Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for the 31st of January 2025. Where has that month gone?
I can't believe how quickly it's already gone, to be honest.
When you get middle-aged, you can say that about whole years.
Especially January and February are the worst months of the whole year.
You want them to go by quickly.
That's true.
I'm not going to complain because it's been very cold and rainy in Britain, so I'm glad to see the back of it.
And obviously I am joined by Stelios, the Stelios, and Bo.
All right.
Bo Hawk, the ballistic missile.
I haven't done that in ages, but I can't come up with any new ones.
Bonan the Brobarian.
That one will do, yeah.
That's not mine.
Okay.
It's truly cringe to come up with your own nicknames, right?
Someone on Twitter said that, and I liked it.
I liked it.
And today we're going to be discussing how Sweden is basically a war zone, whether the AFD should be banned.
I'm imagining you're probably going to say no.
I'm going to say no, but I'm going to show all the debate and we're going to do good journalistic work saying the arguments for and against.
Okay, and Beau is going to reminisce about five years of the post-Brexit world, the five-year anniversary of Brexit, and we're going to talk about it and what went.
And what might happen in the future, because it does leave a lot to be desired the way it was done, doesn't it?
But I'm not going to get into the commentary now.
It's also worth mentioning as well, we do have an announcement that we have the gold Zoom call.
I think it is a panel of yours truly.
So that's the usual time of 3 o'clock, I believe, until about 3pm our time until...
4.30.
So an hour and a half.
If you want to talk to us, if you have questions for us, I think I'm also going to ask you what would you like to see from Trump?
I'm going to potentially turn that into a bit of a segment at some point.
Our sort of wish list for what needs to be done.
So we can sort of mark how well he's doing relative to that.
Although he's already doing a great job.
But anyway, enough.
I've been going on for far too long.
Enough talk.
Yes.
You want news, don't you?
That's what you're here for.
You don't need blathering.
So, Sweden has more or less become a war zone, and I couldn't believe some of the things I was reading when I was researching this.
Like, I was actually speechless, which, considering I've been doing this for quite some time now...
Takes a lot, and I didn't realise just how bad it was.
I think the best epitomisation of this is this headline here.
More than one explosion a day in Sweden as gang violence spirals out of control.
And the byline is: "Sweden is facing an unprecedented wave of gang-related bombings with 32 explosions in 28 days, prompting the government to consider considering lowering the criminal age to 14 as violence escalates and criminals increasingly use financial extortion and digital recruitment prompting the government to consider considering lowering the criminal age to 14 as violence So basically, loads of foreign criminal gangs have moved into Sweden.
No bonus marks for guessing their background, because I think we all know it is the usual suspects.
Who likes doing this sort of thing?
Well, I think we know, don't we?
So, it's also the fact that they're using young...
Teenagers, basically, as part of it, which is why Sweden's going after them.
And they're hiring people from abroad in a sort of marketplace of online criminality, and there are sort of set rates if you want to kill someone.
Apparently it varies depending on which city in Sweden you're in.
It's €50,000 for one, €80,000 for another.
But they've sort of got a menu for crime.
Because criminality has got so extensive.
And of course, Sweden used to be one of the safest countries on planet Earth.
And so this U-turn is not that the native Swedes have just decided, you know, we're sick of peace and quiet, we want crime.
No, it is not the natives, of course.
And Stockholm alone has witnessed 21 explosions in the past month, which is insane to me.
That a major European city can experience that level of what amounts to basically gangland terrorism.
This is a situation of emergency.
There was yesterday a post that listed the bombings that have taken place in January in Sweden, and it literally reads like a band's tour schedule.
Literally, it's just insane.
Literally?
Every single day?
Yeah, it's 30 bombings and it's the 31st of January.
I know, yeah.
Very tenacious, aren't they?
So, the Swedish Prime Minister has called the bombing crisis domestic terrorism, which I think is reasonable.
I think if someone's bombing every day, over twice a day sometimes, then I think that's fair to say.
And police have arrested 50 individuals in 25 different cases, including bomb makers, the perpetrators themselves planting the bombs, and the gang leaders operating from abroad, of course.
And apparently the nature of these bombings has changed.
So originally it was about territorial disputes between various ethnic gangs, and now they're more being used as a retaliative measure to target businesses that refuse to be extorted.
Like a mafia.
Yeah, exactly.
And it seems to be that they're saying, you know, it's like extorting protection money, isn't it, really?
Like all mafias do.
In Sweden, of all places, like you said, it used to be one of the most homogenous, peaceful places in the world.
It's terrible, terrible.
It's a tragedy, isn't it, that this has been imposed upon the Swedish people, because they don't deserve this.
Obviously, yeah.
And you can look at things like this as well.
Hand grenade attacks have more than doubled in 2024, and they're already quite high.
They're already insanely high.
Yeah, exactly.
What other country suffers from spates of grenade attacks?
Apparently, by mid-October, there had been 22 recorded grenade attacks, up from nine in 2023, which is nine too many, and certainly 22 too many.
Even in Britain, which is quite multicultural these days, we're not getting this level of things going, are we?
Of course, Sweden's a little bit further along than we are, but even so, I couldn't believe the actual scale of it.
It's worth mentioning as well that Sweden's got a population of 10.5 million, officially at least, and so these numbers might not seem...
High to you if you're American and you live in a very big country.
But in Europe, in a small European country, this is a similar population to that of the City of London.
And so it would be unprecedented if, say, the City of London had seen a bombing every day.
The question is, why has this happened?
Why?
Because I'm not aware of any kind of vote of the Swedish to just open up the borders and just voluntarily put up with crime and mafias of the sort.
No, exactly.
So it's also worth mentioning, three out of four murderers in Sweden are committed by migrants.
So there's a hint at the picture of who's doing what here.
And I mean, I don't know whether that remaining one quarter is people who've been there for multiple generations.
I didn't necessarily look into...
Well, I mean...
The issue, again, is the per capita.
Well, apparently, gun murders per capita in Stockholm are 30 times that of London.
And it goes on in London quite frequently, doesn't it, Beau?
Sorry, I'm asking you not because you're a gun criminal, but because you're familiar with the city of London compared to me.
Yeah.
I mean, Sweden, on the map geographically, is reasonably big, but a lot of it is sort of...
How to say it?
Not tundra exactly, but a lot of it isn't, it's not urbanised.
So they've got a few cities, right?
A few big cities.
Very weighted towards the south.
And a few towns.
So basically they've been flooded with unbelievably violent criminals.
Some of the worst criminals in Europe by the looks of it and by the sounds of it.
I wonder why Sweden of all places?
Because it's like, I don't think these things happen in...
As badly, anyway, in Norway or Denmark or Finland or Estonia, but specifically Sweden.
I wonder why exactly?
Well, I have some data to reveal that, but sorry, Stella.
No, no, before you say this data, I want to say that if anyone told me about this about a month ago...
I would say, no, this doesn't happen in Sweden.
But maybe there are so many other stuff that we haven't yet heard about, Scandinavia and other countries.
It could be that.
It's possible, yeah.
Although some of the other countries, like the Danes, are pretty good on mass migration in that they don't have much of it and they collect comprehensive data.
I'm willing to make a guess and say that it has to do a lot with welfarism.
I think the Swedes are very generous in what they offer to foreigners and also the kinds of people that have migrated to Sweden.
Let me give you a bit of a clue.
A man who burned the Koran was shot dead in his flat in Sweden recently.
He was actually going through court because of what he did.
And I think he was originally, well, I imagine he's still considered one, an Iraqi.
So it's interesting that...
Presumably a former Muslim, is there burning a Quran and he doesn't even get through his court trial for doing so, which is also ridiculous, let it be said, before someone kills him.
In his own flat?
Yeah.
Shot dead overnight, apparently.
Unbelievable.
But yeah, this was just yesterday.
I didn't have to look far.
All of these things have happened in the past month.
So it's just going to show how extensive it is.
And yeah, it's talking about...
Wasn't Sweden supposed to be socialist paradise?
Apparently so.
Apparently socialists just really like grenade attacks for some reason and killing people.
Well, that's true.
So also the person may be linked to a foreign power, Reuters is saying, for some reason.
So let's have a look at some of the data, shall we?
Here is Peter Sweden, aptly named as he is Swedish.
62,000 people are now involved in criminal gangs in Sweden.
Remember the population, 10.5 million.
We have almost 60 no-go zones.
There were 149 bombings last year.
We have one of the highest sexual assault rates in the world.
and he's saying that socialist policies destroyed Sweden, basically, his home country.
And I can't disagree with that, really.
It seems pretty fair that both the combination of open borders and welfare is just a recipe for disaster here, and we're seeing the consequences here.
You pay people to not work and also not assimilate.
Exactly.
And here I am, rather immodestly, showing one of my own tweets, but it illustrates an important point.
If you look at gun crime deaths as a per capita rate...
Sweden is lodged between Albania and Bosnia.
And what is significant about Albania and Bosnia?
Well, they are the two Muslim-majority countries in Europe.
And so the fact that Sweden's in between them is a little bit prophetic.
It tells you something about the kind of people that might have migrated there.
And in fact, we know that a lot of these people are from Islamic countries.
And if we go to some other data...
Here we are.
We can see, relative, the blue line is those of a Swedish background, as the data labels it, and the sort of pinkish-y colour, it's difficult to tell because the screen glare here, is the first generation immigrant, and then the green is the second generation.
And as we can see, deadly violence and robbery.
Relative to the natives, massively overrepresented, but also the second generations lead the way by a pretty decent margin.
You know, crimes against life and health, the first generation, and crimes against liberty and peace.
I don't even know what that means.
Sexual crimes, the first generations are overrepresented.
These sorts of things mirror the nature of crime all across Europe, really.
We can see...
Certain crimes where the first generation are more likely to commit it than the second generation, but also some of the worst ones, like deadly violence for example, it's the second generation of immigrant that's doing it.
And so the problem isn't simply just the people who are born abroad and moved here, it's also their children, and even more so in some cases their children.
Think about, say, the Southport killer.
He was second generation, and look what he did.
And so it's very obvious to me that the problem isn't so much just, oh, it's assimilation, because no, actually, the more time people spend there, the worse they get, not better, relative to the native population.
And it's something that the native population shouldn't have to put up with.
And here is some more stuff here.
This is some Swedish data.
So this is, I think, the backgrounds.
So North African and African other are massively overrepresented.
Central Asia and West Asia, so some of the more Muslim countries, Pakistanis perhaps.
And then we can see here, like, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand is basically on parity with those of Swedish background.
Nordics, except Sweden.
Only slightly overrepresented, but not by the same degree as countries outside of Europe.
Countries outside of Europe are just massively overrepresented, except for maybe South Asia and East Asia as well is actually underrepresented, which mirrors entirely what we've been saying for years.
Chinese or Koreans or Japanese.
Yeah, exactly.
What's interesting is that the Swedes themselves are not very criminal.
No.
The native Swedes.
As we know from the era before they opened their borders.
Very, very peaceful country.
It's not that the Swedes themselves have changed.
It's the nature of who is Swedish.
An entirely imported crime wave.
Yeah, it was entirely preventable.
The very worst types of crime.
Yeah, it is the worst types of crime.
And it's something that's entirely preventable and was politically imposed upon them.
Much the same as lots of other European countries.
If we go back to the...
To the addition and the conjunction between open borders and welfarism, you see how this all is a respite for disaster because it says essentially let the borders be open and let us just give too much money as social provisions and let us just increase spending for social provisions.
And this actually has a hidden layer of evil.
Because it literally lends to the narrative of all this is an issue of insufficient money given to people who perpetrate such crime.
Because if you have a welfarist background, a very leftist, welfarist mindset, and you think that all crime comes from lack of economic prospects, then the only way to react to this is by saying, well...
Let us just flatten out economic inequalities.
Let us tax the Swedish more in order to give more money to these people so crime diminishes.
And of course, that will make the problem worse, won't it?
And we can look at things like Danish data, and the Danes keep very good records of the nationality of origin and crime conviction rates here.
And you can see that...
Lots of countries like Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Tunisia, Jordan, Uganda, Iraq, Morocco, Algeria, Ethiopia, Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Kenya, Ghana, all over-represented.
For some reason Myanmar's up there.
I didn't realise they'd get many people from there.
But Pakistan, Tanzania.
So basically it is Africa and the Islamic world that are massively over-represented.
And then you start getting to European countries down here in the light blue.
And there's such a clear distinction between the two here, aren't there?
That, you know, you're not getting...
Yeah, you'd say that also for Europe, the Danish are a bit rambunctious.
It's funny, I've seen this stuff before, and it's surprising to me that Kuwait, because Kuwait's number one there, Kuwait's tiny.
But that's because of the per capita aspect of it, isn't it?
Like, you wouldn't...
You could have one crazy Kuwaiti gang.
And that'll bump it right up.
And then, of course, there's lots of data here from Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy and Sweden that the migrants are a net fiscal drain.
So I think Sweden is this last one here.
So you can see...
Yes, so we've got the natives here in dark blue that contribute the most and take the least.
Then intra-EU, slightly less so.
And then extra-EU, you can see that the amount that they actually contribute to the economy doesn't outweigh the amount they take from it in later life.
So they're not net contributors at all, actually.
And you can see that very clearly here, that this part of the graph under the line It's much more significant than the part over it.
It's not even close.
In fact, it's almost two to one, just from eyeballing it, and it may well be that they take twice as much as they provide.
And so, yes, Sweden has imported foreign criminals who basically tyrannise and terrorise the native population, and they're paying for it in the same way that many other European countries are as well.
And here is precisely...
What is going to happen if you add DEI, inequality of opportunity, and all these things?
Again, it's going to lead towards a narrative that says, let us give even more material provisions.
All of the peaks would lower, and everyone would be worse off, wouldn't they?
That's how it would work.
So I'm going to quickly fire through what is actually being done, and I'm just going to say what's happening ever so quickly, and then summarize.
What needs to be done further?
So in September of 23, they introduced new rules for labour migrants.
Basically, work permits will only be made available to those labour migrants in Sweden who earn a salary of at least 80% of the Swedish median salary.
That was to mitigate some of the financial damage that it's doing.
And then in October of 23...
They made it harder for non-European migrants to claim benefits.
And then in August of 24, they were discussing paying Swedish passport holders that are foreign-born the equivalent of US $1,000 to leave Sweden, basically paying a sort of Dane geld to get rid of the foreign gangs.
But of course, if you've got an illegal, they can just keep on coming back and rinsing you of that grand each time.
I still think it would be better than doing nothing, even though I think the idea of paying foreign people that are extorting you money to leave is weak, and you shouldn't have to resort to that.
It's got to be the Bukele solution.
Imprison them, yeah.
You just round up everyone involved, known to be involved, and you put them in a maximum security prison for a long, long, long time.
Well, if they're not native, get rid of them.
Yeah, and or deport them.
Yeah, at the end, either before or at the end of their sentence, they're deported.
Just not allowed in the general population anymore.
Well, they're obviously not safe, are they?
Just not allowed among normal civilised humans.
Mm-hm.
God's sake.
And here's another one.
This was from August of 24 as well.
Basically, they introduced a law which would force public sector workers to report undocumented migrants, basically.
And, of course, this is the guidance.
Guardian saying it's utterly inhumane to report people illegally in your country if you're a public official, which is obviously ridiculous.
Do they have any article now saying how inhumane the bombings are?
No.
Funnily enough, they don't.
Oh, the humanity of those victims, that doesn't matter.
Some people are more human than others.
So here in October, they were having tougher rules.
Talked about introducing DNA testing to see if someone was part of a family before reunifying them.
I personally think that who cares?
If you've come to the country, if anything, you should be removed.
If you want to join your family, you can all go back home.
You don't all have to move here, do you?
You don't have a right to another person's country to bring your whole family across.
That's never, ever been something that has existed until recently, which is...
Ridiculous as well, of course.
And they are actually getting a bit more serious about addressing these problems because they're pretty obvious now, aren't they?
And there was this story, which people leaving Sweden will exceed immigrants in 2024, but it wasn't quite true.
Here's another one.
This was European Conservative reporting the same thing.
It went around, but actually, if you read a Swedish language thing, which is translated here, it was just that the tax agency had a backlog of things it was processing and then processed loads of them at once, which made it look like there was net emigration.
So it was just an administration thing rather than a net emigration.
There is this, though, as of the 30th of January, yesterday, a record number of foreigners are leaving Sweden to move to Germany.
And what does that say about the foreigners?
Well, what it says is that they're going to a country of more lucrative welfare.
It's not so much that Sweden stopped being appealing to them, it's just that they can get a better gig elsewhere, which suggests, to my mind, that they're only there to rinse the native Swedes off their money, and then they're going to leave.
Which is obvious.
They are transigent.
Exactly, yeah.
Whatever's the best deal for them, physically where you live, doesn't matter that much.
They've got no roots to the land.
Well, of course they don't, because they're from abroad.
And this is one of the measures that is being taken to potentially address the concerns, because they've got...
Full prisons, and they don't know what to do with all of the people that they need to send to prison, and they're actually looking at sending inmates abroad as their prisons are full in this crime wave.
And another thing that they were looking at doing was fast-tracking a new law to tackle these bombings by allowing the police, basically, to wiretap people under the age of 15, because...
Previously, obviously, there are ethical concerns, but because these foreign criminal gangs are using teenagers and young people, it gives them a certain level of protection within the law, and so you have to change the law to actually tackle these people, because they're using the fact that they're young to get around the law and not get punished.
So these, within quotation marks, humane policies have led to the state contemplating wiretapping teenagers.
Yes.
So just an extra layer of scumbag behaviour is that they use children loads for this.
Because that was what you led with right at the top, which I wasn't aware of, about the extremely young age of the people involved.
So yeah, just an extra layer of filth that these people are engaged in.
This is one of those things that I think is just undeniably...
A completely negative picture of immigration.
The Swedes have gained nothing but negatives from this so-called deal.
And, I mean, you look at other statistics as well, like, was it four or five Italian women get raped every day by a foreigner?
You know, the rates of crime in France.
It's clearly a scourge on Europe.
We were much better off before mass migration.
And it's entirely obvious to anyone that has a rudimentary look at the data about what's going on, about how it's impacting the native population.
At least Sweden's trying to do stuff to fix it, and I think they're going to be one of the countries, because they're so badly affected by it, that's going to be leading the way in pushing back against this.
And hopefully they're going to get to a point where they actually address the real solution to this, which is mass deportations.
I don't see any other scenario working better than that.
Surely, in Sweden's case, re-migration is inevitable.
Oh, yes.
I know that's one of the...
It's re-migration or be conquered.
Yeah.
Those are the options, and I know which one I would pick as a Swede.
I know some people say, when I say things like this, various people in the dissident right say things like this.
I wrote an article, didn't I, saying re-migration is inevitable.
I'm not the first one in the world to have said it, but...
Some people say that that's just cope.
That's never going to happen.
You're a far-right fantasist or whatever.
People actually don't want that.
But it's obviously what needs to be done.
But actually, I honestly think that is true.
It must be inevitable.
It's not even like a rhetorical device.
It's just, if our country is to continue existing, I say that for all European countries, if our nations in Europe are to continue existing, we need to send people home.
Because we can't coexist.
Because Sweden is simply a bit further down the road, is all.
Yeah, exactly.
That's all it is.
It's a smaller Petri dish, so it's more obvious more quickly.
You can even sort of put countries on a hierarchy.
So Japan's just started getting mass migration, and you can see them going through exactly the same motions that all the European countries have.
Almost, you know, note for note.
So there's almost like a textbook, a playbook.
A pattern.
A pattern, exactly, that it operates under.
But yes, if you live in Sweden, I honestly hope you stay safe.
And I hope your government can actually do something.
And if they do, you're going to be helping Europe because you're going to be setting a president to show that actually you can get these things under control.
And I really hope that it does work.
Okay, we've got a few rumble chats.
Here you are, Stelios.
Thank you.
So, Habsification says a 25-year-old woman in North Wales was found guilty and is being charged in the UK's first ever cyber-farting case.
Welcome to woke North Korea.
I need to look into that.
Cyber-farting.
What is cyber-farting?
What is that?
Do I want that on my search history?
I don't think so.
I'm going to do it anyway just for you.
NeoUnrealist says it's almost as if there was a reason why European Christendom fought for centuries to keep Muslims out.
Reconquista, Siege of Vienna, Battle of Lepanto, Ottomans in the Balkans.
Stopping was folly.
I agree.
The Engaged Few says Sweden should try a more effective incentive.
Walk the immigrants.
Oh blimey.
Can I read that?
Basically say you...
No.
You can either leave or bad things happen.
Thanks for the Fed post.
So everyone says, I remember in like 2018 when Timple interviewed a Swede about the no-go zones and had to black out the person's face and disguise their voice when the Liberal government was still in power.
That's true.
And then he also says, Stelios looks simultaneously 25 and 50 years old with those glasses on.
I'm working on my various disguises.
As I said, every podcast appearance is different.
I'm reinventing my image.
This is the Stelios today, by the way.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
When he takes the glasses off, he's just Stelios.
I tried the hobo Stelios, but it didn't work.
I didn't like it.
We had it on Lads Hour last week.
I said, just put a shark on my face.
Right.
Okay, so I'm going to follow a rigid structure in this one because I have several things I want to say.
And there are going to be elections in Germany on the 23rd of February.
And everyone now is really anxious to see what is going to happen, and there are debates as to whether the AfD should be banned.
They are ongoing, and now they have been reignited.
Now, let me give you short context about what happened these days.
Two days ago, the CDU passed a proposal that was voted by 348 members of the German parliament.
And it passed with the help of AFD members.
So that was the first, let's say, teaming up of a mainstream party and the AFD, which broke the taboo.
Was it the Christian Democrats?
Yes, yes.
Are they the biggest party as well, is that right?
They are, yes.
Merkel's party.
Right, so that broke the taboo that no mainstream party was going to ever collaborate with the AFD that they call the firewall.
Right, so a lot of people, Angela Merkel is one of them, went out and said this is shameful, no one should collaborate with the AFD. And lots of people went out, lots of leftists went out to protest.
Here we have people outside the CDU offices that were evacuated.
And Naomi Saib is asking, you know, who is funding them?
And basically he says that NGOs paid by...
Taxpayer money.
That's what happens in a lot of other countries, isn't it?
So it wouldn't surprise me.
Exactly.
And you had essentially a far-leftist mob that went out to the CDU headquarters and actually led to them being evacuated.
Because they protested.
You know, some far-leftists.
If that were the other way round.
Say the AFD went to another party's head...
They'd be like, that's an act of domestic terrorism.
And this is exactly what happens with the constant bombardment of public discussion with the notion of the far-right and the smearing, because any person who has an actually right-wing or centre-right-wing perspective gets constantly bombarded with accusations of being far-right, and actually they can't talk.
It's much more difficult for the public to listen to what they have to say because they constantly have to answer to smears, but no one is pointing attention to the far left and how undemocratic they are and how much of a constitutional risk they represent.
Right, so the vote...
We'll be held in Parliament today and whether to start a process to try to ban the AFD party.
113 MPs are saying that the AFD is unconstitutional.
It should be declared unconstitutional by the federal court.
And if banned, the party will lose all the seats and all assemblies and assets would be confiscated.
Now, we will go back towards the end to Article 21 of the German Constitution that says essentially that if a party is consistently showing signs that it is going to be unconstitutional and disrespectful of the democratic order of Germany, it can be banned.
Parties have been banned before, even after World War II. We had two bans, I think, in the 50s.
A communist group and another group that was supposed to be a continuation of the Austrian Painters' Party.
So, could I say something quickly?
So, those MPs, I think, are well aware.
I don't think you can exist in Germany without knowing both...
Previous German administration's policies and the AFD's policies, and I'm pretty sure that they know full well that they're very different, and painting them as the same is silly, because I think the AFD is quite a liberal party.
You know, it's quite constitutionalist, it wants separation of powers, it wants to limit the state, and things like that.
It's liberal in a more classical sense, isn't it?
And I think that that's fair to say, and I think that what they're doing...
They're well aware that there is this very clear distinction, and yet they're pushing ahead with it anyway, and I think it's cynical politics more than an actual legitimate concern.
We will get there and talk about their manifesto, which is, as you said, very, I would say, classically liberal.
It's classical liberalism, basically.
It's not something weird.
Especially in economics, it's for deregulation, against bureaucracy.
Everyone knows that the Austrian painter's policies, he loved liberalism for some reason.
Right, so I will mention why the people who want to ban it want to ban it and the reasons they cite, but also the arguments to the opposite side.
Now, remember the number 113?
Three months ago, this is...
Again, 113 members of Parliament signed a document that says that the AFD should be banned.
So it's nothing new exactly.
It didn't happen yesterday or two days ago for the first time.
There are lots of MPs who think that the AFD should be banned, and it looks like there are 113 here.
It's a bit of a failure of a political system that you can vote to ban your political opposition.
I think that you shouldn't have that in a political system at all.
Well, it's very democratic, let's say.
The people vote for a party, you decide that they're too naughty and they ban them.
There's been a movement in Germany since day one that's gunning for AFD's prescription and destruction.
It's certainly not new.
So I want to present the whole discussion and arguments for and against the ban and also...
Use my arguments towards the end.
But I really want to show people the concerns and also the replies.
Right.
So what happens is that I won't say that there are two sides on the debate.
Some people say it's the legal and the political.
I think that's a completely wrong way to carve up the discussion.
I would say it's the intelligence agency side of things and the political side of things.
And I will say I don't have any, let's say, access to intelligence agency.
I simply don't know and I don't have any...
I don't have...
What?
You're doing yourself a disservice there, Stelios.
You don't have any intelligence.
I think you're a bit better off than that.
You know what I mean, Josh.
Right.
So there have been several arguments.
As to why the AFD should be banned, the people who say that it should be banned are routinely saying that, first of all, some of its members, like Bjorn Hockey, have been fined for using slogans that make connotations of mid-century movement.
Wasn't it like...
Something like for Germany.
All for Germany.
That was mainly it.
All for Germany.
And also they say that he uses hawkish language.
He's the leader of the AFD in Thuringia.
And Thuringia is the state where the AFD came first in the federal state elections.
So that's number one.
Number two is that they say that there was an event in the Thuringia.
Where in the first session, the leader of the parliament, who was a member of the AFD, was accused of not following the procedure and the law, and everyone made a fuss as to how this is actually unconstitutional.
And also, there is a court ruling in Münster on May 13, 2024, which is a higher administrative court in Germany that ruled that the AFD party could be classified as a suspected extremist organization,
and the court upheld a 2022 lower court ruling allowing Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the BFV, to continue surveilling the AFD. The judges found sufficient evidence that the AFD pursues goals that undermine human dignity and democracy, particularly targeting German citizens with a migration background.
Right, and they constantly say this, and one of the reasons that they say this is the appeal to re-migration in the AFD manifesto.
Because they're saying that wanting to re-migrate people, especially of a migrant background, is against their dignity and against humanity, and it's considered to be extremist.
I would turn it the other way around, that imposing third-world migration upon a civilised country...
It's one of the most inhumane things ever to be done in human history.
And that people basically surveilling and trying to present a classical liberal party as extremist are traitors to their own country.
I was going to say, yeah, just all that.
Anyone that advocates for that, trying to ban the AFD on the grounds that they're inhuman in some sense for wanting their...
Their own country for being a nativist, for having nativist sentiments.
That they're simply fifth columnist enemies of the state, enemies of the people.
Simple as that.
I mean, I see this constantly.
This is a theme we see.
A lot of the people who are pro-globalists, they're actually standing for foreign nationalisms.
Especially non-European ones.
By standing against domestic nationalism, you're favouring foreign nationalism, aren't you?
Yes.
And let us say that, again, because we're talking about Germany, when we're talking about nationalism, we don't mean nationalism of that kind, of the mid-century.
It's basically patriotism, wanting your country to have its own distinct national identity.
I think that that's fair to say.
That's not a controversial thing.
Wanting your way of life and the continuation of your people.
Yeah.
Right, so...
Interestingly speaking, the people who are saying this are using the justification that the AFD constitutes a threat to democracy.
Now, let me just say this.
How many people have you seen protesting?
Protesting.
How many globalists or pro-EU people have you seen protesting against Thierry Breton, who is the former European commissioner who said that the EU has mechanisms to nullify potential election victory of the AfD?
He said, we did it in Romania and we will obviously do it in Germany if necessary.
Those are the words of a tyrant.
If you willingly overthrow election results you don't like, then you can't be claiming that you're doing it to protect democracy, can you?
Yes.
And from an outsider's perspective, because I'm not German and I don't live in Germany, when I see two people and I see one person gloating and being very happy about how undemocratic he is and how tyrannical he is, and people who are actually his friends are saying that they want to ban...
Another party that expresses more than one out of five Germans for the sake of protecting democracy.
Yeah, my red alert goes off.
Yeah, it's sort of like, you know, Chancellor Palpatine, before he became the Emperor, saying that the attack on my life has left me scarred.
We need emergency powers to crush our enemies.
Sorry to lower the tone.
But still, it's that level of evil.
It's like, I have institutional backing and power, and I'm going to use it to crush my enemies under the auspices of protecting the citizenry.
And this actually shows that there is an actual deficit of democracy in the EU and a lot of the parties that are essentially following the EU line.
It's not a democracy.
It's a managed oligarchy that tries to silence the opposition.
Opposition to its main agenda.
The agenda is multiculturalism that disintegrates social cohesion and there is just a kind of oscillation between whether you want it faster or not.
But that's the main agenda.
And the supposed merit of democracy is that you can actually get a lot of people to change course, not just people to debate whether they want to move fast or slowly towards destruction.
I think it all comes back to what Aristotle said about tyrants preferring foreign people as subjects because it allows them greater freedom to be tyrants, right?
And I think that the same thing is going on here with the AFD and within the EU, that it's in the self-interest of people within these organisations by the sort of perverse way in which they've been set up.
It incentivizes them flooding these countries with migrants because it then enables greater power and influence to the bureaucrats who are running things.
Right, so not everyone agrees Some politicians say that it shouldn't be banned, and they don't necessarily agree with the AFD, but they think that it shouldn't be banned, that the move has more risks and costs than benefits.
And here we have Chancellor Olaf Scholz by the SPD. Who is now the Chancellor of Germany, saying that basically that there is no sufficient evidence for the AFD to be banned.
Well, credit to them.
Yes, that there is no sufficient evidence.
So you would expect that if there was sufficient evidence, that they would have already banned it.
I mean, if they dug around in one of the senior AFD... I don't think they're going to find any of that because as far as I'm aware the AFD have been operating in the confines of German democracy.
In much the same way as any other party, they've not been breaking those rules, so there's no reason to presume that they're undemocratic at all.
Well, I spoke to, I did an interview with, on Lotus Eaters, with Peter Boehringer, when was it, like a year ago or something in that ballpark, who is one, I think he's one of many vice-chairmen, I think that was his, anyway, relatively senior, I think reasonably senior person in AFD, and he was Very, very, very reasonable.
And I don't mean this as a criticism, but it was kind of milquetoast.
Like, I was too based on him.
I was saying stuff where he was like, you know, like a bit wide-eyed.
Like, you know, I was asking him things about the nature of US bases, NATO bases in Germany, the nature of the...
Well, there was one question I asked him about the pipeline, the Nord Stream pipeline.
And he just ummed and ahed and didn't really answer.
And I don't mean to throw him under the bus here.
But then afterwards said, can you not put that out?
We just, as AFD people, we have to be whiter than white.
We can't have anything to do with people accusing us of being conspiracy theorists.
We can't have anything, even the hint that we're being too right-wing.
Everything has to be super, super constitutional, super, super within the lines.
Very German thing to say.
They're whiter than white.
They have to be.
They absolutely have to be.
Because if they cross the line...
Anywhere in a tiny, tiny amount, they'll get jumped on and they'll be called unconstitutional and they'll get banned.
So it's their business.
They're in the business of staying within...
Playing the long game.
Yeah.
Yes.
And so it's mad because if they do ban them, it will only be a stay of execution, so to speak, metaphorically speaking.
For the right-wing or right-leaning movement in Germany.
Germany, like most countries in Europe now, most of the Western countries, are a pressure cooker.
In Britain, we saw it with the Southport riots, for example.
In Sweden, what's going on in Sweden, in France, all over the place.
Germany is, of course, one of those.
It's a pressure cooker.
And if they don't, the establishment, the lefties, whatever it is, the fifth columnists, don't allow...
Some of that pressure out by allowing AFD to exist.
Then that pressure is going to keep rumbling away.
It's going to keep rumbling away.
It's really, really short-sighted of the lefties in Germany to try and outright prescribe AFD. It's crazy.
Because the people that support them are not going anywhere if you ban AFD. They're not going to disappear.
They'll become more bitter, if anything.
Well, this is the thing, isn't it?
That if you push people underground, you only make them more embittered towards you and you prove their point.
And actually, it proves also our point that politics in Europe right now is mostly the micromanaging of decline.
Because even that, if they try to ban the AFD without trying to understand the reasons that people support it and try to address their concerns, they're actually dealing with a symptom.
And not its cause.
And right now, I don't see how you can just ban a party that expresses more than one out of five people.
And this is a conservative estimation by the Politpro that shows that the AFD right now gets 20.8% of the votes.
I've seen some others that say 23. So one in five, one in four people.
More than one in five.
More than one in five.
He's just shut down.
It's the second largest party.
That would be crazy.
Look at the US and what they tried to do to get Trump off of the ballot and try and imprison him and interfere with his presidential campaign.
Blow his head off on camera.
Yeah, exactly.
And he represented, what, 50%?
You know, those who voted are the majority, right?
And so...
It seems like the globalist faction is willing to go a lot further, even if, you know, the AFD held a majority in the unlikely event that happens.
They're still going to go after them.
But also, this raises the question of whether it is actually the opposite, and it's the people who call for the AFD to be banned who are at the constitutional risk here, the risk to democracy, because...
The exact opposite.
Yeah, because by literally...
Pushing forward their policies.
And these policies have actually made Germany a lot worse, poorer.
They have contributed to diminished economic prospects, to a surge in crime.
If they ban the party that speaks about them and actually tries to say, we live in 2025. We need to take the world at face value and move within the world as we find it.
Not as we would...
We like to think that it is.
With my analogy of a pressure cooker, there is a little bit of pressure being released, and they would just turn even that off.
Even that off, because they would communicate, they would signal that they don't want to address the concerns of the people who go to vote for the AFD, and they're more than one out of five.
So it's like taking one out of five people and saying, well, I'm not going to listen to you, and I don't care about you.
You don't have a voice.
You mentioned managed decline earlier.
You're lucky if you're getting managed decline.
It's more like just allowing a narco tyranny or something.
You're lucky if you get managed decline.
Right, so we see here that Alice Weidel is the most popular candidate for Chancellor.
According to some polls, they have been first in the state elections of Thuringia, second in Saxony and also in Brandenburg, and they seem to be the second largest party.
Yeah, they've been doing very well, haven't they, electorally?
And of course, Brandenburg's quite significant as well, considering where it is and its significance in the country.
Exactly.
So I'll show you Article 21. It says here about political parties close to parties that, by reason of their aims or the behaviour of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional.
Right, so I'm not going to lie.
I don't like some of the things that have been said and some of the slogans.
I find them ridiculous.
I'll be very frank.
You don't need to do this, and especially if you are in a group, you don't need to make it.
More difficult for the members of your group.
But what I see here is that I see a whole establishment that signals I don't care about the will of the people.
I don't care about democracy.
I don't recognize your right to have a voice if your voice is contrary to the small choice I'm giving you, which is managed decline or really fast managed decline.
I think what we're seeing Quite nakedly is how a lot of politics functions in the modern day.
That it's party politics above all.
It's my, you know, my group against yours, whatever the cost.
This will lead to, if they ban it, it will lead to widespread delegitimization of institutions.
It would lead to widespread delegitimization of democracy and also of the federal court.
I would put sanctions on Germany if I were, you know, if I were the Prime Minister of Britain.
I think it would be legitimate to say, hang on a minute, you've just got rid of the second most popular party in your country.
How can you be a democratic country anymore?
You can't.
It's just incredibly authoritarian.
It shows that they have zero arguments left, and what they want to do is to basically talk about, they want to prevent people from talking about the consequences of the policies of the globalist parties.
It's not going to work.
Cheery.
You've got a bunch of chats here, Stelios.
Would you like to read them, or shall I? Yeah, okay, so the engaged few.
German commies are trying to outlaw AFD and the CDU, disenfranchising around 50% of Germans.
They're getting so desperate that they keep letting the mosques slip.
Yep.
The binary surfer, the AFD being banned, it's a good job that nothing really bad ever happened by...
Peeing too many ordinary Germans off, right?
Yep.
I see what you're referencing.
Pygmalion was a weeb.
Do you think this is comparable to the banning of Golden Dawn in Greece?
I don't think it is, because I think that the Golden Dawn was banned as a criminal organisation.
Well, I know that when I went to Athens, sorry to speak for you as a Greek, but when I went to Athens, I saw loads of Golden Dawn graffiti on the streets.
It doesn't feel like a political party.
And they were involved in lots of the conflicts in the street, weren't they, with the anarchists and communists.
And so it was more of a point of public order, as I understand it.
This is unfortunately really widespread in Greece.
Especially you have...
Anyway, just...
And also that they...
I would say that they had a very different manifesto.
That's safe to say, yeah.
Right.
And engaged few, the German leftists try to silence AFD, need to remember something important.
When men run out of words, they reach for swords.
That's true.
We have a good Greek saying that what lies outside the domain of reason is under the domain of the stick.
If you didn't tell me that was Greek, that would be my first guess of where it came from.
I don't know what...
I think it's the emphasis on Greek.
You can reason with some people, but with some others, you just can't.
I'm sure that's exactly how they said it originally.
Can someone with a mouse scroll down on the document so I can see my notes and things?
Alright, so it's been five years since Britain left the EU. Hooray!
Or was supposed to have done.
So I do quite like the theme of this thing happened on this day in history.
I'm quite liking that.
It's quite a rich vein of inspiration for me on this podcast.
Because it gives you a reason to look back at things.
And it kind of depends when you measure it.
Whether it was the day that the Parliament voted on it, or whether it was the day the thing was actually finally ratified, or the day the EU recognised it, or whatever.
But anyway, more or less, it's five years since then.
And there's still many, many questions to be asked.
So I thought, first of all, we could just do a bit of a recap for anyone who's very young.
Watching this, you might not remember.
Anyone from another country might not have paid particular attention to it.
We can just look back at it and also look forward as to what we might be in store for going forward.
So first of all then, the pro-Remain people side of the narrative always try to say that it's just small-minded, small Englander, bigotry, all that sort of thing.
That was the only reason why you would want to leave.
It's because you're stupid or you're bad in some way.
Racist.
Racist, yeah, of course.
Of course, racist.
You just can't stomach being near a Polish person or something.
Completely the opposite of things.
No, it was about sovereignty.
Of course, it was about sovereignty.
Where does the cockpit of power lie?
Is it in Westminster or is it in places like Strasbourg and Brussels?
Or wherever, wherever the various buildings are.
So one of the main things, whenever I spoke to people that don't necessarily know anything about these matters, which are usually Remainers, at a barbecue or a dinner party or something, first thing I always go to, my first port of call, is just to mention the European Court of Justice, the ECJ. Just say, so the judges there...
We don't get to pick them.
The British people don't have any say.
And what they decide, their precedents they set, the things they decide upon, superseded our laws in all sorts of ways.
They would sit above the laws of Parliament.
So right there, in a very big way, in a very real sense, we'd sacrifice sovereignty.
You know, they would decide what we can or can't do.
We'd have no input into who those people were.
There's a picture of the ECJ, the outside of the building.
Looks very dystopian, very fitting.
Can I add a little bit to that?
It's dystopian, isn't it?
It's a horrible, horrible building.
If you can't sort of think of why losing your sovereignty might be bad, say that Germany or France had a particular interest, say they wanted to, I don't know, penalise a specific British industry that's competitive with theirs, then they penalise a specific British industry that's competitive with theirs, then they could use the courts as a tool to punish Britain and favour
And so with all courts, if you can manipulate how it's presented and those sorts of things, you can use it as a tool to advance your own interests at the expense of other people.
And when you're in a legal system, you know, bound together...
That's going to cause massive problems.
And they absolutely did do that.
They did, yeah.
Almost from the beginning, to a massive extent.
Some people might argue that this is a bit low resolution and not entirely fair, but still there's a strong argument to be made.
As far as the French are concerned, the whole thing is a project in keeping their agriculture going.
The common agricultural policy to make sure French farmers don't go completely bust.
Yeah, we got screwed over by the European project.
Endlessly.
And it wouldn't be as bad if we had a strong seat at the table and our voices were heard and what we wanted was high up on the agenda.
But it wasn't.
If anyone remembers, one of the last times David Cameron, because Cameron was Prime Minister at the time, one of the last times he went to one of the big EU summits, he gave them a few ultimatums saying, look...
If you don't concede X, Y, Z, and do various things, and we want a rebate, and the British people want these things, then I'm under enough political pressure that I'll have to have a referendum about our membership.
And effectively, the EU just said, pipe down, Dave.
Go away.
We're not even listening.
It's the German and the French project, and you're on board, and that's the end of the story, so pipe down.
Well, we got what would happen.
Because if anyone else remembers, when David Cameron was in power, he gave the country a referendum about PR, proportional representation, which Clegg and the Lib Dems wanted.
Everyone that's not really Tory wants.
So he had that referendum, forced it through super quick before Lib Dems could really mobilise, and won that referendum.
Most people didn't even know it was happening.
Also, it was one where...
The Lib Dems wanted AV +, and so they put in AV. So it was similar, but not quite what they wanted.
And so they were sort of a little bit dispassionate about it themselves.
I think that's probably deliberate.
Yeah, oh yeah.
So at the time, David Cameron, as far as he calculated, so there were sort of three big things that...
three big...
Topics which threatened to fracture the Tory party and had been a thorn in the side of the Tories or could potentially be a thorn in the side of his governments going forward.
The PR thing, because he was in a coalition government with the Lib Dems.
Scotland, because the Scottish nationalists had become a thing by that point and it was their whole point of being.
Was to have a referendum on that.
So he calculated, well, if I give them the referendum, the numbers look like, the polls look like we'll probably win, and then I can shut them down.
I can close that bag.
So you're getting your once-in-a-generation chance.
Hopefully we'll win.
And then I sort of win that, that whole sphere of politics.
I win it, and I can put it in the bin.
So he did that.
Everyone remembers the Scottish referendum we had, and he won that.
So he had two big referendums, sort of putting everything on the line, gambling politically, big time.
And so he thought, ah, well, the other one, the thing that's been a thorn in the side of the Tory party since the 70s, is the question of Europe.
I'm on a roll here.
I've thrown the dice twice, big time, and won.
Do the third one, and I could be Prime Minister for 20 years or something.
Because he thought, in fact, most pollsters, most people thought, that Romain would win.
He gives us a referendum.
And loses.
And his government collapses and he has to resign as Prime Minister.
Crying shame that, personally, for Dave.
So, since then, of course, we've been in a new world because the whole world didn't really see that coming.
There's the inside of the...
Go back one.
There's the inside of the ECJ. Just a supranational body sitting above Westminster.
Telling us what we can and can't do, can and can't say, can and can't sell, to whom.
The Remain party, the Remain side, are, again, sort of enemies.
They're enemies.
Any Britain that wants less sovereignty, or anything other than more or less complete sovereignty for Parliament, it's like, well, what are you?
You've got to be classed as some kind of enemy.
Quizzling.
Yeah.
Some sort of fifth columnist.
Some of the people that attempted to rule us and dominate us, in effect.
Got nice napkins on.
If anyone remembers, a bit of the hysteria that went with it.
Do you remember that Steve Bray chap?
Anyone who doesn't know or doesn't remember, this guy basically stood outside Parliament or in Parliament Square every single day.
I think it was more or less practically every single day for like a few years on end.
That's right, yeah.
Just like that.
With a loudspeaker, just heckling anyone in earshot in Parliament Square about Brexit.
Like, Brexit must not happen.
That's a funny picture, by the way.
It looks like his hat says Top Brexit, so he's like the biggest fan of Brexit.
He'll just be screaming, Stop Brexit!
Like, almost all day, every day.
And he'd get in the little altercations.
I don't think there was any real...
There was no real violence, no real fisticuffs.
That's a bit...
That was probably about as aggressive as anything got.
Because he was also a bit of a joke.
I think there's one...
Titus' expression there does sort of say, oh, look, he's a loony.
This guy's a loony.
But I only mention Bray as a symptom of how the Remains side were sort of kind of hysterical.
They still go on about it to this day.
All the time I see people with like rejoin the EU in their actual name on Twitter and James O'Brien still talks about rejoining the EU all the time.
The progressives and the left absolutely hate the fact we left.
That we clawed back a bit of our sovereignty.
Yeah, they despise it.
Because they're enemies So There was So here's the next thing then Did we really leave?
Not really.
Did we really leave?
Well, so it's a grey area.
It wasn't 100% clean-cut divorce in every respect.
Because there's another thing, the ECHR, the European Court of Human Rights, that's their building.
That looks like it should be...
In Strasbourg.
Aerospace.
Yeah.
Like an aerospace thing.
Famously, everyone, probably most people watching this will know, we didn't leave that.
No, which is still a thorn in our side.
Yeah.
So we'll try and deport foreign criminals, and they'll say you can't do that on human rights grounds.
You're not allowed.
You're not allowed.
Just look at Switzerland.
Surrounded by the EU, basically, just thriving.
Yeah, they're deporting lots of people, aren't they?
That's the inside of the ECHR. Very distrustful.
A bunch of completely unelected bureaucrats and lawyers telling us what we can or can't do.
And not only that, but it's quite obviously detrimental to us, the decisions they make.
No, you must keep, you must allow and then keep.
Like rapists and murderers and things in your country.
It's worth mentioning as well that other European countries are competitors to Britain, right?
And so it's not like they necessarily have our best interests at heart.
At least in many instances.
Of course, if you're like a...
If you're trading with one another, which we do with many European countries, there is some sort of rising tide lifts or boats.
But at the same time, you want comparative advantage, don't you?
And that's what this provides.
It gives them a vehicle to jockey for advantage.
Sorry, Staius.
No, and just look at the insanity of it and the risks they're willing to take with the people in the name of justice and righteousness.
When you have, let's say, someone like a rapist, and they go into prison, and then they get out of prison, and they don't deport him on the grounds that there is a risk, there is a high chance that this person is going to be maltreated in their country of origin.
Yeah, so, okay, let's say that this is the case.
Are you willing to risk this person reoffending against the native people?
You're not so righteous.
It puts the rights of criminals above those of the native population, doesn't it, in a very explicit and clear way.
And of course, I would argue that them risking mistreatment in their home country is, you know, less than they deserve in many cases, actually.
I mean, yeah, the more criminal you are, the more you risk mistreatment.
That's how it should go.
Yeah, exactly.
This cabal of liberals and commies...
So you must accept endless Syrians into your country and let them do what they will and then you can't get rid of them.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, and as you say, whenever, like on...
Who's the James O'Brien show?
LBC. Something like that.
Or The Guardian.
We'll endlessly talk about rejoining the EU or a reset with them or closer ties with them.
I'm just trying to undo it.
The small amount of sovereignty we have clawed back, try and reverse that in some way.
Yeah, whenever there's any sort of discussion about the state of our economy, it's cause of Brexit.
No, of course not.
But I was going to make a broader point and build on what you were saying there, Stella.
Because I know a fair bit about the history of it all.
And I would say, I think it's fair, people might argue with this.
view, this take on it, but I'd argue that the modern EU, the various layers of it, were born out of the post-war era of trying to make sure that West Germany and France, or a united Germany, whenever that might have been, because of course that didn't happen until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, but basically Germany and France should be locked, linked together so that they can never go to war with each other again.
That ancient feud between the French and the Germans.
I saw Samson pumping his fists there with his fingers crossed.
Lots of hands moving there.
Samson wants war.
So the European project, and the EU as it exists today, as I see it, as a lot of people see it, is essentially a French and German project.
All the other countries are along for the ride.
Now, the real reality is that the most important countries in Europe are France, Germany and Britain, in terms of economy, in terms of population, in terms of influence, in terms of military and stuff.
So we just got sort of tagged into it, tagged along after we came late to the party.
Well, wasn't it in 1973 we voted to join the European Economic Union, basically, and the idea was that we're joining...
In the auspices of economic cooperation, it was like a trade bloc thing.
And that was put to referendum and we voted for it because, you know, it's just like, do we want to trade with Europe or not?
Well, sure.
And then it became something that wasn't originally, right?
Yeah, exactly.
The thing we decided to go for in the 70s is not...
What exists today, or existed in 2014, or whenever the actual referendum was.
Yeah, and there's many layers.
It is a bit complicated, actually.
There's sort of the Schengen zone, there's the actual European Parliament, there's the Commission, there's the various law courts, there's the currency.
There's various layers to it.
It's the onion of European bureaucracy.
And European deception.
Yeah, the onion of European deception.
And so we weren't able, or didn't...
Perhaps deliberately, able to extract ourselves wholesale entirely.
We just weren't.
And now, if you want to, Samson, fairly quickly, just click through a load of links I've got there.
All sorts of headlines all over the place.
Going back a few months, some of these.
Or since the lefties' new Labour was going to get in, they sort of ratchet up their rhetoric about let's rejoin, or they use words like reset, or closer tyres with.
Oh, there's all sorts of...
Reset.
That has a strange implication, doesn't it?
We need to reset our relationship.
The tide is shifting.
Lord Kinnock, who couldn't be more pro-Europe type person...
Anyway, they all came out of the woodwork when they knew Starmer was almost certainly going to be PM. The way in which we talk about it is some of the language sort of loses the nuance here.
It's not that the people who voted Brexit are like anti-Europe and now we hate the Continentals.
It wasn't about that.
It was more that we wanted our own self-determination.
Like, a lot of people I spoke to from outside of Britain, I've spoke to loads of people that are European from pretty much every country in Europe, and most of them took it as, oh, you don't like us, okay.
And they sort of felt, it was sort of like you've rejected their advances or something.
Like they felt a little bit spurned.
Just like, you don't want to be a part of us anymore.
But it's just like...
We've already been in an abusive relationship with you for 30 years.
We're trying to dump you.
Look what you made me do.
Yeah, I explained to them that it's not that we just don't like you.
It's that the things that the EU is doing to us are unfair.
And that...
Even now we're further on, I feel like we haven't actually capitalised on the advantages that Brexit could have given us.
I can testify for you, Josh.
Thank you, Stelios.
I knew you could.
I was just going to add that because of how sneaky those EU bureaucrats are, they sort of enmeshed us in a web of...
Not lies, necessarily, but just there are so many tripwires and difficult things to go through that we end up getting EU policies whether we want them or not.
Like, for example, the most prominent example in Britain at the minute is those bottle caps that attach to the bottle.
That's EU regulations that have added that, and now it's in Britain because, of course, most bottle manufacturers are like, well, I'm not going to have a British-specific machine.
Make the bottles.
And so what we've got is EU regulation by default because it's easier to adhere to Europe as a bloc.
But they're sort of leaning on that deliberately to penalise us and be like, well, you're not going to see any gains from your independence because we're going to get in the way and spite you.
Because of course the EU functions as a bit of a power block.
And if Britain manages to wrestle its way away and does better, then it threatens the entire EU project.
And so they have to crush us to survive.
And there's a very clear incentive, and they've been trying to do it ever since we voted to leave.
There is a communicative aspect of it, especially regarding the mainstream media that I see every time I speak with people on the continent.
And there is a deliberate effort to present everything as a...
Closely catastrophe as a close catastrophe.
So I'll just give you a funny example.
When was the first COVID lockdown?
There were a lot of mainstream media in continental Europe that were saying basically that there are going to be endless food shortages in England because of Brexit.
And people were calling me and telling me, just go and pick rations and just before the lockdown, just have stuff, buy pasta.
And I went in and said, the only thing there's a shortage of is beer.
There was an actual shortage of beer in the supermarket.
That's how you know you're in Britain, yeah.
I mean, the European Union, I do see, is an extension of French and German power, but mainly German.
They dominate it politically and economically in all sorts of ways.
I mean, look how Germany effectively treated Greece when they had their economic problems a few years ago.
They just put Greece into hock to Germany financially in a massive way.
They treated Greece not like they were a sovereign body of people.
They treated them like they were sort of their charge, like a little brother.
Or worse than that.
A disliked little brother.
There's an element, but I have a very controversial view in Greece that the Greek crisis, I think, was 100% our issue.
Our fault.
Yeah, yeah.
It's just 100% our fault.
And a lot of the...
Yeah, anyway, just...
That's for another time, but there was an element of that, but I think that it was vastly exaggerated.
Essentially Germany, because I think the German banks hold the purse strings, and they're like, we'll bail you out, we'll bail you out, but you will owe us for decades, centuries, or whatever it is.
Silly, silly amount of debt incurred.
We'll keep you on a tight leash.
We'll bail you out, but you will belong to us in an indirect sense.
I think the irony of it was that they gave us some of the better terms than the other bit.
But anyway, yeah, I mean, we could do a whole bit of content about what happened there.
We could talk about it in detail.
But anyway, yeah, just to say, it's Clive Lewis there at the front there.
Who says all you need to know about the Remainer camp.
If you remember how Bercow behaved and how the Labour behaved during the Theresa May and Boris years of trying to get it through.
And anyway, we didn't even properly leave anyway.
If anyone remembers Change UK? Of course, yeah.
With the likes of Luciana Berger, Anne Kofi, Mike Gapes, Chris Leslie.
Gavin Shooker, Angela Smith, Chaka Amuna.
Anyone remember Chaka Amuna?
Where is he these days?
Nowhere.
Some political giants you've listed off there, Beau.
You know, big names to this day.
The political behemoth that is Luciana Berger.
What's she doing now?
Who cares?
Nothing.
No one.
No one cares.
Yeah, they were just so wrong.
Anna Soubry.
I've just noticed.
The name is like a byword for a political failure, right?
And that's me.
It's true, yeah.
Who didn't even make it to a general election before getting deselected.
Even I went and laughed at Anna Thubry's political career, yeah.
Hysterical laugh.
Oh yeah, I did an article there about how Berko behaved.
Hilarious from there.
It was absolutely absurd how he behaved as Speaker during that period.
And he later went on.
Quite shortly after, he was sort of thrown out effectively.
He was shown to have actually broken some rules and misbehaved sort of formally.
It was sort of all investigated and it went on record that the conclusions was that he was a bully and a liar.
I think that's what it was.
I think I say in that article I can say this without fear of litigation or anything because it's sort of an established fact.
Yeah, there you go.
It's a matter of fact.
He's a serial bully.
That was one of the things.
Sorry, go ahead.
The conclusion of our investigations finds you a bully and a liar.
Yeah.
What a funny conclusion.
True, though.
So, anyway, just to finish up then, to say, going forward, what might happen?
I hope, I think and I hope, Keir Starmer's not going to just actually fully rejoin the EU the way it used to be.
But they are certainly making noises and moves to, quote-unquote, reset.
Or to have closer ties with the European Union in all sorts of ways.
And that's just not what the majority of the people wanted in this country.
It's just not what we've wanted.
And least of all, I haven't even talked about the migration side of it.
One of the big things why we wanted to get rid of the EUs, like the ECJ. They were telling us, you basically must have open borders from other member states, like Poland or whatever.
You must allow almost an endless stream of them.
And we're like, well, we don't want that.
We don't want that.
In fact, we'll rework our entire body politic in order so that that can't happen.
And what did the Tories do?
Just go, OK, well, we'll get them from Nigeria or Bangladesh or India then.
700,000, 800,000 a year from the subcontinent then.
Not entirely.
That number is all from the subcontinent.
I mean, last year it was like a quarter of a million Indians, right?
Just last year.
Yep.
So that seems deliberate.
Again, exactly not what we wanted.
Sometimes I speak to Americans on different streams I'm on and things, and they say, you did this, you did that, you allowed your country to be flooded by...
No, we didn't.
No-one wanted this.
We've been saying it for decades.
We've been saying it since the 60s.
No, we don't want to be flooded by foreign people.
Is that all right?
We don't want some.
We're not complete, insane...
Bigots who can't stand to see a foreign face.
But we just don't want to be replaced by them.
We don't want to be absolutely flooded by them.
So no, we didn't.
It was done by a cabal against our will that promised they wouldn't.
So what's going to happen in the future?
Well, hopefully Starmer doesn't take us straight entirely back in and then hopefully we'll get a government.
The best we can hope for really is reform, isn't it?
Realistically.
I mean, in the polls, I saw recently that reform even edged out Labour in the polls.
Number one, yeah.
So it's far from crazy to think that Nige could be PM in 29 or whenever it will be.
It's not completely crazy.
So the best we can hope for, realistically, would be that.
Hopefully you can put Prince Rupert.
Rupert Lowe over at the Home Office and he can start kicking some ass and taking names.
That'd be nice.
And then maybe we can leave the ECHR or maybe we can have a new department for re-migration or whatever and hopefully we can cut all the last apron strings from the EU and let the French and the Germans get on with it.
And one last point I'd make is that Le Pen, I believe...
It's her policy that she wants to leave the EU. I think the AFD do.
Certainly there's a faction of them that say they do.
If France or Germany quit the EU, the whole project is either, at best, extremely shaky, or it's just done.
If France or Germany, particularly Germany, if Germany leaves, it's like you're just left with some rump.
It's just France, like, trying to still control...
Greece and Spain and Belgium.
It's still good, it's still good.
They still can't control themselves either.
If France or Germany leave, I would suspect the whole thing would change profoundly.
It wouldn't just be wounded.
When we left the EU, it was wounded in a way.
It wouldn't be that.
It would be the whole thing is in question now.
So anyway, looking back over five years, what's happened?
Not enough, in my opinion, in most people's opinion, in Reform People, Brexit Party.
We didn't leave people's opinion.
We didn't really properly leave.
I mean, UKIP is still around, and that's exactly what they say.
When people say, why do you need UKIP anymore?
Why does UKIP even exist anymore?
UK independence.
We've got independence.
It's all over.
Well, it's not, though, is it?
If you talk to Nick Tenconi, the leader of UKIP, he would say, well, we haven't left, though.
And he's right, in my opinion.
So, we've still got to go through a few more years of Chairman Starmer.
And then hopefully, fingers crossed, we'll get at least a reasonable government that can try and put an end to the whole sordid business.
Okay.
I think we'll do the video comments and then we'll do the rumble chats, if that's alright, Samson.
But I do want the collectivism which is the spirit of Britain.
I want the sort of collectivism where we all understand that, you know, you take your turns being served at the bar.
You queue when you go to the postal.
The Chinese and Japanese are collectivist because it's a cultural thing.
It's sort of inculcated in them, even though they've got very different political systems.
And, you know, Germanic types, Northern Europeans, are some of the most individualistic because it's sort of in our...
So ingrained in our culture, it's almost in our DNA, and it could well be, actually.
Well, it's nice to be vindicated.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, I think that people quite often misunderstand what it means to be an individualist or a collectivist.
People characterise it as either you're a human embodiment of a bee as the collectivist, or a hyper-individualist.
Hyper-individualist is like Robinson Crusoe or a hikakomori in Japan, where they just don't leave their bedroom and live on their own.
These are not the poles.
I think what it actually means in a psychological dimension, and this is the correct way to understand it, rather than the political one, because it's actually based on evidence.
Really passive-aggressive, I'm sorry.
Is that people who are collectivist see being dependent on others as being less shameful.
And it's all about...
Dependence and independence and agency.
And I think that that's how it operates at a psychological level, and I think that's the most interesting way of looking at it.
On the subject of corner stores playing classical music that drive away the milling glasses, I find myself thinking about the movie Princess and the Gobblers, based off of the 1870s novel.
And how they also defeat the goblins who are degenerates by singing a wholesome sermon choir type songs, which apparently drives them away like a cross to Romanians.
The original author, George MacDonald, was actually a Scottish minister, apparently, and actually was quite a prolific writer.
That guy does not look Scottish at all, does he?
He looks Russian.
Bit of the Rasputin look.
It does, doesn't it?
No, that's true.
I think that if you show something good to someone bad, they do recoil.
It's always a good measure of character to find out what people like.
Throw them holy water and see how they react.
Or start fizzing and melting.
When people actively dislike wholesome things, it's like, what's wrong with you?
That's a window into your soul.
If someone doesn't like animals or pets, I'm just like, you're a...
You're a psychopath aren't you?
I know it was a while ago now, but watching the non-car people political class talk about the Jaguar thing, y'all left out half a story.
Earlier this year, the Jaguar CEO announced that they were tripling down an all-electric lineup.
He also said they were trying to move Jaguar up to compete with Rolls-Royce and Bentley, and that, quote, traditional Jaguar buyers, like me, would be left behind in the name of progress.
The pink horror they unveiled was really them trying to ingratiate themselves with the upper crust of Rolls-Royce owners.
Of course, what made Jaguar work was a fantastic engine made of the best suspension design around in a classically styled body for a suspiciously low price.
The opposite of what they're doing.
Now.
Yeah, you're the last of a proud line, buddy.
Sorry.
We were just talking about Jags earlier today, weren't we?
In the office.
That's a really nice...
I don't know whether that was 70s or 80s Jag.
I don't like the yellow, but a lovely...
Other than the colour.
Lovely car, that.
An old analogue, proper heavy, old-school, well-built Jag.
The Prime Ministers always used to drive around in armoured Jags, didn't they?
I don't think they do anymore.
Is it like a Prime Ministerial Land Rover or something they've got now?
But for years, all throughout my childhood, when it was Thatcher and Major and Blair, they would always come out of Number 10 and get in a Jag, an old sort of 80s Jag.
Old decline's going to be when they get a Prius.
A special, I believe, armoured Jag.
And I've always thought to myself, if money was no option, if I was Bill Gates rich, I would want one of those ex-Prime Ministerial armour-plated Jaguars.
Yeah, I want one of those, and I also want a button that I can press, a big red button, I press it and it fires rockets out, like James Bond.
Yeah, the front headlights go down, they're little rockets.
Or a minigun pops up from the roof.
Yes, please.
California has the most massive tree in the world.
This giant sequoia redwood is 84 meters high and 31 meters in diameter at ground level.
Named the General Sherman Tree, it is estimated to be about 2,200 years old.
Deep lore time, a communist group settled in the area in 1886 and cursed the tree with the name Karl Marx.
In time, the communists had their land taken by the government for a national park, and they were eventually jailed.
So much irony, only 30 seconds.
Wow.
2,200.
So, like, when it was first germinated or whatever, when it first started to grow, it was still the Roman Republic.
It was still...
Gaius Gracchus hadn't even been born.
Caesar hadn't been born.
Yeah, nowhere near, yeah.
Caesar wouldn't be born for another hundred years.
It's mad, isn't it?
Just to mention real quick, I've been to Northern California and the giant redwoods.
I didn't visit that tree.
There's another one where there's an actual road through it.
Have you seen that one?
I've seen that one, yeah.
Incredible, incredible thing.
But I did see a few giant redwoods when I was there in Northern California, and they are remarkable because we've got nothing like it in Britain or all of Europe, really.
Those giant sequoias, giant redwoods.
You can see why pre-Christian people saw trees as sacred, can't you?
Looking at giant trees like that, it sort of exaggerates it to a point where everyone can see it.
The Swaby, literally, they thought, this is an ancient German tribe, they thought there was this particular giant oak, and they thought that was sort of the centre of the world, you know?
In Islam and Judaism, there's like a certain place that they think is sort of the navel of the world, which is in Jerusalem.
For some of the Germans, it was a tree.
I respect that.
An ancient oak.
Makes more sense than a black stone in Mecca, doesn't it?
I think we have an olive tree that is 3.5 thousand years.
Wow.
Yeah, olive trees can grow really old, aren't they?
It's still alive.
Yeah, yeah.
Wow.
There's some, like, Methuselah trees.
I think one of the oldest things is a tree.
Again, thousands of years old.
Remarkable, actually.
I've lived in the South West for about 23 years.
I'm just laughing in a good way.
Thinking about Glastonbury High Street and the Goddess Festivals and Neolithic altars.
And, you know, they've got a weird and interesting kind of metaphysical bookshop there.
And just generally countryside living in England.
And I think it's something that we take for granted.
I mean, I love it.
I don't want to move.
I don't want to go anywhere else.
I love countryside living, how weird, wacky and wonderful it is.
Well, that's what I grew up with and it's what I want to return to and I have my escape plan from Swindon and it will happen soon.
It's going to turn into a film, Escape from Swindon.
Yeah, the countryside, I feel like, is England at its best, and whenever people come to Britain for tourism, I say, you know, you can go to London, go to the museums and the art galleries, but if you want to see the spirit of England, go to the countryside, and you see what it's all about there.
Yeah, I grew up and spent all my life, more or less, nearly in...
The South East, the Greater London area, Suburban, Essex and East London and London.
And of course, Swindon is a bit of a dive.
But rural Wiltshire is lovely.
You go outside of Swindon town, you go into the countryside.
It's just a completely different world.
Two miles from here, five miles from here.
And it's some of the most remarkable, beautiful countryside in the world, I think.
I agree.
It's up there with the Scottish Highlands or Cumbria, the Lake District, the Peak District.
Rural Wiltshire is absolutely lovely.
Dartmoor National Park is my favourite place on earth.
Yeah.
Cornwall.
You get subtropical climates in Cornwall.
Anyway.
You are utterly incompetent.
You do not have a clue.
I could run things better, even whilst I poop.
So does that.
*laughs* Who is that on the wall there?
Is that who I think it is on the wall of Donald Trump's toilet?
Stormy Daniels, is it?
I don't know.
That would be funny.
I think it's Sidney Sweeney.
I've got two good reasons to believe it.
I don't think the toilet roll would be the one Trump would use.
Oh, here we go.
That's true, yeah.
American flag.
A bit disrespectful.
Oh, Thor!
I mean five!
I'm in fire It's still surreal to me that I went on a podcast with Graham Linehan The creator of that show Yeah.
Got to pinch myself doing this job sometimes.
Right, we've got a bunch of rumble chats.
Are we okay to go on for a little bit more, Samson?
Okay, no worries.
So, where's the mouse?
I can't see.
I'm going to go top to bottom here.
DragonLadyChris says, hang on there, guys.
If we can survive for...
Four years of Biden, you can do five years of Starmer.
I don't know.
Bold Eagle says, so Canada and Greenland are going to become the 51st and 52nd states in the US. Do you want to make the UK the 53rd?
We'd let you do your own thing, but you can't violate the Constitution.
I think the Constitution would be the most welcome part of it, to be honest.
Bystander Syndrome says, we get EU regulations by default, then...
Be your own nation.
Assert your sovereignty.
If these companies' NGOs want to F with you indirectly, cut and replace them with your own product.
That's what we want to do.
I mean, you've got it in one, pretty much.
Yeah, I entirely agree with that.
Fleet Lord Atvar says, if you've not heard Lieutenant Colonel Tulsi Gabbard opening statements in her DNI confirmation hearing, priceless.
Tell Carl he likely appreciates it.
Ten minutes long.
And then he sends a link.
I'm sure we will cover that probably sometime soon.
I think Kyle wanted...
Yeah, we will.
We almost certainly will, yeah.
And then Habsification says Boris screwed over our fisheries and Starmer is screwing our farmers over.
Our politicians hate our own native food production.
That is true.
They want to sell the land to Blackrock, that's why.
And then the engaged few, the final one.
The German leftists are trying to silence AFD need to remember something important.
When men run out of words, they reach for...
Oh, we've read that one.
But that's also just as true as I read it the first time.
Right, I think a couple of comments.
There's some general ones here, and then we'll do one from each segment.
Sorry we went on a bit long, but we've overran to compensate.
So, Ewan Baker says, Oh, behave.
BasicBasedApe says, I googled cyber farting for you so you don't have to, Josh.
It's true.
A woman was arrested for sending disturbing videos of her farting to her boyfriend's ex, causing alarm and distress.
We used to be a real country.
I didn't realise this was a way of harassing people.
I've just discovered something new.
Got my weekend plan sorted.
So, my comment for my segment...
A library of cyberfarts ready to...
Here are my greatest hits.
Omar Awad says, the lib...
We're off YouTube now.
The lib shit has no fury of mind for the savage.
It is the suicidal arrogance they assume the foreigner won't kill the gold-laying goose to maximise immediate benefit over sustained gratification.
Very well put.
I very much agree.
Apache Sideburns, I'm once again asking for Onion of Deception merch.
It's happening, alright.
Is it really?
I think so.
Really?
I don't know.
But I've heard it might be.
I've heard that it is happening.
Email Pete.
It's happening and that's a good thing.
Alpha of the Betas, banning AFD is democratic like two foxes and a chicken voting on what's for dinner.
That's true.
Final comment, Beau, from your segment?
Would you go ahead?
Sure.
Lord Nerevar says, aside from the lockdowns, perhaps the most impressive scam the Conservatives ever pulled was Brexit.
We're not independent from the EU any more than Puerto Rico is independent from the US and the weather is far shittier here.
That's true.
If you could deport me to Puerto Rico, I would much appreciate it.
If there's any one that's going to be the 51st state of America, it would be Puerto Rico.
That's true, yeah.
Puerto Rico's 51, Mexico's 52, Greenland's 53, Canada's 54, we're 55. I once referred to Puerto Rico accidentally as the 51st state on this podcast, and then loads of people were correcting me, and then only a handful of people said, actually, that's kind of based.
Thank you very much.
And I did notice someone's name, Josh Fern playing the piano with his balls.
I'm not quite that talented.
I can only play it just about with my fingers.
But anyway, it's time to end the show.
Join us in about 23 minutes for the Gold Tier Zoom.
I believe it'll be us three.
So if you want to ask us questions or say what you want to see Trump do, I'm going to be writing those down in notes to present the segment.