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May 26, 2025 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:30:33
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1172
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Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
Welcome to the podcast The Lotus Eaters for Monday, the 26th of May, 2025.
I'm joined by Luca and Beau, and today we're going to be talking about some good news.
Antifa finally getting arrested.
How Trump is teaching Harvard a lesson or two.
More good news.
Yeah, more good news.
And whatever chaos is going on in Ukraine.
I haven't been following it, so I'm actually quite looking forward to finding out.
But in the meantime, go and pick up the Trivium, but also join us on Thursday at 7pm for our free webinar, where Dr. Nima Parvini and myself will be discussing my favourite part of the Trivium, rhetoric.
Rhetoric is by far the most interesting part of the Trivium, in my opinion.
Obviously, writing and logic are very important, and you need these foundations to be able to actively and efficiently But it's in the rhetoric where the magic happens.
So join us on Thursday at 7pm British time for that.
So let's begin, shall we?
Because I've been covering Antifa for probably about 10 years now.
So coming on something like that.
And it was insufferable watching Antifa essentially kind of crawl out of the woodwork in the United States.
And Europe, and in Britain.
In Britain, our Antifa was a lot more muted than elsewhere.
The American ones were quite radical, but it was really the German ones that are the most insane.
The largest black bloc ever of about 13,000 people took place, I think it was in Frankfurt, a few years ago.
Yeah, it was huge.
And a black block, for anyone who doesn't know, is where they just dress up in black and act like a roving gang of barbarians, attacking everything they deem to be fascist, which...
And it's used as a way to, like, push out their most negative feelings and really act as just a violent mob.
And so it's nice to see them actually getting cracked down because you may remember that in sort of, They'd get favorable coverage from places like CNN or Vice News or any, you know, vaguely MSNBC, lefty outlets.
And it was quite shocking because, of course, the fundamental problem with Antifa is they break the base agreement that underpins liberal democracy.
That is, we will solve our problems.
Non-violently.
We will solve them democratically, through discourse and the vote, rather than actually just beating each other up.
And watching the police forces and the powers that be being very soft on Antifa was very frustrating.
I'm not going to give people a long list of things they've done that they should have been deeply, deeply punished for now, but you can go and find basically loads of things.
I mean, like, the mayor of Portland getting his apartment block set on fire.
And things like this, which just genuinely endangers dozens of people.
And so many of those people being people that push them on and continue to support them.
Many of the people in Antifa themselves being academics, or people who have radicalised themselves in universities.
But anyway, so a very brief history of Antifa, but some good news.
So over the weekend, there was, I think it was on Friday actually, there was a protest in Seattle.
Now, this was a Christian organization that decided that they were going to have a national tour being opposed to the transing of children.
Now, I would have thought this would have been a fairly straightforward thing that we could all agree upon, but of course, there are evil people in society.
And what I like about the evil people in our society is they'll just come out and tell you that they're evil.
And the counter-protesters, so the Christian protesters were waving flags that had things like, don't mess with our kids, children can't consent to this kind of thing, etc., etc., all very sensible, all very mature.
And the people on the other side denounced them as, quote, fascist family values protest.
Of course.
So, of all of the long list of things that are now fascism, clean streets, safety, law and order, family values have been added to that.
Having children, probably.
Probably having children itself.
Keeping time.
Yeah.
Maths.
Yes.
Civilization.
Yes.
It's hard to think of anything that hasn't been called fascist at this point.
And so, yeah, the counter-protesters turned up with their Trump fascist regime flags, and we were clearly given a show of who's on the side of good and who is on the side of evil.
As the Seattle Times here reports, sorry, it was on Saturday, not Friday.
By Saturday night, police had made 23 arrests on various charges.
That's a lot of arrests.
I mean, like, the average Tommy Robinson back in the EDL days, you wouldn't get 23 arrests.
That's a lot of arrests from very white, middle-class, well-to-do types who, as you can see, there's not very much diversity being represented here.
Kind of insufferable.
But anyway, so, the police had arrested 23 of them, which is a lot.
The protesters said they aimed to counter the, quote, well-funded anti-trans, anti-queer event that was led by far-right Christian activists.
Well, the question is, who's funding you?
Because, I mean, this is another thing with Antifa and all of these sort of rent-a-mob protesters that they have is they're always very well-funded.
So the fact that they're like, oh, you're very well funded.
It's like, yeah, I feel like you might be holding up a mirror.
But anyway, so this was the Mayday rally that was held at the heart of the queer community.
So we have identified the heart of the queer community.
It's in Seattle.
Wouldn't have known, actually.
I wouldn't have guessed.
And roughly 500 people attended either way.
The protesters, of course, shouted, go home fascists.
The mayor of Seattle released a statement, siding with the rioters.
Of course he did.
Because the thing is with a place like Seattle and Portland, they have been incrementally more left-ized as time has gone on.
And the people in charge of these places have, of course, And this is what Wheeler found in Portland when he tried to join an Antifa mob back in 2019 or something like this.
And he just got chased out.
Because, of course, they're like, no, you're part of the fascist system.
Don't you understand our values?
We are anarchists.
We are communists.
We want the total destruction of the state and every position within it.
I was going to say, it's one of the things that true commies or even anarchists, leftist anarchists, say is that liberals get the news too.
Yes.
Yeah, we hate the far right, of course.
No, that was a particular thing from California.
Liberals get the book too.
But liberals are standing in the way just as much.
Yes.
So, there's that.
There's one thing, a broader point to make.
I think it's interesting that when we were younger, Antifa just wasn't a thing.
Well, wait, not that it wasn't a thing.
Not in Britain, anyway.
But it just wasn't ever part of the discourse.
You'd never see black blocks or anything like that.
I found it interesting because by the time it did become a thing in the 2010 era, I was already conversant enough with history to know that sort of anti-fascism does go back...
I mean, look at George Orwell in Spain, for example.
You've got Italy, Germany and Spain.
Yeah.
So the idea of an anti-fascist movement, it didn't come out of nowhere in sort of 2015, right?
It was rekindled.
It was re-brought alive.
Just one of the things that is kind of surprising, if you'd asked me in the year 2000, what's going to be going down in the year 2020, say.
Most of the armed communists terrorising people was not on my list.
Yeah.
I wouldn't have said that a rise of militant anti-fascists in Western democracies.
You would not have guessed that.
No.
But this is fundamentally the problem of the liberals and the communists, is that they follow the same value set fundamentally, which is why the liberals are always like, well, you know, they are saying they're for freedom and equality and tolerance and good things that I agree with.
They're just insane radicals who have decided that actually the norms of democratic society And so the liberals are incredibly soft on this.
Whereas if you had a rally of actual fascists who were chanting, like, death to all black people or something like that, they'd crack down on that like this.
They would have absolutely no sympathy for it whatsoever.
But instead, you've got Bruce Harrell here.
Speaking of the violent communist riots, quote, the far-right rally was held here to provoke a reaction by promoting beliefs that are inherently opposed to our city's values.
But apparently, a mob of violent communists are not inherently opposed to the city's values.
And that's the problem with the liberal and the communist.
The communist will always dog the liberal, because the liberal made a series of promises at the beginning of their own philosophy, saying, yeah, no, we're going to have liberty and equality for all.
And the communist's like, okay, where is it?
And the liberal's like, what do you mean, where is it?
And it's like, no, no, we've got the liberty, where's the equality?
And the liberal's like, well, I mean, we'd have to do some really radical stuff to get that.
And they're like, yeah, we would.
And we're waiting.
And so this is why they'll sit there and say, well, those Christians who are like protect children, far right.
Don't agree with their values.
Also, when they say about the values of our city, of course, they're saying that Seattle is our commune, and actually that the city itself, because we've taken over it, fundamentally stands for something apart from what the rest of the country stands for, what America more broadly stands for, in an act of defiance.
They think that they're the guys on the walls in the French Revolution standing against.
They do.
Yeah, this is the Paris Commune.
Storming the Bastille.
Yeah.
I mean, you've spoken lots about the route where liberalism and the far left come from, sort of, ideologically speaking, the same route, the same place.
But in the modern era, or in the 20th century, certainly I think it's fair to say, is that it's just sort of a fundamental misunderstanding, whether it's the liberal or not, on the part of the liberals, to think that the extreme left, Are, in fact, just a more radical version of themselves.
When they say we just want liberal things, you know, we just want liberty, laissez-faire, all that sort of thing.
And the communist laissez-faire economics.
And the commies, the anarchists, are like, no, we fundamentally want something different.
And the liberals just often just don't hear it.
It's because it's couched in the language the liberal uses to describe.
And this is why consistently you see with different democratic parties across Europe that invariably the centrist or centre-right parties will always side with the far-left party when it comes to a coalition against something more reactionary.
Yeah, I mean, is it even reactionary to say a bunch of Christians saying stop transing kids?
Is that even political?
Where would you put that on a political compass?
Prior to the modern era of woke, right?
Because if you go back to the 60s or 70s, literally everyone's going, of course we're talking with transgender children.
What are you, mad?
You know, the most hardened Democrat would be like, that would be insane.
Why would we do that?
Certainly not reactionary.
And if it is, if you choose to label it, then good, I'm reacting against it.
I'll be a reaction.
Well, fine.
I'm reacting against something evil.
Yeah.
And I feel I have an obligation to do so.
But this is the point.
To provoke a reaction by promoting beliefs that are inherently opposed to our city's values.
So, our city is predicated on transing children, right?
If Seattle can't trans children, it's basically a fascist city, is what the mayor is saying.
Because this took place in the heart of Seattle's most prominent LGBTQ plus neighbourhood.
It took place on Capitol Hill.
So, I mean, I believe it, you know.
He went on, but the thing is, and this is where...
He says, anarchists infiltrated the counter-protesters and inspired violence.
They are the counter-protesters.
The liberal, like, look, I just don't want to believe that they're all a bunch of insane, brutal commies.
It's like, yeah, well, I mean, the thing is, you had to arrest a bunch of them.
They're the ones who started the violence.
They went on to criticise the Christian group, of course, saying, like, various activists were saying things like, well, they want to protect children from people supposedly bad because of misinformation about trans people.
You didn't say they were lying, though.
Misinformation.
It's not a lie.
Interesting use of language.
But yeah, no, so obviously the Christian side...
We're here to love Jesus, which sounds pretty stock Christian to me.
It's the sort of thing I'd expect Christians to say.
And of course, they weren't the ones throwing things.
They did get stuff thrown at them.
They were called fascists.
So there were some updates in this one, which was funny.
So basically by the middle of the afternoon, clashes had continued around the park with police deploying pepper spray on the protesters, various arrests with...
By six o 'clock, the police had requested, quote, mutual aid.
What does that mean?
Isn't it?
What does that mean?
Aid.
Does that not ring a bell or two?
I'm hoping that means the National Guard.
I know it won't.
We're bringing the National Guard, rolling an Abrams or two.
It wasn't the National Guard.
They just requested extra police officers.
But they tweeted out, we have requested mutual aid.
There's only one particular reference to the term mutual aid that I'm aware of.
And it's a book written by anarchist-communist Peter Kropotkin called Mutual Aid.
Okay, I've not heard of it.
Well, I had to read it for my degree.
And so, it's a very strange turn of phrase that they would use, because you would think they'd request backup, reinforcements, or something just normal, rather than mutual aid.
That's a very peculiar thing.
And it seems that they're kind of signaling to the protesters that they are currently arresting.
Right?
And I'm not saying that that is what's happening, I don't know, but there's only one, like, the one term.
One place that the phrase mutual aid is used that I can think of, and it's literally in a book by a communist revolutionary.
So that's weird.
Someone in the press department of the Seattle PD is a well-read pinko, it seems.
I certainly wouldn't doubt it.
The shock there being that they're well-read at all.
Well, yeah.
So by 7 o 'clock, the mayor had taken the unusual step of putting out a statement saying that, look, the protesters did nothing wrong.
It was the anarchists who had stepped in.
Seattle is proud of our reputation as a welcoming and inclusive city unless you're in favour of the integrity of children's bodies and then we're literally going to throw things at you and get ourselves arrested trying to stop you.
To love and peace.
Unless you're a Christian.
Literally, yes.
There is something hard-baked into even socialism, let alone actual communism or anarchism, which is at odds with the family unit.
I mean, the collectivisation of people is at war with the family unit.
Yeah.
Honestly, liberal philosophy at bottom kind of is because it bases itself on chosen obligations rather than unchosen obligations.
And the family is a series of unchosen obligations that you are born into, whether you like it or not.
And so this is why you get social services trying to liberate children from their parents if the parents are being untoward.
Now, don't get me wrong.
Something has to be done in those cases.
The liberal answer is just, well, put them into foster care and then good luck.
So I don't know, man.
That seems like it might be a little bit extreme.
And I think there might come a time in the future where the state being able to arbitrarily take children off of their parents might actually be considered a bad thing.
That in the final analysis, you belong to the party or the state, not your parents?
Yes, because the state is the one that has taken upon itself the obligation to enforce your quote-unquote human rights.
So the state has imbued in children the liberatory message and requirement for it to justify coming in and saying, nope, you're not doing what we want.
So you might be homeschooling your children into Christian morality or something, and the state might be like, well, that doesn't teach them about transgenderism, does it?
And you'll be like, no, it doesn't.
and the state well they need liberating men you know this is a Yeah, it could be anything.
So anyway, by the end of the day, 22 people have been arrested and not a great look.
But again, like, the mayor comes out and says, look, we oppose the extreme right wing who are in opposition to trans people's humanity.
It's like, no one's saying they can't have humanity.
What we're saying is, don't transgender children.
Because they can't consent to it.
It's really not an extreme position, right?
I don't think that makes you extreme right-wing.
And I would be very concerned if I lived in Seattle, if that did make me extreme right-wing, frankly.
But anyway, either way, it's nice to see them getting arrested.
And I can't help but feel if they weren't getting arrested, then Trump would be weighing in on this, right?
So the fact that the police...
Right, that's it.
You know, Billy Club time, pep spray time, no more of this nonsense.
And one can't help but think that if this had been handled in the way that it had been handled in previous eras, Trump would be coming down on this like a ton of brakes.
Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it, when you think back to about four or five years ago, how easily, you know, Antifa would have been able to get on with all this just without any pushback whatsoever from law enforcement and, you know, BLM as well, when the BLM riots were going on.
I feel like Trump has actually shown incredible restraint.
You remember in his first administration, there was that CHAZ thing.
I kept thinking, any day he's going to send in, swamp it with cops.
Those semi-militarised American cops and just end it all.
And he never did.
He just let it implode.
That shows a remarkable restraint, really, because if I was president at the time, I may well have ordered the governor or whatever to do something.
before it descended into actual homicides.
Well, to be fair, it was probably wise of Trump to talk about it.
I would have been too authoritarian.
Trump did make the right move in terms of optics and everything.
Yeah, not only that, there's going to be arguments about federal and state power and what he's entitled to do.
But also just allowing the fruits of their own product to blossom.
Okay, well, we'll get into the chas in a minute.
So anyway, you're not going to be surprised to learn that many of the people involved were not exactly their best and brightest.
You've got here Antifa, Trantifa member, Michele Andrew Baker, who is a member of the Youth Liberation Front who was arrested.
Baker is a certified state delegate for Bernie Sanders in 2020.
Been arrested repeatedly at Antifa riots but has faced no consequences.
So, I mean, basically, they are kind of sending people who definitely don't have a history of mental illness, right?
I think we can all agree that that's certainly not the case there.
And this has been supported by, of course, the people involved.
As you can see here, Sean Scott is a Washington State Representative for the 43rd District.
I assume he him says, we should celebrate Capitol Hill counter-protesters who aren't letting anti-trans extremists into Washington's historic stronghold of LGBT life without a fight, and standing up for the unaccountable police in the process.
Just, okay, I guess that's one perspective on it.
And this, of course, hate has no place in the 43rd Legislative District, unless it's against.
Anti-trans extremists, right?
We're allowed to hate that.
Normal people.
Unless it's against pro-family Christians, in which case, go for your life.
Yeah, and this was indeed on the site of the Capitol Hill-occupied protests at the CHAZ.
Oh, the exact same spot?
I'm not sure.
It's at the Capitol Hill, so yeah, I think it was.
So this was at the Capitol Hill in Seattle itself, where several blocks, I think there's actually a map here, there we go.
So you can see the area occupied by the CHAS, or the CHOP, however it's called, where two people were shot and killed.
There were two non-fatal shootings.
There was a series of arsons, thefts, sexual assaults.
And one study after the fact came to the conclusion that the crime rate in the CHOP, in the CHAS, was 132.9% higher than in other areas of Seattle during the same period, which is very interesting, isn't it?
Taken over by a warlord, didn't it?
Yeah.
An individual gang member dude who just proclaimed himself sort of emperor.
That's proper communism.
And then the feds had to come in and basically bulldoze the lot of it.
So that was an interesting experiment that went very well.
And there was another trial that I found from 2024 in May that I did a bit of snooping around the subject.
And a jury in San Diego found a couple of anti-fascist conspirators guilty of conspiracy to riot.
So them going to a protest in January 2021, fighting members of the Proud Boys and...
They were found guilty of conspiracy to riot, which is interesting because that kind of means that this could be used as a precedent in future cases.
Oh, you've turned up in Black Block with, you know, various pieces of equipment that could be used as weapons.
Well, that's conspiracy to riot and this is now a precedent in US law.
So whether that goes anywhere or not, I have no idea.
But the point being, it's nice to see the Antifa are actually starting to get their comeuppance.
As they should have been.
They should never have been tolerated in the first place.
But thankfully, it's not being tolerated now.
It reminds me of an incident back in the...
I can't remember the exact dates, but I think it might have been the 70s, back when Ronald Reagan was governor of California.
California.
And he sent in sort of the riot squad.
read the riot act smashed it all up and they uh they hark back to that even to this day but yeah just at some point At some point it does turn into, well, what you can only really describe as sedition.
Like that Chaz thing is sort of, I would describe it as seditious.
It's hard to describe it as anything else.
They literally call it an autonomous zone, liberated from the United States.
I don't know what else that's supposed to be called.
The Constitution of the United States doesn't run here.
Which is why so many people are getting raped and murdered.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I'm not even joking, actually.
But yeah, so good news, basically, is that law and order seems to be being restored even in the most lefty areas of the United States.
I suspect it's probably Trump's influence.
It's good.
Shamo says, What do you think?
This is how I came to understand Infinity.
It's the moment the killer realizes the mother has been visiting him every day.
The son that he killed equals Christ is king.
I'm afraid I'd have to spend a bit of time thinking about that.
I wouldn't be able to give you a satisfying answer just off the cuff.
But thank you for the super chat.
Right, let's move on.
All right, then.
So there's been a real battle of wills commencing over this past few months, really, ever since Trump came back to office between Harvard University, the oldest university in America, and the Trump administration.
Now, obviously, as we can see here, a lot of this is off of events that we'll remember before Trump actually, you know,
all these, you know, pro-Palestine and in some cases even pro-Hamas, you know.
It is remarkable how Hamas can kill like 1,300 people and suddenly there are people yelling, yeah, from the river to the sea.
I don't like weighing in on this debate, but it is hard to separate this kind of activism from just pro-terrorism.
Oh, yeah.
And I'm trying to be charitable, but come on.
From the river to the sea?
What, the river Potomac to the Atlantic Ocean?
What are we talking about here?
Well, I think part of that certainly comes between the fact that, well, okay, if you are, of course, pro-Palestine, then it means that, well, what is the Palestinian line of defence against the things that are being done to it?
And then that naturally means, well, you have to put your faith in the prescribed terrorist organisation, because that's really the first line of defence.
that's where we're to.
Now, really what I'm, you know, obviously talking Fundamentally, being for America and being born American makes you American.
However, it is interesting to point out that really, this war on Harvard is not to do so much with the American students, but more to do with the fact that there's an enormous number of foreign students who have been invited in on visas.
Come over as a guest to America to participate in their wonderful, you know, well, I say wonderful.
I'm more doubtful about that after looking into the recent antics of Harvard.
But for the sake of argument, a higher form of education than they could have possibly achieved in whichever country they come from.
Somehow they were radicalized against the United States.
Yes.
Incredible.
If they weren't already, of course.
Yeah.
So we have here...
And as I explained to you in my April letter, it is a privilege to enroll foreign students, and it is also a privilege to employ aliens on campus.
All universities must comply with Homeland Security requirements, and failure to comply with multiple requests.
Because that's actually where this started when she refers to that.
So I just looked up.
What's funny?
Nothing, nothing.
I wish I had mine.
The thing is that, really, what originally in April, all they asked for, all the government actually asked for was, look, can you please give us the names and information of foreign students on your campus who have been engaging in anti-American and pro-terrorist sympathies?
And Harvard's like, absolutely not.
How dare you?
We're going to defend our foreign terrorists, thank you very much.
They're our foreign terrorists and we're proud of them.
That's very weird.
I think, I hope, in America, just like in Britain or in a lot of Europe, if you're not actually Muslim or Jewish, you look upon that sort of forever war in the Holy Land, in the Levant, and you just look upon it aghast without a dog in the fire.
Yeah.
Well, I do.
I think, yeah, I hope that most Americans, again, if you're not Jewish or Muslim, you just think...
So, in America, Israel has a particularly kind of important place in...
I guess you say something of the national mythology at this point.
So, it's not a neutral subject for them.
No, you've been told ever since the 40s that Israel's interests are your best interests.
It's not just about interests.
There's a huge number of evangelicals who view Israel's existence as part of a kind of revolutionary mission.
Certainly, yeah, that's true.
So it goes beyond merely strategic interests.
There is a stripe of Christianity which is essentially pro-Zionist.
Sure, okay.
But this is really, so it says, while perpetuating an unsafe environment that is hostile to Jewish students, promotes pro-Hamas sympathies, and employs racist diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, and so you have lost this privilege.
So, I mean, Harvard are like, well, you got us there.
I mean, like, we do all of those things.
Yeah, that's the thing we're proudest of, if anything.
That's how we got our job doing this.
And you have to bear in mind as well that, obviously, when Trump, you know, gained his second term in office, obviously, and said, look, this is the end of DEI.
This is the end of it.
We are killing it here and now, as far as we can throughout America.
And so Harvard said, well, we'll just rebrand then.
That's not how that works.
Right.
But what I find so bizarre, I suppose, about this is the fact...
Because this here, this is the Harvard Crimson, the commie crimson, the newspaper of Harvard University, the student newspaper.
And the fact that...
Well, thank you for publishing that.
It's going to make catching you out so much easier.
The great tactical minds of Harvard, clearly, yes, from their education there.
It's something they're just proactively proud of.
Yeah, totally.
Totally proud of it.
Yeah.
And, you know, so this new directive, this new...
or visitors, just on the visiting.
And so this here means that before you know it, you're going to have potentially thousands upon thousands of foreign students from Harvard, possibly over 8,000, in a position where they either will be deported because their visas no longer
That is fascinating, because you've got to ask the sort of foreign student body there, why did you decide to get involved in American activism?
What were you thinking?
You were told, oh no, we're going to go out and march for human rights or something.
It's like, yeah, but dude, I'm here to get my degree.
I'm here to get an education, surely.
And now you're pouring a war against the Trump administration by the deans of Harvard.
It's like, this isn't serving you, is it?
You know, you should have just kept your bloody head down and got on with your studies.
I won't say from where, but we had an exchange student come to us.
And within two weeks of arriving from a foreign country, they were very proud about the fact that it says, oh, yes, I was in London last weekend protesting Brexit.
We're having a really delicate, really volatile conversation in our country about the future of our country.
And this random foreigner just thinks that she can get involved with.
There were absolutely loads of them as well.
I remember the Brexit protests and you'd see infuse where it's like, I'm Spanish and I'm against Brexit.
It's like, I don't care.
What your opinion on Brexit is.
I mean, you're not even eligible to vote in the bloody referendum, so shut up, you know.
But because they see themselves as universal citizens, they see all struggles, all political questions as universal questions that they have a right to an opinion on, and not as a national conversation particular to national peoples.
I can't even imagine going over to another country after a couple of weeks being like, yeah, I'm going to get involved.
It's not my business.
I wouldn't dare to.
Yeah, I'd feel embarrassed.
Yeah, it'd be embarrassing to do that.
And I could walk to Parliament Square at lunchtime easily and did loads of times.
Loads and loads of times.
Not every single day, but multiple times a week.
And anyway, you remember that guy that was just permanently there?
Steve Ray.
Steve Ray, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I spoke to him a number of times.
And yeah, most days when there was sort of, again, that sort of perma...
And you just listen out and it's all foreign languages or at least foreign accents.
There's a guy that used to wear this big Boris head.
Remember that?
For a while anyway.
He'd wear this big fake spitting image style Boris head.
And yeah, he was like, I can't remember exactly what he was, but he wasn't British.
I think he was like South American or something or Spanish or something like that.
In the end, it turned out the temerity.
Right.
Well, absolutely.
And so the Donald did what he does best, rolled up his sleeves and posted on truth.
Because that's what he says.
Why isn't Harvard saying that almost 31...
Their students are from foreign lands, and yet those countries, some not at all friendly to the United States, pay nothing towards their students' education, nor do they ever intend to.
Nobody told us that.
We want to know who these foreign students are, a reasonable request, since we give Harvard billions of dollars, but Harvard isn't exactly forthcoming.
We want those names and countries.
Harvard has $52 million.
Use it and stop asking for the federal government to continue granting money to you.
Right, so Trump's threatening to just turn the taps off.
Yes, yes, he is.
I love the use of the term foreign lands.
It's so perfectly archaic.
Yeah.
It just comes straight from.
But yeah, it's interesting to know that it's a bit different to what goes on in Great Britain, because in Great Britain, it's not that foreign students are subsidized directly by a It's just that you're charged a lot more.
Yeah, they charge basically twice as much.
Right.
So that's a whole different dynamic for us.
That's very interesting.
It means that it's in the university's interest to have as many of them as possible because they make more money.
But it's not that they're stealing directly out of the Treasury.
The net result is the same.
As many foreigners as possible.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It can't just be that the US government funds all of Harvard, right?
They have to have some sort of...
They must do.
Sure.
Well, sponsors, donors, all sorts of things.
But it's the fact that Harvard, obviously, being one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in America, that it has enough money to actually mount legal battles against the White House on these sorts of questions, which is not an inconsistency...
Oh, sorry, I've accidentally...
Well, this one here.
So, I've lost that link, but...
Oh yes, here we are.
and there's set to be a court hearing on the 29th of May.
Yeah, so Trump is now also at war with the judiciary.
Yes.
I mean, good, he needs to be at war with everyone who's standing in his way, but...
That's a very good question.
I thought that the Patriot Act gave Homeland Security, not exactly carte blanche, but they were within reason allowed to do, well, certainly something like this.
I thought Homeland security could just do it.
But more of our thought judges could only As in, okay, we're going to take this through the courts, a legal case has been brought, and the judge has to make a ruling on it, not just judge wakes up, I don't know what Trump's done, I incede on that?
Sorry, do you have the authority to do that?
I don't know how this works, but I mean, like, this surely is a question that needs resolving, right?
But Dr. Alan Garber, the...
He said that with the stroke of a pen, the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard's student body.
This, but a good thing.
Yes.
International students who contribute significantly to the university and its mission.
Well, just FYI, they do pay tuition and fees.
I looked it up.
Although this may well be reduced by government aid.
So, I don't know.
And they do contribute significantly.
To the disorder?
Yes.
Yes.
The mission of more and more DEI and basically just more and more obstruction of just the general things that the American population are interested in seeing come through.
But obviously we have to ask the question, of course.
Well, this Dr. Alan Garber is the president of Harvard University.
Why is he the president?
Oh, yes, that's right, because their most recent president, Dr. Claudine Gay, lasted for exactly three months because she was found to just have rampant plagiarism.
Wasn't this Chris Ruffo's crusade?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Superb work.
Yes.
Professional papers from 2001.
And they also found as well, even as far back as when she was studying for her PhD back in the 90s.
So, you know, determined never to kick a bad habit, as we can see here.
And fundamentally, it comes down to the thing that, look, if you're ever complicated, then just go for what America First Auron has to say, which is...
Yes, Bill, America is for Americans.
and fundamentally American education should be tailored to American students and not foreign ones.
Yeah, I mean, literally Bill Crystal's comment here, foreigners studying and working here are not damaging to the United States.
A virulently nativist administration Because if Harvard is being a third of Harvard, nearly a quarter of Harvard, is populated by non-native students, then they are positions, like Harvard is an institution of limited scope.
There are only so many classrooms.
There are only so many buildings.
There's only so much...
Then a quarter of those are being used in lieu of Americans occupying those positions.
So what does the United States mean if we're talking about nativism being bad for America?
The United States must mean some kind of global, liberal, universal order that is promising something to all mankind.
Anyway.
What a perverse, subversive couple of statements that is.
It is, totally.
Foreigners studying and working here are not damaging the United States, full stop.
well doesn't it depend what they're doing surely you That's not damaging.
Not going to take into account what they're saying or doing.
you must mean some kind of universal liberal human order.
I'm so glad you brought up the Chinese spies, by the way, Carl, because this is, again, if we talk about the academic independence of Harvard and the mission of Harvard, and, you know, as we say about the fact that...
you know, the function is what it does, then we have to bear in mind the fact that Republicans, led by committee chair Right?
Jesus Christ!
I mean, there's a commitment to fostering foreign terrorists.
You know, okay, we're just going to have...
Which is legal in Britain, obviously.
But, you know, people going out there and saying, you know, down with Jews, up with Hamas, whatever it is.
But then there's actively training the paramilitary organization of a foreign country.
Yes.
Well, this is to do with the Xinjiang Production and Constructions Corp, or the XPCC, and the reason why they are designated in such a way and faced sanctions both in Trump's first term and Biden's term, oddly enough, right?
So there's some consistency on what these guys stand for is that they had a major part in the logistical process Oh.
And yet they were just turning up.
They were invited to host events at Harvard.
They were part of events, you know, some years back.
And that seemed to be all fine in keeping with American values and the good of the American people.
So they're anti-Uyghur Chinese, I take it.
Well, I mean, they were.
Doing terrible things to them.
So isn't there any sort of tension between those and the pro-Palestine types?
Did they ever clash with each other?
I guess not.
I guess their mutual enemy, Uncle Sam, comes first and foremost, I guess.
Yes.
Well, it's not about how well the, you know, their...
It's more about the fact that America is always a bad guy.
It's completely irrelevant.
It is literally just anti-Americanism.
It is.
It is.
And so, obviously, what we've also got here is the fact that off the back of such things as this, Trump has threatened to remove the tax exemptions that Harvard has under the from that they were given by the IRS.
Going back to the 50s, I think it was.
So yeah, he's willing to play that card.
So Trump is playing hardball?
Oh yeah, really.
Yeah, he's using as much hard power as he can here.
And I suppose that means that you have to ask yourself, with all of these sorts of things, you know, between potentially losing all of their foreign students, between the fact that they seem to be implicated in Chinese espionage and even worse things that the Chinese could be accused of, How could it possibly get any worse for Harvard?
Right, you get the feeling like it's one of those things, assaults are coming at you from all sides right now.
Body held, keep your head down.
Everyone just be on your best behavior.
Do the best you can.
parts.
Is this real?
This is real.
And not only is it real, it's current.
It's current.
This is this week.
So what?
Right, well, the what is that Cedric Lodge, 57, admitted that he took parts of donated cadavers after they'd been used for research and sold them rather than...
Who's buying that?
So it's not the 18th century where people actually want to do research and they're not allowed to, so you go and get bodies illegally.
We don't live in that world anymore.
No.
Who's buying the severed heads?
This guy's not emulating da Vinci.
I think this isn't entirely...
He and his wife sold the parts to a network of body parts dealers.
Some of those in the network still face challenges.
Jesus Christ.
There are body part dealers?
Yeah, to what end?
In Massachusetts?
To what end?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yes.
Wow.
Creepy.
I will personally follow developments on this story, ladies and gentlemen, out of sheer morbid curiosity.
But as I say, the fact of the matter is that really as well, that Harvard being...
It's really important that Trump wins this fight.
It's really important, not only because of its symbolic significance, but also to set the precedent of what is actually acceptable on an American university campus.
I'd say, if an actual American citizen...
Of course, that's your prerogative.
But to just allow thousands upon thousands of foreign students to come and just meddling your politics in any way.
Also foster a distinctly anti-American sentiment within the university itself.
It's like, sorry, this is just not an acceptable thing to do.
It seems to me, from this segment, I'm learning things.
Not just your classic student protest disruption, but actually going into the realm of paramilitary stuff.
What are you doing?
That's obviously beyond the pale.
There must come a point, really, when something has to be done.
A line in the sand needs to be drawn.
Stelios was telling me something I didn't know about last week, that in Greece...
They would just never do it.
I mean, Greece has got a long history with student protests going back decades and decades and decades.
But anyway, in recent decades, that was what was done.
And so criminals just...
Took it over.
Yeah, or if it was like a criminal's embassy or something like that.
And he said that there'd be like drug dealers would set up on the campus.
Never one knew what was going on.
And the police, until recently again, would just never go in there.
And so they flourished.
And apparently that doesn't happen anymore.
The Greeks have sort of come round to it a bit and stomped it out.
Maybe they're not sacred spaces.
Maybe the police are allowed in to the universities to clear out the criminals.
A sacred grove for criminals and subversives.
So that's sort of the extreme end of where it goes.
If you don't intervene, then somewhere like Harvard or any number of universities across America might end up just a sort of hive for criminals.
Yes, and leftists.
Yeah, well, same thing.
Yeah, exactly.
Venn diagram.
Yeah, very interesting.
Yes.
Right, okay.
Well, let's move on.
What's happening in Ukraine?
Can I get the mouse?
You can.
Scroll down on my thing there.
Cool.
Okay, so I think we need to talk about Ukraine a little bit, some developments over the weekend.
Can I be honest?
I haven't followed this for months, so I have no idea what's happening.
Well, a broad overview, headline, is that it's increasingly apparent that the Ukrainian side of the ledger are losing or have lost on the battlefield.
That seems to be the case.
So, over the weekend, basically, the Kremlin unleashed a bombardment of Kiev.
Quite a big one, actually, it seems.
Hundreds and hundreds of drone and missile strikes on the Ukraine on Saturday going into Sunday.
But on Saturday night, Russia fired 367 drones and missiles at Ukraine, its biggest aerial assault on Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022.
at least 12 people were killed meanwhile Russia's defence ministry said it's destroying So just a bit of an escalation of the air war.
I thought they were supposed to have a ceasefire and there were going to be negotiations.
Well so that's the next thing to say that a lot of people have pointed out.
The last segment we just did was a bit of a win for Trump and the Trump administration and the MAGA movement.
This is a bit of a fail, sort of undeniably.
I mean, Trump said he would end...
I mean, you know, we're all here pro-Trump, or at least gunning for MAGA over the Democrats, if nothing else.
Obviously.
There are issues with the MAGA movement, and Trump's not a perfect man, but still, we go with him over the Democrats.
But, unfortunately, he didn't stop it in 24 hours, did he?
No.
Well, let's play the clip of him saying that.
In fact, Samson, can you do it?
Thank you.
You play it?
There we go.
I will prevent and very easily World War III, very easily.
Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, I will have the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine settled.
It will be settled quickly.
Quickly.
I will get the problem solved and...
I know exactly what to say to each of them.
I got along very well with them.
That was a bit optimistic.
If you just play the other link real quick, the next one.
If I were president, and I say this, I will end that war in one day.
It'll take 24 hours.
I know Zelensky well.
That's enough.
You get it.
This is a promise he made repeatedly.
He's actually talking to Nigel in this interview.
So, I mean, I'm not gloating about it.
It's unfortunate.
It'd be nice if he'd ended it in 24 hours.
That would have been great.
So that's a miscalculation.
It is the case that this conflict is much deeper, much more bitter than many, including the Donald, thought.
That both sides, politically anyway, are much more entrenched.
The Ukrainians are refusing to give in, refusing to accept the battlefield reality, and the Russians, or Putin, are just not going to stop.
The thing is, both sides are basically in a position where one has to be destroyed, right?
So if Putin must be like, yeah, okay, fair enough, that was a mistake, and we're just going to pull out of everywhere, well, that's going to have a massive hit to his credibility in Russia.
As in, sorry, you know, the strongman who has the claim to have guided Russia well since the end of the Cold War, well, that was a huge mistake, got hundreds of thousands of people killed, God knows how much money wasted, and ruins Russians' credibility on the world stage.
Whereas for Zelensky, I mean, this is going to get him giving away like a fifth of the country, is again a political death sentence, if not an actual death sentence for him.
He's got nowhere to go either.
He can't concede anything.
And for the time being, we still at least seem to be on the page where all of the European countries are still giving unconditional backing to Ukraine.
So as long as he has that support and some allies still funding him, even if Trump has, you know, gone cold on the question of Ukraine, then that's at least something for him to carry on with, some means for him to continue.
A lot of the European countries are still off the line as long as it takes.
Yes.
Don't worry about how many Ukrainians die.
Or how impoverished we become doing it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you said, you didn't say anything incorrect at all there.
I completely agree with all your analysis.
Other than the one thing we say, Szymanski gave away a fifth.
It was taken from him.
Well, yeah, but for him to concede it will be seen for him to be giving it away.
But he's got no choice.
Yeah, I agree.
It's happened.
It's a fait accompli.
Yeah.
So, okay, it just seems that, again, the sort of the military, strictly military side of it, all the momentum really is with Russia.
I don't know if Ukraine are exactly exhausted.
War weariness is an element in it.
But they just, they haven't got a reply.
I said this before when I've talked about Ukraine quite a lot, probably more than any other individual.
Lotus Eat has done more segments on it.
But it seems clear at least a year ago, or arguably right from the outset, that it was not going to be possible for the Ukrainians to win.
Or if they were, they would have needed extraordinary wins against the odds.
And that didn't happen for them.
I think two summers ago, there was going to be a big spring offensive.
It came to nothing.
It bogged down and came to nothing.
There's a big push in the Kursk region.
It came to nothing.
So that's sort of it.
They've shot their bolt and it didn't work.
Because the problem with Modern Warfare generally is it's just a game of numbers at this point.
Especially if you've got...
And material, yeah.
It's all about numbers.
And if you've got one side whose entire strategy is attrition, well, good luck.
Yeah.
So, where there's this sort of escalation in the air war over the weekend, Trump was calling it crazy that Putin's gone, quote, absolutely crazy.
But there is the idea that once the momentum's with you, it's like being chip leader in a game of cards.
You bully everyone else.
In order to win the game overall.
And that happens in war lots.
If you look at wars and you look at the casualty figures, often it's the case, both World War I and World War II, that right at the end, there's a massive uptick in casualties.
Because one side smells blood and realizes this is our opportunity to really crush the enemy now and force them to the peace table.
Maybe that's what's going on here.
Maybe that's the calculation that's gone on in Kremlin and in Putin's head.
I don't know.
But that would make sense.
It's easy for me to sit here and say this when there's completely innocent civilians getting killed in Kiev.
But, I mean, there you go.
But Trump is calling Putin crazy.
I mean, this is what he said.
I've always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him.
He's gone absolutely crazy!
He's needlessly killing a lot of people, and I'm not just talking about soldiers.
Missiles and drones are being shot into cities in Ukraine for no reason whatsoever.
Well, it's not for no reason whatsoever.
I mean, it's not nice.
I don't agree with it.
I'm not justifying it, but it's not for no reason whatsoever.
I've always said that he wants all of Ukraine.
I've never bought that line, but okay.
Not just a piece of it.
Maybe that's proving to be right, but if he does, it will lead to the downfall of Russia.
Will it?
You're going to nuke Moscow?
What are we saying?
Is it?
Likewise, President Zelensky is doing his country no favours by talking the way he does.
Everything out of his mouth causes problems.
I don't like it, and it better stop.
Well, you've done that, you've tried that, and he's not stopping.
You gave him a dressing down in the Oval Office on camera, and he hasn't stopped.
In front of the entire world.
So you don't like it, it better stop.
It sounds redundant now.
That sounds empty now.
I'm afraid.
I wish it weren't.
I wish he could just wag his finger at both parties and they just stopped immediately.
That would be great.
But it's not happening.
I remember going back years, people tried to wag their finger at Putin.
I remember when David Miliband was Foreign Secretary, saying, Mr. Putin better not subvert his democracy anymore and run for president for the fourth time, wherever it was.
Like, naughty boy.
Putin doesn't care.
And Putin was like, yeah, sure, Dave.
Sure.
Sure, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
You probably didn't even think about it.
No, right.
Yeah.
Who are you?
Trump continues saying, this is a war that would never have started if I were president.
Yeah, but we're too far gone on that.
Yeah, but it has.
Yes.
But it has.
This is Zelensky's, Putin's and Biden's war, not Trump's.
I mean, yeah, true, but you're the president now.
You've got to deal with the issue.
I'm only helping to put out the big and ugly fires that have been started through gross incompetence and hatred.
The thing is, the fires don't even seem to be dwindling, do they?
Yeah.
Well, that's the next thing.
So lots of drone stuff's going on.
I did a segment the other week talking about the future of war, what it might be.
Unsurprisingly, it's drones.
It's drone stuff.
Because everyone's seen those quadcopter-style drones.
But there are, in fact, loads of different types.
Most military drones are not like that, in fact.
You have much heavier, bigger...
And we've been using them over Iraq and wherever for decades now.
Yeah, you can describe ones that are like those Predator drones, where it's like a small aeroplane, really.
There's a picture here of one.
With its rail, it actually puts me in mind of a V1.
Have you ever seen the Nazi V1 rockets?
Not from memory.
I can't think of it.
The doodlebugs.
No?
People out there will know what I'm talking about.
I don't know, I'm afraid.
V1 doodlebug, check it out.
Vengeance Weapon 1. This puts me in mind of sort of a 21st century version of that.
I see it.
Obviously much, much more sophisticated.
The V1, they just flew a rough trajectory until the fuel ran out and it just fell wherever it fell.
But this is something.
But so, yeah, drone and anti-drone warfare seems to be the thing now.
Um, just playing a bit of this.
People must have seen lots and lots of versions of this type of footage.
I genuinely hate this kind of warfare as well.
It's really impersonal, isn't it?
It's awful.
Absolutely awful.
I feel like this is a lot of what will happen is guys trying to shoot drones out of the air.
Like you say, it's so impersonal.
It's one thing being blown up by a rocket or something, but it's like, no, this thing is now tracking you, and it can try and blow you up.
Completely merciless.
And this one doesn't even look like a really, really fast one.
No.
It's like one of those quad ones.
Anyway, they happen to get it.
Yeah, they happen to get that one.
But yeah, there's some different images of all different, much, much more sophisticated ones.
Would you say that Russia and Ukraine are now the two most advanced countries when it comes to drone development?
Absolutely.
The Americans sent switchblades turned out to be total junk.
If we're talking about what actually worked from the West in this war, it's Starlink.
If you take Starlink away from Ukraine, their naval drones are done.
The Chinese have built their own version of a heavy drone.
The problem with Chinese weapons is they build everything like it's a toy.
Early in the war, most injuries and deaths came from artillery.
Now it seems like 70% of casualties are from drones.
When it comes to protecting foot soldiers, the only real defense is to run fast.
useless.
Is there any power measure against fiber optic drones?
Nope.
Ukrainian vehicles roll up and the drone launches just 15 meters away.
Those Ukrainian drivers don't stand a chance.
That was pure hell for the Ukraine.
Okay.
So, So, this is sort of what's going on.
It'll be harrowing.
if those numbers are correct, and I don't know if they are or not, because I'm not on the ground, but if it's the drone, drone casualties have overtaken artillery casualties, that's, that's truly remarkable.
The counter drone technology like jammers and things are sort of losing in Something like that.
Render the drone useless?
You think that'd be a really easy defence?
I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know, but apparently not.
I'm sure that countries will put money and time and resources into research and development into anti-drone measures.
Yeah, they've got to.
Quite often, a few times on Twitter and things, I've talked about drones, people say, oh, all you need is an EMP device, and they fall out of the air.
That's all I need.
You can build your own EMP device at home for $30.
It's like, can you?
Yeah, is that going to be battlefield effective most of the time?
Is it, well, It's very science fiction, isn't it?
There was a movie back in the 90s.
Where humanity is fighting like a robot uprising.
They have buzzsaw drones that go along the ground or go under the ground and then kill people.
It's horrific.
And we're arriving in that sort of stage.
So impersonal.
Yeah.
I feel like the future might be both sides.
Drones fight each other long before the actual men do.
That it just become redundant or pointless to send any men into a battlefield area because the drones will dominate them so easily and so quickly.
Then it's just manufacturing capacity as to who wins the war.
So it's just a drone on drone thing and taking out your enemy's ability to manufacture drones.
Yeah, maybe.
Welcome to the future.
Yeah.
Okay, so back to the politics side of it.
Even the mainstream media are admitting that That Russia are confident, again, purely in military terms, that all the sort of momentum is kind of with them.
Here's one about Ukraine's, quote, chaotic withdrawal from Russia, saying, the article goes on to say that Ukrainian forces used to, even on a small scale, relatively small scale, bounce across the Russian border, not with impunity, but here and there where they could, and they're not really doing that anymore.
In fact, they're, So there's that.
Yeah, even like the BBC, saying, is it the beginning of the end?
Are we there?
At what point is Zelensky completely painted into a corner?
Completely?
at some point there'll just be no options left.
It'll be, I don't want to compare him to Hitler, obviously, but like, you know, where I, Was it the history buffs one?
It was, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But the point is going to be the same, though.
Obviously, they're not the same people, but the point is the same where it's just like, okay, what can we do?
There's nothing we can do.
At some point, the Red Army is going to be arriving in Berlin.
At some point, the Russian Army is going to be arriving in Kiev, and we just don't have any men or munitions to fight them with.
So, it's over.
I mean, yeah, very interesting.
I don't know if the...
It's not total war.
Putin could nuke Kiev.
He could carpet nuke all of Ukraine if he wanted to.
This is a limited war.
I don't think his war aims are to storm Kiev.
I don't think he does want to take the whole thing.
I mean, showing no signs.
There was, right at the beginning of the war, they put armour as though it were going to Kiev.
Yeah, it was a really aggressive attempt to surround the capital.
Yeah.
Some say that was a feint.
That was a tactical thing.
That that was a feint to take Ukrainian materiel away from the east of the country.
There was another time, more in the middle of the war, where they did a similar thing.
It looked like they were going to Kiev.
But it might have been a shimmy.
It might have been a feint.
Well, it was.
So anyway, here's an interesting, I think, quite an interesting web page where they show us a few different maps.
One of them I think is quite interesting is this one.
We're around in the Kursk region where even last summer we were told all about the Ukrainian push towards Kursk or certainly across the border into Russia proper.
And that now, it just utterly failed.
It just utterly failed.
Russia's taken it all back.
So it seems like, and I could be wrong, I don't know all the details and the secrets of Ukrainian military tactics and strategy, but it looks like that they're kind of done on the battlefield now.
Well, surely the only thing that would actually change this calculus in any conceivable way would be European boots on the ground.
Or, you know, just other countries.
British troops, French troops, whoever it may be.
Aren't there thousands of European troops in Ukraine at the moment as well?
Well, I don't believe that they're fighting.
Well, okay, that's an interesting question.
And there's also special operations people where the reality is that countries like Britain and the United States, wherever there's a hotspot where there's even remotely our interests are involved.
There will be covert Special Forces dudes.
No doubt.
I mean, technically, the SAS is supposed to be completely secret.
Technically, that is what it's supposed to be.
But it gets out.
People know.
So there will be Western or European soldiers of whatever ilk in and around there.
So, yeah, I just don't know how long...
And if Putin just keeps ramping up the pressure, how long can they take it?
Trump's saying, he's crazy.
He's crazy.
I don't like it.
Stop doing it.
And Putin's just ignoring it.
The Kremlin's just completely ignoring it.
If you cut the signal out of the noise, you see that Russia has just advanced on every front.
And is winning victory after victory, right?
Like, they're consolidating the things they've taken, and there doesn't seem to be a lot the Ukrainians can do about it.
Right.
I mean, look at this set of maps.
It tells the story.
So from 2022 to now, it just tells the whole story, really.
The ability for the Ukrainians to push the Russians out of anywhere.
Has failed.
It's this old thing from Sun Tzu to Von Clausewitz.
Don't start a fight you can't win or you're almost certainly not going to win.
Even if the odds are anything less than 75%, you likely to win.
It's best not to do it.
Like, it's me starting a fight with Jon Jones.
It's not a good idea.
It's not a good idea.
The end result of it is I get beaten up.
Sun Tzu would argue that the best battle is the one you don't have to fight to get your objective.
Right.
And we tried the thing of giving them fantastic amounts of money, lots and lots of materiel, crazy amounts really.
That has all now failed.
And even Trump throwing his oar in politically isn't doing anything.
Trump thought he was going to leverage his relationships with them.
Which didn't go anywhere.
So all the cards are really with the Ukrainians or Zelensky to come to the peace table now, it seems.
Well, they had the other week, didn't they?
There was two delegations that met in Istanbul with one another, but all they actually agreed on was just an exchange of prisoners of war.
They couldn't get any further than that as regards to winding down the actual conflict.
Because at some point, they will just have to come to terms with the fact that they've lost.
It puts me in mind of the German surrender in World War I. The last thing they want to do is...
It's so much...
But it's that or you lose all your men.
Right?
It's that.
Or you are truly crushed World War II style where we do have to come all the way to your capital and end you sort of Carthaginian style.
Are you going to go there?
Is Zelensky going to play his political hand to the point where Putin's got no option but to do thunder runs through the middle of Kiev?
Is that where he's going to take it?
I hope not.
So one other thing, one other development for the Ukrainian update is that Putin took a trip to the front or near the front, the region on the border, and the Ukrainians tried to take out his helicopter.
Good luck, lads.
I'm surprised both lads haven't tried to assassinate their leader more.
Yeah.
Again, this is a limited war.
This is a limited war.
I'm surprised the Russians haven't tried to smart bomb.
Zelensky before now.
Yeah, I'm surprised because both sides are doing it a bit, but the Ukrainians are also assassinating generals and things in Moscow.
I'm surprised they haven't tried something more aggressive against Putin's actual physical body.
But he went to the front and they tried to take out his helicopter and various outlets were reporting on that.
Some saying that his helicopter was able...
There you go.
It fended off a drone attack.
But okay, so there's sort of the updates from the weekend.
And it's just a sad story.
I mean, it was always sad from the beginning.
But it feels like to me that Zelensky's running out of options quite quickly.
And if the Russians play their hand, Ruthlessly, which is kind of what they do best.
That's what I expect them to do.
Then he's going to be truly painted into a corner, if not already.
Okay, so there's that.
Matt says, could Trump have expected when he said he was going to end the war that European allies would have undermined his request for peace?
Well, if Trump had been more diplomatic with his European allies to begin with, then maybe he could have brought them along.
But the problem is Trump did the diplomacy after attacking them and putting them in their place, which, OK, I mean, don't get me wrong.
I enjoyed watching the Europeans getting humbled as well.
Trump should have been shoring up his alliance, making them essentially completely dependent on him, and then judo-flipping the table, saying, right, so this is what we're doing now.
And they would have committed, but I've spoken about it before.
You said this about with the Canada question and all sorts of things.
I think you're absolutely right.
It's just the 2024 MAGA administration was...
Don't be like, we're going to annex Canada and then rely on Canada for things.
What we say goes.
We are the boss of the world.
We're the hegemon of the world.
We don't need coalitions.
What we say goes.
And yet on a couple of different fronts, that hasn't worked.
It has worked on a...
I think it has worked on a number of...
This particular one, it hasn't.
The engaged few says, it might not be so ruinous for Putin as he could blame the loss on Western interference.
I hope he can do that because I think Putin is standing in the way of even worse Russian leaders.
To be honest with you, that's probably true.
I was at a meeting a while ago, speaking to a bunch of conservatives.
I was like, look, it is like Putin is not unrepresentative of Russia.
Putin is like thematically unrepresentative.
Like, at its worst.
You could have a way worse leader in Russia who understands the situation far less than what we've got.
You could have a Stalin figure, a true maniac.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Someone who's actually mental in charge.
Someone who would have used the nukes by now.
Maybe.
Like, you know, someone who wasn't capable of laying up, because Putin has spent a long time planning for this and shored up his position in the right ways and things like this.
And so the Western sanctions didn't crush Russia, didn't, in fact, hurt ourselves and things like this.
So the point being, there could definitely be a worse leader in Russia than Putin.
It's a very good question.
I don't know anything about that.
OPH UK says, American drones cost 10 million apiece.
Russian drones put together with plywood, duct tape and alcoholism.
Yeah, that's another thing, but the Americans have got a lot more money to spend than Russia.
And the American drones are probably more effective.
I imagine the Russian drones are just one-shot drones.
Whereas American drones can fire missiles and then return.
Again, as I said in the segment, there's drones and there's drones.
There's like the super high-tech sort of Reaper drones.
And then there's those little quad things chasing down an individual pickup.
Some are super high-tech and really advanced, and some aren't.
There's heavy drones.
Yeah, there's all sorts of things.
The Habsification says, you have to see Enduril.
They're an American defense company that only develop and use autonomous drone war devices.
Well, I hate the name.
Why?
Oh, that's the name of Aragorn, Thor.
Yeah, I was going to say, why do you...
Well, sure.
And it's like, drone what?
Again, to go back to that impersonal thing.
I mean, the thing is, eventually it's going to be AI-dominated drone warfare, because the nature of the war will require 24-7 administration of the drones, right?
So you're going to have just AIs commanding fleets of drones, and you'll get a report, oh, we've lost this one.
Oh, have we?
Okay, well, there we go.
We've lost this war.
The AI has told us this war is over, and therefore.
That's going to be what war is going to become.
It'll be funny, you realise you've lost the war when your drone app, there's a pop-up on your drone app saying you lost.
Notification comes through.
It's going to be like a paradox game where you're just looking and saying, oh yeah, you've lost three provinces and the enemy has gained three provinces and your war indemnity is X amount and this is just what you have to pay now, so this is being garnished from your wages.
Oh, brilliant.
Just brilliant.
Anyway, Lothar says, I wonder if Donald will consider starting a reverse Cuban missile crisis and sticking a few hundred nukes in Poland and the Baltic States.
Would Putin sit down for that or embrace escalation?
I have no idea, man.
I really don't like making predictions in such uncertain times.
And OPH UK says, the USA doesn't need coalitions, they just need the Germans and Russians not to form a coalition.
Well, the thing is, they kind of do, and that's the problem with Europe's support for Ukraine in the face of America's desire in the war.
If Zelensky had...
I just think he went about it in the wrong way.
I feel like, yeah, the US doesn't need coalitions.
Well, not in order to defend its own skies and its own coastline, but yeah, to do something by proxy in Central Europe, it does need coalitions.
Even at the height of the British Empire, we still had other foreign allies.
We still needed coalitions.
I mean, think about taking on Napoleon.
Well, just every time Britain's engaged in a major war in Europe, we had a coalition.
Yes.
I mean, was it like the eight coalitions or something fighting Napoleon?
Right, yeah.
You know, it's like literally they called them the War of the Fifth Coalition or whatever.
So it's like the idea that coalitions aren't essentially needed.
It's kind of bizarre.
Unless you want to go full crazy.
Like the US could drop paratroops or send in the entire Marine Corps or something anywhere it wanted.
Okay, it could do that.
Right?
And in that sense, it doesn't need a coalition.
Okay.
Sure, but like...
But if you don't want to do that, or you're not prepared to do that, then you need a coalition.
Right.
Let's go to the video comments.
Hey, I was just thinking about the guy who blew up that fertility clinic, and I was reminded of a time I was trying to sell one of my books to a lady at a show a couple of years ago, and I said that the main character, by the end of the story, she decides she wants to get married and have kids.
And the lady turned around and said, oh, she'll change her mind once she has kids.
And she was surrounded by her own children who were younger than ten.
That's not nice.
Jesus.
I've got a little update for Coop.
Oh yeah?
I did a fair amount of writing this weekend.
Oh, well done.
On my novel, because he always asks me.
Right, right.
He said he'll help me get published when I finish my novel.
Still a long way off letting anyone see it, but I did a fair amount of writing this weekend.
Well done.
I will get there one day.
Do at least a page a day and then you'll get there.
I know.
It's the little and often.
Yeah.
That's easier said than done.
Or you just churn out crap.
You've got to commit.
But I've tried that before, and then you look back at it, and nine-tenths of it is crap and unusable.
So is that the best way of doing it?
I'm absolutely sure that yours will come out before George R.R. Martin's does.
Let's go to the next one.
When the rocket's by your woodless gleam, Our broken brothers set us free Through the mansions of the Lord.
I don't know who that was.
It's Memorial Day in America, right?
That explains it.
Let's go to the next one.
Oh.
The funny thing about Keir Starmer's hard right turn is that no one buys it.
Yeah, no one.
Literally, it's done nothing for him in the polls.
Other than people to the left of him that are using it as ammo against him.
Yeah, exactly.
It's completely served no one.
Yeah.
So, well done.
Can you imagine the strategy meeting after those local elections?
Like, literally, the next morning or the next day.
You need to get really racist.
Yeah.
Is that going to work?
I don't know, but we've got nowhere else to go.
Someone floats it.
Should we quote Enoch Powell?
And Starmer's like, I like the cut of your jib.
We're doing it.
Oh, I've not been ratioed for the first time in three years.
This is great.
I'll keep going.
Yeah, but the thing is, everyone knows that it's BS.
Everyone knows.
So transparent.
You don't believe this, Kit.
We know you don't.
Let's go to the next one.
Nothing beats a Jetsu holiday.
And right now, you can save £50 per person.
That's £200 off for a family of four.
We've got millions of free Child's Place holidays available with 22 kilograms of baggage included.
So bad.
It's so bad.
For any foreign people watching, the audio to that is an advert that's constantly on TV, right?
Anyone in Britain would get that.
For our city of culture.
I'll just say it about Zesty King real quick.
A big fan of the show.
Shout out to Zesty King.
He sent in a bunch of material about some institutions, museums and things going super woke.
Thank you for that.
Really appreciate it.
At some point soon, I will almost certainly do a segment on that, but I appreciate the work that went into that very much.
Hopefully, Zesty King sees me say that.
Thank you very much.
Alex says, there's something baked into socialism.
He replies, Beau, socialism is the underlying ideology.
Communism, fascism, national socialism, etc.
are all manifestations of socialism.
They all resort to the same methods because they want the same thing.
They only differ in who is going to have power.
Broadly true.
Yeah, I was going to say, broadly.
Yeah.
That's true.
It's a little bit of a low resolution, but nonetheless, I fundamentally don't disagree with that.
Yeah, no, I agree.
Matthew says, are Democrats finally saying the Antifa types are not popular and are supplicating them?
Well, that's the question, isn't it?
Like, you know, who knows?
I think that they just realise the political environment has changed.
There isn't going to be a sort of permissive government or...
And so I think back in 2017, 2018, they're like, well, Trump's not going to do anything because he's at war with literally all of the institutions.
And even if he does, he'll be out in two years and he'll never be back again.
Exactly.
I wonder what the details are, the real drill down into the fine detail of what happened at Seattle, whether they were attacking police, because quite often the police...
Right.
So that's a big thing.
There's one thing letting Antifa attack a few patriots or a few Christians, but when they attack the police, And they just let it happen to them.
Yeah, yeah.
On this day in history, they decided, nah, I'm not having that.
Which is good to see.
Right.
Arizona Desert Rat says, call them what they are, Kyle.
Spoiled, entitled children.
Hygienic children, yeah.
That is true.
They are also that as well.
Korak says, the only thing in recent history that has not been called fascist is actual fascism.
It's a good point, actually.
They never actually talk about actual fascism, do they?
Is there much actual fascism?
I don't see a lot of it.
I mean, get the odd LARPA.
What was the guy where he's literally dressed in red like Satan and he's parading around like he's a theatre kid?
In front of a bunch of national socialists in America.
I can't remember the name of them.
But the left had nothing to say about them.
And he's literally yelling, yes, I'm a Nazi.
By the way, I'm a Nazi.
We've got a bunch of Nazi flags.
That's been kipped.
Yeah, it probably is.
But the point is, the left had nothing to say about that guy dressed in red like he's Satan himself.
But it's like, oh yeah, the Christians have come out and like, don't trans children.
Look at those Nazis.
Omar says, this made itself evident during the H1B saga.
The Harvard thing over Christmas, but people have really vastly overinflated the sense of the number of elite human capital.
They talk about every foreign Harvard applicant like the next Einstein, von Braun, or Stephen Hawking, but those geniuses are 0.1% of the 0.1%.
Even spread across every possible discipline, you'll never find enough in existence for a quarter of Harvard, let alone the rest of the universities.
Yeah, a lot of it is just diploma mill.
For money.
Which is precisely what our university is doing when they cram themselves full of foreign students.
Yeah, the myth that this is us taking in the best and brightest of foreign lands.
It's not true.
I mean, most of them go home anyway.
So even if it was...
you just simply get three or four times the amount of money from a foreign student and it's more or less And it is a zero-sum game.
They've got a finite number of places.
So you can only imagine their senior leadership or their bursas, whatever, are like, well, get as many foreign ones in then because it's filthy lucre for us.
Yeah, I mean, it's not even worth calculating, is it?
Well, one thing that I didn't mention when I did my actual segment was just even if, you know, like a foreign Chinese student was, you know, perfectly well behaved, just is it really in America's interest to be taking in thousands of Chinese students from, a national adversary of theirs.
You know, like, just...
Right.
Let's see what your problem is, Luca.
But yeah, no, no.
It's a great point, to be honest.
Grant says, international students at Harvard technically pay a high rate, too.
But the thing about US education is that nobody pays the sticker price.
And knowing how much a student would actually pay to go to Harvard would require navigating a labyrinth of weird rules and idiosyncrasies.
Fair enough.
That's probably why we couldn't find it.
And Lord Enquista Rex says Harvard will be brought to heel and stop allowing subversive elements to be trained within our borders.
The age of their aristocracy has come to an end.
That would be nice.
I mean, you know, the problem is what happens when Trump leaves office?
Harvard's still going to be there.
Still important subversives.
Alfred the Beta says Putin doesn't want a ceasefire.
He wants a peace deal.
Ukraine used the last ceasefire as a chance to regroup and rearm.
Biden's government bragged about it.
Putin isn't falling for it twice.
Seems to be the case, doesn't it?
You know?
You sort of can't blame him if you put yourself in his situation.
I'm not saying he's done something wrong, but at some point you're going to have to look facts in the face and say, right, so I've lost a fifth in my country and like 500,000 men and the prospects of winning.
At some point you're going to have to look these facts in the face.
I'm saying you can't blame Putin, I mean.
Oh, right.
Well, I don't blame Zelensky either, to be honest.
I can totally understand why you'd be like, no, if I'm going to be given resources to fight, I'm going to fight, right?
But the facts are the facts.
Riss says, why would Russia want to eliminate Zelensky?
They might elect a competent general rather than the actor they currently have as president.
Honestly, that's a good point.
Yeah, that's actually genuinely a fair point.
Yeah.
Russia's not like, we're not taking him out.
He's key to the victory.
Well, also, if they take out either of the two leaders, then it could potentially mean that it gives the other side that opportunity to back away because it says, well, that was his plan, that wasn't our plan.
Yeah, that's a good point.
That's a great point.
And Alan finally says, the film Carlos talking about is Screamers.
That's it.
It was a really good film.
I had the guy who played Robocop in it.
But it had a sequel to Apparently, but I never watched those.
But anyway, thank you for joining us, folks.
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