The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1369
Aired: 2026-03-06
Duration: 01:32:58


=== Red Heifer Controversy (14:12) ===

[00:00:00]  Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters number 1369.
[00:00:05]  Nice.
[00:00:06]  And it is the 6th of March 2026.
[00:00:09]  I am joined by Nick and Firas.
[00:00:12]  And today, I believe Nick is going to talk about why war is madness.
[00:00:17]  I will.
[00:00:18]  Oh, Firas is.
[00:00:20]  Sorry.
[00:00:20]  I don't know why I thought that.
[00:00:22]  You're going to be talking about why Bastani is...
[00:00:25]  Why Aaron Bastani is super-based, the last true conservative.
[00:00:28]  Yeah, this is my claim.
[00:00:30]  I'm sure that's going to be very popular with our audience.
[00:00:34]  And then I'm going to talk about how the Vikings have returned, except they've been cast by Netflix.
[00:00:40]  I'm not going to give you any more clues as to what that's about.
[00:00:44]  But I suppose we may as well begin.
[00:00:47]  Thank you.
[00:00:49]  Before I start, I want to mention to you that the Stonewall myth documentary has come out by our very own Harry Robinson, and it goes into the history of the Stonewall movement.
[00:01:03]  And it's really quite interesting, slightly depressing, slightly sad, very sad, but you should actually go ahead and watch it.
[00:01:13]  Now, I want to talk a little bit about the Middle East and the war that we find the West engaged in in the Middle East with more and more countries being drawn in.
[00:01:25]  And I want to talk about it really from the religious dimension because I feel that this isn't discussed enough, unfortunately.
[00:01:33]  And when it is, it's a bit one-sided.
[00:01:36]  We can all agree that the Muslims have a bit of an extremism problem.
[00:01:41]  Can we...
[00:01:41]  It's putting it a touch lightly.
[00:01:43]  Can we...
[00:01:44]  Can we agree on that?
[00:01:45]  Can we come with that?
[00:01:46]  Though, I could argue, you know, that old line of the problem with Islamic fundamentalism, other fundamentals of Islam.
[00:01:55]  So is it really extremism?
[00:01:56]  But I agree with the point you're trying.
[00:01:59]  100%.
[00:02:00]  And you had the former president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, saying to European foreign ministers how chaos is actually a good thing.
[00:02:10]  Because when chaos comes, you see God more clearly.
[00:02:14]  And maybe it'll bring about the Mahdi and the end days.
[00:02:18]  I always thought that God was meant to symbolize order, a divine order, not a divine chaos.
[00:02:24]  You'd think so.
[00:02:25]  That seems to be the other guy.
[00:02:27]  And incidentally, that is mainstream Shia thinking, including by people like Khamenei, for example, who just got whacked in Iran.
[00:02:35]  So Ahmadinejad was sort of riffing a little bit on his own, but we can agree that he's insane.
[00:02:41]  We can broadly agree that he's insane.
[00:02:44]  And then we can say that widely in Islam, you get statements like this one.
[00:02:51]  The end times shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews, and the Muslims shall kill them until the Jew hides behind trees and rocks.
[00:03:03]  And the tree or the rock will say, O Muslim, O slave of Allah, that is a Jew behind me, come kill him.
[00:03:10]  This was one of the except for this tree because it is a tree of the Jews.
[00:03:18]  This is the Jewish tree, okay.
[00:03:20]  Apparently, apparently.
[00:03:22]  And this is from the Hadith, the statements of Muhammad.
[00:03:26]  So it's not actually from the Quran, but it's accepted as true by pretty much all mainstream Muslims.
[00:03:32]  This was one of the favorites of Callum, the late Callum, peace be upon him.
[00:03:38]  He pointed this one out to me.
[00:03:40]  It's very interesting, isn't it?
[00:03:42]  It's written right there in the Hadiths, which are very important.
[00:03:46]  Extremely authoritative.
[00:03:47]  Like you can't go against what's in the Hadith.
[00:03:50]  If you are going to be a mainstream Muslim, you have to accept that this is part of your thinking and that this relates to the end times.
[00:04:00]  The issue is that it's not just the Muslims.
[00:04:04]  And we have to be a little bit honest about that.
[00:04:06]  And it's uncomfortable.
[00:04:09]  You have a growing movement within Judaism that is trying to build the third temple.
[00:04:16]  And that requires destroying what is called the Aqsa Mosque, allegedly on the site of the Third Temple.
[00:04:23]  This is supposed to be the third holiest place in Islam.
[00:04:27]  And it's the place that Muslims originally prayed towards.
[00:04:30]  They prayed towards Jerusalem and the temple before beginning to pray towards Mecca.
[00:04:36]  And here there's a collection of Jewish rabbis explaining that they want to rebuild the third temple.
[00:04:44]  Great thumbnail pick as well there, by the way.
[00:04:46]  Just Jesus.
[00:04:48]  I mean, I didn't choose this.
[00:04:51]  This is how it shows on YouTube.
[00:04:52]  I have nothing to do with it.
[00:04:54]  But let's listen to a couple of these guys and then maybe we can see whether or not we should be worried about this kind of extremism as well.
[00:05:03]  Mashiach is coming.
[00:05:05]  And all the Jews are about to be brought back to the land of Israel.
[00:05:10]  And the third temple is about to be rebuilt.
[00:05:14]  Many people forget this detail about October 7th.
[00:05:18]  But if you look at the name of the operation, what was it called?
[00:05:23]  Remember, Storm Al-Aqsa.
[00:05:27]  If you think about it, what did it have to do with Al-Aqsa?
[00:05:32]  It was miles away.
[00:05:34]  But herein lies the secret to what's going on and the chaos in the whole world.
[00:05:39]  The whole world knows deep down inside.
[00:05:42]  The Muslims, the Christians, the atheists, the Buddhists, you name it.
[00:05:46]  Everybody knows it.
[00:05:48]  Moshiach is coming.
[00:05:51]  What's Mashiach?
[00:05:52]  The Messiah.
[00:05:53]  Okay.
[00:05:54]  So this guy is saying that the Messiah is coming and that the war that started on 7 October is intended to pave the way for that and for the destruction of this mosque squatting on top of the alleged site of the third temple.
[00:06:10]  And you're going to get this happen.
[00:06:14]  Just for the idiots here on this topic, which is me, what's the Al-Aqsa point that he's making there?
[00:06:19]  So basically, like I said, on the site of the Temple Mount, there's a mosque and it's called Al-Aqsa.
[00:06:26]  And Hamas named their 7 October operation the flood of Al-Aqsa, not the storm, which because they cast it as a defense of the Muslim holy sites.
[00:06:39]  Because over the last few years, the Jews have been going into the site of the Third Temple more and more often and praying there.
[00:06:50]  And Muslims find that insanely offensive.
[00:06:53]  How dare the Jews pray at the site of the Third Temple?
[00:06:57]  So there is this extremism here.
[00:07:00]  Now, there are other views.
[00:07:01]  This rabbi explains that the Messiah cannot come through war.
[00:07:08]  And so I just wanted to point that out: that it's not everybody who believes that it has to be through war.
[00:07:14]  And this gentleman makes that point clear: that it's not going to come through bloodshed, it's not going to come through war.
[00:07:20]  But then you have the Rebbe of Chabad.
[00:07:24]  Chabad Libovich are a Jewish supremacist sect within Judaism.
[00:07:30]  They believe that other people don't have equal souls to the Jews and that they only have animal souls and only Jews have truly elevated souls.
[00:07:41]  Again, this is not all Jews believing that.
[00:07:44]  I learned that from the Epstein emails.
[00:07:46]  Yes.
[00:07:48]  So it kind of matters because Chabad was asking Epstein for money, by the way, just as a bit of a side note.
[00:07:57]  But this man is incredibly important.
[00:08:00]  He is the most influential Jewish leader in the 20th century on the religious front, not on the political front.
[00:08:09]  And he is saying here something that I think we should listen to.
[00:08:13]  It's in Yiddish, but you can see the translation.
[00:08:17]  If the temple was not rebuilt in your lifetime, it's as if it was destroyed in your lifetime.
[00:08:33]  Emphasizing the duty of Jews to rebuild the temple by removing Al-Aqsa Mosque.
[00:08:41]  But wasn't it destroyed in the time of the Romans?
[00:08:43]  Wasn't it Trajan?
[00:08:45]  Was destroyed in the time of the Romans, and mainstream Christian theology is that Jesus Christ is the temple and he is the living temple and there is no need for a new temple.
[00:08:56]  But, as we will see in a moment, that is not a point of universal agreement among Christians.
[00:09:25]  And this man is used to be incredibly influential.
[00:09:32]  There are videos of him meeting with bankers and with business leaders and with all kinds of others.
[00:09:38]  And his word was massively respected.
[00:09:41]  I think his birthday was made the National Education Day in the United States or something like that.
[00:09:48]  And he received the Presidential Medal of Honor posthumously.
[00:09:53]  So he's a genuinely important person.
[00:09:56]  That's an interesting thing to happen where he's saying that the person awarding him the Presidential Medal, presumably the President of the United States at the time, would not have an actual human soul.
[00:10:08]  They would have an animal soul, and yet they're awarding him a medal.
[00:10:13]  Okay.
[00:10:14]  Interesting.
[00:10:15]  You have to make do with what you can.
[00:10:17]  And here's another person in Israel explaining that the third temple is going to be built and that this is absolutely necessary.
[00:10:26]  And another person, also a rabbi, debating whether or not the Levites, or who are whose last name is Cohen, essentially, are going to go back to being, Cohen means priest, are going to go back to being priests when the temple comes, when the temple is rebuilt.
[00:10:45]  So this is an animating principle for a lot of Jews, but there is debate on how it is going to happen.
[00:10:52]  And for some, the war is an opportunity for that to happen.
[00:10:57]  And we should know this, because just as we need to know about Sunni radicalism and act accordingly, we should know about this kind of radicalism, given its ability to aggravate some Muslims, say from Indonesia all the way to Morocco, which is definitely going to affect Europe.
[00:11:19]  Just in that spirit of understanding what is going on, this should be understood.
[00:11:26]  And then you see people preparing the red heifer.
[00:11:29]  Now, to rebuild the third temple, according to some Jews, including this gentleman, a red heifer, a perfect red heifer without a blemish, must be slaughtered and then burnt.
[00:11:43]  And then the ashes would be used to consecrate the vessels that will be used in the service in the temple.
[00:11:50]  And this is seen as a required preliminary step.
[00:11:54]  So you have to conduct animal sacrifice of a red cow that can't have any spots on it.
[00:12:01]  Yes.
[00:12:01]  And apparently they are being bred in Texas and a bunch of them were moved to Israel.
[00:12:06]  And then they finally did.
[00:12:10]  And then last night, Byron Stinson posted a video.
[00:12:13]  This was the first red heifer sacrifice in over 2,000 years.
[00:12:17]  Done with a perfect priest.
[00:12:19]  Which will was completed outside of the camp, aligning with Numbers 19.
[00:12:23]  It was the perfect one.
[00:12:25]  It was a ceremony.
[00:12:27]  They did sacrifice a red heifer, and they do have the ashes for the purification ceremony.
[00:12:33]  It was a legitimate ceremony that was done with a Kohim, a priest, that was done with a very qualified red heifer.
[00:12:44]  What if I told you that?
[00:12:47]  So, if you're about to sing about the red heifer, the mental.
[00:12:53]  I don't even want to know where this would have gone.
[00:12:56]  But in the same way that we need to understand the sources of Islamic radicalism, which are the Quran and the Sunnah, the sayings of Muhammad, we need to understand what's going on here, because some people believe that this pathway is going to lead to the rebuilding of the temple.
[00:13:15]  And that includes the current American Secretary of War.
[00:13:21]  And let's listen to him for a moment.
[00:13:24]  And today, Jennifer and I and others had a chance to go see the western wall of the Temple Mount, the Western Wall tunnels, so much of the old city.
[00:13:34]  And as you stand there, you can't help but behold the miracle before you.
[00:13:38]  And it got me thinking about another miracle that I hope all of you don't see too far away.
[00:13:44]  Because 1917 was a miracle.
[00:13:47]  1948 was a miracle.
[00:13:49]  War of independence.
[00:13:50]  1967 was a miracle.
[00:13:52]  Six-day war.
[00:13:53]  2017, the declaration of Jerusalem as the capital was a miracle.
[00:13:57]  And there's no reason why the miracle of the re-establishment of the temple on the Temple Mount is not possible.
[00:14:06]  A load of rubbish.
[00:14:08]  No, these were things done by people.
[00:14:11]  They're not miracles.

=== Miracle Of The Temple (11:22) ===

[00:14:13]  Much of it was drawing up legislation.
[00:14:15]  I personally do believe in the miraculous.
[00:14:17]  That's a different conversation.
[00:14:19]  But so does he.
[00:14:22]  And as a Christian, you're supposed to believe that Jesus Christ is the temple and that there is no need for another temple.
[00:14:28]  And indeed, the physical destruction of the second temple was precisely because it has been replaced by Jesus Christ.
[00:14:36]  If you're a Christian, you believe that this is part of God's divine plan.
[00:14:40]  Pete Hegseth disagrees, and it really matters.
[00:14:44]  Because right now, he's engaged in a war against Iran, which is going to encourage certain elements of Israeli society.
[00:14:54]  And I'm not saying all, and I'm not saying all Jews, but I am saying that this is real, because we've just seen it on video.
[00:15:02]  It is going to encourage them to attempt to build the third temple, and this is going to have at least some consequences.
[00:15:10]  It's surprisingly prevalent, this Christian Zionism amongst the American administration.
[00:15:14]  Obviously, Ted Cruz with his famous interview with Tucker Carlson.
[00:15:18]  Huckabee, I know you've got coming up.
[00:15:20]  Hegseth, it's quite strange how, because we don't really necessarily understand that in Britain, how widespread that is.
[00:15:25]  It is very widespread, and it is seen as part of a divine plan.
[00:15:29]  And there is some disagreement as to who wins out in this.
[00:15:33]  Because if you're Protestant, you might believe that the Jews would be condemned.
[00:15:38]  You might not believe that.
[00:15:41]  That is a point of debate within American Protestantism.
[00:15:47]  And if you are Jewish, you believe that the righteous among the nations, which would include people, in their view, like Hegseth and Huckabee, would have a portion in the world to come.
[00:16:01]  However, that is defined.
[00:16:03]  So there are these theological issues that are animating people.
[00:16:08]  And it's one thing for this to be some random guy in Israel saying, I'm going to burn a cow and it's going to bring about the temple.
[00:16:17]  It's a fundamentally different issue when it's the Secretary of War and the Ambassador to Israel and the, I think Ted Cruz is the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Senate and others of that caliber who have that role in informing foreign policy.
[00:16:38]  You see, my intuition, my thinking would be that surely Christians should be against ritualistic animal sacrifice.
[00:16:48]  I know I am, and so...
[00:16:51]  that's kind of my view as well it seems especially since it's settled in the new testament that it is not what goes into a man that purifies him or soils him It is what comes out of him.
[00:17:08]  As in what he says and how he behaves in the world, that is what makes you dirty, not what meal you had for breakfast.
[00:17:15]  If you had bacon for breakfast, you can still be clean.
[00:17:18]  It's fine.
[00:17:19]  Makes intuitive sense, yes.
[00:17:21]  You'd think so.
[00:17:22]  You'd think so.
[00:17:22]  And this is the mainstream Christian position.
[00:17:25]  So these guys are engaged in a word that I love to use, which is heresy.
[00:17:31]  And it really matters when the ambassador to Israel, the American ambassador to Israel, says things like that.
[00:17:37]  I'm trying to understand the implications of your theology for geopolitics because you're saying that the present government of Israel has a moral right to take over what are now other people's countries.
[00:17:49]  No, I didn't say that.
[00:17:50]  Then what are you saying?
[00:17:51]  I saw this recently in an extremely telling exchange between the lieutenant governor of Texas, who I know and I've always liked.
[00:17:58]  Carrie, excuse me, I'm going to interrupt the discussion.
[00:18:02]  This is not a commission on defining religions or calling out any theology, or this is not the commission for that.
[00:18:11]  And a woman I don't know, never met, who's on the Religious Liberty Commission or something.
[00:18:16]  And she said, I'm a Catholic, and Catholics do not embrace Zionism, just so you know.
[00:18:21]  So is all Catholics anti-Semites, according to you?
[00:18:24]  He kept saying, and everyone on the panel seemed to keep saying, you have to believe in Israel's right to exist.
[00:18:30]  But it did raise two questions I think are really important.
[00:18:33]  And I hope you'll answer them.
[00:18:35]  One is, where does that right come from?
[00:18:37]  You could say it comes from the Bible.
[00:18:39]  I would say that it does.
[00:18:40]  They have a biblical right.
[00:18:41]  I just read Genesis 15, as I have many times.
[00:18:44]  And that land, I think it says from the Nile to the Euphrates, which is, once again, basically the entire Middle East.
[00:18:52]  So God gave that land to his people, the Jews, or he didn't.
[00:18:56]  You're saying he did.
[00:18:58]  What does that mean?
[00:18:59]  Does Israel have the right to that land?
[00:19:03]  Because you're appealing to Genesis.
[00:19:05]  You're saying that's the original deed.
[00:19:09]  It would be fine if they took it all.
[00:19:11]  It would be fine if they took it all.
[00:19:16]  I understand if you feel that way and you say it in church, religious liberty and all of that.
[00:19:22]  If you are an ambassador to a foreign country, it's different.
[00:19:29]  Yeah, I thought I was bonkers.
[00:19:30]  There was even that rumor that that delayed the U.S. military action in Iran because it was so mental.
[00:19:35]  The entire Middle East went crazy over this.
[00:19:39]  They all went crazy over this because essentially a key part of the American administration said to all of their allies, we're going to let the Israelis take over.
[00:19:50]  It's fine.
[00:19:51]  It's fine if they take it all.
[00:19:53]  His words.
[00:19:55]  So it really matters.
[00:19:56]  And the connections around this kind of stuff are kind of important because Netanyahu and Jared Kushner, the current American envoy to negotiate with Iran, are very old friends.
[00:20:12]  And apparently, Netanyahu used to sleep in Jared Kushner's bed when he visited New York.
[00:20:21]  Do we know if Kushner was in it?
[00:20:23]  No, no, there's nothing inappropriate going on.
[00:20:25]  There's nothing inappropriate going on.
[00:20:27]  He was a very close family friend, and we have a clip of Netanyahu confirming it, but you can see it in the comments.
[00:20:35]  It's quite well known, isn't it, really?
[00:20:36]  It's quite well known that they're very old friends.
[00:20:39]  And you have here Kushner visiting the Wailing Wall with Ivanka and Steve Witkoff, the other envoy negotiating with Iran.
[00:20:54]  But Kushner is also a big supporter of Chabad, the people who want to destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque and build the third temple, whose Rebbe is on record saying that this is kind of important and the temple has to be rebuilt.
[00:21:10]  And that is the, according to him, the accepted site of the temple.
[00:21:16]  So I'm not going into a sort of history of archaeology here.
[00:21:21]  Are they right or are they wrong?
[00:21:22]  Completely separate from that.
[00:21:23]  Completely separate from that.
[00:21:25]  It's actually something that I don't know enough about to say.
[00:21:29]  But he gave them, his family gave them $3,500,000, $100,000 almost.
[00:21:37]  And then Jared Kushner himself gave Chabad a million dollars for their center in the United Arab Emirates.
[00:21:47]  And he did that actually quite recently in 2024, right after Trump won the elections.
[00:21:54]  So you can kind of see that this ideology is held by people in power.
[00:22:00]  Some of them are discreet about what they say, like Jared Kushner, although their donations make their beliefs more evident.
[00:22:07]  And some of them are stupidly indiscreet, like Mike Hakabi, who as a diplomat should slightly know better.
[00:22:14]  But this isn't the end of the extremism here.
[00:22:16]  This isn't really the end of it.
[00:22:20]  You have Ben Gvir, the security minister in Israel, who leads a party called Jewish Power.
[00:22:29]  And he accepted in 2020 that he needs to take down the photograph of a mass murderer who shot 29 people while they were praying, 29 Muslims while they were praying, in Hebron, a city that is believed to hold the grave of Abraham.
[00:22:47]  So that is quite substantial.
[00:22:49]  And that's exactly where he shot them.
[00:22:52]  And he had a photograph of this guy up on his wall and took it down in 2020 so that he could be part of the next cabinet.
[00:23:00]  He's a supporter of Meir Kahane.
[00:23:05]  He says that he doesn't want to expel all the Arabs, but when he said that he doesn't want to expel all the Arabs, he was roundly booed by the audience, according to the Times of Israel.
[00:23:18]  So we're not cherry-picking sources or choosing sources that would be unacceptable or anything like that.
[00:23:24]  And Meyid Kahane, the guy that he admires, actually started a terrorist group and was convicted for it.
[00:23:35]  And one of his fans is now sitting in the Israeli cabinet.
[00:23:39]  And he tried to pass a law saying that non-Jews in Israel will be obliged to assume duties, taxes, and slavery.
[00:23:47]  If he does not agree to slavery and taxes, he will be forcibly deported.
[00:23:52]  Now, I'm not sure if slavery is an accurate translation because it could mean indentured servitude.
[00:23:58]  It could mean a bunch of different things.
[00:24:00]  So I just want to highlight that.
[00:24:03]  He says that a non-Jew will not live within the jurisdiction of the city of Jerusalem, which is kind of how the Muslims don't allow anybody who isn't Muslim from entering into Mecca and Medina.
[00:24:15]  And any non-Jew who has a relationship with a marital relationship with a Jew is liable to 50 years in prison.
[00:24:24]  These were part of the legislations that he supported.
[00:24:28]  And one of his acolytes is now Minister of Security in Israel.
[00:24:34]  And the Minister of Finance is somebody who kind of shares the same views.
[00:24:40]  So to object to Ariel Sharon's plan to withdraw from Gaza, and this is according to a former deputy head of the Shinbet, the Israeli Internal Security Service, this guy, the finance minister, is described as a Jewish terrorist who planned to blow up cars on a major highway during the 2005 Gaza disengagement.
[00:25:04]  He is a terrorist.
[00:25:05]  He's Jewish, but he's a terrorist, Ilan reportedly said.
[00:25:09]  At the time of the disengagement, he wanted to blow up cars on the Ayalon highway at rush hour with gasoline.
[00:25:17]  We caught him with 700 liters of the stuff.
[00:25:21]  Now, Smotrich denied that this ever happened, but a former deputy head of the Shinbet versus a politician, I'll choose the security guy.
[00:25:31]  They tend to be a little more honest, but I don't know for certain.

=== Rubio's Concerns About US Policy (06:22) ===

[00:25:35]  And then you have Rubio saying that the Israelis kind of forced America's hand into this war.
[00:25:42]  I found that very interesting that it seems like the United States, despite all of their martial power, are following in the footsteps of Israel and being led by them, basically.
[00:25:53]  When they're the ones funding it and arming it, and presumably they'd be able to say no.
[00:25:58]  Well, yeah, it's sort of a fundamental problem whereby you're a significantly more powerful nation being led around by the no's, by a weaker nation, who actually, their existence relies on the United States.
[00:26:11]  If the United States didn't defend them, the nation of Israel probably would no longer exist.
[00:26:16]  Exactly.
[00:26:17]  Exactly.
[00:26:18]  So there is this reality here that, and Rubio is a very hardcore Israel supporter, full-on, like Hexett, like obviously Jared Kushner, like Witkoff, the other guy negotiating with the Iranians.
[00:26:34]  And so the picture that you end up getting is somewhat problematic, really.
[00:26:42]  And what you're getting is that Netanyahu is fulfilling his dreams, that he's longed for 40 years for a strike on Iran, and now the Americans are delivering it.
[00:26:53]  They are delivering it because a bunch of insane extremists are running the Trump policy team when it comes to Israel and the Middle East.
[00:27:04]  And they are associated with people who want to rebuild the third temple, triggering a bit of a problem with the Muslim world.
[00:27:12]  All of Europe would feel the repercussions of that problem, but that is how policy is being made.
[00:27:18]  Because it's not clear that there is a plan for what to do about Iran.
[00:27:22]  It's not clear that Iran can be, you know, defeated in the conventional sense because you will get Hashashin in the mountains with drones, lobbying drones and missiles at everything that passes through the Persian Gulf.
[00:27:38]  That's completely discounted from the planning.
[00:27:42]  And that's how the policy is being decided for the benefit of people who believe things that I would argue are a bit extreme.
[00:27:50]  I would say so.
[00:27:51]  Do you argue that they're a bit extreme?
[00:27:53]  I think that's putting it lightly.
[00:27:56]  So it seems that the West is strapped between two kinds of fanaticism.
[00:28:00]  Both of them are quite destructive.
[00:28:03]  Both of them don't particularly like mainstream Christianity, as far as I can tell.
[00:28:10]  And that's a bit of a bad situation to be in.
[00:28:15]  What do you think?
[00:28:16]  It's quite weird to think about.
[00:28:17]  I was just thinking it's weird to think about what would have happened if the Democrats had got in.
[00:28:20]  Because as you say, it's something quite unique to this Trump administration, it seems to me.
[00:28:26]  Not really.
[00:28:26]  You don't think so.
[00:28:27]  You think it's the deep state, the permanent state.
[00:28:30]  Republicans have always been very pro- Oh, yeah, not just the Trump administration, but would the Democrats have done this?
[00:28:35]  That's what I'm interested in.
[00:28:36]  I don't think they would have done this in quite the same way.
[00:28:39]  And in fact, the likes of Heg Seth and Cruz wouldn't be around.
[00:28:43]  No, I don't think they have the same religious claim, wouldn't have the ear of the president if a Democrat had won.
[00:28:52]  But perfect timing for Netanyahu to say that this is what I will long for for 40 years, this is the moment.
[00:28:58]  Pretty much.
[00:28:58]  Pretty much.
[00:28:59]  And you know how much money the Edelsons paid, and the Edelsons are fully on board with this belief system.
[00:29:08]  And you know that Ellison has funded Rubio.
[00:29:11]  And you kind of ask yourself, well, is this really how foreign policy should be done on behalf of donors associated with religious fanatics?
[00:29:21]  And I don't think that's a very good idea.
[00:29:24]  You get in trouble, don't you, for saying it?
[00:29:25]  I mean, because people say, why, as Josh has said, why does Israel lead America?
[00:29:30]  But it's really not, as we're pointing out here, it's not really Israel.
[00:29:32]  It's people within the institution, within the administration in America, who happen to have these views.
[00:29:37]  Yes.
[00:29:37]  Slightly different.
[00:29:38]  They've also been selected for by financing, haven't they?
[00:29:42]  Yes.
[00:29:42]  In that they've got to their positions because they've been propped up by wealthy benefactors.
[00:29:48]  Exactly.
[00:29:48]  Exactly.
[00:29:50]  So, yeah, it seems to me that they're both a bit fanatical.
[00:29:53]  That's what I'd say.
[00:29:55]  Troubling times.
[00:29:56]  Very, very.
[00:29:58]  And sorry, I went a little bit over time, but it's all very interesting.
[00:30:01]  Oh, thank you.
[00:30:03]  It's difficult to make heads or tails of some of this stuff, you know, from the comfort of the British Isles.
[00:30:08]  I've never been to the Middle East, let alone understand the theological difference.
[00:30:13]  I've seen those pictures of you kissing the wall, Josh.
[00:30:15]  So don't worry about it.
[00:30:15]  How dare you!
[00:30:17]  You got your money.
[00:30:19]  I've never been outside of Europe and North America.
[00:30:21]  Thank you very much.
[00:30:22]  I never leave now, I only visit civilized countries.
[00:30:26]  Okay, so did we read the comments?
[00:30:28]  I don't know.
[00:30:29]  I couldn't.
[00:30:30]  There's one that's annoying about me.
[00:30:31]  They said I was touching my phone.
[00:30:32]  All I was doing was I was checking the shot that I wasn't too out of the shot, and then I was looking up something about Ted Cruz.
[00:30:39]  Right.
[00:30:39]  People notice everything, you're not allowed to just own your own body when you're on the internet.
[00:30:43]  It's like, stop moving it.
[00:30:45]  You know what I mean?
[00:30:46]  People think you're being rude, but actually you're being excessively polite and accommodating.
[00:30:49]  Extremely conscientious, yeah.
[00:30:51]  And I'm timing things on my phone to this level of conscientious they can't understand.
[00:30:54]  They think it's the opposite.
[00:30:57]  The position of Chabad and indeed most Orthodox sects, including my own sect, is that the third temple will not be built by humans, but that it will descend from heaven.
[00:31:08]  That's interesting.
[00:31:10]  Tell me more about that on X.
[00:31:12]  I really want to understand this.
[00:31:14]  But the sort of statements from others might suggest something slightly different.
[00:31:20]  Sigilstone says, if they're rebuilding the temple, then I. Spicy.
[00:31:27]  Och Shador says, if I remember correctly, the main reason Jesus was not accepted was because he was not a warrior to lead them through the conquest.
[00:31:38]  I mean, there's a lot of obviously when Christ says that his kingdom is not of this world and the sons of Zebedee are sort of expecting him to have a more conventional kingship, you sort of see that there is that element there.
[00:31:53]  But I don't think that is the main reason why he was an exile.

=== Millions Matter: Gas Prices & Geopolitics (15:26) ===

[00:31:57]  I don't know enough to say, actually.
[00:32:00]  My understanding of the biblical stories is that they condemned him to death for heresy.
[00:32:06]  Yes, exactly.
[00:32:07]  For saying that he was the son of God.
[00:32:09]  Yeah.
[00:32:10]  Yep.
[00:32:12]  Is that meaning I've just started it?
[00:32:17]  From one heresy to another.
[00:32:18]  All right.
[00:32:19]  Well, I'll get on to my, but first we've got to plug the Stonewall myth, which is an exciting documentary at lotuseaters.com.
[00:32:26]  Many years in the making from Harry.
[00:32:27]  He's been out in the field doing lots of research.
[00:32:30]  He's been hiding in the bushes.
[00:32:33]  He's lost a lot of dignity since.
[00:32:34]  No.
[00:32:35]  It's Harry looking at the myths around Stonewall.
[00:32:39]  And he's put a lot of work and research into it.
[00:32:41]  And it's a very well-edited thing.
[00:32:43]  So please check it out.
[00:32:44]  Check it out.
[00:32:45]  All right.
[00:32:46]  So my segment is called Aaron Bastani, The Last True Conservative.
[00:32:52]  And in case you're watching, Aaron, I'm a tremendous fan.
[00:32:56]  But someone will always pop up and say, well, you know, he's only doing all this just to subvert it later.
[00:33:00]  So there is that argument as well.
[00:33:01]  I'm well aware of that argument.
[00:33:03]  But he does do some based tweets.
[00:33:05]  And so we're going to look at that.
[00:33:07]  But it's also got a serious point, which is why is Bastani sounding more conservative than reform and the Tories?
[00:33:14]  But also the new realignment where reform seems like it's in the neoliberal centre.
[00:33:18]  We've got the Greens on the far left and we've got Restore.
[00:33:22]  Can they be a kind of nationalist alternative to the neocon centre-right?
[00:33:27]  And that's kind of the possible new realignment.
[00:33:30]  Yeah, the dynamic is really restore are like the right-wing equivalent to the greens in that they are genuinely a different paradigm to the neoliberal centre of Labour, Lib Dems, reform the Tories.
[00:33:42]  Yeah.
[00:33:43]  Which you have the Greens restore and the blob.
[00:33:47]  You do, yes.
[00:33:49]  And Bastani, of course, is a fan of the Greens.
[00:33:51]  Of course he is, yes.
[00:33:52]  But it's, and we'll see as well how the Greens, you know, it's an open goal for the Greens, all this neoconism from the centre, but it's potentially an opportunity for restore is my point.
[00:34:02]  But it is a danger that the Greens will take that space, as we saw in Gorton and Denton.
[00:34:05]  So, although obviously Restore didn't stand, but let's start.
[00:34:09]  So here's Bastani on his Groyper arc.
[00:34:12]  So this is too extreme for me.
[00:34:14]  Obviously, you know, Aaron's gone far too far right for me here.
[00:34:17]  But basically, we won't play it, but basically Fuentes was making a point about we all need to get together to be against the sort of Israel war project that you've just discussed.
[00:34:27]  So Aaron says sharing this because particularly among older political folks, I think there's a failure to understand how widespread this view is.
[00:34:33]  I'd say it's a majority view among politicized people in Britain under 40 that Israel directs US foreign policy.
[00:34:39]  And Aaron's like, I'm just saying it.
[00:34:40]  And everyone's like, why are you sharing Fuentes?
[00:34:42]  He's like, because he thinks he's right on this occasion.
[00:34:46]  He's not wrong.
[00:34:47]  Well, there you go.
[00:34:47]  And he justifies it here.
[00:34:49]  Really can't overstate how rapidly the consensus on foreign policy will capsize in the US and UK over the next 10 to 15 years.
[00:34:55]  Perfectly happy to be called all sorts of names for making that observation.
[00:34:58]  It's happening.
[00:34:59]  Ace seems fair.
[00:35:00]  Ace Bastani, I'm telling you.
[00:35:03]  And he makes the case against the war here because Linnahan, they're arguing about when was the last time someone had won by bombing.
[00:35:10]  Uh, I thought I could click that, but I can't because I'm incompetent.
[00:35:13]  Um, boomer, doesn't really matter.
[00:35:15]  The point is, they were.
[00:35:17]  Um, oh, I was gonna look at the original, but it doesn't really matter because it's not a very oh, there we go.
[00:35:21]  I can't think of an instance when bombing a country ended up resulting in a better situation.
[00:35:25]  Linerhan says, Well, just off the top of my head, World War II.
[00:35:28]  But Bastani says, Correct, but nothing then since then, 80 years.
[00:35:31]  I also don't want tens of millions to die and for nukes to be used and dozens of cities to be reduced to rubble like Dresden and Coventry for Israel.
[00:35:38]  So that's his case.
[00:35:39]  Um, I just want to point something out.
[00:35:42]  Uh, there hasn't been any victory just through aerial bombardment.
[00:35:47]  So, if you want to use World War II as an example, it did involve landing massive armies on the European continent and soldiers dying by their millions as they slogged through all of Europe in order to achieve that victory.
[00:36:02]  So, the original point that it doesn't work just by aerial bombardment is a well-established military fact.
[00:36:10]  You have to go on the ground if you're going to win.
[00:36:13]  And even Starma said the other day, I don't believe in regime change from the sky.
[00:36:17]  Exactly.
[00:36:17]  Fair point, Starma.
[00:36:18]  Yeah.
[00:36:19]  Broken clocks.
[00:36:21]  So, and he also goes on to point out that, of course, this will displace people, which can't be good for us.
[00:36:26]  Looney Toons MAGA people are egging on Infinity War in West Asia.
[00:36:30]  Reform and the Tories, who go on about reducing refugees, are on the same side.
[00:36:34]  Hundreds of millions of displaced people.
[00:36:36]  They don't know what they're doing, as an Orange friend of Epstein once said.
[00:36:41]  So, yeah.
[00:36:42]  Framed in a very lefty way.
[00:36:44]  Framed in a very lefty way, but he's the point is fair.
[00:36:46]  I made the point the other day.
[00:36:47]  Tys was saying, you know, we're going to go in, and even Lewis Goodall said to him, Well, won't you then not end up with loads of migrants from Iran?
[00:36:54]  And he's like, Well, you know, we'll try to not let that happen.
[00:36:56]  It's like, but it totally happens.
[00:36:58]  It already is happening.
[00:36:59]  Like, how retarded do you have to be to say that?
[00:37:01]  Iranians.
[00:37:03]  What does that even mean?
[00:37:04]  Iranians are already in the top five groups coming here already, let alone without a massive war and a bombing campaign.
[00:37:11]  So, I don't think it's going to change.
[00:37:13]  It's not going to get better the more you bomb them, is it?
[00:37:15]  No.
[00:37:16]  And Aaron here agrees with Tucker on the second order effects.
[00:37:19]  Maybe the biggest loser of all right now is Western Europe.
[00:37:22]  This couldn't be more correct.
[00:37:23]  Reform and Tories are cheering it all on.
[00:37:25]  Yes, we can have a quick look because it's the migrants, but it's also the LNG that the liquefied gas exports.
[00:37:30]  There's another big loser in this war, in Israel's war.
[00:37:35]  And this was obvious years ago.
[00:37:38]  And that's Europe.
[00:37:39]  Europe?
[00:37:40]  Who cares about Europe?
[00:37:41]  Well, the neocons care about Europe for reasons that are entirely clear.
[00:37:46]  But you often hear the neocons, the Warhawks, Chills for Israel, whatever you call them, but people who supported what we're seeing now.
[00:37:53]  And they're mad at the Shiites and the Aitolla and the Arabs.
[00:37:56]  And, you know, of course, got it.
[00:37:57]  But if you listen carefully, there is a deep hostility, hatred, in fact, toward Western Europe.
[00:38:02]  Now, where does that come from?
[00:38:03]  Someone should think deeply about this because it's had a big effect over the past 80 years.
[00:38:08]  It doesn't even matter where it comes from.
[00:38:10]  They hate Western Europe.
[00:38:12]  And maybe the biggest loser of all right now is Western Europe.
[00:38:15]  So last night, Qatar shut down its LNG exports.
[00:38:20]  LNG is liquefied natural gas without getting boring about it.
[00:38:23]  LNG is essential to the global economy.
[00:38:25]  It's essential to Asia.
[00:38:26]  South Korea subsists on Qatari LNG exports.
[00:38:30]  China is a huge consumer of them.
[00:38:32]  And Western Europe, Britain, 40% of homes in Britain are powered by Qatari LNG.
[00:38:38]  Lots of reasons for this.
[00:38:38]  We blow up the North Stream Pipeline is one of them, but it doesn't matter.
[00:38:41]  That's the truth.
[00:38:42]  So when you shut off natural gas from Qatar, and it's now shut down, it's 20% of the world's total supply is shut down.
[00:38:49]  Well, all kinds of effects on that.
[00:38:51]  It crushes markets, it hikes inflation, it can wreak havoc on the global economy.
[00:38:55]  Say a prayer that it doesn't, but it could.
[00:38:57]  But the first thing that it does is totally shafts Europe.
[00:39:00]  All right.
[00:39:00]  So, quite interesting.
[00:39:01]  You know, people might not have thought about that.
[00:39:03]  I suppose it won't help his reputation as Tucker Kurt Hulson, but to say that you're going to lose your LNG is quite important.
[00:39:10]  It really matters way beyond ad hominem attacks.
[00:39:15]  Higher gas prices means that industries collapse.
[00:39:19]  And it's not just the issue, it isn't just the gas, it's all of the other chemicals that also go into fertilizer.
[00:39:27]  And guess what?
[00:39:28]  It's spring.
[00:39:29]  Everybody's going to be planting now.
[00:39:31]  If fertilizer prices go up, food prices go up next.
[00:39:35]  And even if this war ends tomorrow, because of the shutdown of the exports that has affected fertilizer prices, that hike is going to be carried over into harvest season next year.
[00:39:47]  And the way that traders operate means that they're going to raise the prices now because they're expecting to make less money next year.
[00:39:57]  Very interesting.
[00:39:57]  So the food inflation angle affects Europe, of course.
[00:40:01]  We all eat food.
[00:40:02]  It also affects Africa a lot.
[00:40:04]  And if you don't want a lot of immigration, you don't want instability in Africa.
[00:40:09]  Interesting.
[00:40:10]  There you go.
[00:40:10]  So obviously, not everyone likes Tucker.
[00:40:12]  I mean, Sterlios isn't here, but other opinions are available.
[00:40:15]  But I think it's a good point about supporting the war and the second order effects.
[00:40:19]  I don't think there's anything wrong here, to be honest.
[00:40:22]  And in fact, every geopolitical action of the neocons in the Trump administration and Israel has been detrimental to that.
[00:40:32]  Intentionally.
[00:40:33]  Yeah, it has.
[00:40:34]  Either intentionally or not, it's been detrimental to Europe.
[00:40:37]  Since George W. Bush's days.
[00:40:39]  Yep.
[00:40:40]  And I can't help considering the consistency that it is a deliberate strategy.
[00:40:44]  And all it's going to do is push Europe away from the United States, which is already happening.
[00:40:50]  Which is interesting because I've got some stuff on that.
[00:40:53]  So here, Bastani, based Bastani, makes the point that actually, why is the right not taking this approach?
[00:41:00]  And only Rupert Lowe is.
[00:41:01]  So, Rupert Lowe replies to Farage.
[00:41:02]  Farage says the Prime Minister needs to change his mind on the use of our military bases and back the Americans in this vital fight against Iran.
[00:41:09]  He did eventually start a change slightly on that.
[00:41:11]  But Lowe says, before we start bombing yet more countries, I suggest you go to Clacton and look around.
[00:41:15]  The money is needed here in Britain spent on British people.
[00:41:18]  That's what Restore Britain is all about: British interests first every time.
[00:41:21]  And Bastani says, In my limited experience, this is the default among those who don't vote, which is millions upon millions of people who reform needs for a majority.
[00:41:28]  It's extraordinary it's taken this long for a British right-wing politician to say this so clearly.
[00:41:33]  And that is a constituency, if you like, that Restore is looking at the non-voter who says, Why are we in all these foreign wars?
[00:41:41]  Yeah, it's not a bad angle for Restore to take, but reform very much backing, as we've said, the neocon center relationship.
[00:41:47]  There's plenty of voters as well that are pretty sympathetic to not starting wars.
[00:41:51]  Yeah, it's I could say it's a popular position, even.
[00:41:54]  Not just that.
[00:41:56]  If you are genuinely conservative, you understand that the systems of other countries are manifestations of the nature of these countries.
[00:42:05]  Iran will always have a very tough secret police and it will always have a religious dimension.
[00:42:11]  Even the Shah couldn't cross the clerical establishment too much and needed their approval.
[00:42:16]  And this has always been true in Iran.
[00:42:18]  And because it's an ethnically diverse country, it has to be repressive, just like Russia.
[00:42:24]  This is what geopolitics means: understanding the geography and the culture that affect the politics.
[00:42:30]  That's where the term comes from.
[00:42:32]  And so they don't get that these countries are the way they are for a reason that is intrinsic to them.
[00:42:41]  And that you can't simply show up and download a piece of political system as though it was software, because actually it's operating on different hardware that comes from the geography and that comes from the culture.
[00:42:59]  It's blank slate French liberalism is the core of it, isn't it?
[00:43:03]  It's black status and foreign policy.
[00:43:05]  Exactly.
[00:43:06]  Which is stupid.
[00:43:07]  Inherently stupid.
[00:43:08]  It's a good point as well about the millions of people because I was at the anti-Iraq war march.
[00:43:13]  Someone the other day thought I must have been a baby, which I guess was flattering about my age.
[00:43:17]  I was not a baby.
[00:43:18]  I was there, and of course, yeah, most people instinctively don't want to get into these wars.
[00:43:23]  A million people marching in London, completely ignored by Blair.
[00:43:26]  One of the largest marches and protests in British political history, even to this day.
[00:43:32]  And if you count all of the marches that happened consecutively worldwide, it is the largest protest movement ever seen on planet Earth.
[00:43:38]  And it didn't stop the war.
[00:43:40]  And the might class pretty much ignored everybody and then destroyed Iraq, gave the West endless refugee flows, bailed themselves out in the financial crisis, handed money over to themselves in COVID, and now they're going to war again in Iran.
[00:43:56]  And a lot of people, I never believed the WMD claims, but a lot of people did.
[00:44:00]  But yes, the way that Blair ignored it as well, I think it disenfranchised more people, created more non-voters because they went, oh, we don't matter at all.
[00:44:07]  So elite theory for the win, I guess.
[00:44:09]  But this is interesting on the America thing you just mentioned.
[00:44:12]  So Peter Hitchens had an article, and this is just an extract from it.
[00:44:14]  I read it, but it was a good article.
[00:44:16]  And he said, what distresses me is that many Tories claiming to be British Conservative patriots join in this foreign mockery of the head of our government.
[00:44:24]  Meaning Starmer, of course.
[00:44:25]  We have in our midst far too many people who think that being a trumpoyed Republican is the same as being a British right-winger.
[00:44:31]  It is not.
[00:44:32]  And Aaron just says goat.
[00:44:34]  Perfectly fair point.
[00:44:35]  Yeah.
[00:44:35]  Yeah, it does seem an area that is not explored enough, the kind of American skeptic area.
[00:44:40]  Of course, there's a history of it.
[00:44:42]  Enoch Powell was skeptical about the American Empire and Churchill and their attempt to end our empire for their own good.
[00:44:50]  Whereas there's also the very pro-America side, which has obviously dominated, I suppose.
[00:44:53]  Of course, it's worth mentioning as well that there are many Americans who are just as critical of these same things as we are.
[00:44:59]  So it's not necessarily that we're like anti-American.
[00:45:03]  We're against what your government is doing, as are many people.
[00:45:06]  You know, I've seen many people in our own audience that have been criticising the same things that many critics of America and Europe have, for the same reasons, that it's not good for America, Europe, or the Middle East, what they're doing.
[00:45:20]  Yeah.
[00:45:21]  And this guy, who I don't like this guy at all, because he was responsible for cancelling the late Sir Roger Scruton.
[00:45:28]  So it's a bit rich from giving any advice to the right, but he does, because he'd probably just cancel whoever followed this advice.
[00:45:33]  But he does say there's a big gap in British politics for a Gaullist America sceptic right.
[00:45:37]  I think there's something in that.
[00:45:38]  I think at the minute the French are leading the charge that, you know, obviously Gaulism comes from there.
[00:45:44]  Yeah, there's this British Gaulism idea.
[00:45:46]  It's never kind of really become a big, it's never been a big thing, but it's always been around.
[00:45:49]  I think the biggest barrier to that is that we're very pally interpersonally, whereas the geopolitical aims are very much at odds with one another.
[00:46:00]  And so it's a difficult thing to navigate because we like Americans and Americans like us.
[00:46:06]  And so to then go against their government seems a little bit almost disloyal, if you know what I mean.
[00:46:12]  National relationship, but does it exist?
[00:46:14]  No one knows.
[00:46:16]  And this was really interesting, because this was a guy who came on and made an anti-case against this military action, said it wasn't planned and so on, and we shouldn't be involved.
[00:46:23]  And Bastani being based again, the boomerang Anglo with his tweed waistcoat, sat in his study in Wiltshire, has still got it.
[00:46:29]  It's never over.
[00:46:30]  It's the barber nationalism of Bastardi.
[00:46:34]  It's kind of funny.
[00:46:35]  This was funny.
[00:46:36]  I'm more conservative than Kemi Baynock and I'm literally a Marxist.
[00:46:41]  Something in it.
[00:46:42]  I mean, there's something in it.
[00:46:44]  This is funny.
[00:46:45]  Bastani Scruton posting on Maine.
[00:46:48]  I would gulag fly tippers and redirect money from abolished quangos to restore Victorian architecture and tax UPVC front doors to install infinity conservation area lighting.
[00:46:58]  That's actually an unironically good policy.
[00:47:01]  It's a good idea.
[00:47:02]  I think gulagging is too kind for flytippers, to be honest.
[00:47:05]  Well, actually, it doesn't restore.
[00:47:06]  Have a policy about deporting flytippers, I read earlier.
[00:47:09]  Yeah, so very Sebastani restore crossover.
[00:47:13]  No one was expecting.
[00:47:16]  But in this post, he elaborates further on the Kemi thing, and it's quite interesting.
[00:47:19]  A few days ago, I jokingly said I was more conservative than Kemi Baydock, except I wasn't really joking.

=== Gulagging Flytippers (15:04) ===

[00:47:23]  Core to what was British conservatism as a worldview, it's now essentially dead, is that things can always get worse.
[00:47:29]  In fact, they often do.
[00:47:30]  And to stop that.
[00:47:31]  Tagline of our podcast for a while.
[00:47:33]  My dad always used to say.
[00:47:35]  In fact, they often do.
[00:47:36]  And to stop that, or take things even in a slightly better direction, requires real thought and care.
[00:47:41]  To make things marginally better is an obligation, but also tremendously hard, and always the work of multiple generations over time.
[00:47:47]  And you still need luck.
[00:47:48]  I had to reconcile that with thinking Marx had the best understanding about the volatility and permanently revolutionizing nature of capitalism.
[00:47:55]  But actually, one is more comfortable with the other than at first glance.
[00:48:00]  And he talks about all that solid melts into air, which Marxists always love saying.
[00:48:03]  It's a powerful analysis and can be adopted by anyone from socialist revolutionaries to social conservatives.
[00:48:08]  Indeed, it has been.
[00:48:09]  But back to British conservatism, it no longer exists.
[00:48:11]  It's dead.
[00:48:12]  That's more visible with the permanently utopian schemes via war, cheered on by the Tories and reform.
[00:48:17]  Oh, most visible, sorry.
[00:48:18]  Rather than thinking things tend to get worse, that this is a default, they think things can't get worse, certainly abroad, that things can only get better.
[00:48:26]  There's a place for that, certainly.
[00:48:27]  Optimism is important, but as a default thinking regarding foreign policy, it's insane.
[00:48:32]  And we've been paying the price for decades.
[00:48:33]  We will for many more.
[00:48:35]  The only powerful faction in global affairs now interested in hard work, getting rich, global civility and progress is ironically the Chinese Communist Party.
[00:48:42]  The British right has very few conservatives now, certainly not intellectually.
[00:48:45]  It's just liberals who cheer on war and often dislike Muslims.
[00:48:51]  He's more about the mainstream there of the British right than some of the alternative media figures.
[00:48:56]  Because a lot of the alternative media figures, I think, would agree with this.
[00:49:00]  Whereas the mainstream right, the kind of people who go on talk and GB, no offense.
[00:49:05]  I don't do it anymore.
[00:49:06]  That's true.
[00:49:07]  How can it possibly?
[00:49:08]  You've not seen a lot of my tweets about GB.
[00:49:09]  You're obviously not caught up.
[00:49:10]  But anyway, go on.
[00:49:11]  I don't go on Twitter as much as I probably should, which no one's ever said.
[00:49:15]  But yeah, it's certainly true of the commentariate class, sort of Westminster terminally M25 people.
[00:49:25]  They're exactly like this, and that is true.
[00:49:28]  He's also somewhat perhaps alluding to the kind of Fukuyama constant progress idea.
[00:49:33]  when he talks about the utopian everything's going to get better all the time that is still that paradigm where sort of the end of history mindset still exists yeah and it certainly exists among people who think that you're going to get a democratic iran instead of hashishin with drones Yeah.
[00:49:48]  And they still think they can go back.
[00:49:50]  And Dominic Cummings always say they want to go back to somewhere just about the fall of the Berlin Wall or pre-9/11, pre-financial crash.
[00:49:57]  And even Fukiara himself will talk about the financial crash as a kind of blip and these things as RAC wars blips rather than sort of fundamentally disproving the theory.
[00:50:05]  An associate of ours would might say a return to fresh prints, perhaps.
[00:50:09]  He might, he might indeed.
[00:50:11]  And Aaron just adds, Britain was far more successful and its political culture far more intelligent when socialists were socialists and conservatives sought to conserve.
[00:50:18]  Fair.
[00:50:19]  I mean, you think about Ben versus Powell, for example, you know, it was certainly a much richer discourse.
[00:50:25]  And on this little point, when he says it's just liberals who cheer on war and dislike Muslims, I know where the tweets got that from because he said I saw a tweet and he didn't say which one it was, maybe because it's a right-wing account, but I'm sure he's thinking of this one.
[00:50:35]  Most of the UK right-wing figures and their followers are just liberals who don't like Muslims.
[00:50:39]  That's as far as it goes.
[00:50:40]  I actually saw him quote tweet this, I think.
[00:50:42]  Oh, did he?
[00:50:43]  Because I saw him just say that he'd seen a tweet.
[00:50:45]  Okay, maybe you found it then and it was this one.
[00:50:48]  And there's something in that because I certainly don't want to get into the weeds of Tommy Robertson because we have to do a long explanation about how he's a working-class hero and was brave and so on, but at the same time does things that are questionable and it wastes a lot of time.
[00:51:01]  But I just wanted to point out there is something in that.
[00:51:04]  Tommy's here saying bomb them, lads.
[00:51:06]  And it's like this idea of sort of very pro-Israel, very anti-Islam, but also very, very siv-nat is a sort of strange, idiosyncratic combination.
[00:51:16]  And it's not necessarily real conservatism.
[00:51:17]  I'm sorry, but this is an awful tweet.
[00:51:20]  Yeah, it's not a good.
[00:51:21]  I mean, these are just people lamenting the demise of the Ayatollah, but they're just normal Iranians, really.
[00:51:27]  Why should you bomb them?
[00:51:28]  Exactly.
[00:51:31]  Just war theory, you know, the Christian distinction between civilian and combatant goes back to St. Augustine.
[00:51:39]  And it's always been understood that war is hell.
[00:51:42]  You should avoid it if it isn't necessary.
[00:51:45]  You shouldn't engage in wars of choice.
[00:51:48]  And if you do, you make a distinction between combatants and non-combatants.
[00:51:52]  And so just saying, oh, kill them all, that's a bit crazy.
[00:51:58]  Yeah.
[00:51:58]  And why is it just, yeah, that one group?
[00:52:01]  If we're going to hate people, we've got to be consistent and hate them all.
[00:52:03]  Whereas it seems there's this strange thing that wants to infiltrate the right, which is we hate this one group, but then let's be totally siv-nat on everything else.
[00:52:11]  And it's like, it's quite a weird combination of views to have to take on, and every new party will get this foisted upon them.
[00:52:16]  It's like, actually, I'm not sure.
[00:52:17]  As if the cultural difference only exists with Muslims.
[00:52:20]  Right, right.
[00:52:21]  When in reality, the cultural difference is very deep between Christians and Buddhists, between Christians and Hindus, between Christians and animists, and between Christians and Muslims.
[00:52:32]  Yeah, and there's also certain countries that are problematic, whatever their beliefs are, coming into this country.
[00:52:38]  Basically, the only countries that don't cause its problems are European, North American, and East Asian.
[00:52:46]  Everywhere else in the world, there are associated problems with the people coming here.
[00:52:51]  I mean, if if you count the Chinese and the fentanyl stuff, it becomes a bit of a different story.
[00:52:57]  And they're very annoying in universities as well.
[00:52:59]  So in marginal case.
[00:53:01]  The Japanese, South Koreans, there, you're all right.
[00:53:05]  So sorry, Tommy.
[00:53:06]  But and the other thing, yeah, the reason I let me just explain why I'm going to the next suite, which is that it's back to this conservatism thing that basically Bastani is saying that the conservatives aren't conservative.
[00:53:16]  The kind of people who are core conservatives aren't conservative.
[00:53:18]  And so it's true because reform really don't care about social conservatism at all.
[00:53:24]  And I realized the other day you played this clip on one of your segments.
[00:53:27]  So I picked out this clip though because it just shows how Farage doesn't care about social conservatism at all.
[00:53:32]  One, it's abortion, yes.
[00:53:34]  But also listen to what he says about the whole sexual revolution.
[00:53:37]  Will you undo any of it?
[00:53:39]  No.
[00:53:39]  Just wanted to ask about some comments that Danny Kruger made to the Host magazine recently.
[00:53:44]  In an interview with our magazine, he said that reform could have a limited but important role in undoing elements of the sexual revolution.
[00:53:51]  I think he was specifically talking about pro-natalist policy.
[00:53:54]  But I mean, you know, other elements of the sexual revolution include abortion rights, contraception, LGBT rights.
[00:54:02]  Can we expect any rolling back of any of these areas under a reform government?
[00:54:08]  No.
[00:54:12]  But I do believe in freedom of the individual, you know, on issues like abortion.
[00:54:18]  I don't think these things should ever be party political issues.
[00:54:21]  It should be issues of conscience.
[00:54:23]  Danny is somebody of a very deep Christian faith.
[00:54:27]  Nothing wrong with that.
[00:54:28]  And he believes in what he believes in very strongly.
[00:54:30]  But that doesn't mean it's party policy.
[00:54:32]  It doesn't mean we'd implement it directly.
[00:54:35]  Yes, I put this clip in before I realized you'd already covered it.
[00:54:37]  But it's an important clip because so many things.
[00:54:39]  I mean, one, the guy says to him basically, are you going to undo anything about this establishment?
[00:54:43]  For example, the sexual revolution.
[00:54:45]  Oh, absolutely not.
[00:54:45]  We're going to change nothing.
[00:54:46]  Don't worry.
[00:54:46]  That's what Farage is telling them.
[00:54:48]  The other thing is that Kruger is working on these things.
[00:54:50]  But Kruger's going to be totally ignored.
[00:54:52]  Don't worry about that.
[00:54:52]  We've got this crank Christian working on stuff in the background, but we're not going to listen to him.
[00:54:56]  Okay.
[00:54:57]  The other thing is the abortion thing itself and the fact that Farage says it's a matter of conscience, not policy.
[00:55:02]  I mean, what on earth could that possibly mean?
[00:55:04]  We have one of the most radical policies in the world, which is 24 weeks, not to mention the decriminalisation which has come in up to birth.
[00:55:11]  Gone.
[00:55:11]  I was just going to say that at 24 weeks, it's possible for the baby to survive.
[00:55:16]  Right.
[00:55:16]  And guess what?
[00:55:17]  We're in line with the Netherlands, which is never a great idea because of the most liberal nutcases ever.
[00:55:21]  Germany, I believe, is 12 weeks.
[00:55:23]  A lot of countries are 14 in Europe.
[00:55:24]  So it's not just conscience, is it?
[00:55:26]  Because if you have a conscience in Germany, it's different from your conscience in Britain.
[00:55:29]  You might have a conscience in Germany, but you're at 13 weeks, so it's too late.
[00:55:31]  So obviously it's about policy, not individual conscience is part of it, if you're within the legal remit, but there's a massive difference between 12 and 24 weeks.
[00:55:38]  It's double.
[00:55:39]  So the idea that it's like, oh, this is not for us, this is for individual conscience.
[00:55:42]  What are you talking about?
[00:55:43]  You just accepted the most radical liberal or leftist policy on it as if that's well, it's not conscious then, is it?
[00:55:50]  It's politics.
[00:55:51]  You have to have a position on it, otherwise, you end up with a situation like you know, the liberal states in the United States, where not only is it legal up until the point of birth, but it's celebrated and fetishized, and people boast about it.
[00:56:04]  And that's one of the ugliest things to have in a society you could possibly produce through politics.
[00:56:11]  And some people from reform hit back on this and said, Well, you can't have reform running on abortion because it's an unpopular issue in Britain, which is true.
[00:56:17]  But as the larger point about does reform have any kind of socially conservative program, I think is totally valid.
[00:56:22]  Come on, I think, just in terms of being honest about it, there's no constituency for opposing abortion because so many people don't understand what it is.
[00:56:35]  They don't understand that late-term abortion involves literally dismembering a baby that can feel the pain.
[00:56:42]  They don't in a country where the suffering of animals can actually be a major political issue, the suffering of babies as they get dismembered or have their skulls crushed can also be a major political issue.
[00:56:57]  So, this is insane.
[00:56:59]  It's just because nobody has picked up that banner and says, This is what abortion entails.
[00:57:05]  This is when the baby has a nervous system, this is when it can feel pain.
[00:57:10]  You are literally cutting a baby to pieces.
[00:57:12]  Are you okay with that?
[00:57:14]  And once that argument is made, I actually trust the public.
[00:57:18]  I think people who oppose to slaughtering animals in the cruelest way will oppose slaughtering babies in the cruelest way.
[00:57:25]  So, what it shows on the part of reform is a total lack of leadership.
[00:57:30]  All you get is vibes.
[00:57:31]  The Americans like this, let's go with a vibe.
[00:57:34]  The vibe is pro-abortion, let's go with a vibe.
[00:57:37]  There's no thought behind it, and there's no honesty, and there's no integrity.
[00:57:40]  You can't say that actually I know how abortions are done and then say, But I'm okay with dismembering babies.
[00:57:49]  I watched a video from a former abortion doctor, and if you watch that kind of thing, you can't go back.
[00:57:53]  It's horrific.
[00:57:54]  Yes, but the broader point, though, they just don't have any, to get back to the Bastani thing, they have no socially conservative program, they have no thought about it.
[00:58:02]  They're a liberal party continuing the Blairite paradigm.
[00:58:05]  And just more on this, Michael Gove, of course, former Tory now editor of The Spectator, tells us that we should read a book called Good Slut.
[00:58:13]  I've actually met this woman, she's perfectly nice in person, but her book's called Good Slut.
[00:58:18]  And to give you some of the idea of what's in the book, and by the way, Kemi also gave a good blurb to this book.
[00:58:23]  Number three will blow your mind, as they say.
[00:58:25]  So, five bombshells from my book, Good Slut: How Money, Sex, and Power Set Women Free.
[00:58:31]  Number one, Capitalism is Good for Women.
[00:58:33]  False.
[00:58:34]  Two, the patriarchy doesn't exist in the Anglo-Sphere anymore.
[00:58:36]  Probably true.
[00:58:37]  Three, Bonnie Blue is a sign of the health of our society for women, however, unhealthy are her actions.
[00:58:42]  Well, I did say number three would blow your mind.
[00:58:45]  I've seen this.
[00:58:45]  It's a ridiculous thing I've seen.
[00:58:47]  I've seen it and it's still annoying to hear.
[00:58:49]  Number four, a woman can physically defend herself against a man, even if he's bigger and stronger than her.
[00:58:53]  Nonsense.
[00:58:53]  540 plus is a great time to become a first-hand mother.
[00:58:56]  Nonsense.
[00:58:57]  So that's those dealt with.
[00:58:58]  And that's, ladies and gentlemen, your base conservative, Michael Gold.
[00:59:01]  Sean Connery somewhere just got a little bit more right, didn't he?
[00:59:07]  I mean, absolutely mental.
[00:59:08]  And that's the kind of thing.
[00:59:09]  So just to give you an idea, yeah, this is where your conservatism is.
[00:59:13]  And it's completely not conservative.
[00:59:15]  This is antithetical to just morality.
[00:59:18]  Everything she said.
[00:59:20]  Everything she said is not true, demonstrably so, but she's too stupid to know it.
[00:59:25]  Except possibly number two.
[00:59:26]  There doesn't really have a patriarchy.
[00:59:28]  Yeah, that one's fair.
[00:59:29]  The others are all nonsense.
[00:59:30]  No, there is.
[00:59:31]  Every father with a family knows that it exists.
[00:59:33]  Okay, even that one's round.
[00:59:34]  Five for five loss.
[00:59:36]  I'm willing to relent.
[00:59:37]  The other area where the so-called right are going to be in trouble is the Greens getting the working class vote.
[00:59:44]  They had this Hannah Spencer.
[00:59:45]  Now, you know, as Nick Buckley pointed out, she wasn't actually that local.
[00:59:48]  She lived in the posh area of Hale, but she seemed vaguely local and she talked about being a plumber and it was sort of connected with the local people.
[00:59:56]  I have to say two things.
[00:59:57]  Firstly, Hannah Spencer, an extraordinary candidate.
[00:59:59]  Very, very strong candidate.
[01:00:01]  Her acceptance speech we discussed on Friday night, you know, hit so many notes.
[01:00:05]  You could see Goodwin behind her thinking, Christ, this is what my voters talk about.
[01:00:10]  Litter, fly tipping, antisocial behavior, high streets, small businesses just, you know, not getting a chance to succeed.
[01:00:19]  And I think that's partly why reformers are so angry is because they can't just pigeonhole the Greens now as these like ultra-left social liberals who will tell you off for taking a package holiday once a year, right?
[01:00:32]  It goes on a bit, but I think that's a fair central point.
[01:00:35]  And if you look, you know, the Greens have overtaken labor in this poll.
[01:00:40]  And the key part here for me was that the Greens are now the most popular party in all age categories under 50.
[01:00:46]  Here we go.
[01:00:47]  Some 49% of 18 to 24-year-olds would bat the Greens, as well as 27% of 25 to 49-year-olds, the top choice.
[01:00:54]  So not just the young nutters, but semi-not-that-young nutters.
[01:00:57]  Well, not that young, up to 49.
[01:00:59]  I mean, so this is everyone can see that the system is rigged.
[01:01:02]  Right.
[01:01:03]  Everyone can see that if you have enough money, Robert Jenrick will help you with your planning problems and get rid of your taxes.
[01:01:10]  And he's been saying that he's pretending to be right-wing and is going to pivot to the center.
[01:01:16]  People like Nadeem Zahawi will talk to the financiers and they will make sure that they're on board.
[01:01:22]  Everybody can see that the system is rigged and that money talks and decides policy.
[01:01:28]  And that is actually a problem.
[01:01:30]  If you're conservative, you're also conservative for small and medium businesses.
[01:01:34]  You're conservative for the sake of unions and for the sake of employees.
[01:01:38]  They have a right and a say in this.
[01:01:41]  They no longer have a right or a say if you flood their communities with migrants because that depresses their wages and makes everything more expensive.
[01:01:50]  But you should be worried about them if you're in politics.
[01:01:53]  Whereas what reform are saying to people is that we're going to take care of the money classes, who we're taken care of under labor, who we're taken care of under the conservatives, who will always find a way to be taken care of and can actually take care of themselves.
[01:02:07]  Government exists to protect the weak from the predation of the strong.
[01:02:12]  That's why you need a government.
[01:02:14]  And these liberals don't seem to accept these basic realities.
[01:02:19]  It's interesting that it just came out that reform are the most funded party now of any party.
[01:02:23]  By a significant degree, as well.
[01:02:25]  Yes, yes.
[01:02:25]  And who's funding them and what do they want?
[01:02:27]  So that's the key.

=== Open Borders Policy Papers (05:19) ===

[01:02:28]  Yeah, very interesting.
[01:02:29]  And also finally points out that the local game of the Greens, you guys need to grasp something.
[01:02:34]  The Greens led reform by six points among under 65s in yesterday's YouGov poll.
[01:02:38]  They were first among working-age people with YouGov.
[01:02:41]  Being locally visible and doing stuff about litter, fly tipping, and nightmare neighbors goes a very long way.
[01:02:46]  So, you know, if they can do that, of course, that's appealing to people.
[01:02:50]  I mean, Chesterton said that the greatest tragedy of our time is that politicians are no longer close enough to kick them.
[01:02:57]  He said that the greatest strategy of the time is that not enough politicians are being hanged.
[01:03:03]  And he said that all politicians should be close enough to kick them, that they should be involved in local affairs that matter to people, like fly tipping, like people being horrible, like crime, and so on and so forth.
[01:03:18]  Not be in ivory towers in the M25, taking care of the rich and having caviar every night.
[01:03:25]  Yeah.
[01:03:26]  And just because I've also gone over, Carl's not here to tell us off.
[01:03:31]  Very bad.
[01:03:32]  Let me just point out that, of course, the Greens will struggle under scrutiny.
[01:03:34]  They've got their smack for everyone policy, you know, heroin, and they've got all these terrible policies.
[01:03:40]  Win in Scotland, for sure.
[01:03:41]  But the point is, the right can't appeal to the youth with boomer slop.
[01:03:45]  And this is the stance that's very different with Restore.
[01:03:48]  So Britain has enough problems.
[01:03:49]  We should not be bombing Iran.
[01:03:50]  Rupert Lowe put many tweets out to this effect.
[01:03:52]  So it is an opportunity for Restore Britain to be against foreign wars.
[01:03:56]  And they have a Zuma contingent who are concerned with the cost of living and housing and things like that.
[01:04:01]  And of course, the one thing they have that Mr. Bastani can't do is take on the immigration question because Bastani's put his long tweet about conservatism, but there's nothing conservative about obscene levels of immigration.
[01:04:11]  Now, he might well say, look, we need to control it, but we know this is an area where the left and the greens are very, very weak.
[01:04:17]  They basically sound open borders.
[01:04:18]  Whether Bastani is, certainly Zap Plansky sounds like he's open borders.
[01:04:22]  And so there's nothing conservative about that.
[01:04:24]  So that's the area.
[01:04:25]  Green policy is fully open borders.
[01:04:27]  Right.
[01:04:27]  There are actual policy papers that were leaked, it seems.
[01:04:30]  I think they were leaked or something.
[01:04:32]  And they were like, no, no, no, everybody should be able to come to Britain and receive a house and a welfare check.
[01:04:38]  Which is insane.
[01:04:40]  On the economic questions, on the fact that there is a deep injustice in the system and that you've got to take care of the little guy, yeah, they're right.
[01:04:49]  Yeah, yeah, they're wrong about how they want to pursue it, but the sentiment is correct.
[01:04:53]  Yeah, that's why I think if restored acknowledges these things, but adds the immigration part, they can be in a strong position because we now have the neolib center, which is Tories, Labour, Lib Dem, and or Lib Dem a bit left, and reform, and Labour now thinking we've got to pivot left and try and get to the Greens.
[01:05:09]  You've got the Greens and you've got Restore.
[01:05:10]  I think that's probably the new layout.
[01:05:12]  I mean, it's confused because Labour is going to try and move further left to get back the green vote, and Lib Dems are pretty mad left as well.
[01:05:18]  But that's basically what we have.
[01:05:20]  So, and Bastani, is he the last true conservative?
[01:05:24]  You guys can decide for what I laid out there.
[01:05:27]  Do we do Rumble?
[01:05:29]  I can do that for you if you want, because you do need to read ahead because they misbehave in the Rumble.
[01:05:35]  I've noticed that.
[01:05:36]  I'm going to talk to you like a scolding father.
[01:05:40]  Sigil Stone says, Good slut, man.
[01:05:43]  What kind of household did she grow up in?
[01:05:46]  I did the same check, by the way, Sigil Stone.
[01:05:50]  And yes, I know.
[01:05:56]  That's a random name.
[01:05:57]  Ah, yes, yes.
[01:05:58]  Another segment of why women have suffraged enough.
[01:06:03]  Interesting turn of phrase, though.
[01:06:07]  There are plenty of good women out there, by the way.
[01:06:09]  It's just that good women aren't vocal about it because they don't go on social media because they're normal.
[01:06:16]  Not saying that all women on social media are weird or anything, but still, digging myself in a hole here.
[01:06:22]  Yeah, I think you're not getting out of this.
[01:06:24]  I don't know how to move these.
[01:06:25]  I don't care enough.
[01:06:27]  Where is the mouse?
[01:06:28]  Oh, it's up here.
[01:06:30]  I'm going the wrong way on the screen, aren't I?
[01:06:32]  Here we are.
[01:06:34]  People forget only 61% of Iranians are ethnic Persians.
[01:06:37]  I wouldn't be surprised if an ethnic civil conflict ended up being on the horizon, even if all things go right.
[01:06:42]  Yeah, it is perfectly possible.
[01:06:44]  That's exactly what I've been saying.
[01:06:45]  And then the last one I'm going to read.
[01:06:48]  Oh, no, no, no.
[01:06:49]  I'll read two more.
[01:06:50]  Busted Brian.
[01:06:51]  Tucker is incorrect about the LNG from Qatar, particularly because Golden Pass in the US will become a world exporter equivalent to Qatar literally within the month.
[01:07:01]  Interesting.
[01:07:02]  It's well beyond my pay grade, but it's not.
[01:07:03]  I hope that's the case because I don't want it to get more expensive.
[01:07:07]  Otherwise, I'm going to be doing this podcast from a tent.
[01:07:13]  I'm not even going to bother reading that name.
[01:07:19]  Move on.
[01:07:21]  I'm glad you understood that.
[01:07:23]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:07:24]  It's the tree that we mentioned that is supposed to hide the.
[01:07:27]  I was curious about that, actually.
[01:07:31]  So the Vikings are coming back to Britain, it seems, except Netflix has been casting them and they're not quite the tall and pale people that they used to be, but they are in fact a different kind of people.
[01:07:44]  Are they going to be collecting the Dane Guild?
[01:07:46]  Oh yes, they will.

=== Paying For Asylum (10:24) ===

[01:07:48]  But on a similar topic about people you should keep your daughters away from, Harry's just come out with a new documentary.
[01:07:56]  And not only has this documentary come out, but so has he talking about the Stonewall myth and all of the mythology around it and how it is wrong.
[01:08:05]  He's done a lot of research there, so please do check it out.
[01:08:08]  I'm sure he'd very much appreciate it because he has put a lot of time and effort into this and it's very well produced.
[01:08:16]  So check it out.
[01:08:17]  And with that out of the way, I suppose we better get on to what I'm on about.
[01:08:23]  And that is this.
[01:08:25]  That failed asylum seeker families are to be offered as part of a pilot scheme up to £40,000 to leave the UK.
[01:08:34]  And it's worth mentioning here that employee earnings in the UK in 2025, the median annual salary for a person was £39,000.
[01:08:46]  And so that is £1,000 more than the average salary of a person in the UK, at least the median salary.
[01:08:54]  Quite possibly, you could get more than that on benefits.
[01:08:58]  That is also true.
[01:09:01]  So she says that the government would seek to forcibly remove failed asylum seekers if they do not accept incentive payments of up to £10,000 per person.
[01:09:11]  So if you capped at four per family within seven days.
[01:09:15]  So if you have a family of four, presumably you could get £40,000 to get deported, which, you know, is a pretty good nesting.
[01:09:22]  It's a claiming asylum worth it, right?
[01:09:25]  Well, at this point, I'm tempted to renounce my British citizenship and just go on dinghy trips across the channel.
[01:09:31]  I mean, I know how to sail, so why don't I just get a little sailing boat and really make some money out of this, get a huge tax rebate.
[01:09:37]  The amount of money you've stolen from my family, British government, I could take hundreds of thousands and still, you know, not have recouped everything.
[01:09:45]  So you are scum.
[01:09:46]  I hate you.
[01:09:47]  Give me back my money.
[01:09:48]  Don't give it to foreigners.
[01:09:50]  It's exactly the same premise, though, isn't it?
[01:09:53]  If you're a student of British history, here is Britain in the past when the Vikings were here.
[01:10:01]  Here you can see a map of the Dane law.
[01:10:04]  So what we used to do was we used to pay the Vikings to go away, basically.
[01:10:10]  Leave us alone.
[01:10:11]  Stop raiding our shores.
[01:10:12]  Stop raping our women and taking our money.
[01:10:15]  And you know what actually had to be done?
[01:10:16]  Because paying them didn't work.
[01:10:18]  We had to defeat them in a pitch battle and drive them from the shores that way.
[01:10:25]  And so it doesn't work, is my point.
[01:10:28]  That paying people money to go away makes them want to come back.
[01:10:32]  Like, it didn't work for the Huns, it didn't work for the Vikings.
[01:10:35]  It's even worse that you incentivize them to come over and then they can fail and then get paid to leave again is even worse than paying them once they're already here.
[01:10:42]  So, that's even madder.
[01:10:43]  But yeah, I see your point as well.
[01:10:47]  If you don't actually seal the border, this is an insane policy, but they are committed to not sealing the border.
[01:10:54]  So, what they're offering is come visit Britain, fully funded taxpayer, fully funded holiday by the taxpayers.
[01:11:02]  It's insane.
[01:11:03]  Well, we're having a Lindisfarne every day here, aren't we?
[01:11:07]  And by the way, just for context, Shabrano Mahoud is considered beyond the pale too far right.
[01:11:12]  There's an elite group of all the Labour MPs like Stella Creasy going, oh, this is terrible.
[01:11:16]  We're not going to share this.
[01:11:16]  We're going to be mentioning that in a minute.
[01:11:18]  But yeah, this is obviously not the way to do things.
[01:11:22]  That paying people to break into your country, I take a much more, how do I put it?
[01:11:28]  Third world approach to this.
[01:11:30]  In that, if you break into my country, I'm afraid you're at my liberty.
[01:11:34]  You know, what happens to you is up to my discretion.
[01:11:37]  Giving you the money.
[01:11:38]  If you break into somebody's home, exactly.
[01:11:40]  Whatever they do to you, it's up to them.
[01:11:42]  You shouldn't have broken into their home.
[01:11:44]  Yeah, I don't think people should be rewarded to break into my country, especially not higher than the average salary.
[01:11:53]  Yeah, what incentive do people have to actually work in this country when you could be an illegal migrant?
[01:11:59]  You could, you know, for all you know, you could have raped your way through Europe, turned up to Britain, and be given a nice little nest egg to spend the rest of your life with in your third world country if you actually do agree to leave.
[01:12:10]  So when you say, sorry, what incentive do people have to work?
[01:12:13]  Unemployment in Britain has just gone, or in the UK, has just gone higher than Italy.
[01:12:18]  Which is a sort of benchmark for unemployment.
[01:12:20]  Oh, it's Europe.
[01:12:21]  The Euro-maxing unemployment paradise.
[01:12:22]  But we're like, what are we doing, man?
[01:12:24]  Yeah, so there's no incentive to work.
[01:12:26]  It's very frustrating.
[01:12:27]  It's sort of, you know, GDP per capita in a place like Ethiopia is, what, £2,000?
[01:12:33]  So you're paying them maybe £20,000.
[01:12:37]  They're becoming the bill gates or the Jeff Bezos of their country on our money, right?
[01:12:41]  They're ultra-rich.
[01:12:43]  And getting a dinghy.
[01:12:44]  They would do it for so much less, basically.
[01:12:46]  You've gone in with like 40 grand.
[01:12:49]  Oh, I'd have done it for 400 quid.
[01:12:51]  It's insane.
[01:12:52]  Well, at this rate, I would travel from Ethiopia for 40 grand.
[01:12:55]  You know, getting a dinghy across the channel on a calm day, even an idiot can do.
[01:13:00]  Well, they do, don't they?
[01:13:01]  It's a golden ticket.
[01:13:02]  But the parallels are very stark.
[01:13:05]  People in small boats are crossing over to Britain from the continent and extracting wealth from us.
[01:13:12]  And it's exactly the same thing, and it won't work for exactly the same reasons: that you can't just pay people off.
[01:13:20]  You have to use force.
[01:13:21]  And that means forcibly removing them, legally, obviously, and deporting them, whether they like it or not.
[01:13:27]  At least the Vikings were quite cool.
[01:13:29]  They looked cool.
[01:13:30]  They were kind of tough.
[01:13:31]  And you've got the Jorvik Museum, which is fun.
[01:13:34]  What are we going to get out of this?
[01:13:35]  You can respect the Vikings.
[01:13:36]  Yeah, you can respect them.
[01:13:37]  I didn't like what they did to my people.
[01:13:39]  And I've still got 4.95% Nordic to this day.
[01:13:43]  Just the one bit of non-English I've got.
[01:13:45]  I can see how that happened.
[01:13:47]  But, you know, objectively.
[01:13:49]  They had a little bit more of a vibe to them than an emaciated Ethiopian, didn't they?
[01:13:53]  They had vibes.
[01:13:53]  They had aura.
[01:13:54]  They had aura.
[01:13:56]  They were all.
[01:13:59]  They mogged us.
[01:14:00]  They were all.
[01:14:01]  We won in the end.
[01:14:03]  Yeah, we frame mugged them, clearly.
[01:14:05]  But they were even mutually intelligible.
[01:14:07]  They come from a part of Scandinavia where the language overlapped.
[01:14:10]  So they weren't that foreign, really.
[01:14:13]  In the grand scheme of things, certainly not sub-Saharan African level.
[01:14:18]  But to carry on with what's actually going on here, to scroll down a little bit, the scheme is expected to target about 150 families living in taxpayer-funded accommodation, and the Home Office estimates it could save 20 million if successful.
[01:14:32]  Here's a bold new idea.
[01:14:34]  How about you don't give taxpayer-funded accommodation to these people in the first place?
[01:14:38]  Then you don't have to do this stupid scheme.
[01:14:40]  And I know what's going on here is that they're trying to approach it in a pragmatic sense where they're working within the system.
[01:14:46]  But the problem is that the system is not moral and it should be changed at the very least, if not burnt down to the ground.
[01:14:54]  You know, the ash is buried and then something beautiful rebuilt anew.
[01:14:58]  Mainly a giant airport terminal with deportations written on the side.
[01:15:03]  And then it carries on to say, the UK government already runs a voluntary returns program that provides up to £3,000 in financial support to eligible asylum seekers who choose to leave the UK, which sort of suggests that, well, dangling a bigger carrot might actually make the situation worse if they're already offering to pay people and it's not working.
[01:15:23]  Mahmoud said, housing a family of three in an asylum accommodation costs up to £158,000 per year.
[01:15:30]  I don't know what on earth they're staying in, but you know, a family of three should not cost that much.
[01:15:39]  You could make it cost a quarter of that and they could still live very comfortably.
[01:15:43]  So this is obviously being handled to an excruciatingly incompetent degree.
[01:15:48]  I think Faras is about to have a breakdown.
[01:15:52]  I know, so am I. I've paid for this my entire life.
[01:15:55]  So have my family.
[01:15:55]  I've been a higher rate taxpayer for a long time.
[01:15:59]  It's the kind of thing that makes me want to drop out of the system entirely out of spite because paying tax is just funding my own destruction here.
[01:16:07]  And she carries on to say, and this is a direct quote, where a voluntary removal is refused.
[01:16:12]  We will escalate to an enforced removal for those who can be returned to their safe home country.
[01:16:18]  We are now consulting on precisely how the removal of families with children must take place in a way that is humane and effective.
[01:16:24]  I'm afraid if you refuse to leave our country that the humanity aspect is all but gone in my opinion.
[01:16:30]  I don't care what you, you know, what you want and need.
[01:16:34]  Your presence here is a detriment, therefore you're going.
[01:16:38]  For too long, families who have failed their claims have known that we are not enforcing our rules, which created a perverse incentive to make channel crossings with children in small boats.
[01:16:48]  Which, by the way, when their children die, when the boat capsizes, it's the fault of the parents and no one else.
[01:16:53]  You shouldn't feel bad.
[01:16:54]  They chose to gamble their children's lives for the sake of some welfare payments.
[01:16:59]  They are fundamentally evil people for doing that.
[01:17:03]  No responsible parent would ever do that.
[01:17:05]  And so they don't deserve to be rewarded for these sorts of things.
[01:17:08]  The fact that they would blame you for taking an insane risk with their children shows a deep level of moral depravity.
[01:17:16]  I would say nobody likes to see children getting hurt, of course.
[01:17:19]  Which don't have any morality.
[01:17:21]  Exactly.
[01:17:22]  It's just sort of so thoroughly immoral to do this, to say, instead of I'm going to go to wherever I've had to go because there is a war, I'm going to try to make the best out of it.
[01:17:37]  Why can't I just live on some other people's expense without working?
[01:17:41]  Also, they're coming from France, and I was in France in September of last year.
[01:17:45]  It was very nice.
[01:17:46]  Was that sorry?
[01:17:47]  Was it a safe country?
[01:17:48]  Well, I was in the French Riviera in Saint-Tropez, so I think the foreign rapists were a bit priced out.
[01:17:56]  That makes sense.
[01:17:58]  To carry on, the final thing I'm going to say is in her speech, Mahmoud also announced that asylum seekers who break the law or work illegally will be thrown out of government-funded accommodation and lose their support payments.
[01:18:08]  Why it's taken to 2026 to do this is beyond me.

=== Rule Through Fear (08:31) ===

[01:18:12]  It's absolutely absurd.
[01:18:14]  But she's also doing some other things as well.
[01:18:16]  Refugee status is becoming temporary, which should have happened a long time ago.
[01:18:22]  All refugee statuses should be temporary because if you're a refugee, you're there to be safe until the conflict is over and then you return.
[01:18:30]  Also, I think having lots of exemptions to countries that are dangerous would be nice.
[01:18:36]  You know, I'm okay helping out a few Ukrainians, but I've got no loyalty to a Sudanese person.
[01:18:42]  I mean, they might have been in the empire once, but they chose to be independent.
[01:18:46]  Therefore, they're no longer my problem.
[01:18:49]  And here's another one.
[01:18:51]  I'm here to stop study visas from four countries due to abuse.
[01:18:56]  I believe one of these is actually...
[01:18:59]  Your eyebrows look so weird, by the way.
[01:19:02]  She picked ones that were the very small part of the problem and avoided key ones that like Pakistan, for example.
[01:19:09]  And she was asked about that.
[01:19:10]  She didn't rule it out in future.
[01:19:12]  Obviously, it's going to be quite weird for her to rule out Pakistan when she's from there.
[01:19:17]  But anyway.
[01:19:18]  Yeah, so it is Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan, which are four countries where they're very unstable and there's lots of bad things going on.
[01:19:30]  But there are plenty of others that could fit in that list.
[01:19:33]  I have a nomination of about 150 that I would add to it.
[01:19:36]  But unfortunately, I'm not in the government.
[01:19:39]  Soon.
[01:19:40]  In terms of numbers, they're just not close to being the main problem.
[01:19:43]  So it's very strange.
[01:19:45]  She's trying to send a signal, but it's stupid because she's being she's playing a game of chicken with people who don't care.
[01:19:52]  And it's just fundamentally stupid.
[01:19:53]  And of course, there's an element of her own ethnic loyalties.
[01:19:56]  Like, obviously.
[01:19:57]  They obviously trump everything else, don't they?
[01:20:00]  As we've seen time and time again.
[01:20:01]  So these are the leaks that you're on about, Nick.
[01:20:03]  Yes.
[01:20:04]  And it's interesting as well that the PLP office, Parliamentary Labour Party office, I presume, is asking them to share the latest from Mahmood about this sort of stuff.
[01:20:15]  And all of the women here are replying, no, no, that's terrible, ah, blah.
[01:20:20]  And then you've got presumably an Indian person here saying, I will share this.
[01:20:27]  And then also there's a man here.
[01:20:30]  Stella Creasy, long virtue signaling nonsense.
[01:20:33]  I'm not even going to dignify it by reading it.
[01:20:35]  But yes, the Indian and the man are the only people that said they would do it.
[01:20:39]  Whereas all the women, the middle-class liberal women, are whining, saying, oh, it's me.
[01:20:45]  Oh, it's terrible.
[01:20:46]  Imagine being in a WhatsApp group with Stella Creasy.
[01:20:49]  She's just as annoying in private.
[01:20:50]  Like essays, like the most lib-tarded essays in every group.
[01:20:54]  No, this is why I won't share it.
[01:20:55]  It's like, oh, shut up.
[01:20:56]  Share the policy.
[01:20:57]  You're in the Labour Party.
[01:20:59]  I mean, all of a sudden, I've become a massive supporter of euthanasia for myself.
[01:21:08]  But I wanted to point out that this sort of thing already goes on in the continent.
[01:21:12]  Here's a story about Sweden recently offering migrants 34,000 US dollars.
[01:21:19]  Obviously, they're not going to offer it in dollars, but or at least I don't think they will.
[01:21:24]  But that's just what it amounts to.
[01:21:27]  And in Sweden, they had previously got payments of the equivalent of 1,000 US dollars per adult.
[01:21:34]  They've had that since 1984.
[01:21:36]  And lo and behold, it's not worked.
[01:21:38]  It's not done anything because, as we know, Sweden...
[01:21:40]  It's like all political decisions, by definition, must involve the threat of violence to be enforceable.
[01:21:46]  Well, yeah, of course.
[01:21:47]  I mean, all governments effectively have the same business model as the mafia, right?
[01:21:52]  That you've got to rule through fear of reprisals.
[01:21:56]  And if you're extracting protection money like a government does through taxation, you've also got to do the protection bit.
[01:22:03]  Yeah.
[01:22:04]  Which involves using hard power, which these people are completely immune to the idea of because guess what?
[01:22:10]  Women aren't wired to understand violence.
[01:22:13]  Thank God for that.
[01:22:14]  We love women.
[01:22:16]  It's not their domain.
[01:22:17]  That's all.
[01:22:19]  No, and this is very present.
[01:22:21]  If you've ever been walking the streets late at night with a woman, there's just zero situational awareness of male body language relating to violence.
[01:22:28]  I've had to explain it so many times.
[01:22:30]  But anyway, in 2023, before they made these reforms to the amount, when it was just $1,000, in 2023 in Sweden, only one person used the scheme to return home.
[01:22:43]  So that's why they've raised the number.
[01:22:46]  Oh, that was the problem.
[01:22:47]  Yes, it's just not appealing enough.
[01:22:50]  So in this new system, they pay a small amount when the decision is made to leave, a slightly larger amount when they arrive in their new country, and the majority after 15 months in their new country at the earliest.
[01:23:01]  So they've at least tried to work around the loophole whereby someone could just keep on coming back, you know, joining the queue for the seat kitchen and another payment and another payment.
[01:23:15]  But presumably, as soon as that threshold is ended and they receive their last payment, what's stopping them from going back there again?
[01:23:22]  Or to a different European country?
[01:23:24]  If all of Europe is basically just a piggy bank for illegal migrants, surely they could just country hop between lots of different countries and make far more than the average European would make in a year through our governments just by playing all of the different systems and getting all of this money.
[01:23:40]  It's a terrible idea.
[01:23:41]  They keep saying the same thing.
[01:23:43]  Recognize Eastern Libya and Somaliland.
[01:23:47]  Give them energy contracts.
[01:23:48]  Extract some resources.
[01:23:50]  In exchange, they get to build a tent city.
[01:23:53]  You can go home or you can go to Libya.
[01:23:54]  Pick one.
[01:23:56]  It'll work.
[01:23:57]  It's better than they deserve.
[01:24:00]  So there are also other countries that have this sort of scheme.
[01:24:03]  Denmark offers more than 15,000 US dollars per person.
[01:24:07]  Norway offers 1,400.
[01:24:09]  France, 2,800.
[01:24:11]  Germany, 2,000.
[01:24:13]  And so, has this worked at all?
[01:24:16]  Is Germany brimming with ethnic Germans?
[01:24:20]  Is France entirely ethnically French?
[01:24:23]  I don't think so.
[01:24:24]  In fact, it's not worked at all.
[01:24:26]  It's done nothing.
[01:24:27]  And all it's doing is adding a nice little carrot at your border that if we have to get rid of you, we pay you.
[01:24:34]  Whereas, you know, you try to break into Saudi Arabia, they shoot you.
[01:24:40]  There's a bit of a disparity with the global attitudes towards borders here.
[01:24:44]  I don't think paying people off when you've got some of the most advanced militaries in the world is a good idea.
[01:24:50]  Capture, detain, deport.
[01:24:52]  That's what you should be doing.
[01:24:55]  And even when you implement these harebrain schemes that don't work, as is the case in Sweden recently, loads of local municipalities, this was in November of 25, defied the government over the voluntary return assistance.
[01:25:11]  And apparently, 130 out of the 290 municipalities in Sweden refused to participate because of the poor migrants.
[01:25:21]  So nearly half of the localities in the country refused to do it because they had the power to do so under the auspices of it's cruel to the migrants giving them free money.
[01:25:32]  I mean, that is one important idea for Restore to the extent that they need cooperation with local government.
[01:25:39]  Any local council that refuses to cooperate with a decree on migration, you just round them up and throw them in jail for a year.
[01:25:48]  They'll teach them and they won't do it again.
[01:25:51]  Well, I mean, what I actually think is necessary, like being completely serious about it, is there needs to be repercussions for being deported.
[01:25:59]  I personally think that every person who's deported, we should have a financial figure attached to them.
[01:26:04]  And however much money they've taken out of the system needs to be taken from them through force to reimburse the British taxpayer.
[01:26:12]  So their possessions need to be taken.
[01:26:14]  Like if they're a debtor, for example, that same sort of philosophy of they owe money, so we're going to take their possessions.
[01:26:21]  And if they get returned to their home country with the clothes on their back, well, they should have thought about that before they ripped off the British taxpayer.
[01:26:28]  It's not my problem to fix the lives of people who, quite frankly, are parasites on me.
[01:26:35]  It's this absurd notion that we owe them anything.
[01:26:39]  You can simply debank them en masse.
[01:26:42]  I mean, they've shown us that it can be done.

=== Possessions at Stake (04:46) ===

[01:26:44]  Thank you.
[01:26:45]  Okay.
[01:26:46]  Now it gets done the other way.
[01:26:47]  Well, if you don't pay tax, the government can take the money out of your bank account forcefully anyway.
[01:26:52]  The infrastructure is already there.
[01:26:54]  Why don't we do that instead?
[01:26:55]  Because then people will actually fear being deported because they will lose something, not gain £40,000 on the backs of hardworking people in this country.
[01:27:06]  And so, yes, it's a terrible idea.
[01:27:10]  Right, sorry.
[01:27:12]  Two minutes.
[01:27:13]  Right up to the end there.
[01:27:15]  Shall we play video comments on Monday?
[01:27:20]  Because I'd like to read a few website comments.
[01:27:25]  Okay, no worries.
[01:27:27]  I don't want to miss people out.
[01:27:28]  I always feel bad not reading the comments out because they're always very insightful things.
[01:27:34]  We've got one minute, so it's going to be impossible to do it anymore.
[01:27:37]  Overrun a little bit, I think, but that's okay.
[01:27:40]  Overrun is lads out.
[01:27:43]  I think we can do five, can't we?
[01:28:19]  Okay, I'm taking my son there.
[01:28:22]  Thanks for that.
[01:28:22]  It's all from When We Are a Proper Country, actually manufacturing things.
[01:28:27]  Like, these things actually make me happy now.
[01:28:30]  I see them as sort of relics of a bygone age.
[01:28:34]  While it certainly is amusing to have the state of hate freaking out over those with moderate opinions, the utility of having an enemy should not be understated.
[01:28:44]  Our friend is going to try to spare your feelings, but an enemy will find your faults and expose them without mercy.
[01:28:52]  This is beneficial to those who seek to better themselves through personal growth.
[01:28:57]  Of course, the left can't take criticism, otherwise, they wouldn't be the left.
[01:29:02]  That's what Javier Millet insightfully said.
[01:29:05]  One of the best things he said was, we've been persecuted by them for so long that it has made us strong, and now we've got the strength to destroy them, basically.
[01:29:14]  Which I think we should.
[01:29:17]  It's another cat.
[01:29:19]  Blimey.
[01:29:25]  Is that a mouse?
[01:29:28]  Oh no.
[01:29:31]  Just a cat video.
[01:29:32]  Thank you.
[01:29:33]  I'm always happy to have a cat video.
[01:29:36]  And here's one for Luca.
[01:29:38]  On March 6th, my local community theater company will have our opening night for our town.
[01:29:44]  So before you all turn in on Friday night, give our town a read.
[01:29:48]  And remember, I'm in it.
[01:29:50]  And since Harry's History of the Gay Rights Movement, part two, comes out the same day, reading this play will help get the taste out of your mouth.
[01:29:59]  Check out Highlight Acting Troop on social media.
[01:30:04]  Highlight Acting Troop.
[01:30:06]  Well, best of luck with that.
[01:30:08]  I hope it goes well.
[01:30:09]  Yep.
[01:30:10]  Right.
[01:30:11]  Shall we read some comments?
[01:30:13]  Oh, yes, let's do that.
[01:30:16]  Daniel Butcher says it makes sense that Jesus himself will be the third temple on his second coming because who else but an evil person would want to bring about the end times?
[01:30:28]  So wouldn't the idea of trying to rebuild a physical temple to bring about the end times be contradictory as those trying to build it would be doing evil in the name of God?
[01:30:37]  Not just that.
[01:30:39]  I don't trust anybody who is very confident that they're going to be redeemed in the end times, that they're going to be among the saved, because we're all sinners and we're all going to be held to account.
[01:30:53]  And if you are absolutely sure that nothing you've done condemns you to hell, then there's something a bit suspicious about you.
[01:31:02]  That's my take on it.
[01:31:03]  That's why I don't like people who are operating, you know, to bring about an eschatological condition.
[01:31:13]  Okay, would you like to read one from yours, Nick?
[01:31:16]  Okay.
[01:31:18]  So Michael says, Josh, I'll never see the lotus eaters as anti-American, but like so many educated Britons, you see through the lens of a history that built an empire and through hard experience, Britain's look at the US and say, just so you know, we tried that, it doesn't work.

=== Embarrassing Honorable Mentions (01:27) ===

[01:31:30]  And Zesty King had a good one pointing out that Matt Goodbye had a video with Aaron Bastani on GB News where he had listed all these countries we didn't want to put first.
[01:31:38]  And Bastani said, what about Israel?
[01:31:40]  And Matt went, I was completely stunned.
[01:31:42]  It was embarrassing.
[01:31:44]  It was embarrassing.
[01:31:45]  It was just embarrassing.
[01:31:46]  Yeah, we should have included that maybe.
[01:31:48]  But anyway.
[01:31:49]  Wilden Wake says, so let's say I'm a Frenchman with 10 grand in credit card debt and I just have to cross the channel and the English taxpayer, yes, I mean English, Taffy, Jock and Paddy, yes, they're net tax recipients, aren't they?
[01:32:06]  We'll pay it off.
[01:32:07]  Great.
[01:32:08]  Yeah, I know.
[01:32:09]  It's just our national inheritance, isn't it, that's being sold off to foreign raiders.
[01:32:17]  Any honourable mentions?
[01:32:19]  No.
[01:32:19]  Well, I suppose I shall leave it there, but don't worry, in about 27 minutes' time, we will have Lads Hauer, which we're going to be breaking down the British class system, but doing it in an unconventional way in that we're going to classify random things as being working, middle, or upper class.
[01:32:39]  And Carl also insisted that we mention whether they're right or left wing as well.
[01:32:44]  So it's going to be a bit of fun.
[01:32:46]  We're going to explain the class system to any Americans watching because you guys don't get it.
[01:32:51]  And although it doesn't sound it, it will be fun.
[01:32:55]  So thank you for watching.
[01:32:56]  Enjoy your weekend and goodbye.