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Jan. 10, 2025 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:29:42
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1076
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Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters episode 1076. I'm your host Harry, joined today by Carl, and we have special returning guest Harrison Pisson.
How are you doing, Harrison?
Very well, thanks for having me, gents.
Anything you'd like to update the audience with now that it's the new year?
Nothing too major.
Well, there's been a bit of a change of things at Eurocon, and I'm not going to be as much on the online edition anymore, but I will still be available in the print, and I'm looking to take the bulk of my writing services elsewhere.
Stay tuned for news on that front.
Stay tuned for where you'll be able to find Harrison going forwards.
But as it matters, today we'll be talking about how we need to keep up the pressure against Labour, the scouring of Los Angeles, and how Mark Zuckerberg might not be as anti-free speech as people think.
So that should all be interesting, and for all of our subscribers to the website, you should also be aware that we've got Lads Hour again this afternoon at 3 o'clock, the first one of the new year, so we're all looking forward to it.
We're going to be making our predictions for our 2025 bingo card.
That should be a lot of fun, so stay tuned for that.
And with that, let's get into the news.
So, speaking of things that people probably didn't predict...
Who would have thought that Elon Musk would go on a more than week-long tirade about the grooming gangs in Britain?
The great thing about this is that Elon Musk is just too big for them to get a handle on.
For people outside of the UK, basically, there's a kind of dome that overpins, that overarches over our political life, and it is the sort of Westminster media class's protective bubble.
And when a story bubbles up and tries to seek to break through, they close ranks and form this protective shield across the establishment.
and Elon Musk is just above this and has just come down from above and just smashed straight through it and made the grooming gang issue essentially front and centre and forced them to accept that there has been a lack of accountability on the part of the political class the institutions of this country and the communities who have been involved in it and this has been difficult for them to deal with and they have tried the usual tactic of closing ranks, circling the wagons and saying well hang on a second
everything we've ever done is perfect and in fact you're just an evil far right bigot but this is an argument whose time has passed The problem is clearly too deep and too...
Honestly, too morally abhorrent to cover up anymore.
If you would like to know in detail what has happened, go watch Connor's latest Tomlinson talks in which he goes through the grooming gang scandal historically and in the present day in great detail.
That's essentially the prerequisite to this segment.
So, it begins with the narrative crumbling.
As you can see...
James O'Brien, our favourite LBC commentator, is complaining that Robert Generic has gone, quote, full Yaxley Lennon, full Mr. Robinson.
So, essentially, Tommy Robinson's opinion is that Islam as a culture has, well, medieval attitudes towards women and is not from Britain.
And that is also Robert Jemmerich's opinion, and he articulated this in a perfectly reasonable manner the other day, and James O'Brien has been losing his mind over it.
Of course.
What was his reaction going to be?
No, James O'Brien's right.
Islam isn't alien to Britain, and it's completely normal to treat women in that way.
No, of course.
The narrative is completely crumbling.
And the thing is, they knew this was coming.
This is a conversation he had with a British Pakistani caller whose mother said one day, well, they've let us in and one day they'll kick us out.
I said, okay, but why would we do that?
Why would you worry about that?
It's a topic I'm going to do something more on.
It's a benefit to the country.
Yeah, it's something I'm going to do more on because there's something to that.
But anyway, so the Conservative Party decided they were going to try and force a vote.
On an amendment that would institute a national inquiry into the Grimmengang scandal, which you would think is a good idea.
We've had plenty of inquiries, but they've always been local, and it's come to light that it's at least 50 different towns and cities across England.
They've had grooming gangs operating in them, often with the knowledge and tacit consent of the local council, the police, the social workers, and the Labour MPs who were in charge of them.
And so Labour obviously decided, no, we're not going to do that.
Keir Starmer employed the whip to make it compulsory for Labour MPs to vote against this national inquiry, which does very much make him look like he is just on the side of the grooming gangs.
And, of course, they had the vote, and not a single Labour MP dared speak out.
The rest of the left-wing parties, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, also voted no, because for some reason they thought, you know what, we're not complicit enough in the Green Gang scandal.
We would like to be more complicit in that, and so we'd like to deny the National Inquiry.
But what we did have is Rupert Lowe.
And Rupert Lowe has distinguished himself in recent months for being completely fearless towards the hegemonic narrative of the progressive left and the media in Parliament.
And he just stood up and gave them both barrels.
I'll let you watch it in your own time, because we've got a lot to go through.
But he did a superb job saying, well, look, this is a scandal that we've never seen before, and you've done everything you can to cover it up.
We would like, and he names, Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs as the issue that needs to be addressed.
And of course, for reasons of political correctness, it hasn't been addressed.
And so enter one Mrs. Phillips.
Because Elon tweeted about Jess Phillips, calling her a rape-genocide apologist.
And a witch.
And a witch.
Which is strong language.
And this has allowed Jess Phillips to become...
In some way a distraction to this issue.
And I think they've done everything they can to make this about her.
As you can see here, is it Kathy Newman?
Yes.
The woman who became famous for interviewing Jordan Peterson.
She decided to sit down and take Jess Phillips' advice on what Elon Musk should do, in fact.
I think maybe Elon Musk knows about how to run his own life better than Jess Phillips.
Yes, and also, I mean, who is it there saying I would suggest getting a bit more shut-eye?
Elon.
Of course, but it's Jess Phillips saying that.
I mean, the results in Elon's case speak for themselves, don't they?
I think so.
I actually don't know how he manages to cram in all of the tweeting that he does do, but nevertheless, it's not as though SpaceX is crumbling, it's not as if Tesla is crumbling.
Some have argued he outsources some of his tweets.
There seems to be a unity of style.
Too much of a unity of style for that to be the case.
But the point being, I think the richest man to have ever lived probably knows how to run his life better than Jess Phillips does.
But the point being is they wanted to make Jess Phillips the story, as Posey Parker points out.
I would genuinely love to hear her say, let's not make this about me, when thousands of girls were and are still being raped.
Well, the human there is, of course...
Imagining Jess Phillips saying, let's not make this about me.
She's a narcissistic idiot.
Yes.
That's all she knows how to do.
Yes, and she's thrilled with being the center of attention.
You can tell, because she's always got a little smirk on her face when she's in these interviews.
She's trying to act like this is a terrible thing, but suddenly the glow of the center of attention is upon her, and you can tell that she's enjoying it.
Well, talking about the media closing ranks as well, you're absolutely right.
About that, Carl.
They see it as their job to protect the regime against legitimate criticism from outsiders, even if those outsiders...
Obviously, they would prefer those outsiders to be people like Stephen Yaxley and like Tommy Robinson because they're more easily smearable.
We would resist many of the ways in which he is smeared, but it's much more easy to contain that kind of populist energy than it is a billionaire with the success that Musk has.
And talking about the media closing ranks, when Keir Starmer held that press conference, because again, this is the whole point, he has to address what Musk says in a way that he doesn't really have to address what Anons Online say.
All of the media, apart from GB News' Christopher Hope, to give him credit, all of the questions were about Musk's tweets, about Jess Phillips' safety being compromised.
It was only Christopher Hope who sort of applied proper pressure.
The media likes to congratulate itself on being the fourth estate, democracy dies in darkness, and all the rest of it.
But they're very selective about when they choose to care for journalistic standards and when they close ranks.
Well, they know exactly what they're doing here.
I mean, Beth Rigby, she gave a brilliant analysis of the situation, all about Jess Phillips.
So they've decided, and again, you can just read through this, it's just Jess Phillips, Jess Phillips, Jess Phillips.
I mean, it couldn't have been...
More complimentary to Jess Phillips if Phillips had written it herself.
And so they're using Jess Phillips as a shield to try and avoid this issue.
But, I mean, you've got Ian Hislop saying, well, this is medieval misogyny to call Jess Phillips a witch.
And it's like, really?
Really?
I mean, A, the high watermark of witchcraft in England was actually in the 17th century, so it was post-medieval.
But I think, actually, industrial rape gangs are a bit more misogynistic and a bit more medieval, Ian.
I don't want to invoke Norm Macdonald already, but I think the real problem was the raping.
I'm sorry, Ian.
To lovies like Ian, it's the lack of proper manners when discussing it that makes it the problem.
Because, of course, we can't be going into our nice, liberal upper echelon dinner parties with this kind of talk now, can we?
And that is, honestly, that is 100% what the issue is.
Like I said, Elon Musk has just rocketed this into orbit, and he's still tweeting about this.
He's still hammering this point home, so that is superb.
And, of course, they are like, okay, well, holding up Jess Phillips as the shield didn't work.
Okay, what's the next thing?
Oh, there's an extreme right-wing group called Blood and Honor.
Is there?
Is there?
That's news to me!
Reasonable grounds to suspect it's involved in terrorist activity.
Well, okay, but what's that got to do with the conversation that we're having?
Have you ever heard of these guys?
No.
Sounds like a fed operation.
Well, that's the thing.
With a name like Blood and Blood...
It's a bit too on the nose, isn't it?
Come on.
Even if it isn't, they're nobodies.
Yeah, exactly.
Even if it's not, okay, but who are these people?
And okay, if they're an extremist potential terrorist group...
Do something about them.
That's your job.
Like, this is, like, you know, I'm not going to congratulate the cashier at Tesco for running through my goods.
After Prevent decided to put most of its resources to tracking down white identitarian and other such movements, the news is going, we found one!
We found the one!
Thank God!
And so the Jess Phillips thing, oh, that didn't work right.
No, no, no, look at this, look at this, look at this.
No, no.
I don't know who they are.
I don't care.
Arrest them if they've committed crimes.
Otherwise, shut up.
So the next thing that they had to do was go, okay, right, well, that didn't work either because literally the entire response, in fact, it's just people like, no, never heard of them, don't care, right?
So the next thing was for them to go, well, actually, you know who really is responsible for bringing the grooming gang problem to the fore?
That's right, us, the left-wing establishment.
We're the ones who are championing this as if anyone believes this.
This is not going to fool anyone.
If it wasn't for these left-wing women, this would still be going on.
It's like, really?
Is that the case?
Oh, you know what?
Andrew Norfolk actually broke the grooming gang story.
Let's see if there's a community note on this.
Oh, wait, there is!
There is!
Oh, that's not true, says the community note.
Here's a source.
No kidding.
Again, anything to get around this.
At the very least, with the previous post that you had up on screen there, I agree with the ultimate message of it, which is that you need action.
Sure.
Now, we need some kind of national tribunal, not a national inquiry.
Can I make one quick point as well?
There's a bit of a slippage in the argument there as well, because on the one hand they're saying that, no, no, it was courageous women.
in and even if you do want to praise people like Sarah Champion or people like Anne Cryer who can can rightly be classed in some way as whistleblowers they always say and it took them such courage to do this well why would it take why would it demand courage it's because of the it's because our culture militates against pointing these sorts of things out Sarah Champion was...
Wasn't she on the Labour front bench or something?
She was a part of something.
I believe she was on the shadow Labour front bench when Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party and because she...
She got deselected.
I don't think she got deselected but I think she got kicked out of the shadow front bench and back onto the back bench or something like that.
It was something that she got in trouble for.
I can't remember exactly what it was.
But the point is...
Drawing attention to this it was.
Yeah, it requires courage because there's...
There's an anti-racist cult which inhibits our ability to get to the heart of issues and to enforce justice.
That's what's going on.
Absolutely.
And you were exactly right to point that out.
But of course they claim, well actually it was our left-wing journalists who did this.
And it's like, not really.
Andrew Norfolk did, as the community said, talk about this.
But he had to admit that he had to stop doing it because essentially all of his peers were like...
We don't want to talk about this at our dinner parties.
This is better out of sight, out of mind.
Thank you very much.
And so it took someone like Mr. Robinson to continually bang the drum and become the sort of totemic evil to say, no, this isn't going away and you can't just hide this.
And again, I think it's always worth hammering home that one of the reasons that they were more than happy to ignore it at their dinner parties and not just because of the fact that it was like poor manners to bring it up, it's because, well, the people it's happening to are working class scum anyway, so who cares?
Yeah.
It's never going to be their daughters, which is the reason that all of this has gone on.
Anyway, so the next thing to do is to try and change the subject.
Try and distract you.
Oh, by the way, do you remember the...
The gangs crossing the channel and invading Britain that we're putting up in the hotel still for some reason.
We're going to do something about them.
It's like, yeah, we've heard that before and you haven't done anything yet.
And I don't believe you.
And why am I still paying for these people to live in hotels?
Just deport them instantly?
So, again, nobody, as you see from all the replies, nobody is buying any of this.
This is all part of the distraction tactic.
Don't let them get away with it.
You've got, still, victims being targeted by the institutions.
So, as Samantha Smith here points out, the police are trying to get her to stop talking about the subject.
The same with Sammy Woodhouse.
She received a phone call from South Yorkshire Police saying, look, you've got to stop talking about this on Twitter, on X. Why?
Why would they say this?
Of course, the problem is they know that there are community tensions that are going to be created.
By the fact that this has gone on, and so the best way to prevent them, in their minds, is to silence them.
Yes, and this is another reason why...
There are so many reasons why a national inquiry, a definitive comprehensive national inquiry with subpoena power...
Led by a relatively impartial judge would be preferable to the ones that have already gone on.
One reason is that the one, the J report, is national in its focus, but it's about child sex abuse in general, and so it doesn't touch on this particular issue.
And I think Charlie Peters wrote a very good piece in The Standard where he was talking about how the word Pakistani is only mentioned two or three times in that whole report.
Walter Rotherham is mentioned once, and Telford, because these loom large in our mind, but Charlie Peters estimates there are as many, well, he says he's said.
There are over 50 of these towns.
So there needs to be a comprehensive inquiry.
But another reason why there needs to be one is that the J report didn't really lean very much on the testimony of victims.
It was much more interested in officials.
And local inquiries, you've basically got a case where councils are marking their own homework.
And then it may be the case that the council officials, local officials, have been responsible in the cover-up.
There's the old Roman Latin principle, Nemo, Judex, and Corsi, so no man can be a judge in his own case.
The National Enquirer would be properly comprehensive on the one hand, but touch all of these issues and it would be completely immunised against conflict of interest.
People who weren't complicit in it, because the South Yorkshire Police are complicit in this.
These institutions still have people in them who are covering up for it when it was going on for the historic cases and for the ones that are currently still going on.
These people can't be trusted.
To mark their own homework, as you rightly point out.
And, of course, lots of people are like, well, are you sure the victims want this?
Yeah, of course the victims want this.
This is a victim who phoned up Andrew Marr and was like, no, I'm thrilled that Elon Musk is amplifying this and getting our voices said.
Finally, some people could be punished for what's happened.
Because the thing that we do in Britain, and we think that this...
Smooths the whole thing over is, well, let's just take the ringleaders of the gang and lock them up for five or ten years, as if that's long enough, and then let them back out into the public.
We won't deport them.
And then we'll say, look, job done.
That's our hands.
Justice served.
And their victims will be able to run into them at the local shops as well, which has happened.
And so none of the councillors, none of the social workers, none of the police, no one else involved.
I mean, there are thousands of rapists wandering around in these communities who have not been arrested.
Because these were pimp gangs that were trafficking them from town to town and selling them.
Often, there are tens of thousands of rapists wandering around this country.
Not to speak of the people in authority who just turned a blind eye, covered her up, or where they were involved.
There were at least two Muslim police officers who were currently in jail for being parts of the Grimm gang.
And the Lord.
Well, not in prison, but...
Well, no.
Was it Lord Ahmed?
Oh no, Lord Ahmed is out now.
Oh, okay.
He wasn't a police officer though.
Oh, fantastic.
First Labour Lord turns out to have been...
The scale of this is extraordinary, and the other thing as well is that...
Have you noticed Channel 4's recent...
I don't know if you're going to get to this, but have you noticed Channel 4's recent attempt at a kind of narrative counterpunch?
I have.
I actually forgot to include that.
Well, during the whole Me Too period, of course, if people like us, generally it was people like us, were supposed to complain, well, you know, due process is important here, false accusations are possible.
We're talking about individual cases there.
There were all sorts of hoaxes across American campuses in particular, where you had white jock guys who were being accused of...
The Jula Cross case springs to mind and the media wasn't at all interested in the false accusation cases.
They were part of the whole operation.
The whole METU moral panic that we lived through in that period.
Whereas now the evidence could not be staring us more in the face.
It could not be more definitive.
The scale of it could not be clearer.
And yet they have managed to zone in on the one case where a white working class girl falsely accused a Pakistani gang of engaging in this kind of...
It really is extraordinary.
And notice how widely spread that's being.
I think the BBC were doing something about it as well.
And you know that the reason they're focusing on this to such a degree is to essentially try and discredit the other victims and say, well, there was this one woman who was lying about it.
Are you sure the rest?
The title of the documentary is called The Fake Grooming Gangs.
That's what it's called.
And they know so many people will see the title but not watch the actual content as well.
So anyway, the victims are happy to be heard.
And you get, again, excellent reporting by people like Charlie Peters, who go and interview the victims and they say, well look, like he was trying to film interviews in Rotherham for the reaction to the vote.
And he says, no one would speak to us.
Pakistanis at the markets claim they didn't know what was going on.
A white man warned anyone who puts their head above the parapet gets shot.
Just silence.
So everyone knows.
Everyone's afraid.
Everyone doesn't know where this ends.
And as he says, no one wants to go on camera even anonymously.
There's a lot of tension, anger, and denial over this.
And so the point that the people in our space have to, I think, take away from this is keep on the pressure, right?
This is a pressure cooker.
They can't keep a lid on this forever.
And Elon Musk has done a great job.
And you can see this because, frankly, they admit that this is the problem and this is still going on.
Like, throughout all of this, all of the distractions with Jess Phillips, she did still come out and say, well, yep, they're in every single part of our country.
Okay, then we don't need to talk about you.
Let's talk about the gangs.
Let's talk about this problem.
Even people like Sarah Champion saying, well, look, actually, we do need to implement the child protection recommendations to prevent this.
This hasn't been done, right?
And, of course, then you have Andy Burnham.
The Mayor for Manchester, the Labour Mayor, who decided to break ranks with Keir Starmer and say, look, we do actually need this inquiry.
Is Keir Starmer going to kick him out of the Labour Party?
This has been a hard line for Keir Starmer.
What's the consequence going to be?
Now, so far, this happened yesterday.
So far, nothing.
So far, radio silence from Keir Starmer on this.
But the point is, you can see the cracks are being exposed in the Labour coalition.
Even the ones who are most vociferously trying to deny it admit this is a problem.
Even the ones who are saying, well, look, we kind of spoke up about it.
We need to do something about this.
Labour mayors are now coming out and saying, look, yeah, the Prime Minister is wrong on this.
So just keep up the pressure.
This will work.
Scanlines...
You've got that one.
Sorry.
Scanline says, can we push back on the idea that David Armes was killed because of online rhetoric and not Islamic ideology?
I keep hearing it across the news outlets and it's allowing Islam to get away with more.
I don't know, to be honest.
I've noticed that whenever there's a...
Islamist attacks are obviously much more common, particularly when you weight it for per head of Muslims in the population, as compared with whites in the population, than so-called far-right terrorist attacks.
But I've noticed that whenever there is a kind of terrorist attack which codes far-right, they're interested in the message and the ideology of the perpetrator, whereas whenever there's an attack that is obviously Islamist in terms of its character, they become very interested in the mechanism by which they were radicalized, such as online content, because then it becomes a pretext for censorship.
You've got to be on guard against those highly selective double attacks.
That's a random name says, I feel like Jess Phillips narcissistic personality.
I can't read that.
It is quite entertaining though.
It's entertaining, but I don't want to get in trouble.
Thank you very much.
Carl has already made one apology.
He doesn't need it.
Yeah, I don't have to make any more.
Thank you.
Goodness me.
Alright then, so, on to the next story, and that is that Los Angeles is burning down currently.
This is an ongoing news story, but the beginning of each year seems to bring new and interesting stories.
Last year we had the tunnels underneath New York.
This year, what I was not expecting to happen was that Los Angeles is burning down, and it's happening quite rapidly.
And I want to make it clear, I do not want to make light of this story, because...
Hundreds of thousands of people are having their lives ruined, their lives completely upturned, and who knows what's going to happen for most of these people.
But there is one thing that I know, which is the reason for all of this happening seems to be a complete and utter failure of management of Los Angeles and its climate.
Because this isn't necessarily climate change, this is the fact that Los Angeles is an incredibly warm city.
In the middle of the desert, and things catch on fire quite often.
And generally speaking, it's been pointed out that they've been very, very lucky that the entire city hasn't burned down before because the winds just haven't been blowing the right way to push fires all the way through the city.
This time they were.
And there's also the question of how the fire started.
Did it start because of natural reasons?
Did it just naturally spark up?
Was there a lightning strike or something?
Or was it arson?
And 95% of all of the wildfires in Los Angeles and California seem to be...
Man-made, and there are already people being arrested for being potential arsonists.
Is there a distinction between people who arson on purpose and by accident?
Well, in this case, the person who's been arrested...
Let's just skip straight to the end here, why don't we?
So the Times have been reported...
The Telegraph, sorry, have said that an alleged arsonist suspected of sparking the latest fire in Los Angeles was found with what neighbours describe as a large propane tank and flamethrower.
That doesn't sound accidental.
No, it certainly doesn't sound accidental.
So this is the latest fire, because there are multiple fires all blazing at once across different parts of Los Angeles.
But I would be unsurprised if it turned out that another arsonist, or maybe even the same person, is the one who started the original fire in the Palisades.
But just to give a little bit of information of what's been going...
To start off with.
So, several major wildfires burning in Los Angeles County.
At least 10 people have died so far, but officials warn that the actual toll will remain unclear until it's safe for investigators to access neighborhoods, because who knows how many people got trapped in their homes and are currently stuck among the rubble burnt to a crisp.
Horrifying, horrifying thing to think about.
Tens of thousands of people have been impacted by evacuation orders since the blazes began.
I believe the BBC have said it's about 130,000, but that was as of yesterday.
So today it's probably even more as the fires spread.
As many as 10,000 structures have already been destroyed between the Coastal Palisades Fire, which is now the most destructive to ever hit Los Angeles, and the Eton Fire, which has now devastated more communities.
So of the fires, there's the first one that started, which is, of course, the largest, the Palisades, and that started on Tuesday.
So it's only been a few days.
And it's already destroyed so much of California, and some of these other articles will have images of that.
Then there's the Eton Fire, Lydia Fire, Hearst Fire, Sunset Fire, which is right next to the Hollywood Hills, and there was lots of images coming out of the Hollywood sign burning, but that all turned out to be AI, because otherwise it would prove that God had a sense of humor, but...
That was all AI. A sixth fire, the Woodley Fire, started in the Van Nuys neighbourhood in LA on Wednesday, and a new brush fire, the Kenneth Fire, broke out on Thursday afternoon.
So I assume that that being the latest one is the one that this arsonist has been arrested for.
What else is going on in the news here regarding this?
Despite the efforts of the firefighters, the biggest blazes remain totally uncontained, and weather conditions and the underlying impact of climate change, which the BBC... Yes, yesterday i'll carry on the in
among the celebrities who've lost their homes are leighton meester adam brody and paris hilton i also saw that mel gibson was on joe rogan i watched it yeah and while he was on joe rogan his house burnt down as well in hollywood so loads of celebrities have their houses The insurance industry is fearing this could prove to be one of the costliest wildfire outbreaks ever.
Insured loss is expected to be above $8 billion.
Mansions are burning down.
Yeah, if Hollywood Hills mansions are starting to burn down as well, then yeah, it's expensive.
And people are also upset at the fact that Donald Trump has been making some comments about it, pointing out that LA and Gavin Newsom in particular are mostly to blame for all of this for not controlling the amount of dry brush that has been all over the Hollywood and Los Angeles forest floors for decades at this point and just allowed to dry out.
This has been a long-running complaint, actually.
Yeah.
I assume they think it's natural and sort of a rewilding effort or something like that.
Nature has its own ways of clearing this stuff up.
They get similar problems because it's a hot place.
You've essentially got to rake through the...
I don't really know how it works, but you've got to make sure that it's not full of dry tinder, basically, which seems like a reasonable point to make.
An entire county is a tinderbox.
Almost the entire state.
It's also just emblematic of the way that the left weaponizes science, TM in grand terms, in order to pursue these highfalutin projects while just neglecting basic fundamental duties.
They're trying to do the Herculean without doing the basic.
This is actually reflected in California's budget I was reading about.
Whereas the...
The ill-defined climate change budget has been soaring steadily upwards.
They've actually cut their wildfire prevention management budget, which would include precisely those sorts of activities.
There's also been massive cuts to the actual firefighting budget in Los Angeles itself.
Which has been something that people have been complaining about.
An LA City Council member, Tracy Park, said on Wednesday that there's been chronic underinvestment in the city of Los Angeles in public infrastructure, which is at fault for the devastating fires all across the city.
The circumstances of the last 48 hours were 100% predictable, she said in an interview, noting that the city's failure to invest in water systems, fire stations, and other infrastructure contributed to the lack of resources to fight the fight.
Also, there's been a lot of people talking about how apparently there's one billionaire couple who owns about 80% of all of the water reserves in California due to a lot of backhanded business dealings that have been going on with city officials since the 90s.
I think it's the Resnicks is what they're called, possibly.
But also worth bearing in mind that, I mean, I looked at California on a map.
There must be hundreds of kilometers worth of seaboard.
They bought, I mean, desalination.
Isn't particularly expensive.
Presumably this isn't a sort of a developing landlocked country.
This is a supposedly highly developed, what they used to call it, the land of milk and honey when the original sort of pioneers were coming out west.
Up until like maybe the 60s and 70s, Los Angeles and California in general was seen as a paradise on earth.
And also as a quite right wing, both Nixon and Reagan came out of California.
Reagan ruined that for the state.
What I'm saying is that in terms of its cultural and social...
It should be complicated.
I recall hearing that it wasn't that the reservoirs were empty or anything like that.
It seems, I think, Harry's getting at it.
It's just mismanagement.
Yes, exactly.
Oh yeah, it is.
And again, this woman is pointing out Tracy Park.
She says that Pacific Palisades, where the first fire started, relies on the LA Department of Public Works to supply water to fire hydrants via a series of reservoir tanks.
Park said she will look into why firefighters struggled to battle the blaze as hydrants ran dry, which she saw So you've got these enormous wildfires going on and the fire hydrants just run out.
Again, in what is essentially an enormous desert.
Absolutely ridiculous.
After the fire erupted, demand for water in Pacific Palisades quadrupled, in part because fleeing residents left hoses and faucets on, according to Park, and there was an unusually high strain on the system, and by that time, 80 mile per hour winds as well, so they were having hurricane force winds, prevented fire officials from dropping water by air.
Instead, they called in mutual aid, but the city was very, very limited for it, and those winds were, of course, helping to spread the fire and fan the flames.
Los Angeles has some 3,400 firefighters, the same number it had 50 years ago, despite its much larger current population.
She also added that the city needed more firefighters and 62 new fire stations.
When the latest fires erupted, the city had nearly 100 firetrucks and ambulances out of service because it doesn't have enough mechanics to fix them.
Just failures on every level here because, again, as she said, as everybody has been saying for ages, this was always going to happen.
This is entirely predictable.
Not to discount the courage of female firefighters if they exist as well, but I would also like to look at the sex proportions of the fire, because it might not only...
Oh, we've got a little bit on that.
Oh, great.
We've got a little bit on that.
I'll hold my gunpowder in reserve then.
So when Donald Trump appeared on Joe Rogan, he was even saying that they need to build more reservoirs and manage their forests better to prevent wildfires, so Trump's been saying this for a little bit.
That's the reason not to do it, isn't it?
Yeah, after the last massive wildfire that spread through California, Donald Trump was there to say, hey, maybe we need to do some forest management around here, guys.
Joe Rogan, back in July, was saying that he'd spoken to a California firefighter who said that, yeah, LA's probably going to burn down one day.
Because of all of these problems.
But what did Gavin Newsom have to say on the matter back in 2021 when- He was a racist?
Well, when peace came back to America with the benevolent Biden regime, well, he said, don't worry, we'll solve all that problem now because we've got a president on our side.
We've got Joe Biden on our side.
So this is never going to happen again.
Except it didn't, and Donald Trump called him Gavin Newsom on Truth Media and said that this is a complete failure of Gavin Newsom and- L.A. and California.
And what do you think Gavin Newsom had to say about that?
Don't politicize this matter.
Oh, wow.
You must have some premonition abilities or something, man.
I don't know if this video is going to load now, but basically, yes, he says, I can't believe he would politicize it like this.
I don't even have the guts to say what I want to say to Donald Trump, but I'm just trying to solve the problem now.
This problem never should have happened in the first place.
And loads of people have been pointing out, like, libs of TikTok posting this Fox News clip where they were saying that Los Angeles was not refilling the water reservoirs, which is one of the reasons why all of the fire hydrants were running out incompetence on the highest level.
And also, there was an enormous budget cut to the Los Angeles Fire Department of $17 million from 2024 to 2025. And what was the...
Mayor, after she signed that and this all happened, what did she have to say about the matter when she was confronted by journalists?
Do you owe citizens an apology for being absent while their homes were burning?
Do you regret cutting the fire department budget by millions of dollars, Madam Mayor?
Have you nothing to say today?
Have you absolutely nothing to say to the citizens today?
Elon Musk says that you're utterly incompetent.
Are you considering your position?
Madam Mayor, have you absolutely nothing to say to the citizens today?
And it goes on like that.
My favourite part of democratic governance is the eagerness to take accountability that our representatives have.
I mean, good God.
All of that's happened.
Literally, the city you're in charge of is burning down slowly.
And you just...
Do you know where she is?
Nothing to say.
She was in Africa.
Yeah, she was in Ghana.
She was in Ghana.
Because Ghana had the first female black president.
And she was going over there to show solidarity.
I think it's interesting as well, because it's very interesting that Gavin Newsom's, I won't labour this point too much, but it's very interesting that Gavin Newsom's response was, I know we didn't get to see it, but don't politicise this.
It's because...
California is now effectively a one-party state and there are no politicization of issues.
There are no real political debates.
You get this kind of complacency on the part of officials.
I'm guessing she's a Democrat.
What gave it away?
She knows that she is not going to be politically challenged.
They fear politicization in their state because it would count against their current claim as a state to be a one-party state.
They don't want...
I think that's one of the reasons why she doesn't seem very phased by these questions.
And she doesn't know she's probably going to be able to stay as a crony in power.
And she doesn't have an answer because she's never had to produce an answer for these kinds of questions.
Officials who fear accountability.
And that's what politics does.
It gives you that.
Another issue with the we don't want to politicise this.
Well, that's because there's only one way in which to point the finger.
It's not any of the Republicans.
Well, you're going to point your finger at me, the man who was in charge the whole time?
Well, that's just not fair.
Yeah, and my party, the one party state that is California, I mean, who else are you going to point the fingers at?
There's just no way...
All quick as you can blame me.
This is just culture war BS. Let's try and avoid it.
And what does it lead to?
Well, it leads to these being the extent of the fire.
Bear in mind that the Los Angeles County is enormous, so this fire alone, I think, is like...
Twice the width of Manhattan.
And that's just on the outskirts of LA and then you've got multiple all breaking out at the same time.
Again, it seems very likely that arsonists have a lot to do with this, especially given that even outside of one person already being arrested, most of these fires in these areas tend to be started by people in the first place.
Some have even speculated it might be insane environmentalists who want to prove a point.
I've seen suggestions to that effect.
Yeah, and I think it was on this article they had.
Maybe it was this article, maybe it was some of the others.
I mean, look at this.
There's the smoke plumes in this little video here emanating from California, just from L.A. That's a little representation.
And some of these, you have these images.
Before, after.
This is thousands of people's lives.
Completely turned over.
And how do you recover from this?
And this didn't have to happen.
No, it didn't have to happen.
Let's not politicize this.
And look, this looks like it's still got the fires burning in the trees around this area.
Some of the images that have come from this is frightful.
And again, it's right by the sea, so you'd think that, oh, you've got easy water access right there.
No.
Has anyone seen that film 2012, which sort of...
Portrays an apocalypse.
The images are very reminiscent of that.
Yeah, some of it is truly apocalyptic images.
So while they were cutting the fire department budget, what was the Los Angeles spending its money on?
Can you guess?
Yeah.
Really?
Gay choirs, trans calves, and social justice art.
Yeah.
They gave 100 grand to the Civil and Human Rights and Equity Department for a midnight stroll transgender cafe.
They gave the Cultural Affairs Department Special Appropriations Budget, gave $100,000 to the NAACP for their awards ceremony.
They gave almost $9,000 for the One Institute, the International Gay and Lesbian Archives.
Budget also allocated $13,000 for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Heritage Month programs and $14,000 to the Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles.
It also appropriated $170,000 in total for social justice art worker investments.
Was that the one that sang We're Coming for Your Children?
Yes.
Yeah, the Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles.
Yeah.
They just get 14 grand.
And the LA Fire Department was blasted for promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in its 2023-26 strategic plan, saying that DEI was one of its key goals.
A stated priority of the city's first LGBTQ and woman fire chief, Kristen F. Crowley, is promoting a culture that values DEI, but not...
Putting out fires, I can assume.
You haven't even congratulated them on how diverse their culture was.
Well, I mean, it's getting more and more diverse because now you can also be a fire department employee if you're a criminal because they've employed 800 incarcerated firefighters.
What I assume this means is prison labour.
Like scripting the prisoners.
Yep.
It's funny how none of this ever is political.
Yeah, no, no.
But wanting to redirect the state's duties to encompass...
You know, a bare minimum of security for the people in their home, a bare minimum of environmental preventive activity is the political point.
And LA also has a deputy chief of the fire department who is a fat, diverse woman.
Literal description.
And this is what she had to say when talking about responses to fires starting...
This before or after?
This is before.
I think she might decide to frame it a little bit differently if she was giving this interview now.
You want to see somebody that responds to your house, your emergency, whether it's a medical call or a fire call, that looks like you.
It gives that person a little bit more ease, knowing that somebody might understand their situation better.
Is she strong enough to do this?
Or you couldn't carry my husband out of a fire, which my response is, he got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire. - Yep.
If your house was burning down in LA over the past few days, that's the kind of attitude to greet you.
Well, maybe if you didn't want your house burning down, you shouldn't have built it so close to the fire.
That's the kind of attitude that's being presented there.
Yeah, sorry, I'm in danger.
Can you please help me and help my job?
Not strong enough.
You should have thought about that before you got in trouble.
It's complete absconding of their own moral duty to do their own jobs.
It's just...
It's disgusting.
It's unbelievable.
It is disgusting.
And the thing is, if you'd made up a parody script...
Of this.
And you had her say that, people were like, come on, they're not going to say that.
It's a bit on the nose.
It's too ridiculous.
No one would buy it.
And yet that was her response.
But this isn't to denigrate all of the, I'm sure, very competent and brave firefighters that are currently out trying to fight the fires and save people's lives.
All of the non-diverse hires, and even some diverse hires that might also be decent at their job, just not that woman.
Also, courage and competence are not the same thing.
I admire, in a way, when I see those, it's a bit ridiculous, but when you see those sort of five-foot-two women being police officers in Westminster, when I'm walking through there quite frequently, I sort of think, well, at least you are putting yourself in the line of duty, so you're a courageous person, but I don't estimate your ability to drag a six-foot-five criminal to the ground.
At least she might try, whereas with that woman, sadly, she's on break right now.
She's doing badly on both the courage...
And the competence.
She on break.
Not her job.
Not her job.
And the result of all of this is LA burning down.
The fires are still going.
Who knows how long this is going to last.
Is it going to take out Hollywood?
Is it going to take out the entire city?
Is this some kind of divine retribution for insults against God?
These are all questions that we're asking.
And some of the footage and photos really make it seem apocalyptic.
Like, this was the red sun.
Rising over Los Angeles as it was rising above the flames.
These are the sorts of fires that are going on.
Just imagine looking out of the window and seeing that and then knowing, I've got to leave my home now.
Because people have been saying that they saw that there were the fires going on the Palisades the day before or even like, oh, I heard about this five hours ago.
Now my home's burned down and I've had to leave and evacuate.
And it is important to remember that this is all politically decided.
This is a consequence of a series of decisions made by deeply irresponsible people using your money Yes.
That should be our response as well, because they always try and accuse us of politicizing things by responding to often decades' worth of politicization on their part.
It should always be that we found the situation in a political state, and we were addressing it on that terrain, but you decided the terrain, not us.
That should be our response.
Yeah.
Here's the most apocalyptic sight for Americans out there.
If you are American watching this right now, cover your eyes.
This might really upset you.
Look at the fire on the trees, yeah.
It's scary.
Hurricane of fire, because each of those embers being blown as well might set fire to something else.
They might set fire to your house.
And who's going to take advantage of all of this?
Well, it's LA, so you've got criminals going around.
Oh, someone's house is about to burn down, but it's not gone yet?
Great.
Fantastic.
It's abandoned.
Time to make some money, boys.
So, this is LA as it exists right now, which might not exist for very much longer.
We'll see how it goes.
I, you know, hope for the best for everybody who is directly affected by this.
I hope that the death toll is as low as possible, but this could have all been avoided, and California's representatives really need to face justice over this.
Can I pitch the mouse back, please?
Yes, you can.
Thank you.
Wimpilsey says, without control burns and forest maintenance, social fire, SoCal fire was inevitable.
Equals environmentalist causes.
Yeah, I've seen nothing but...
It's on British media.
They're like, well, climate change for you.
Climate change for you.
It's like, no, it's always been hot in California.
The Californian climate hasn't actually changed.
It's a desert.
Sorry?
It's a desert.
It's literally always been a desert.
This isn't new.
This is bad management.
In fact, EC says, The mismanagement of forest lands in California began in earnest in the 90s, as did the degradation of standards in the LAFD. This is willful and malicious.
Yep.
Cranky Texan says Californians are so angry they're going to vote for a completely different set of progressives in the next election.
I've seen a lot of people saying, well, is California going to flip red now?
No.
Probably not, but...
I mean, it's burning red for a bit.
Never rule anything out, to be honest.
You don't know what will happen.
But yeah, it is entirely political they've chosen this themselves.
If you want to be a one-party blue state, then expect this kind of response.
That's a random name.
I'm not reading that.
Bobo Bad says...
Have you heard about that joke that he made?
One for the green room, I think.
Bobo Bad says, can't say that not building reservoirs and not managing forests and enabling massive wildfires to own the chuds is a good move on Newsom's and the Democrats' part.
Yes.
And this is indeed cutting off...
I'm not going to read that either.
And Johnny says, in the UK you have to go through a fitness and strength test through practicals and a classic blep test to even be considered...
I think the bleep test.
That's because we have some standards left still.
Well, yeah, if you're expected to save somebody's life from a fire, being able to carry the average weight of a person is probably a good start.
It's not even in any way unreasonable, either.
No shock, right?
I shouldn't have to say that, but...
But anyway, one thing, another positive thing that has happened in 2025, and there have been quite a few of them, actually, so far.
It's, what, nine days in now?
Ten.
Sorry?
Ten days.
Oh, it's ten days now, right.
Ten days in, not even two weeks.
And there's been a cavalcade of good news, actually.
And one piece of good news, I thought, was Elon Musk...
And the things he's doing with Twitter, the effect that this has had on his fellow tech billionaires.
So we did a roundtable on the website, go and sign up, support us, and watch this, because it was a very good discussion on what Elon's forthrightness means in all of this.
I've listened to you for a moment.
Forthright, we thought you were saying.
What do you think?
We both thought you were saying forthright.
That's good, because that's what I was.
Is that what you thought?
You were saying forthright.
Of course.
Okay.
Forthright, we thought.
Oh, no.
Forthrightness.
That's what you thought, right, Harry?
That's what I heard.
Exactly, yes.
His forthrightness on the issues that actually matter.
Elon really has been radicalized by his own platform.
I do think that has happened, actually.
I do think he's become a little bit radicalized by Twitter.
But in the right way, which is good.
And this, we discuss in this roundtable, so go watch it.
And it, we, the...
The effect this has had on his fellow tech billionaires has been liberatory.
And I'm actually quite sympathetic to a lot of the tech billionaires.
Now, I know a lot of people are very angry with them and are passionate opponents of them, but I actually think they've been in a kind of an impressive atmosphere themselves and been unable to actually...
Morally assert themselves.
So I think that most of the tech bros suffer not from the problem of being evil, but being weak.
And Elon doesn't have that problem.
He's not weak.
He's quite happy to stand on his own two feet and say, no, I think this is right, and I think that's wrong, and I'm going to assert it.
And one of the things that he did was community notes.
Now this seemed, I thought, like a very good idea.
But it was remarkably poorly received by, of course, the powers that be.
Because what he said was, look, rather than employing however many thousand people Twitter employed as fact-checkers, I can just outsource that to the community.
And people can provide the real information themselves.
And this saves me money.
But it also democratizes the discourse.
If someone is taking advantage of things, well...
The fact-checkers have a political agenda.
They have a political bias.
And what this will allow is every political persuasion to be able to have an input into the knowledge production discourse.
And that's...
A very, very well-meaning thing to do.
It's worth saying as well that if it were just democratising it, that might be a problem, because the demos can be wrong.
But it's democratising it while also building in very strong and robust epistemic standards, which select for truth over time.
So I'm certain it's not as though every single opinion is given equal weight, which is a risk if you're democratising too much.
It's a decentralised system which is pursuing truth, and it clearly selects for that.
There have even been cases, to be fair to...
To Musk, where he has been community noted himself for getting things not entirely accurate.
In fact, it's not even that rare that he gets community noted if he's said something that's wrong.
And we should say as well that the problem with these sort of third-party content, there are sort of two, I've said before, there are sort of two rough theories of truth running in our society.
There is a kind of top-down managerial understanding of truth, which says that, well, there is...
There exists an expert class whose every word should be honoured and acknowledged on every major topic, and obviously the problem with that is that they have agendas of their own, they're often prone to groupthink, there's no sort of institutionalised disconfirmation of bias, it's the opposite of that.
Whereas with a kind of decentralised algorithmic system that Community Notes tries to model, there is a more organic, emergent theory of truth.
Exactly.
And it seems to be working, and it's encouraging that Zuckerberg...
Well, that's presage what I'm going to talk about.
But yes, the issue is, of course, having a dictatorship of experts who are all of one particular political stripe prevents accountability, frankly.
And they have not only been wrong, which of course anyone is capable of being wrong, but a lot of the time they have lied, knowingly and on purpose.
And so Community Notes is a superb...
Intercession into the dialogue.
And actually, Elon's done a good job implementing it as well.
One of the important parts, I think, was very, very good, was preventing a post that has been noted from earning revenue.
There is a lot of slop.
I'm not going to say there's not a lot of slop.
There's a lot of engagement farming because, of course, the monetization of Twitter, while a good thing, I think.
Did come with this downside.
And so at least telling overt lies that can be easily disproven by providing a source isn't financially incentivized.
So that is actually a good thing.
Good move.
When did he make that move?
I haven't quite noticed that taking full effect on my Twitter feed.
Stop posting lies.
A lot of slop accounts still seem to be doing very well.
I've seen a lot of people, well, I complain a lot about the slop accounts.
And recently, yesterday, I did a daily video talking about all of these new Facebook-tier threads where it's like 15 images that will change your life.
And everybody says, well, just go on the following tab then.
But the For You tab will actually expose you to new accounts that you've not seen before and new information.
Sometimes if you're going on following because it's purely chronological, you'll miss things, interesting things that people have said.
So there is still worth your time occasionally to go onto it.
But you've got all of these top ten images that will make you give up your job and go and live in the desert, and I hate them.
I hate them so much.
They're not actually true or false, right?
So they can't really be commuting.
You get 130 million views.
How much money is that person making?
We're in the wrong business.
Good God.
But basically with those, just block them.
There aren't actually that many of them.
So if you just block them when you see them...
And Elon's done well on the bots as well.
It's much less of that.
But lots of left-wing media outlets, of course, don't like community notes.
And a lot of people are like, ah...
The Guardian's quitting Twitter.
Why is that?
Well, they say, well, it's because it's a right-wing hellhole now.
But it could also be they kept getting community noted, and it's kind of humiliating, because wherever that post then goes, the community note goes with it, and so everyone knows that you're lying because you work for The Guardian.
And not popular with the media, but it is popular with people.
I mean, there's a subreddit with 170,000 people.
Following it, just about community notes and what they have done.
And so you can see that the other tech billionaires are looking around at this and saying, well...
This is actually a model that's working, and maybe, in fact, we could follow it too, which is why Mark Zuckerberg has decided that he will do the same for Facebook and Instagram, which I think, again, is just a superb step in the right direction.
Now, I want to defend Mark Zuckerberg slightly.
I realise that Josh did this the other day, but I feel like doing it as well.
I don't think that Mark Zuckerberg is an insane woke tyrant.
I think Mark Zuckerberg is a moral coward.
He's a weak man who...
Is surrounded by people.
This is a defense.
This is the defense.
The case for the defense.
I just think he's a socially awkward autist.
Yes, exactly.
He's a Chad now, isn't he?
There are two kinds of socially awkward autist.
I don't know if you want to call him a Chad.
I know that he's grown his hair out a bit curly, he's got a bit of a tan.
He's got lats, and he's doing jujitsu.
But...
Even still, photos taken from certain angles, he still looks a bit reptilian.
A bit dweeby, yeah.
Sure.
And his famous, I was a human once, is probably always going to come back to haunting.
I still remember.
You've got two types of billionaires.
Tech bro billionaires.
Those that are, they enjoy the cut and thrust of it, and those that don't.
And Zuckerberg is clearly on the...
I don't enjoy this.
Elon is obviously on the I do enjoy this side of things.
But like I said, I don't think that makes Zuckerberg a bad person, actually.
And he's actually had some very strange run-ins with the people who want to censor-free speech.
So he put up a post about this.
And in this, I'm just going to quote a bit.
He says...
In his 2016 speech at Georgetown University, Zuckerberg argued that free expression has been the driving force behind progress in American society and around the world and inhibiting speech, however well-intentioned for the reasons for doing so, often reinforces existing institutions and power structures instead of empowering people.
He said, quote, Giving more people a voice is driving division rather than bringing us together.
More people across the political spectrum believe that achieving the political outcomes that they think matter is more important than every person having a voice.
I think that's dangerous.
It's like, okay, great.
I agree with you.
But why did you then essentially collapse into we'll just have the progressive world order and have all the fact checkers and censor lots of important things than standing on that You could have done this.
And it was the same with Jack Dorsey at Twitter.
Jack Dorsey, when Twitter was first created, their slogan was the free speech wing of the Free Speech Party, which was meant to be the Democrats back in 2006 or whenever it was.
Obviously, that collapsed as well.
And you could see in the conversation that he had with Tim Pool, Joe Rogan, and Vijaya Gaff.
He jaded, didn't he?
Even to be there?
Yeah, he didn't even need to be there.
He was clearly being long-housed by a bunch of progressive people.
It was that dreadful Indian woman who was clearly the brains behind the censorship operation at X before.
Of course.
I won't try and pronounce her name, but you know who I mean.
She was the one who was sort of enthusiastically giving all the answers.
This is why we censored him.
Jack Dorsey just seems...
Jack Dorsey, I agree with you, he seemed jaded to be there.
He didn't seem like a...
Stoned.
Well, maybe that's true.
Possibly that, but I... He doesn't seem like an enthusiastic censor.
No, exactly.
And in fact, you can tell the tech bros, they began their lives as free speech activists.
They were like, no, it is good that we have free speech.
This is a liberal value, and of course it is.
But they weren't morally strong people, unlike someone like Elon Musk, who perhaps is just too autistic for them or something.
I don't know.
He's just like, no, I can't even understand why.
You just seem further along the spectrum.
And so it's not that these people are themselves naturally inclined.
And the most remarkable thing that I think Zuckerberg ever did in the cause of free speech was defend Holocaust denial, actually.
Defend...
The right to Holocaust denial, I think.
He wasn't starting to get his calculator out.
I would be very surprised if Jewish man Mark Zuckerberg decided to do that.
Bookshelves is brimming with David Irving.
But he had a very, very good point on this, and it was a good couple of months that he defended this, six years ago, when they were really getting on his...
On his arse about it.
But basically, he didn't want to de-platform Alex Jones and Infowars from Facebook.
And he said, look, he would like to reduce the distribution of that content, but would not censor the page.
And he said that Holocaust deniers were deeply offensive, but I don't believe that our platform should take that down because I think that there are things that different people get wrong that I don't think they're intentionally getting wrong.
It's hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent.
I just think, as abhorrent as some of those examples are, I think the reality is I also get things wrong when I speak publicly.
That's actually a very noble position.
And it's...
It's a fair and down-the-line sort of position.
Yes, it is.
But it's also...
I don't want to...
John Stuart Mill's case for free speech is very similar to this.
He says a perspective can either be fully correct, it can either be fully wrong, or it can be half wrong and half correct.
That's what John Stuart Mill says about propositions.
And then he adds how in each one of those cases, making the conversation maximally free and decentralized and unregulated and uncensored does favor and select for truth value in every single case.
And this is with Holocaust.
We don't want our understanding of the Holocaust to become complacent or to become atrophied.
And if we don't allow people, maybe very disagreeable people, to question things, then the case is going to become atrophied and people are going to be less able to defend it.
So even when something is fully true and you're confident that it's fully true, all the more reason to subject it to discourse because then it confirms that truth with greater solidity.
And this is not exactly a popular position to publicly defend in front of hundreds of millions of people, which is the potential audience that would have known about Mark Zuckerberg suddenly leaping to the defense of Holocaust denial.
And it's not that Alex Jones was a Holocaust denier or anything like that, but he was using that as the worst possible example.
And he said, look, I don't want to take them off Facebook either way.
Now, he collapsed on that argument eventually and then installed Nick Clegg as, of course, the...
He's a content moderator of Facebook, and it's been a progressive hellhole since, and basically I stopped using it.
And now things have changed.
He's decided he's going to bring in a Community Notes-style regime, fire the autocratic fact-checkers, and replace Nick Clegg with a Bush-era Republican.
I thought he was...
I'm sorry, just this image.
He looks like he's trying to sell the guy some drugs.
Give him a break.
I thought he brought in Dana White, or has that got nothing to do with the community notes thing?
He's brought in Dana White?
Yes.
But what for?
Dana White now.
I was assuming this was going to come up.
Dana White's going to be on the board of Meta all of a sudden.
Really?
I didn't even hear about that.
Is Zuckerberg going to start his in-ring WWE career soon as well?
Is that what he's been training for?
He's in decent shape.
He goes to more or less every UFC event.
He's in the corner of Alexander Volkanovsky, who's a sort of featherweight legend.
He's having a sort of high-T character arc going on at the moment.
I need Taker to come out of retirement for one last match against the Zook.
But anyway, he's putting a Bush-era advisor in charge of Facebook now.
A bit better.
Yeah, exactly.
A bit better.
But that's fine.
And so, like I said, Josh covered a lot of this.
But what I wanted to cover, really, is the response.
The response has been exactly as upset about this as you can imagine.
The fact-checkers are not happy with this.
Wait, I'm in this image.
Well, of course.
I mean, they're going, this is my job, actually.
I can't be bad at my job because this is how I get paid.
Exactly.
If you interfere with the man's money, he'll be very angry with this.
One fact-checker said, quote, I don't believe that we were doing anything in any form with bias.
Alright, okay.
This is Neil Brown, he runs PolitiFact, one of the fact-checking partners, and it's like, that is just a remarkable thing to say for the kind of academic left, since they only believe that a human being can be biased, and to be honest with you, on that score, they're probably right.
So the very fact that, okay, we weren't doing anything with any bias, it's like, well, okay, we disagree with you.
We think you are very biased, and in fact there's an entire wing of politics that thinks that.
I like his next sentence as well.
There's a mountain of what could be checked, and we were only grabbing what we could.
And I'm sure it was a complete random, objectively, no bias involved in that either, guys.
Good job.
Used an algorithm to randomly generate numbers, and then, yeah.
The great thing about the community notes thing is that it models the institutionalized disconfirmation of bias.
And so rather than having to trust To these people who rather fancy themselves as an accredited expert class, outsourcing it to a truly disinterested AI is much, much more reliable, and it means that it's far less likely to become agenda-driven.
Honestly, so far, I've only seen the community notes being used appropriately as well.
I don't think I've seen a single bad example.
I think there's a general ethos in the community that uses community notes, that is, you have to provide the evidence, which is good.
And anyway, so I thought we'd just briefly move on from this sojourn through the tiers of the community, the fact-checkers.
Just to have a quick look at five times I got it wrong.
Basically, four of these are, of course, surrounding COVID and the jabs.
And then, of course, the Hunter Biden story, the laptop story, which we were assured was Russian disinformation, which turned out not to be.
But the response from the left has been pretty good.
It summarizes basically much of it.
It's like, oh, this is just a cynical power play.
And the framing on this is amazing.
In a video posted this week, presumably from a secret lair hidden beneath a volcano somewhere, the Meta CEO announced plans to scrap the fact-checking on his platforms in favor of crowdsourced community note system.
So you can see already it's, oh, he's now become the evil villain because he's democratizing the epistemological sourcing of information on Twitter.
Okay, well, sorry that you guys don't like that.
Very, very sorry, Mark.
But he is actually, I mean, he's actually always kind of been on this side anyway.
And it was artificial that you were keeping him on your side of it.
And of course, he points out, well, this is just as Donald Trump is preparing to return to the White House.
It's like, yes, that is true.
Suddenly, a bunch of people who, I guess you, I mean, I bet if you were to ask Zuckerberg, You'd be able to describe what has happened to him as a form of oppression.
He would probably say, yeah, no, I didn't feel like I was able to properly assert what I truly believe.
Certainly a form of strong-arming.
Absolutely.
Browbeaten into it.
I mean, he's a dropout from Harvard, I believe.
He's clearly got a quite independent, buccaneering mindset.
I imagine that intuitively he codes in quite a libertarian direction, like most of the tech brothers.
A disproportionate number of them are cottage dropouts, which is to say that they are intelligent, but they don't particularly like the regimented nature of class structure.
So there's a sense in which he is an intuitive libertarian, but it might just be the lack of moral fibre, and libertarians do tend to lack that.
It might just be that which is making...
And now that there's a new sort of vibe...
I think it is, and I think you're summarising exactly, and the correct people are all getting very upset about this, such as Brazil's communist government.
No, I just feel like you made more of the case.
Sure, but I think he's summarising it very well.
But, yeah, no, Brazil's communist government is very upset by this, and I think that's superb.
Anything that upsets Brazil's communist government is probably going to be at least worth paying attention to, if nothing else.
Anything attributed by the mainstream as being bad for democracy sounds good to me.
Well, that's literally exactly what it says there.
They say the decision was, quote, bad for democracy, because without fact-checking, you don't have control.
You don't have control of the spread of hate, misinformation, and fake news.
And that's what democracy has always been about, right?
An unaccountable oligarchy.
That's exactly right.
I'm not joking here.
In the name of saving democracy, we need to radically limit the range of news and opinion to which the demos has access.
Yes.
Otherwise, democracy fails.
And they say that's the problem.
We need to have control.
We need to regulate social media.
That's what's happening in Europe.
It's like, yes, but that's bad.
That's not a good thing that that is happening in Europe.
Please don't look to Europe for good examples.
Exactly.
And then the very final attack is just, oh, did you forget these super rich guys?
Alright.
Reheat some...
What's the Occupy Wall Street line?
What kind of a gotcha is that?
Rich man is rich.
Well, think about it.
What happens to rich men?
They shag beautiful young women.
Or sometimes they get shot.
That also happens.
Interesting, yes.
So saying, well look, he's got a $900,000 watch, Luigi.
Have you thought about that?
He's going to be...
He's going to be spreading misinformation.
I feel like the Luigi's of the world are slightly less disturbed by Mark Zuckerberg spreading misinformation than they are healthcare people denying their family members healthcare.
That's the fact.
You don't know where this ends.
It is interesting how the left after BLM, after the Great Awakening, whenever you want to date that from, sort of relaxed a lot of the class warfare stuff and they started amping up the race warfare, the sex warfare, the ethnic warfare, all these sorts of things.
When the billionaires were on their side.
Yeah, when the billionaires were on their side.
But now that there are some coming out again, they're sort of reheating some of those Occupy Wall Street talking points, which is very curious.
Precisely.
And they know that it's an environment where there's a large percentage of the left who are like, yeah, I'm actually in favor of Luigi shooting CEOs.
And we know that they're ramping up their own security.
So, again...
This isn't an accident.
They know what they're doing.
Random Italians, communists, shooting rich men in the streets.
We really are back in the 20s, aren't we?
Yeah, it's something that's arrived back here.
But anyway, like I said, I think the tide is actually turning here.
I don't think the tech bros were bad.
I think they were just weak.
And it was, thankfully, strong moral leadership from Elon Musk and Donald Trump on these.
That has won thing.
And so 2025 looks like it might be quite a good year.
Alright, let's go through the rest of the Rumble rants and then we can get to the video comments.
You alright there, Harrison?
I thought Kyle was going to quote something from Milton's Ariel Pagetting.
I was looking forward to that.
Oh, I was looking forward to that.
Yeah, sorry.
You did kind of presage it.
You cut him off.
Oh, no.
I thought I wouldn't.
I do like Milton.
Yeah, Skitton says California, like Oregon, can't flip bread because we've had fake mail-in voting since 1987. Yeah, now, I don't want to go off on this, but this is the thing.
I just think the Californian Democrats just cheat.
Non-stop.
California was 40% Trump in the last election.
That's a huge amount.
But they're just going to keep pumping out fake votes in the cities until...
And if that doesn't work, they'll just keep importing more and more Democrat voters.
And scaring off more and more Republican voters who will seek their fortunes elsewhere.
Yeah.
And hopefully not vote blue.
I don't like Zuckerberg, but I do know the FBI pressured a lot of people and said to the Senate and Congress, well, that's another point that I didn't even get to.
We know there were something like 70 FBI agents working at Twitter or something like that.
Oh, sorry.
Zuckerberg has admitted to this.
Yeah.
We don't know how many are going to be at Facebook, but there are going to be loads.
And, again, does Zuckerberg have the moral fortitude of Elon Musk to just say, no, get out?
No.
And...
Yeah, the FBI personally asked Zuckerberg to squash the laptop story.
I bet that rattled him too.
Yeah, I bet it did.
And to be honest with you, I would like to think if the roles were reversed, I'd be like, no, I'm definitely going to.
But I don't know what they threatened him with.
I don't know what the circumstance was.
I don't want to be too judgmental when the state starts sending their feds after you.
It's a scary situation.
And certainly not one that he imagined he'd find himself in when he was setting up Facebook.
So that he could judge women.
It was quite a based reason to start a social media platform.
Let's be honest.
Not even to meet women, to judge them.
A lot of people hate on Zuckerberg, but I don't think he's that bad.
Speaks Mandarin, doesn't he?
Yeah.
Buka says, I think Zach must put Andrew Tate on the board in the name of DEI. We need to have a Muslim and a person of colour, so not look bigoted.
I want to hear then about all the woke neoliberal arguments against it.
Well, I don't think he's going to, but there we go.
Apparently also, according to the Habsification, Rupert Lowe's put a bill in the Commons to ban quantitative easing.
Rupert Lowe's so good.
They're gonna shoot it down.
I was gonna say, that would be great if it passed, but if it passed, Rupert Lowe would immediately be assassinated.
This is actually one ironic way in which democracy does need saving from itself, because the people often, they want things, but they don't like the costs that come with them, and so there's a sense in which you can just...
Well, like, destroying international banking gets you immediately murdered.
That's a big cost, to be fair.
People are easy to bribe with their own money, is what I'm saying.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
This is a guidebook on how to convince your friends and your acquaintances and your family using a mixture of bullying, shaming and berating them.
I use a combination of lies, manipulation, cheating, stealing, gaslighting, bullying, insulting and flexing to make sure that everybody in my office stays under my thumb.
Even the women.
I dominate them.
I dominate the women in my workplace.
Okay.
I'm glad that somebody got the reference that I was making there.
Can you imagine James O'Brien trying to, like, flex on his staff members in the office as well?
What would he do?
Flex his child-rearing hips at them.
To be fair, I submit!
I submit!
I'm sorry, James!
No!
Please stop flexing at me.
Hi, Lotus Eaters.
It's very late, but I still wanted to wish you guys a very happy new year and show you guys some fresh snow.
I've been waiting a long time for this, so hopefully it stays and doesn't melt and turn into sludge.
Fresh snow is one of my favorite things, even though I don't like the cold all that much.
But yeah, hope you guys have a great year ahead.
Thank you very much.
Lovely imagery.
It's been snowing a lot in Swindon the past few days.
I got up early in the morning and it's settled but by the time I got out of the office it's just gone.
Very nice on the mountainside it's coming and I was just on the train of course.
It's settled in the countryside just outside Swindon, it's very nice.
Does anybody else remember the story?
A women's firefighting conference in Canada helped to promote diversity and inclusion in a male-dominated field didn't go well.
They set fire to their own national park.
Took five helicopters raining down buckets of water to get the fire under control.
They say we had 50 participants on site.
They were female for the most part.
We had a few men and a few folks that were non-binary.
They're all highly trained firefighters.
Jane Park, who was responsible for all aspects of the emergency response, could not be reached for comment.
Ah, it was the wind.
Patriarchy strikes.
Once again.
Clearly, climate change and patriarchy and everything else.
How could it be wrong?
Did you see the picture of them all smiling?
How happy they were?
Yes.
Talk about cocaine hippos.
Can we stop for a moment?
We've got some echo.
I don't know if the audio is coming from the television and the speakers at the same time.
Is there any way to stop it echoing?
I just leave hippos a good eating.
I think I have a solution here.
Americans.
You rang?
Many Americans like going on hunting holidays.
Tell me about the project.
Yeah, you shoot the hippo, we'll grab it, we'll carve it up, you'll have hippo burgers, it'll be amazing.
Splendid, I'm in.
If we had a cultural tradition of slaying hippos, like their dragons, I think it would help.
Never fear, we'll slay it by ten and be back in camp for elevensies.
Nice.
Hippo slaying?
Sounds good to me.
Any more?
Okay, I think that's all of them.
So let's go through the written comments from the website then.
Do you want to read through yours, Carl?
Yeah, I'll do.
Omar says, Carl's video answering Elon's question as to why this was allowed to happen goes a long way to explaining James O'Brien's behaviour.
That gremlin has an entire career that hinges on smug comebacks and snide remarks founded on liberal ideas.
Again, it's really remarkable reading...
because it's so much more introspective how not to be wrong where he just talks about how he has this just innate feeling in him that any conversation that he's in he has to almost sabotage By turning it into an argument that he can win, and he has no morals whatsoever about how he wins that argument.
We already know in How To Be Right that he admitted only one time, only one time ever, never did it ever again, to lying.
To lying as part of the conversation so that he could win against somebody else.
So yeah, I think a lot of these people are insecure narcissists who feel that if they're not dominating a conversation that they're somehow lesser, whereas in fact you're just being a twat.
Does not make you a good person.
Yeah, especially when it turns out that you start doing things like making excuses for national-scale grooming of white working-class children.
Thomas says, Labour kicking a national inquiry into the long grass is a gift.
Reform can now set the terms, start the process, extend it to Parliament, and put it in the manifesto for the next general election.
Prison for the non-spologists.
Yeah, I mean, to be fair, Nigel Farage did say he was going to do that, and...
Okay, maybe he will.
Let's hope something comes up.
Okay, do it then.
Do it.
Yeah, exactly.
Just get on with it.
That's my main complaint with most politics recently, which is just a lot of people talking and I'm there screaming at the edge of the- from behind the bars going, just do something!
Just do it then!
I do like the way that, um...
Thomas Howe has talked about reform setting the terms, because one of the intrinsic problems with populism is that it's usually very reactive.
Usually what populism tries to do, it kind of settles for a very subordinate role.
We're going to meet public opinion where it is, and then we're going to champion it over elite opinion, whereas what you should be trying to do is reshape both elite opinion and public opinion.
And by staging an inquiry in this way, obviously it would have limited powers, it wouldn't have subpoena powers, but it could still, nevertheless, restructure the terms of our national conversation, and that is urgently needed.
Biden-esque, based, revolutionary mindset.
Someone's been reading the French 17th century.
This has been a long-standing complaint about Nigel Farage, is that he's always the step behind the cutting edge of the wave.
And, in fact, leading the charge on this unimpeachably one-sided moral issue would be nothing but a win.
There's nothing to lose.
Exactly.
Only anything to gain.
So if you are going to be cynical and just...
Purely politicize this.
Okay, but at least this is an issue that really needs doing.
And you could get some Musk money, rend the fences with Musk and then get some Musk money to fund this whole operation.
I'm sure Musk would throw a million or two at that.
Exactly, yeah.
Say, look, we need five million to do this national inquiry.
he'd probably do it yeah Chair Koala says the Grimmengangs are reminding me of a lot of the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur young people being willingly given up by the ruling class to be devoured in order to keep the peace and now we find a political labyrinth in order to frustrate efforts to actually address the problem well to be honest with you it's actually a great metaphor of what has happened here yeah Will Faraz be the Theseus?
Base Tape says, To be fair to Jess Phillips, she was correct.
We do live in a rape culture where elites ignore and cover up crimes to protect the attacker.
She just didn't tell us she was the one doing it.
Well, the thing is, people have got to remember that almost everything the left says is a confession.
So we should have taken them more seriously to start with, maybe.
Good point.
You are those.
Justin says, anyone that added no on any national inquiry into grooming gangs needs adding into the list of those to investigate for it.
The only reason that people would not want one is if they are afraid their guilt will be uncovered too.
Well, the thing is, the guilt's already been uncovered enough for the Labour Party, the councils and the police.
We already know that they're implicated in all of this and they have been for decades.
In a way, yes, of course they're not going to vote.
A lot of local councillors have vetoed local investigations taking place because they have the liberty to do so.
That's another reason why it should be national.
And like I said, checking their own homework.
Why would we entrust them with that?
We found that we did nothing wrong, weirdly enough.
A dude in the nude says, I think we should be thankful to Andy Burnham for having the courage to speak out against his own party and supporting further investigation into the grooming gangs.
We should always praise those who stand by their principles, even if they're our opponents.
Yes, I mean, it is the bare minimum that we can do to say, yes, maybe we shouldn't just allow child rapists to get away with it, but...
I think the bar should be a little bit higher than politician doesn't protect paedophiles.
Yes.
Personally.
But you are still right.
Good on Andy Burnham for actually doing the right thing in the face of...
For not trying to actively protect pedophiles.
Sorry?
Good on Andy Burnham for not actively trying to protect pedophiles.
Well, I mean, he is mayor of Manchester, so...
But, I mean, let's be fair, the mayor of London...
Not doing that.
No, no.
There's a reason I quite like Manchester more than most cities in this country.
It's not just because of Stockholm Syndrome, alright?
It's a nice place, kind of, sometimes, in parts.
I didn't much care for it when I went.
I need to take you to some good clubs, mate.
Alright, cool.
We'll do it.
Charlie says...
That sounded so gay.
Charlie says, the Trump comment about the dry brush isn't without validity.
In Australia, there have been periodically control-burning dry brush since the Aboriginals arrived.
Then the government stopped it in the name of climate change, and lo and behold, Australia had one of their worst fires in 2020. Well, this is why I mentioned the Australians, because they've been banging on about this for ages, because it's obviously something that has to be done.
Again, these things are completely predictable.
Yeah.
That if you've got lots of dry brush in a place that might set on fire every so often...
I'm no expert, but...
It's all going to set on fire.
Yeah, and it really doesn't take any genius.
What do you mean if I threw a match onto this gasoline it was going to set on fire?
No one could have predicted that.
Let's hope there's no arsonists around.
Yeah.
Fingers crossed, guys.
I mean, talk about wanting to live in a high-trust society, right?
They just presume that, well, you know, we all trust each other that nobody's going to set fire to LA, right?
And all of these weird Guatemalan migrants who definitely wouldn't burn someone to death on the New York subway or anything.
Yeah, well, too bad.
You live in a world where everybody's trying to set you on fire.
interesting event is going to happen soon, when the newly homeless people of LA now have to compete for welfare with the 75,000 known homeless population.
The unknown homeless population in the illegal immigrant community.
Once again, they will have to deal with the consequences of their voting patterns.
Well, yeah, but the As always, I feel bad for red Californians.
Yeah, obviously.
But...
They're not going to vote differently.
Certainly feel bad for anyone dying, and I don't want to engage in any kind of schadenfreude like crowing at the misfortunes of others, but there is a sense in which, as a general political cultural matter, it is preferable for the luxury belief class to be living close to the consequences of their decisions, as opposed to them being able to siphon them off into other districts and to saddle poorer communities with them.
Why is my mansion on fire?
Well, there's actually an actionable political reason for that, that you voted for repeatedly and condemn people who even considered voting the other way.
So that's why your mansion's on fire, actually.
It's better than something else.
Justin saying, people are yelling at the insurance companies for cutting fire coverage.
However, it seems that California passed laws that said they had to cover people regardless of the risk and were not allowed to charge an unreasonable amount.
So apparently the insurance companies are just starting to pull out of California completely as the risk was too high.
I didn't even know about that.
There's echoes of the housing crisis there as well.
Well, yeah.
Listen, you've just got to give mortgages to these unmortgageable people with terrible credit, because otherwise you're being racist.
That was literally...
But what's the downside?
A very underreported part of the subprime mortgage crisis.
Well, yeah, I mean, that was what Thomas Sowell wrote about in his book on it, and it was very, very interesting, where he's just like, yeah, all of these people who had terrible credit happen to be black, doesn't mean you should just give them credit.
Arizona Desert Rat says, I'm wondering where all these displaced people are going to go.
Well, interestingly, probably Arizona.
There's limited housing in most of California.
Most developers don't like building in California due to all the regulations and red tape they have to deal with.
Building in California just isn't worth it.
And that's obviously true.
And again, there's another consistent point that Trump and Musk are pointing out.
These regulations aren't helping you, are they?
Joe Schmo says, in 2018, LA experienced a wildfire that destroyed 97,000 acres and caused 6 billion of damage.
The fires will happen next year, too.
I mean, they could literally decide to just do the job properly at any time.
They could literally just decide.
That's way too difficult for California.
Yeah, well, I mean, Trump said maybe you should do the job properly, so of course Gavin Newsom has to start setting fires himself, I imagine.
Look at what you made me do, Donald!
It's literally the what would Hitler do.
The Austrian chap said.
All they say is, what would Hitler do?
Hitler would prevent the fires.
Therefore, I have to start the fires.
Gavin Newsom shows up like that Simpsons supervillain with the flame threat.
Yeah, basically.
Jimbo says, seeing a lot of panic from certain communities that undermet his new policies, people will be able to accurately describe them as mentally ill.
Oh yeah, that was the thing I forgot to include.
Facebook and Instagram, you will be able to point out that people who think they're born in the wrong body and are in fact a different gender are mentally ill, which you'd get censored for a couple of months ago.
So that's a start.
My question is, who still uses Facebook?
I mean, Instagram, amazingly, I can call thoughts, thoughts again.
With no consequences.
Community noted, correct.
Wild West.
But Facebook, yeah, other than boomers who are already, like, conspiracy posting 24-7 anyway.
I mean, you know, fair play.
If we can get more insane Facebook conspiracies out there as a result of this, I think that's only a good thing.
Yeah, I mean, to be honest with you, I use Facebook to keep in contact with friends and family.
Yeah, that's all I use it for.
Follow, like, hobby stuff and video game stuff.
Every so often I'll go on the page and go, like, how are all the people I used to know ten years ago?
Oh, they're all retarded.
But, you know, that doesn't mean they're bad.
Joshua says, the last 25 years we have lived under the tyranny of the drama club and it looks now as if the techno nerds are taking over.
Will their tyranny be any better?
Will we at least get flying cars?
I think that the reign of the tech bros will be better than the reign of the drama club.
I just don't want a chip in my brain.
I don't think it would be mandatory.
Not yet.
The slippery slope is undefeated.
That is true.
And that is a genuine concern, but, I mean...
I don't want Elon...
Well, Elon wouldn't censor my brain, but somebody would.
I can't even say it in my head anymore.
No!
No!
Well, I mean, it's not going to be Zuckerberg either.
He's going to be like, no, you can deny the Holocaust all you want.
Wait, what?
Why are you accusing me of it?
I'm not accusing you of anything.
I'm just saying that Zuckerberg, he's pretty laissez-faire when it comes to this sort of stuff.
So, you know, that's good.
George says, community notes of...
The same problem as fact checkers though.
It really depends who's allowed to write them.
Well, the thing with the community notes so far is that it's been pretty open.
But you are right.
It's definitely...
They will try to gain control of who is allowed to author the community notes.
So that is something you're going to have to worry about.
And Snopes.com says fact check.
Carl said forthright.
Got you.
Got him.
I said forthright.
You've been fact checked, Carl.
Don't believe the fact checkers.
Where's my community note?
They're not biased.
There's a mountain of information.
They just happened to pick that one.
Okay?
So you can't say anything about it.
All right.
And with that...
I think that's all we've got time for, so thank you very much for joining us, thank you Harrison for joining us as always, and remember to stay tuned to see what Harrison is doing in the future, and please join us at 3 o'clock where we'll be going on Lads Hour through our 2025 bingo card.
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