a fun one, but it is gonna be an important and interesting one.
And speaking of things that aren't particularly fun, but important and interesting...
So we've got an epidemic of migrant crime in Britain.
This will be absolutely news to nobody who watches this show frequently.
But I thought I'd document some of the...
Recent cases, because it's important to be mindful of what we're subjected to, because every single one of these crimes is a consequence of government policy, because these people don't need to be here.
And speaking of people that are inflicting on us, Keir Starmer tweeted out about this, or at least the person who controls that robot's Twitter account.
Absolutely tragic news.
Nobody should have to face any violence at work, and certainly not something as shocking as this.
My thoughts were the victim's family, friends and colleagues at this time, and he links to a Sky News article Sorry, can I just make a point?
I genuinely despise these kinds of statements in retrospect of something terrible that's happened, right?
Absolutely tragic news.
Nobody should have to face any violence at work.
How could violence at work do this?
No, it's not that.
My thoughts are with the victim's family.
So he's begun with a moral proposition.
This is how things ought to be.
There's no reason.
No one should face violence at their work.
And I'm really sorry about it.
Now, on with the rest of the day, it's like, you're the Prime Minister, right?
You are the person who is able to legislate against this.
And what you're doing with this statement is saying, I'm never going to do anything about this.
I'm not interested in going any further.
I've made my moral proclamation.
You see Sadiq Khan tweeting in much the same way very often.
It's like, well, no one should have to do that.
And anyway, it's like, okay, but you are the government.
You are the people in charge.
Why not do something?
If you genuinely held this to be a core moral principle that you were deeply concerned about, you have the power to do something, and you're not.
You were literally saying, I've accepted that that's happened.
I don't think that's right.
And then we're moving on.
It's like, okay, it's pathetic.
You may as well have said nothing.
By failing to act, you're making it part of the white noise of managed decline.
You're also permissive of it, that's the problem.
It's not just it becomes a background noise.
It's openly permissive, even though you have stated yourself in opposition to it.
Obviously you're not really, because words mean nothing, but actions actually mean something.
You could act, and you're not.
Especially in this example, he could act.
Because the very article that Keir Starmer links to, which can be seen here with Sky News, if you scroll down, I think it's about paragraph 17 and 18 of a 20 paragraph article.
I love how deeply they bury these things.
Yeah, you find out about the identity of the perpetrator.
So the man killed was Jorge Ortega, a 61-year-old, who worked as a customer experience assistant for Emtrell, who run the Elizabeth Line.
He was attacked at Ilford Station and was taken to hospital with serious head injuries but later died.
Again, condolences to his family.
In paragraphs 17 and 18, Ayodeli Jamgarbi of Kingston Road, Ilford, ah yes, local Ilford man, was arrested and charged with section 18 of GBH, that's grievous bodily harm, and possession of a prohibited was arrested and charged with section 18 of GBH, that's grievous bodily harm, and possession of a prohibited offensive weapon in This was on Friday, so this would have been the 6th of December, and remanded to appear at Inner London Crown Court.
Now the reason Keir Starmer didn't put that in his tweet is because he would then be implicated to do something about it, because the perpetrator did not need to be in the country.
history.
So curious admission there.
I also overheard, this was on ITV News, on a bulletin on the same evening, just in the kitchen as my family were making dinner, and they read out the identity of the poor victim, the deceased man.
Again, just skipped right over the perpetrator.
Nope, no need to pay attention to whether or not this crime ever needed to happen in the first place.
And the reason is, it's because there's more.
There's a pattern.
I know noticing those is racist these days, but there's now a man...
Another man, student, killed a woman on Dorset Beach to see what it was like.
Criminology student, Nasen Sadi, got a wonderful sketch of this high-skilled migrant here.
He had many questions.
One teacher asked him if he was planning a murder.
He told the trial.
The student said he tried to stab a woman to death in Dorset Beach because he wanted to know what it would be like to take a life and how it would feel to make a woman feel afraid.
As he plotted the attack, Sardi asked his lecturers questions about how police tracked suspects.
One teacher asked him if he was planning to commit a murder because he'd asked so many, according to Winchester Crown Court.
After the police arrested him at his home in Pearlie in South London, oh yes, Pearlie man, For the murder of a sports coach called Amy Gray, age 34, and the attempted murder of her friend Leanne Miles on a beach in Bournemouth, they found he had a collection of knives and an axe.
Sardi told police he was fascinated by true crime and had been in Bournemouth at the time of the attacks, but denied any involvement he pleaded not guilty to murder and attempted murder.
Interesting how he didn't try to attack someone who looked like him.
Interesting how he decided, no, I can be incredibly cavalier with the lives of English women, rather than Arabic women or wherever he comes from.
It's very interesting how he didn't choose someone in close proximity to him, someone from his own community.
He's like, no, I care about those people, but whose lives don't I care about?
Right, okay, well, I'll just find out what it's like to murder someone by murdering one of them.
Similar with the Somali sexual assaulter that you covered, was it yesterday?
Oh, the chap who raped a woman to death on a bench, yeah.
Yeah, I'm seeing a pattern here.
Again, none of these people needed to be here.
Speaking of people that don't need to be here, Bibi Stockholm!
Turns out it's battery farming rapists.
Oh, good.
Yeah.
Very good.
So, Ardnan Ahmed is alleged to have attacked a woman at an address in Portland, Dorset, on the 21st of August.
At the time of the alleged offence, the 36-year-old was a resident of Bibby Stockholm, which housed asylum seekers.
A summons was sent to the barge on 2nd November, instructing Ahmed to appear at Weymouth Magistrates Court on Wednesday to answer the criminal charge.
However, almost predictably, this foreign criminal, who broke into the country, just failed to show up.
So they asked him politely.
On the honour system, and he didn't acknowledge it.
Weird that, how these career criminals just don't comply with the polite requests of the judicial system.
So this led to a warrant for his arrest being issued.
But the problem is, magistrates said that they don't know where he is or how to contact him.
Why would they?
I mean, he's been given unfettered access to our country.
We don't know who he is.
These people are unvetted.
We don't know what kind of crimes they've committed.
And the world's like, yeah, okay, so, you know, I'm sure you won't cause any trouble amongst the native population.
Why are we doing this?
Natalie Evans, the court clerk, said, Mr. Ahmed is not here.
He was on conditional bail to be here.
We don't know where he is now that Bibby Stockholm has been vacated.
He was charged by the police and given conditional bail on the 2nd of November.
He was meant to be here at 10am, and Ian Hoggart, the presiding magistrate, said, we don't know where he is, and Miss Evans just went, no.
He's not the only one that's disappeared as well.
Second asylum seeker, charged with sexual assault, failed to turn up to court.
Moffat Connufilia, 47, who is accused of assaulting woman on Weymouth Beach, is now living in a hostel for asylum seekers in Coventry, 180 miles away.
A summons was sent to him on the 31st of October to attend Weymouth Magistrates Court to answer for the allegation.
The court heard he notified the authorities to say he does not drive and has no money and was struggling to attend.
So you sexually assault a woman, you're charged, you're told to turn up to court, and you say, but the taxpayer hasn't paid for my taxi because I can't drive, therefore, sorry mate, can't make it to the sentencing.
He was then invited to apply to change the venue of the court, or to appear via video link, so to just zoom in to his own sexual assault trial, but he didn't respond.
He just chose not to.
Because they're allowed to do that.
Apparently.
Not even the only resident on the Bibby Stockholm, it turns out.
There's still no update on the whereabouts of two other former Bibby Stockholm residents who have gone missing and convicted of criminal offences.
So that's Kenson Knoll was convicted of drug and violent offences.
He claimed to have fled to England to escape drug trafficking gangs in Trinidad and Tobago and then just carried on the family business.
In July, he pled guilty to charges of possessing cannabis that he took on the barge itself and then assaulted a police officer who tried to arrest him.
So did he owe them money or something?
Possibly.
We don't know.
Yeah, exactly.
We don't know.
And we can't know because he's vanished.
Yes.
The 29-year-old went on the run before he could be sentenced and was later picked up by police after an arrest warrant was issued for him.
He was sentenced to a community service order but disappeared again after having failed to turn up for the unpaid work on August 3rd and September 11th.
Why is he not detained in a place that he can't escape from because you know that he keeps trying to escape?
Why did he just let them out?
Just deported.
Just deported.
That too.
There's also Ahmed Huffer, again, good British name, convicted of theft and assault in February, but who failed to appear in court for his sentencing.
Huffer stole a £60 jacket from TK Maxx in Weymouth and then assaulted two security guards who chased him.
A warrant for his arrest was issued by magistrates in Weymouth, but ten months later, still not been located by the police.
Weirdly, the most remarkable thing about that is that the security guards tried to prevent him from stealing.
They're usually instructed not to do that because of a threat to their own life.
I read an article yesterday about some woman in Costa in London was there and a homeless guy just comes in, grabs all the sandwiches and walks out and she asks the staff, well, are you not going to do anything?
And they're like, no, we've been told not to.
Especially because shoplifting below, I think it's £250 or thereabouts?
Something like that, yeah.
The Conservatives essentially legalised it.
Thank you, Theresa May, for de facto decriminalising that one.
Incredible.
Speaking of people that are assaulted at migrant accommodation, we have an update to the trial of Rhiannon Sky White.
For those who don't know, Deng Cholmejek, who claims to be 18, we don't actually know because we take their word for it, is charged with the murder of Rhiannon Sky White.
X-rays teeth.
That would be good, but I don't think you're allowed to do that now.
Oh, really?
Oh, okay.
I think it's a violation of their human rights.
Jesus Christ.
I know.
She was stabbed at Bescott Stadium station in Walsall in the West Midlands.
Miss White died in hospital surrounded by her family three days after being attacked on the evening of the 20th of October.
Apparently she intervened over a fight over a packet of biscuits and so he stalked her to a train station.
Chol Majek was expected to enter his pleas during an appearance at Wolverhampton Crown Court via video link from HMP Manchester today.
But he refused to attend the hearing.
I don't understand how this is an option.
Yeah.
Charlie Crinnan, defending the South Sudanese National, said the teenager had refused to speak to him through an interpreter before the hearing because he did not know who he was.
Oh, sorry, he's just refusing to do it.
Can't do it, mate.
That's it.
Guess the justice system just stops.
That's fine.
We police by consent in this country.
Even if you're a Sudanese alleged murderer.
The prosecution said the trial, which could happen in April, would be expected to last between five and seven days.
The next hearing was on the 13th of December, which was last Friday.
And we have another update.
They said the trial is going to take twice as long because he doesn't speak English.
So we're paying, by the way, for all of the interpreter's fees that we spend millions on every single year for foreign criminals who break into the country and then murder English girls.
Speaking through a Sudanese-Arabic interpreter, he's bilingual, wonderful.
He was asked how he pleaded to possession of an offensive weapon charge and he said, it wasn't me.
The shaggy defence.
Asked again to enter the standard response of not guilty, he said, I did not do anything, I did not do that.
So he's literally too stupid to understand what's being asked of him as well.
Excellent.
Amjad Malik, Mr Majek's barrister, shock, suggested the trial could double the prosecution's estimate of five days.
Given the language requirements and his general demeanour, it may take longer.
Mr Majek claims to be 18, but curiously there's no documentation.
We're such a joke.
Yep.
He also refused to appear in front of a screen for the plea hearing before Judge Michael Chambers, KC, last month.
Now this isn't uncommon.
Rupert Lowe has been doing lots of work on this, and he's putting in a request to the Home Office to say what the policy is for age verification of migrants.
And incredibly, he says, the Home Office applies the policy of, quote, the benefit of the doubt.
Oh, incredible.
Where often the illegal migrants' word is taken as the truth of their supposed age.
In 2024, in quarter two, there were 1,461 disputes resolved on the claimed age of asylum seekers.
Of 1,461 resolved claims, 757 were found to be over 18. Can you imagine what they think of us?
They think we're morons.
Yeah, they must think we are so stupid.
Yes.
I mean, this is just like the chap who stabbed Thomas Roberts, or the Afghan asylum seeker who, it turned out, had shot someone in Serbia and then pretended to be a child, got placed in a school, suspended for chasing students around with a knife.
How many other instances have been happening, I wonder.
Now there's more in actually Lowe's constituency, it turns out.
He's written to Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, about an illegal migrant in Great Yarmouth who has 17 prior convictions and still hasn't been deported.
And as Lowe says, he should be immediately removed from our country and never allowed back.
Now, I think it's under the 2007 Borders Act that says that any foreign criminal who has a sentence longer than 12 months can be automatically deported.
So there's no excuse not to.
For just some reason, these people need to be in our country for, I don't know, GDP purposes or something?
That'd be weird.
He also found out some more data.
This is to do with the illegal migrant.
This is where he's tweeting deportations, deportations, and even more deportations as a simple answer to foreign criminals.
Good for Rupert Lowe.
Yes, he seems to be driving reforms.
Absolutely superb.
This is exactly what we need to have normalised in the discourse in this country.
There are a bunch of foreign men who are massively prone to criminality, and we don't know anything about their backstories, and they apparently keep lying and not respecting the system.
No, go.
They can go.
So he's got some numbers on just how many there are.
So, the Ministry of Justice estimated that from April 2021 to March 2022, 140 foreign re-offenders with 10 or more re-offences were released from custody or given a court order.
In all caps, every single one should be deported.
I mean, very strong, but...
So, 10 or more re-offences?
Yes.
How do you even offend that much?
You get to the fifth offence, and you're like, I don't think these people are going to do anything about this.
It's like a cost of loyalty card.
You get your 11th offence free.
So, Rupert just thought, okay, I'm going to make use of my parliamentary questioning, and so I'm going to ask the Home Office, why don't we do an inquiry?
Because, of course, Jess Phillips has just been appointed Home Office Minister.
She's very concerned about the safety of women and girls.
So, Rupert has said, By illegal migrants.
Because we know that they were arrested at 35% higher rates than the native population.
We know from Finland, Denmark, Sweden, that they commit about 2.5 times the rate of crimes than indigenous Europeans.
So it would be very good to have the data published on this.
The Home Office replied and just said no.
The Home Office denied Rupert's request to publish data on illegal migrant crime.
They claim the public doesn't want them to commission dozens of entirely new statistical analyses simply to answer questions in Parliament.
Well, I'm a member of the public and I do.
Yeah.
Weirdness, what purpose is the Home Office if not to inform the public via their elected representatives of what's going on in the country?
Well, I think Rupert's correct.
This is a cover-up and I think it's because the Home Office is essentially an institutional method of facilitating the mass immigration into Britain of foreign peoples from around the world.
That's literally their job.
And to gaslight you into accepting it via the Raikou unit and the 700-strong Home Office Islamic network, which has regained operations under the Labour government as of September, because they were suspended, I think it was in March, by Oliver Dowden, under suspicions of them supporting Hamas.
No kidding.
Yeah, and then just kicked into overdrive again.
I suppose if I was in charge, I'd liquidate the Home Office.
Yeah.
Yep.
I'd have a department for deportations and that's about it.
Yes.
He's also said this rather strong statement, which I quite like.
Again, just pushing the needle in the Overton window.
Imagine how quickly a properly run country would deport foreign criminals, yet in Broken Britain we were ridiculously arguing about the ethics of doing so.
Honestly speaking, I don't care about their right to a family life or whatever other nonsense.
They sacrificed that when they raped, murdered, or assaulted a British citizen.
If it were up to me, this lot would be out of the country before any poisonous left-wing lawyers have a chance to go to bat for them.
I don't want them in British prisons learning yoga or how to lay bricks.
I don't care about their rehabilitation.
It's not our problem.
Send them back to wherever they came from.
They can rot in some African prison or wherever else.
Oh, Captain, my captain.
I like where this is going.
Agreements can be reached for these countries.
We'll take our prisoners back.
They can have theirs.
I suspect it may be a one-sided exchange.
Britain is a soft touch.
We need to get real and put the safety of British people above the human rights of foreign offenders.
A mass deportation scheme for these criminals is required.
Superb.
So on the timeline, we are here.
Farage tells Edgington, it's not my ambition and it's not possible.
I call for mass deportations at the Reform Conference.
Lowe starts asking parliamentary questions, gets stonewalled by the Home Office, finds out about the rates of foreign re-offenders, and is now their most popular MP by saying, mass deportations.
Things are getting better.
At least.
Very good.
However, they're not being sent to an African prison.
What's being prosecuted instead in Britain?
And then we'll go over to Germany.
Oh, they're probably getting foot rubs.
So a former boxer has been sentenced for racially aggravated posts.
Let's hear them.
So, Derek Hegey made, quote, grossly offensive comments in two YouTube videos between the 2nd and the 8th of August, so at the height of the Southport riots and protests.
He had been due to stand trial on the charge under the Malicious Communications Act, but instead pleaded guilty, probably on the advice of his court-appointed lawyer, to sending communications of an offensive nature.
The court heard that, in videos relating to Muslims, Hegey made comments including, young white girls are being raped by these grooming gangs.
That's factually true.
That's literally true according to Operation Stovewood at the Home Office.
Who are we convicting when these finally get through the courts, if that's not the case?
Curious that, isn't it?
So if you state the truth on social media, you will go to prison.
But the problem is you're pleading guilty.
Yes.
You shouldn't be guilty.
Force them to go through the process.
Yes, you shouldn't be pleading guilty.
But the fact that they're even drawing them up on charges in the first place shows, again, the animus of our institutions against the native population who don't want their children abused, meanwhile letting out 140 foreign offenders last year with 10 or more convictions.
Apparently, this YouTube video where he was stating the obvious, and what we've reported on this channel before, was quote, done for the purpose of causing distress or anxiety to grooming gangs.
Oh no.
Yeah, there we go.
Child rapists.
When he was interviewed, the defendant had sought to portray himself as a journalist and maintained that the online posts were justified.
So, all of Charlie Peter's work for GB News, Reports in the Times, stuff we've covered on this show is apparently now a criminal offence in our country.
But abusing women?
No, you don't even have to show up to your court hearing.
Can I take a guess at the kind of accent he has?
Working class?
Yeah, exactly.
If you're speaking with a sufficiently low-class accent, then yes, that's a crime.
Yes.
And finally, if you speak with German accent, it turns out as well that you're also going to be criminalised.
So there's an update to this story, the Mannheim stabbing.
So the chap who was attacked by a spiked, say here, Former refugee from Afghanistan.
Magic how you stop becoming a refugee when you commit crimes.
It's almost like breaking into the country should have been the first crime that disqualified you from being a refugee, but there we go.
Are you sure he wasn't given, like, settled status or something?
It's entirely possible they gave him settled status.
Possibly, yeah.
Probable, I would say.
Yeah, you're right.
But he targeted and attacked a chap called Michael Sturzenberger and six others during a rally organised by Sturzenberger's campaign group Pax Europa in Mannheim.
The incident left that policeman there who was stabbed in the neck dead and Sturzenberger severely injured and he needed several operations on his face and knee.
So he must have been very surprised when the German government decided to fine him for statements he made at a rally in Hamburg in 2020 regarding criticisms of Islam.
Last month the court upheld the original verdict after he'd appealed it and reduced his sentence to a fine of 3,600 euros.
So you are going to have to pay thousands of euros for criticizing preemptively, truthfully as it turns out, your Islamist stabbers.
And then there's a woman in Germany as well, we'll keep an eye on this trial hopefully, a US woman who lives in Germany who was attacked by an Eritrean migrant.
At a train station, and this was in Rhineland, Palatinate, and he grabbed her rear end, and there was an argument where a scuffle ensued.
She drew out a folding knife in order to get him to back away, and he grabbed her arm, and as she tried to free herself, she stabbed him, and it went straight in the heart during the same movement.
Apparently the public prosecutor's office does not believe the stabbing was justified by self-defence, the spokesperson for the prosecutor's office told the tabloid Bild.
So the German state is going after this woman for defending herself against an Eritrean possible rapist.
Attempted rapist.
Yes.
So if you notice the problem, you name the perpetrators, or you even attempt to defend yourself from them, you will go to prison.
Meanwhile, they will let out, or not even mandate they show up to the trial, serial foreign offenders who are being housed at your expense.
Got some rumble rants, sorry for that one.
That was a jolly one.
I know, you were literally dead sorry.
That is the quietest I've ever seen you in three years of knowing you.
I can feel the anti-racism rising, Harry.
Peter says, I can, yeah.
Peter says, if you take away someone's human right to live, then you should yourself lose that right.
First degree murderers can't at the moment.
Well, we used to execute murderers for exactly that reason.
If you take someone's life, well, this is the scales of justice being balanced.
Civilisational self-defence.
And even John Locke wrote about that.
It just makes sense.
John Locke was quite aggressive on the ride to self-defence, actually.
It's one of those points where, actually, yeah, no, he's got a point here, guys.
If someone tries to mug you, you're entitled to kill them, according to John Locke.
Based, and banning atheism, I agree.
Yeah, well, there's a couple of things that he did get right.
Dragon Lady Chris says, Just to make sure, I'm getting things straight here.
Native Brit makes angry social media posts, gets two years in jail, migrant commits assault, doesn't show up for court, and it's no big deal.
It's not even angry, it's just factual reporting.
Yeah, yeah.
It's worse than you think, but yes, it's exactly like that.
Sorry, have you not read A Theory of Justice?
It's all in there, mate.
John Rawls wrote all this down.
I love that joke for me, it's so good.
It's all in here, mate.
The thing is, I'm actually reading rules at the moment and it kind of is.
Is it really?
Kind of, yeah.
We'll do a book club on it at some point if you want.
I'm sure you and Stelios, because I've seen Stelios reading that massive tome as well, because it really is just this thick.
Thankfully only about the first quarter of it covers his proper...
What's the rest of it then?
Him essentially kind of coping and seething.
Look, I know you're all going to object to a bunch of things.
Speaking of things that everybody will object to, we all love democracy, right?
You love democracy, don't you?
More than anything else.
More than the lives of my own children.
But I am an extremist, according to the Home Office.
How many foreign wars would you be willing to fund for the sake of foreign democracies?
Not that this has anything to do with foreign democracies.
This has everything to do with our democracy.
And the fact that it will be never ending.
So the one argument in favour of democracy that is good is at least it is a mechanism through which we can non-violently remove politicians we don't like.
That is actually a good argument in favour of democracy.
That's a great argument.
But, in practicality...
Hang on.
Hang on.
However, you are right.
We have now been saddled with Keir Starmer for the next five years with basically near-dictatorial powers when nobody wanted it.
And you can be damn sure that they're going to use those powers because there has been a recent announcement that Labour has a plan for change to deliver the biggest transfer of power out of Westminster to England's regions for a century.
Now, that sounds great, right?
That does sound quite good, actually.
Decentralising government, right?
Okay, so...
That's a great way of selling it to people.
People don't like centralised governments.
I mean, realistically, Britain is one of the most centralised governments in all of Europe, and has been probably the most for over a thousand years.
For nearly, well, for at least about 700 years.
Yeah, for a very, very long time.
But how will this actually play out?
Sorry, Connor?
Well, I was going to say, if they're going to sell us on this idea, do they have to choose the most vacant, blank expression photo of Angela Rayner?
That's the only photo.
Angela Rayner arrives in the lauded halls of English constitutional reformers, you know, alongside.
The Magna Carta.
You joke.
This is a massive change to Britain's constitution that's going to be made right and in the history books it will have her face and her name plastered all over it alongside with Keir Starmer.
So what does this mean?
It's a...
the government has done a devolution white paper that was published on Monday And Rayner described it as ensuring regional powers are no longer agreed the whim of a minister in Whitehall.
It comes after ministers warned that they would be prepared to step in if plans to build more prisons, wind turbines and homes met opposition at a local level.
Right.
So it's about polishing.
These two things seem like they're polar opposites of one another, wouldn't you say?
Ms. Rayner's Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said Labour's devolution policy will allow regional leaders to guide development projects across areas' housing, transport and skills.
England's regions will be centre stage in the government's mission to grow the economy and build 1.5 million homes.
She is expected that she did say it in her speech.
So the plan is, essentially...
In Britain we have a patchwork of local government where there are small designated areas which are councils and you can get different varieties of councils but generally they're all supposed to represent the local people and represent the local needs and desires and what they want doing in that local area.
What this is going to do is abolish all of the smaller councils and reform them into much larger mega councils over a larger area.
So for instance If I just skip to the end right here, this is already going to be taking place in Lancashire, where it's got 15 councils, right?
But what they're planning on doing is abolishing them and replacing them with just about three or four local authorities, whilst also creating at the same time a Lancashire mayor.
Who has top-down power over all of these regional authorities.
So, in a supposed apparent, they say, effort to devolve the powers and decentralise government, this is a massive centralisation of government.
Along with this, and I'll get into this in a few minutes, it will also create a number of other...
Larger regional councils that have overarching power over all of these other ones to create a sort of feedback loop of never-ending democracy where you're constantly voting for this council and this council and this council and this council and these councils are constantly voting for one another and they're constantly exchanging things.
So basically the never-ending conversation of democracy where nothing gets done except at the diktat, presumably, of these mayors who are going to be Labour stooges.
But also the very nature of it.
Okay, I'm actually quite in favour of local councils being responsible for local affairs and responsive to local people.
That's actually quite a good idea.
And if that's democracy, okay, that's fine.
I'm all in favour of it.
But what they're doing here is essentially abstracting into the managerial frame.
So essentially they're removing those traditional institutions and instantiating these new, broader, more distant bureaucratic things that are going to deal with problems on the ground.
So essentially you're exactly right.
This is just going to be a massive expansion of the bureaucratic nature of the state.
Well, the way they're going to do this as well by turning them into fiefdoms is in creating mayors, you're creating personality figureheads who have a vested interest because they're associated as a personality with the party to do the party's bidding so that they can retain their seat and keep their job.
Because if participation in local elections is very low, participation in mayoral elections is slightly higher, particularly if you're a polarizing figure like a Sadiq Khan type...
And so, they are going to have a lot of loyalty to what the party wants them to do, so that they get funding for their next re-election campaign.
So, if the party wants, as Angela Rayner has already said, Operation Scatter, where she's going to replicate the ugly cities of Milton Keynes all over the Green Mill...
Well, let's not forget that they've taken away the regulations that mean that new housing has to be beautiful.
Exactly.
Yeah, why did they do that?
You know why they did that.
And also they're changing the definition of greenbelt land to ensure that you can build over the countryside to battery farm foreign nationals.
Well, the way that they're selling it is that these new local authorities will have to reconsider some of these areas of greenbelt land that they have.
So the London School of Economics is thrilled about this, I assume?
Yes, because five in seven of these new homes is going to new foreign nationals that will be imported over the same period of house building.
All of this is just to create mini desk spots, mini regional desk spots that are answerable to the Labour Party, so that local councils can't block massive housing developments to airdrop foreign nationals into your area.
That's exactly it, because I know people on local councils, and this is one of the things they do all the time.
Because, of course, the locals don't want, actually, a massive tenement full of weird foreigners running around the countryside.
Well, if I jump to the actual devolution white paper, which is published on the government website, it is all about the 1.5 million homes.
They literally say this word for word.
Mayors, they say, are integral to delivering the 1.5 million homes...
Committed to in this Parliament.
Therefore, we will support these new powers where all areas with or without a strategic authority will have to produce a spatial development strategy which will be adopted with support from a majority of constituent members.
This policy change means that more homes will get built.
Mayors will also be given new development management powers similar to those exercised by the Mayor of London.
This will include the ability to call in planning applications of strategic importance.
In conjunction with these powers, mayors will be able to charge developers a mayoral levy to ensure that new developments come with the necessary associated infrastructure, etc., etc.
So just like in Greater London with the Elizabeth Line.
To enable mayors to deliver on their plans, we will forge a stronger partnership between Homes England and established mayoral strategic authorities, increasing Homes England's accountability to mayors.
So it sounds like these mayors are going to have in their areas A hell of a lot of power.
And you brought up an interesting point, Connor, which was about the actual low turnout of local elections already as it is.
If you all of a sudden have all of these new different regional places which you have to start voting for on a yearly basis, shall we?
Well, potentially.
How much lower is local council elections going to turn out be?
People don't care now.
Yeah, if it's more of a constant process, the actual idea of this never-ending democracy is not that politicians are held more accountable, it's that voters become more apathetic.
Yeah, weary.
Yes, because they don't want to involve themselves in the process, especially when they begin to see that the process doesn't actually have much of an effect on what they get out of the other end of it.
Yeah, they're trying to anaesthetise you to manage decline.
And if you want to talk about the more decentralized areas as well, so they say in here, new forums such as the Council of Nations and Regions, chaired by the Prime Minister and the Mayoral Council, chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister, will change the ability to do particular things.
Mayors will have a statutory duty to produce local growth plans which will hardwire their local growth priorities into the way the UK government works.
Infinity migrants to make sure that you've always got that line going up.
And also, these new councils being chaired by the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister does not sound particularly decentralised to me.
Yeah, not very independent if the government is literally going to sit on the board and give them the orders.
Yes.
But back to some of the other stuff.
You mentioned about how diffuse this whole thing will be.
People have already started to worry about the fact that people will be living up to about 50 miles from their town hall under these new plans.
They say here, critics warn the Prime Minister's devolution revolution could lead to mega councils and take the powers away from local communities.
Districts have already been abolished in North Yorkshire, meaning that residents in Selby have to travel almost 50 miles to the county's headquarters in North Allerton.
Now, if this is sounding familiar to any of the viewers right now, that's because I've basically covered this before with this document that was released back in late 2022. A New Britain Renewing Our Democracy and Rebuilding Our Economy.
Now, this was a policy document that was supervised and written, I believe, by Gordon Brown.
And it was essentially a way to completely upend the unwritten constitution of the UK and put in all of these new areas that can be made into Labour strongholds to make sure that Blair's revolution can later never be changed.
It also instantiates a constitutional right to the NHS and a constitutional right to apply for welfare if you are just on the soil, regardless of citizenship.
Can we also take a moment to appreciate just how representative this image is of the bureaucratic managerial mindset?
It is a series of lines and nodes.
There is nothing natural about this.
It is...
It is the country, with everything important drained out of it, so that the manager can literally, this is how the spreadsheet would look.
Right, okay, well I need to know what these, it's just the managerial perspective.
It literally looks like it's got slight heatmap dots underneath it as well, so we will allocate resources according to the heatmap.
You might as well just run governments through an AI. It also looks like Shelob has captured the entire country.
It does.
But there's nothing natural or normal or traditional.
This is literally an AI map of the important nodes for the bureaucratic managers.
That's all this is.
That's their worldview perfectly encapsulated here.
Oh absolutely, and when I say that they want to make sure that this is put in place so that it can never be changed in the future, well they're making sure of that because they're already starting to delay local elections in preparation for these changes.
So as part of her white paper, every area governed by two-tier county and district councils will be asked to submit plans for mergers to create larger unitary authorities with about 500,000 people in each.
Ministers say such a change will help empower authorities, but is also likely to mean elections in some areas will have to be delayed.
Jim McMahon, the local government minister, said on Monday that the government may look at postponing some elections till next year, but added, it won't be for longer than a couple of months a year, which means indeterminate amount of time until it's already irreversible.
Well, that's because these local government elections are referenda on Keir Starmer's very unpopular prime ministership.
So if Labour are defeated in local elections and mayoral elections across the country, it sends a very strong message that their policies are unpopular.
So they also don't want the bad PR. Also, just to point out as well, this New Britain document that they're basing all of this off was not in their manifesto, was not a promise at the election.
Yeah, they didn't exactly spend a lot of time rhetorically arguing for it, did they?
No, this was not mentioned, this is nothing that anybody voted for, so if you want to talk about democracy, they do not have a democratic mandate to do such a thing.
Although, to be fair, I will say this has also been done under the Tories, because they also did it in Cumbria, Somerset, and North Yorkshire, who all delayed their 2021 elections by a year as they went through similar reorganisation.
Now again, it's a bit complicated to envision, so happily I was actually pointed towards this video, which obviously does not have many views, I'm not familiar with the gentleman who made it, but it was a pretty good video and had a bit where he goes through the different layout of government in the UK up until now,
so this was before Blair where you, the voter, vote for your local council, And you, the voter, vote for, you know, MPs and it gives power to the government who give bills to the Lords who have any ability to veto if they want.
After Blair's revolution, what happened was more like this, where they don't have it as hereditary, the rest are appointed to the ruling party.
So, what's it gonna look like under this, under the New Britain document?
Well, it's gonna actually just look like this.
Okay, so you, the voter, yeah, you vote for your local MPs, but then you also vote for your metro mayors, your local council, also potentially trade unions will be involved directly in this, and then obviously if you're in the devolved assemblies like Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland, you also vote for those.
They all have to speak to the Council of England, who then report to the Council of the UK. They report to the Council of the Nations and the Regions and they have a back and forth with the Assembly of the Nations and Regions.
So what this gentleman Shire Strike describes this as is a setting up of a number of different Soviets.
Well, this is the EU-ization of Britain.
It's stakeholder governance.
But this is very similar to the weird and insanely convoluted governance structure of the European Union.
It's various things, and so the average person has just no idea how it works, and that's by design.
Because I'll be honest, looking at this diagram, I'm just looking and going, how on earth is this going to work?
What's the point of the Council of the UK and the Council of England if they both have to report to these people and they have to report to the Assembly of the Regents and Nations, who are in direct communication with the government back and forth?
what's going to be the relationship between all of them.
He also points out as well there are other parts of it where they have the new rights in the New Britain document which include health.
Every person entitled to healthcare in the UK, not citizens, Yes.
Not people born in this country, not even people who were given a piece of paper.
Just every person will receive it free at the point of need where they are in any part of the UK. No person shall be denied emergency treatment education.
Every child shall be entitled to free primary and secondary education wherever they are in any part of the UK, which is one of the reasons they're attacking the public schools.
Poverty.
So being poor...
Nick Timothy, Conservative MP, actually put a question.
That's just a funny way to frame it.
Being poor will be illegal.
Except not in a cool, despotic way.
In a really lame, communist way, where everybody's just going to be poor, so nobody can technically be poor.
Yeah, exactly.
The government will make itself, essentially, in violation of the law, if it doesn't provide them with money.
Well, they're going to.
So Nick Timothy put in a letter to the Home Office because he disputed Yvette Cooper's numbers on the asylum system, saying it's going to save billions, and it turns out it's going to cost an extra 17-odd trillion a year.
Sorry, billion a year.
I was going to say trillion.
We haven't got any money, bro.
17 billion a year.
The reason is they're going to move the asylum budget to the welfare budget because every single legal migrant is going to be able to claim the full spectrum of welfare benefits as soon as they arrive, which has the convenient excuse of Hiding the costs of asylum in the welfare budget.
They don't need to differentiate because it looks bad.
I've covered this on Thomason Talks before and this document as well.
Yeah, and of course it also says that every person shall be entitled to decent accommodation, that being housing, which 1.5 million homes, but in the same amount of time that we're expected to build those 1.5 million, we'll have 2.5 million new arrivals in the country.
As you mentioned, five in seven of these new homes will be going to these new arrivals in the country.
So it's a moot point and it's completely unmanageable, completely chaotic, but that doesn't matter.
That doesn't matter because this is an insane cultural and governmental revolution of how the country works.
Just the thing on this, what are they trying to achieve here?
What are they actually trying to do?
And this genuinely is the most extreme expression of the Rousseauian form of liberalism, where the government recreates the state of nature as Rousseau has envisioned it.
As in Rousseau was like, oh no, nature provides man with everything he needs.
He's always got somewhere to sleep, he's always got food, he's always got everything that he wants.
And when you exchange your natural rights for civil rights, well then it becomes the government's job to provide everything that nature purportedly provided.
And so that's exactly what we're seeing here.
These are all of the things that Rousseau would have us do through the state.
And it's just, okay, great.
We're finally moving into the sort of final phase of liberalism, where the government is literally the thing that provides everything to the country.
Yes, but, if we remember, some are more equal than others, and if you are a client group of the government, you still get yours, or if you are a group that helps fund the government, for instance, you still get yours, because union chiefs are already starting to draw up the industrial strategy for Labour.
Have they been thinking a lot about the relationship to the means of production, have they?
Maybe.
Maybe not.
I think they've mainly just been thinking about how much they can make from all this.
Yeah, doubtless.
Yeah, so that's the never-ending democracy.
It is currently rolling forwards in motion.
We've got the devolution plans moving forward nicely.
And so next we just need, you know, housing to be made a human right and poverty to be outlawed.
Well, they literally are saying that.
Well, it'll be interesting how they outlaw poverty.
I look forward to seeing how they manage that.
Well, you've got to remember that nature provides fruit just from the trees and fish in the rivers.
If we live in the Garden of Eden, you don't need to go away.
That's literally what they're thinking.
What they're going to do is abolish relative poverty by making us all poor.
Well, yeah.
Destitute is a relative term.
On a global scale, aren't we all super rich?
Yeah, thank God I'm just as rich as Nancy Pelosi.
Glee says, so our glorious General Secretary Keir Stalin is breaking the country into autonomous Soviet republics.
No, I think it's much more like Europeanization of Britain.
This is what the French revolutionaries were trying to do to France, where they literally broke it up into equal-numbered autonomous zones.
The fact that they've specified it has to be 500,000 people per one of these, it feels very arbitrary.
It feels like it's just like, oh, this feels rational.
No, no, but that's exactly what it is.
This is just the French Revolution being applied finally to the United Kingdom.
Well, the thing is, I don't want to give it up to them.
I'm not happy about that, so I'm not going to.
No matter how bad it gets.
Anyway, moving on.
So, for the past 30 or so years...
Probably 40, really.
It's been evident that there has been an increasing growth of what I'm just going to call the corporatocracy, which is giga, international mega businesses, in which you are just a functional cog in a machine.
And everyone knows that this is...
The part of life where...
the rat race that you were essentially trying to escape.
And when I was young, when I was in my late teens, early twenties, you got many, many films representing this.
And it was evident to the Gen Xers that actually the future was looking...
boring.
Really spiritually devoid.
Really uninspiring, and it wasn't going to be somewhere you really wanted to be, but it made you comfortable.
As Edward Norton's character in Fight Club lamented he would have to go and do a job he hated every day, and then he'd sit on his fancy furniture and watch rubbish TV until he just did it again the next day.
This is a basic theme for many of the really big and influential cultural touchstones of my generation.
And there was a kind of despondency in it.
A kind of despair.
And that's why you wanted to join the Fight Club.
That's why you went to eat gruel in Zion with Morpheus, right?
It's like, okay, that sucks.
On a physical level, there's hardship, but at least there's spiritual fulfillment.
You know why you're doing this thing.
Well, it provides a struggle, which is something that the modern world tries desperately to prevent from people having...
It wants to make people as comfortable as possible.
The problem is that if you're as comfortable as possible, you may as well be dead.
Well, that's the lament of Blade Runner, isn't it?
It's that the androids were made to be...
Heavy labour simulacra of human beings.
And the human beings living in a corporate dystopia have lost their humanity.
But the androids are attempting to do some sort of existential revolution to ensure that they get longer lifespans and they can see incredibly beautiful feats like starships on fire and entire galaxies and be remembered.
And it's that...
The cruelty is that the human beings have been rendered these agents of the state to hunt down these few people with the last spark of human divinity in them, and that's why Decker tries to leave it.
It's about leaving the corporate dystopia.
Yeah.
And so the Gen X position is, well...
We're going to have no meaning in our lives, and so we're going to have to try and find meaning in some way, but at least we will be able to work, make some money, buy a house, get married, do whatever.
The future was...
Boring, but it wasn't bleak.
And the dystopia was kind of abstract.
It's like, yeah, okay, it's going to be, you know, I'm going to be in the mouse utopia, and that's going to be kind of depressing, but it's not a crushing sense of failure, inevitability, and a black hole in which nothing will ever come out of.
The prospect of retirement was in reach after you'd done your 40 years in the rat race.
Exactly.
It's not that there was nothing that you could gain out of this.
This system could make it pay off for you.
It was just going to be insanely depressing to do it.
But you could look at it and go, okay, I have a plan.
It's going to take 40 years, but I have a plan.
And fine.
And the Millennials didn't take that approach to corporations.
They didn't like the kind of resignation and inevitability that the Gen Xers took towards corporations and decided, no, what we're going to do is...
Essentially, grab hold of these corporations and make them moral.
The Gen Xers never felt that corporations could be used in a moral way.
Which just meant, make them gay-race communists.
Yes, that's exactly what it meant.
And that's why all of these corporations, as soon as millennials started entering the workforce and making demands on them, they're like, well, yeah, I mean, of course we can agree to gay-race communism, because, frankly, it's not going to attack our bottom line.
But, of course, as soon as it starts attacking the bottom line, then actually we're not going to listen to that so much.
But then you've got the Zoomers.
Especially the younger Zoomers.
I think the older Zoomers aren't doing too badly, but the younger Zoomers, I think, are looking at the world, they've just finished university, they're looking at the world and going, okay, why am I here?
What prospects do I have?
And I think this is one of the issues that underpins Luigi Mangione's assassination of Brian Thompson.
Because in them, I think there is a kind of symbolic representation of the past and the future coming into conflict.
And it's not like they haven't seen this coming, right?
So, as you may not know, because this has only been really reported in left-wing media, UnitedHealth aren't exactly a very nice company.
They provide a huge amount of healthcare in the United States, and of course there's a private corporation, and ProPublica got leaked documents that outlined the company's strategic playbook for withholding treatment to, in this case, autistic children, because it's going to save them money.
Hang on.
So, look, I'm very suspicious of this just because the narrative is often that every single health insurance company should take on all the claims.
Sure.
I'm not...
I know you're not, but then as for the kids with autism claim, again, massive sympathies to the family that actually have it.
I have seen recently, in places like Minnesota with a large Somali community, them exploiting the my child has autism, ADHD, etc.
in order to get more state assistance and health insurance stuff.
The problem with this is that in the leaked document, UnitedHealth accept the legitimacy of the complaints.
Okay.
So they say, yep, there's a real problem with these kids.
They do need medical treatment for their autism.
And when we say autism, we mean someone who is not very socially adept.
They give examples of children who literally can't speak and who are just...
Wildly out of control and actually need medication to just bring their behavior into line with what is normal.
So, it's...
I agree with you that there are massive problems with exploitation.
But in this case...
But in this case, it seems that they are also...
You do have, like, the exploiting...
But you also have the Gordon Gekko types who are like, look, we're losing money on this and we need to...
Make sure that we keep our profits up.
And that is a genuine concern and problem that the system is simply not set up to deal with well.
For example, in the case of autism, in fact, in the past two decades, autism has increased from 1 in 150 children to 1 in 36. And so UnitedHealth are pursuing market-specific action plans to limit access to this treatment because it's just going to cost them too much money.
I think they've also seen the direction that state regulation was going in.
This might change into the Trump administration, but especially after the Obamacare individual mandate, which penalised you if you didn't want to use the state-allocated healthcare options.
They're seeing the state is swallowing this up and regulating it and growing, so they're thinking, oh, it's okay, the government will just take care of that, so we don't need to snap that up.
Yes, indeed.
And one of the things that the sort of...
Politically aware Zoomers are thinking, well, okay, I may not know the details of all of that, I may not know how all of this all connects together with all the other things, but I do see that this company makes $22 billion a year in net profits.
And then they're essentially squeezing the people who do need, and again, they admit that they need these medications, and squeezing them to withhold it as much as possible, so the corporation looks like a giant evil vampiric entity.
And this is why Brian Thompson was worried about his company's negative image.
Before he was shot, in fact in 2024, Brian Thompson had an early warning for his colleagues.
The company has a public relations problem.
Yeah, no kidding.
Because you look like a giant evil vampiric corporation.
Average Americans didn't understand the massive insurance company's role in the nation's health system, he argued.
Again, that's true.
They don't understand, but they see you're making 22 billion dollars in profit.
He argued in internal discussions with fellow executives that the steps it had taken to limit out-of-pocket costs for life-saving drugs, and instead United Healthcare and its parent group had faced investigations and congressional probes simmering consumer anger over challenges, and it was making billions by denying healthcare to the ill and elderly.
He understood the public was frustrated with what they perceived the company's actions to be, according to one of the people who spoke with Thompson.
He was actively articulating a vision that helped better educate and help people better understand what the company was doing.
The problem is it's a difficult sell if someone you know has a genuine condition and is being denied treatment by this company.
Again, this company might well have disreputable actions, but the The framing of this does annoy me.
They're making billions by denying healthcare from the elderly and vulnerable.
No, they're not.
They don't start with a giant pot of gold and then accumulate more gold just because they're not giving treatment.
By giving treatment, they're making the money.
So they're being selective.
Remember, people pay health insurance, so the pot of gold is there, and that's meant to be used to provide treatment for someone when they need it.
So the incentive for the health companies and the insurance companies is to refuse to pay out when it's needed in order to retain as much as possible.
I think that they're refusing to cover people when they apply for the pre-existing condition, not refusing to cover an issue that arises once they've already got the insurance.
It's not one or the other.
Well, it is.
If you got into a motorcycle accident, for example, that's not a pre-existing condition.
But a child with autism, if you're trying to get healthcare coverage, they wouldn't apply that because that's at the application stage.
But the thing is that there are going to be millions of different claims for various different reasons, various different circumstances.
And what they're trying to do is just generally overall lower.
And so some things will go through, some things won't.
But the general sort of contraction of the availability of the care is caused by the perverse incentive of the fact that they want to make billions in profits for shareholders.
And that actually does mean that people are Denied the medical coverage that they need, the medical care that they need.
And so there's a genuine understanding, and I think it's not irrational, that, well, we're kind of at war with the healthcare providers, right?
They are essentially, in some way, Disincentivized from actually helping us when, and Luigi Mangione himself was injured and needed healthcare, right?
He needed these things.
And so he is someone who is directly affected by these things.
Not that I'm trying to in any way justify what he's done or anything like that.
Of course, do not commit murder.
I shouldn't have to say that.
But the point is, there are perverse incentives in privatized healthcare.
And I'm not saying, like Kyle Kalinsky style, Oh, well, then we just need an NHS and everything.
No, no, there are massive perverse incentives in state-controlled healthcare as well.
It's something that we just don't have a solution for, and I'm not saying I have a solution for it.
What I'm saying is the reality on the ground is that there are people who are suffering, and there are, they perceive, fat cats who are profiting from their suffering.
And this, whether you agree with them or not, is their perception.
And also, if you're a...
I mean, it's not like Mangiani was an ill-educated dunce or something like that.
He was a highly educated tech guy.
So he knew he was a smart guy.
And these are the perceptions that the young people coming out of the universities now are looking at the world around them going, right, so I'm going to have a very difficult time to get into that position.
I'm going to suffer and I'm going to spend a lot of time In the grind, on the way, and I can see the fat cat right there essentially tyrannizing me through the use of the system, through the corporatocracy.
And it doesn't even matter whether you agree with that or not, that's basically what they think.
And I don't think it's an irrational perception either, right?
And I think that's why Brian Thompson was like, look, I am actually a bit worried about the way this is going.
And so, when polled, a recent poll from Emerson College Polls, found that 4 in 10 people between 18 and 29 basically thought that was fine.
Because they find themselves at the bottom of a system that doesn't seem to be intent on helping them And it seems to, in fact, see intent on preventing them gaining access to things that other countries purportedly say are universal for everyone in those countries.
And therefore think, well, this guy was essentially an oppressor, and it's fine to shoot him.
Now, like I said, I don't agree.
Shouldn't kill anyone.
But the point is, when nearly half of a cohort in a country is like, yeah, no, that's totally fine, and in fact I support it, and I've been cheering it on, That's a real civilizational problem.
That's the system having a massive issue and not doing as people think it should do.
So yeah, 41% of people thought it was completely acceptable to shoot the CEO in Manhattan when he was wandering around.
23% of those in their 30s thought it should be acceptable, and only 13% of those in their 40s found it acceptable.
So the Millennials, a third of them were nearly like, well, Yeah, that's what they get.
And that's just a cohort that's getting bigger.
Where it's like, look, we can see that there is wealth and access pooling unjustly at one side, or at the top, and this is making the lives of the people on the bottom worse.
Well, that's why you get the increased cohort there.
The point, I think, that underpins it really is that the corporate structure of America is not upholding any kind of noblesse oblige, right?
The CEOs of these companies should be making examples out of particular problem cases and saying, yeah, no, I'm a multi-millionaire CEO. That person has, you know, got some terrible congenital illness and for some reason they can't get it treated.
I'm going to, as a really nice big show of good faith, I'm going to pay $500,000 or whatever.
I'm going to get that person fixed.
Philanthropic ventures, basically.
Exactly.
There's no philanthropy from these people, and so there's a massive moral disconnect.
They don't feel like they're part of the same civilization.
In fact, they feel exploited and suppressed, and as if this is never going to get any better.
And that's why you get someone like this guy just shooting one in the street, and then nearly half of Zoom is going, yay, brilliant, love it, want to see more of it.
And it's like, that's a crazy problem to have, and it's not getting any better, as you can see by, like, you know...
I mean, what are the sort of generation alphas going to be like when they have it even worse?
The prospects of that generation are even worse than the prospects of the Zoomers.
I mean, it's going to be more than half of them, like, yeah, just start shooting COs.
We don't care, because we hate them, because we have nothing.
We will never get a house, we will never have a family, we will never have any of the things they have, and they have it all, and we don't care.
Unfortunately, the left have a point when it comes to inequality.
It matters.
Whether it's fair or not, like, whether mechanically the creation of the inequality was fair or not isn't really the problem or the concern of people of his age.
They don't care.
They've got to the point where it's like, okay, well, there's no future for me, so I may as well do crazy things.
Was it Bernie Goetz, if I remember the name correctly?
The guy who became a vigilante in New York City when crime reached a peak and it inspired Death Wish and Joker?
Well, I remember there was a vigilante in New York who shot a few criminals and public opinion was overwhelmingly on his side.
Oh, this was the subway shooting, wasn't it?
I'm not fooling about that.
That doesn't surprise me.
This sounds like similar conditions, where perceived social conditions deteriorate to the extent of where people will turn to vigilante figures if they don't think that the state is acting in their best interest.
Yes, and that's precisely what has happened here.
So the BBC are like, oh, well this is a bit of a concern, isn't it?
Lots of people are pro-Mangioni.
Lots of them.
And, I mean, obviously, a small number of people turn out in public, but lots of people on social media, and when polled, are actually like, yeah, no, this guy's a hero.
They view him as a kind of Robin Hood figure, rather than someone who has just murdered a person in cold blood.
And what I'm saying is when the system starts producing this, the system has entered into a kind of...
Well, it's one of two ways, actually.
It either enters into a death spiral or it clamps down and becomes very, very tyrannical.
Did you see Peter Thiel on Piers Morgan, I think it was, being asked about it?
No, I didn't, actually.
Struggling to give an answer when Piers asked him, how do you feel about this?
What do you think about the people who think it's acceptable to...
Shoot multi-million multi-billionaire CEOs in public and he just had no answer for it.
What could he answer, given his position?
He genuinely seemed frightened by the question.
Yeah, and I think a lot of them are frightened.
We'll get to that in a minute, actually.
Basically, the public have responded really poorly to his arrest and to everyone.
The police department that arrested him started getting death threats.
The McDonald's workers who turned him in started getting death threats.
The...
Etsy has been flooded with pro-Mangioni apparel, whereas Amazon are constantly pulling these things from their site.
They're like, no, we can't have you glorifying a murderer, especially, like, directly in the wake of the murder.
We can't have that.
And this is a major problem.
There is a huge public upswell of sympathy for him for this reason.
I'm not even getting to the women who are just, you know...
Not just that, there was a woman in Florida who I believe has been arrested because she...
Luigi carved a message on the three bullets and she relayed the same message that were on the bullets to her own healthcare provider.
Right, so this is another thing.
So I'm not going through individual cases of people who have been struggling with this company in particular because of problems that they have, and it seems that Luigi had exactly this problem, problems they had, and their reactions to it.
I mean, there's one Jen Coffey who's mentioned in this article who's been fighting to get UHC to cover her medical bills for whatever reason, and she was like, well, I think it's terrible, I condemn violence, but I'm not shocked.
Because who wants to be trapped in a years-long legal wrangle over getting whatever problem you've got solved with this medical company who's got every incentive to just have their paid lawyers to just tie you up as long as possible, right?
Who wants that?
That's not good.
That doesn't help anything.
And so what people are saying is, look, this has been coming for a while.
This system is not serving the people who are at the bottom of it, and the young people who are at the bottom feel that there's no world ahead other than to be a suffering cog in the machine of the corporatocracy...
While other people benefit.
And why would you want that?
That's a terrible social contract.
To be putting in front of someone and saying, right, okay, so you're going to be paying for Brian Thompson's new yachts while you suffer, and that's how it is forever, so get used to it.
So you're predicting, unfortunately, a large number of Nicholas 30-uns.
I'm not predicting anything.
I'm trying to give a warning to say, this is going to get worse...
If things don't change.
Exactly.
Unless something structural changes, and just, again, with the Peter Thiel, what's your answer to this?
Nothing.
Of course nothing.
What can he say?
He's essentially got to say, well, I need to start being more charitable.
I need to start...
I think in Teal's case, he's on side.
Yeah, I like Teal.
Yes, but he is part of a cohort that will be targeted no matter his personal philanthropic ventures.
Exactly.
On a personal level, I like Teal, but he's benefiting from the system that is causing these problems.
And so, okay.
Anyway, Mangione is getting a terrorism charge, and the thing is, that's probably not inappropriate.
Yeah.
This is a political killing that's designed to cause political change.
So anyway, the corporatocracy is of course going to come down as hard on him as they can, but a failure to understand why this has happened means that it's going to persist and get worse.
And Reuters in this point out, look, Americans pay more for healthcare than any other country, with spending on insurance premiums and out-of-pocket payments, blah blah, being the highest in the world.
Now, Americans make the most money in the world, so you would expect healthcare to reflect that, that spending on healthcare is more than everyone else because it makes so much money.
But the thing is, there comes to a point where it just doesn't seem to matter how much money you put into healthcare.
So I saw a chart the other day, in fact, where it showed the amount of money put into healthcare correlated with life expectancy.
And after a certain point, there's just no life expectancy increase.
And so it looks to people who are looking at this like actually this is a form of extraction rather than healthcare.
Particularly when they're not looking after the health of Americans, they're merely responding to the arising of ailments which often come from their diets and the like, which has been introduced because of state lobbying by other large pharmaceutical and agricultural bodies.
And so, like I said, I'm completely against any kind of arbitrary extra-judiciary murders, obviously.
This is not getting any better though, and Mangioni, the harder they come down on him, and they should come down hard on him, but that's going to have a consequence of making him into the folk hero that they probably shouldn't be trying to create.
Obviously they have to come down on him on this, but this is not going to make him less popular with the people who are incredibly resentful against the system itself.
And I thought it might be worth just pointing out that they know that the danger is coming, right?
Like, this is from November.
This is from before the shooting in Business Insider.
And you can see that CEOs are worried about security.
They're clamoring for bodyguards as the world feels more dangerous.
So one security expert they asked, they said, well, we've got wars going on, elections, protests, social challenges, immigration challenges, it all creates the need for additional security.
So it could be that the outcome of this is essentially the cyberpunk dystopia, where the giant corporations have got to essentially employ a kind of private army to protect themselves from the public, from the underclass.
There's an interesting point here as well, related to other political movements.
This chap speaking to Business Insider said to the FT, the business is linked to Israel and the defense and energy industries are most likely to hire extra security for their staff because of the salience of the pro-Palestine protests.
so absolutely and - Yeah.
And Mangione and Thompson are going to provide direct incentives for CEOs to require...
I mean, if you're a billionaire, well, okay, I'm just going to triple, quadruple my security detail.
I'm just going to have loads of armed guards around me at all times, because why wouldn't I spend the money on that?
And so now I'm entrenching in my position.
But not only that, the idea that I have an obligation to the public, no, I'm rendering the public as a danger, right?
I don't have an obligation to them, they're the threat to me that I have to prevent.
And so now you've got an even wider and deeper rift between the people at the top of society and the people at the bottom, which is not exactly going to mollify the concerns of the people at the bottom.
What you're going to come out and say is, well look, I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that poor people are happy and healthy and prosperous, but also I need all these armed guards to protect me from you evil poors.
Sorry, the actions don't fit the words.
It's going to become an irreconcilable rift.
But if you work in security, as it pointed out there, it might be some good money.
Oh yeah, this golden era for personal security.
And of course, since the shooting, everyone is like, oh god, we're going to need security.
So they know.
They've been worried about this for some time.
Brian Thompson himself was warning, look, our PR is pretty poor.
We can either stop being evil or we can start making people like us.
I mean, they could harmonise, but...
They know.
They absolutely know.
And so, Amazon...
So did you say that they could harmonize?
We could be evil and make people like us?
No, no.
Stop being evil, and then people would like us.
Oh, okay.
So, you know...
I misheard you.
Yeah, yeah.
You're like a spokesperson for the Republican Party in The Simpsons.
Yeah.
But anyway, Amazon, various other companies, they all know, oh god, this is going to get difficult.
Is it beyond the realms of possibility that a disgruntled Amazon employee who was sick of being monitored by the AI that's watching every second of his movements down to the 10 second block...
Who knows?
Who knows what's going to happen, right?
Like Michael Douglas falling down.
Exactly.
And this is something Dan covered on the Lotus Eases video, because 10 years ago there was an article by a tech millionaire who said, look, the pitchforks are coming.
People aren't going to live like this forever.
And this is, essentially, we're waiting for the generation to be, whichever generation it is, that is just so despondent at the future that they're just like, well, I would rather go to jail and face these crimes and take revenge on these people than carry on like this forever.
Right?
Where my generation, it wasn't that bad.
So we were like, okay, we'll just drudge through it.
Okay.
The millennials had to kind of cope.
Oh, we'll make the corporations good, bro.
We'll make them moral.
And gens that are like, okay, no, you tried that doesn't work.
You know, I can't do what you did.
You tried making them good.
That didn't work.
And so now what?
It turns out putting the Pride flag every Pride month on the Twitter account...
Didn't fix it.
Didn't do it.
Sorry, millennials, we know you tried.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was a noble attempt, and honestly, in a way, it is kind of noble.
It's like, look, we're going to try and make them good, and it's like, okay, but you're evil, but whatever.
Naughty Dog can make as many ugly female characters as they want.
I know.
It doesn't make the games any better.
I know.
But the point being that there has to be some kind of structural institutional change, or else we are genuinely heading for the cyberpunk dystopia.
Sorry.
While Samson loads up the video comments, we've got a couple of rumble rants.
BoboDad says...
Jackpot.
Common loot.
Jack says, UK-based, I got screwed by Lloyds over their self-admitting mistake over payments to mortgage, ended with two payments missed, added debt, credit score, their response.
Here, have £100 and the ombudsman agreed.
This is the point.
If the corporations are not going to be actually helping people, then they're not really...
The system itself has to serve us.
It's not even that they're not helping people, it's that just through sheer incompetence in this case, they got it wrong, and they have no accountability or responsibility to their customers, who are the people they're supposed to be providing a service to.
And they're hoping that you won't bother chasing it up because the lost labour it costs you actually isn't going to be properly compensated.
And so this, and I hate to say this, but Marxist theory of alienation, well, we're watching it playing out, actually.
People feeling very, essentially, dispossessed from anything that they do in their lives.
Yeah, that's going to make them not happy and think, you know what, maybe a different system would be better.
You know, I'm going to read through all the Carlisle that I have, because I'm almost certain that Marx stole that from Carlisle.
I'm pretty sure he did, yeah.
We need to start attributing it to right-wing thinkers.
We should, but it's commonly known Marxist theory of alienation.
But the point being, from different angles you can arrive on the same point, because that's a true point.
It is true that people should probably actually like what they do, and like where they live, and like the life that they have.
I'm just thinking we should probably quote more Carlisle than Marx.
That's true.
Anyway.
Press play.
Absolutely useless.
My wife's business will be gone in April, which means 50 parents will have to find childcare because she cannot afford to pay them.
That's six people unemployed and that's going to be across the whole of the nursery system.
It is the most moronic thing that has been done.
It's going to be more dangerous to this country than COVID or any of the wars that we've had.
She can't run a credit card.
She certainly can't run the country's economy.
Yeah, well inflation's gone up this month and the economy shrunk by, what was it, 0.1, 0.2?
So yeah, it's going great so far.
What is that poster?
Sorry, like the shark, the American shark being like, oh well, come and join us.
And then the EU shoal of sheep.
As if the EU is prospering.
As if the EU is doing brilliantly.
Which out of these two political organisations is doing well?
The Americans.
Exactly!
The Americans are doing great!
Can it not just be that we do well?
Yeah, I know.
Can we not be an enormous whale in the background?
The 51st state, unfortunately.
At least they're rich.
But we're not!
I know!
Why can't we be here?
It's because of Keir Starmer trying to make us into the EU.
Well, here we go.
The dog is adorable.
That was very cute.
Love a cavalier than Charles.
Oh, here we go.
Base tier list.
Connor Tomlinson, aka Colin Thompson, got an early start trying to influence policy.
However, he quickly found that politicians don't care about policy, just being elected again in order to embezzle and be bribed.
However, he has had far more success by simply ousting their corruption instead.
Who even knew what Raikou was before Connor?
When he has time, he and Harry do great when discussing comics.
Connor goes in C tier.
Oh, that felt like it was going a bit higher than C-tier.
Yeah, I know.
I was quite shocked.
What's the flower?
Why is there a flower there?
Samson.
Daisy.
Oh.
Oh, okay.
Why does he even know how based Daisy's supposed to be?
Ah, right, okay.
Oh, okay.
So what, he just put her down there as a punishment?
Okay.
Fair play.
Oh, excellent.
Is that all it is?
Okay, we've got a couple more rumble rants while we go to the written comments on the site.
I'll just let you take over that one.
The Engage View says, and if the Lord wants to take me, I'm here for the taking because hell's probably better than trying to get by.
I actually don't know what that's from.
Me neither.
Whatever song that's from.
BasicBasedApe says, I'm so glad Carl picked up on the should-never-happen line.
Feels disgusting because the use of the word should involves theoretical language rather than certain and knowing language.
The person is refusing to acknowledge the fact that it happened and instead is responding to a theoretical reality where it theoretically happened very descriptive and gross.
Yeah, I really despise that kind of...
It seems like cop-out's, oh, this should never happen.
Okay, you've given yourself a moral injunction, follow through on it.
If I say, Harry, thanks for lending me that tenner, I should pay you that back sometime, and then walk out.
You'd be like, hang on, hang on.
He's drawing from real life.
At least when you take him to court, you're securing the knowledge that he will show up, ah, he didn't, because he can't speak English.
Well, yeah, that's a good point.
Excuse me.
Excuse me, my brother, my brother!
All because I only have one suit.
But that's the point, isn't it?
Like, if someone's like, oh yeah, I should really do that, and then they don't, you're just like, okay, well then don't say that you should, because you obviously don't believe it, you liar.
Omar says, Starmer isn't expressing regret, giving condolences, he's just following the how-to Prime Minister manual.
Yeah, and this is why it just seemed very much like Sleekh Khan, because he does this all the time.
No one should be blown up in an Islamist terror attack.
Just going to point out, by the way, in response to Connor, I'm more English than either of you.
I actually haven't had a test, so I don't know.
Well, you're Irish and you're African.
I'm quarter African.
Which is enough, I suppose.
I'm about 90% English.
Hang on!
And one tiny percent slav according to how they updated my results.
Slav!
Oh no!
Slav!
If we were a black-owned business, does that mean we can get extra loans from the government?
Can I apply?
Have a look.
Find me a link, I'll apply from the government.
There you go.
They're taking my money anyway I may as well take some back Guy Goblin says Shame we can't take the government To court for fulfilling Their duty of care obligations To the public Their negligent border security No I don't think we can James says No, he wouldn't.
Farage is getting a lot of flack online, and a lot of it is deserved, to be honest.
I think that Farage, the way I perceive it is that he's just trying to be a sensible political navigator rather than...
He's being overly cautious.
They're doing what I said to you earlier about the Ming vase strategy, trying to carry the vase across the finish line, but there's a reason why he's letting Lowe do this and then amplifying Lowe's tweets after the fact.
Because, I mean, I've been following Farras for years, and he'd go back ten years ago, he'd be saying some quite hardline stuff, and it's like, okay, and that's why I ended up liking him in the first place, so it's like, okay.
Well, on Sky News with Trevor Phillips, he was citing the Henry Jackson polling that said the majority of Muslims are not fit to be in the country, and then he's since retreated from it because, unfortunately, he feels like he needs to be a little bit softer and more...
Mainstream centre-right.
More accommodating, yeah.
He used to say that his political hero was Zenoch Powell.
They are hearing these criticisms.
So it's, you know, it's like, okay, come on, we want a base right-wing party.
Stop being so cautious.
I just want to point out as well, chat's saying that officially, Carl, you have the pass.
Oh.
You can borrow my life.
Yeah, okay, that's great, but like...
Try arguing that with the powers that be.
I don't know.
Harry getting a sleeve for Christmas says...
What?
Am I? Amazing!
Best present.
Actually, that's a lot of effort.
That's a hell of a lot of effort.
On the plus side, now he gets Cultivate his southern accent.
It'll fit my facial.
I'll grow the little soul patch.
All of this policy through devolution is trying to do is allow the government to escape accountability through post bureaucracy and bickering at local level, making the plebs fight amongst themselves while ignoring their masters.
Absolutely terrible.
That's definitely going to be one effect of it, but there's also the abstracting away from normal people's view of local politics.
To create the kind of bureaucratic EU style somewhere else run by someone else for something for the government's own benefit.
That's what the eventual effect is going to be.
It hides the agenda and the banality of procedures.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's literally going to become like the EU, where it's like, something has happened, who's made the decision?
Well, some nameless, faceless bureaucrat.
It's like the film Brazil, where the entire apparatus exists to pass forms around, where there's actually no accountability in any one given person.
And the people who are actually making the decisions will not be the elected.
Remember in that how the entire situation in that film is set off because a fly falls into one of the photocopiers or one of the printers?
I haven't seen it actually.
Have you not?
It's really good.
It's your sort of film.
You would like it.
Same director as 12 Monkeys.
Yeah, Terry Gilliam.
The entire situation is set off because a fly falls into a printer that causes a printing error that gets the wrong person killed.
And the main character of the film, he starts off having to give a receipt of apology or a refund.
Because when you get executed by the state, they charge you for it.
They give you a receipt for it.
Well, I'm not going to pay it.
Now what?
I haven't seen it, but I will.
Too bad.
You should watch it.
It's great.
Carl's masterfully minimal use of Nuln Oil, that's a more accurate name, says, It makes so much sense when you remember that Soviet translates to council.
Yes.
That's a great point, actually.
The placement of workers' councils to dominate peasant areas is exactly what Lenin did after taking power.
And this is why, what was it, Gorbachev or someone like that?
Who's like, wow, you're setting up the Soviet Union in Europe now, are you?
When he came to his critique of the EU. Because, literally, it's like, yeah, we've just got loads of councils that deal with councils that are all passing, you know, bureaucrats passing notes to each other and nothing's happening and no one knows who's in control of it.
So this is like one of my friends, her Ukrainian dad, who grew up in the Soviet Union.
When he came over here, he told me once that...
You know, he was asked, oh, why did you come to escape communism and socialism?
And he was like, have you seen your school system?
It already is here.
This is after the comprehensives have been set up.
Someone online says, in a Palpatine voice, I love democracy.
I can't do voices.
Stay tuned for After Christmas if you like Emperor Palpatine.
Just saying.
No, I'm not going to ask because I don't know.
But anyway.
What's Lad's Hour?
Greg says, I work in a doctor's office and I confirm the UnitedHealthcare does arbitrarily deny coverage for well-established but costly treatments, forcing us to jump through hoops to get claims paid.
We just had a patient die recently because we had to pause treatment because one of these denials.
Not only has the patient died, but our practice is out tens of thousands of dollars for the cost of the materials we've already used.
Align me.
That's just awful.
But that's the thing.
That's what I was trying to put across.
The people who are in arms, essentially, against these corporations, they're not being irrational.
They're not just leftist ideologues.
There are lots of people who have been mistreated by them, and the right should understand and take ownership of that.
It's like, no, no, we're for the fair treatment of good people.
So, this isn't it.
On the right, are we for the corporatocracy?
I don't think we are.
Whenever I speak to people who aren't familiar with my own political views, they always just assume that I'm some kind of corporatist Tory.
Yes, exactly.
Because that's what the centre-right has been for so long, and that's what they've presented themselves as.
Are you not a Thatcherite?
Aaron Bastani nearly fainted when I said I was an anti-capitalist.
Yeah, I'm not a capitalist.
But anyway, the point being, we should be quite bold about saying this.
I'm not saying that corporations can't exist.
What I'm saying is we should have some I can hear Josh rushing to the studio right now.
The point being, there is a problem, and it does need to be dealt with.
Matthew says, Yes, but it's a complex thing that most people don't really have a solid grounding in theory to understand.
So...
I mean, Harry's segment, in fact, is a perfect example, where it's like, you know, you've got this really complicated diagram, and it seems that the person who made the diagram doesn't really understand it.
Harry doesn't really understand it.
The whole point of the process is to make sure that you do not understand it.
And oftentimes, if you speak to the people who exist within it...
They don't really understand it either because if you're voting for local elections, oftentimes those people will not be like careerist politicians in the same way that your MP might end up being or somebody in Whitehall or the government.
So they get in and they're like, wait, how does this work?
I'm not joking.
This is exactly what happened when I went to visit the UKIP MEPs in the European Parliament, right?
When I was a member of UKIP. It's not that they weren't doing their job or anything.
It's just the system is so Byzantine on purpose that even, like, you know, they're professional aids.
They don't know exactly how these things work.
And so they're like, well, I think it's going to go there.
I think that'll happen, but we'll wait and find out, basically.
It's like, surely the system should have some predictability built into it.
You know, especially if there's so many bloody emails and bits of paper that we're passing around.
But, yeah, no.
It wasn't a criticism saying, you don't understand it.
No.
No, no, I know.
I said, I was looking at it going like, no, I don't think anybody is going to understand how it works, and the government will just be able to do whatever they want, because if you complain about it, the government will say, well, in that case, very Brazil or maybe even Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
you need to fill out Form B143, and then you need to route it through this department, who will cross-check it, countersign it, then send it back to you, and then you need to take it to this department, and you'll need to go through all these bureaucratic processes, and all the while, the government will just fast-track everything that they want to do through.
Oh, and by the way, if you complain about it, you're on a Home Office extremist watch list under the Cabinet Office.
It's a brilliant way of avoiding accountability.
Well, you can't hold me accountable if you don't know what I've done, or how you're supposed to even do it.
But anyway, I think we're out of time, though.
Yes, we are.
We'll come back in half an hour if you're watching live for Tomlinson Talks.
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