The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1373
Aired: 2026-03-12
Duration: 01:30:10


=== Don't Panic At The Airport (02:42) ===

[00:00:00]  Good afternoon and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters episode 1373.
[00:00:04]  I'm your host Harry joined today by Dan and Firaz.
[00:00:09]  Hello.
[00:00:10]  And we're not going to be looking at anything contentious or noteworthy today, really quite boring actually.
[00:00:15]  We're going to be asking why America is at war, whether this is a just war.
[00:00:21]  And I'm going to be asking how the MI5, potentially vetting candidates for the Reform Party UK, spelled Y-O-O-K-A-Y, will help save Britain.
[00:00:31]  And before we get into that, I would just like to remind everybody that we do have a live event, the first one in over four years, coming up on the 11th of April.
[00:00:41]  It will be held in Swindon at the Mecca Theatre.
[00:00:44]  It'll be live from 7 o'clock till 10 o'clock.
[00:00:48]  So get tickets whilst you still can.
[00:00:49]  You'll get the chance to see me, Firaz, Dan, Josh.
[00:00:54]  I don't know why he shouldn't still work here, but he does.
[00:00:56]  I think he sleeps here.
[00:00:58]  You'll get the chance to see plenty of us live and in person and have good time with us.
[00:01:03]  So get those tickets whilst they're still available.
[00:01:05]  Anything else we'd like to say, Chan?
[00:01:07]  We're actually going to speak to the people that turn up at this.
[00:01:09]  Well, I mean, it would be manners.
[00:01:12]  Ah.
[00:01:12]  It would be nice to meet some of them, find out who they are.
[00:01:15]  I think it'll be fun.
[00:01:16]  Yeah, it'll be good fun.
[00:01:17]  Yes, it'll be a good time.
[00:01:18]  But yeah, with that, I think we should get into the news.
[00:01:22]  I don't know if it's news, it's more of a question.
[00:01:24]  So, I mean, I've been sort of offline for two weeks.
[00:01:28]  You're good man.
[00:01:30]  Up in the jungle mountains of Central Asia with my coterie of fresh-faced attendants and three barrels of rice wine and no internet during that time.
[00:01:41]  So I come back and get nobody to tell on you then.
[00:01:45]  No, well, there's that.
[00:01:47]  And I get back to the airport having no idea that there's anything going on.
[00:01:51]  And there's all these sort of signs and announcements coming out basically saying some version of don't panic.
[00:02:00]  Which is never a good sign.
[00:02:02]  What was the price of fuel before you left compared to when you got back?
[00:02:05]  Oh, I checked later.
[00:02:08]  There were people on the flight for whom the price had tripled because they didn't book ahead.
[00:02:14]  I booked ahead.
[00:02:14]  So anyway, I get to the airport and they're saying, you know, don't panic.
[00:02:18]  Now, if you were already in a state of panic and you get to the airport and there's an announcement saying don't panic, that's probably a good thing.
[00:02:25]  If you had no idea there was a reason to be concerned and all you can hear is don't panic, it has the opposite psychological effect.
[00:02:32]  So anyway, I get on the flight and I had a window seat and the two seats in the middle were some Italian couples.
[00:02:39]  So I lean over and say, what the hell is going on?

=== Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories (15:09) ===

[00:02:43]  And their English wasn't that good, but it was something along the lines of, oh, we're at war with Iran now.
[00:02:48]  Okay, then.
[00:02:49]  Why is that then?
[00:02:50]  I couldn't quite get that far.
[00:02:51]  So I've managed to pick up on one or two people.
[00:02:54]  To be fair, even if you'd been paying very close attention to all of the announcements made by the White House, you would still not have a great answer to that question.
[00:03:02]  Ah.
[00:03:05]  That's kind of the purpose of the segment.
[00:03:06]  I was going to ask you.
[00:03:08]  Well, let's start off with that then.
[00:03:09]  So I've been out of the loop for like, whatever it is, two weeks now.
[00:03:13]  And I mean, it seems like overkill to ask this question to a geopolitics guy.
[00:03:18]  So I'll just ask you as a civilian.
[00:03:20]  When the announcement came out, yeah, we're going to go to a war with Iran because sentence.
[00:03:26]  What was that sentence?
[00:03:28]  Well, first of all, technically we're not at war with them, even though I believe that the Cyprus bases are being used for staging attacks.
[00:03:35]  So Britain is directly involved in war.
[00:03:37]  It's like collective West.
[00:03:38]  I mean, we all end up on the same side eventually.
[00:03:42]  Even Trump's initial announcements seemed to be some variation of we're doing it for the human rights of Iranians.
[00:03:51]  What, so Iranian women can have better fashion choices?
[00:03:55]  Yes, but that seems to have melted away somewhat immediately after it came out that a Tomahawk missile in the first strike was used to bomb an Iranian school full of girls.
[00:04:05]  So the question of human rights and women's fashion choices seemed to be somewhat superfluous.
[00:04:12]  Sorry, I'm not hearing an explanation.
[00:04:15]  Yes.
[00:04:16]  Yeah.
[00:04:19]  Then there was nuclear weapons.
[00:04:20]  They won't be able to get nuclear weapons.
[00:04:23]  Hang on, I distinctly remember a year ago.
[00:04:27]  What was it?
[00:04:28]  Like summer of 2025?
[00:04:29]  June.
[00:04:30]  June, yes.
[00:04:31]  I thought we went to war with Iran then, and I remember hearing...
[00:04:34]  The 12-day war, yes.
[00:04:35]  Yes.
[00:04:35]  And I remember hearing at the time that the reason that war stopped is because Iran's nuclear weapons capability was completely obliterated.
[00:04:42]  It's gone.
[00:04:43]  Yes, they did a bunker buster.
[00:04:45]  Yes, they did a bunker buster at Fordow and two of the other nuclear development sites and said on a White House press announcement that you can still find online that we have destroyed their nuclear capabilities, which is why we pulled back.
[00:04:58]  It had nothing to do with Iron Dome and Israeli defenses maybe not being able to withstand a prolonged Iranian missile barrage.
[00:05:06]  Okay.
[00:05:07]  But if the nuclear capacity was obliterated like less than 12 months ago, why are we doing it again?
[00:05:17]  To stop them from getting nukes.
[00:05:21]  I mean, I don't want to say that your explanation is making no sense to me whatsoever.
[00:05:26]  Well, I've got a better explanation for you in that case.
[00:05:29]  To stop them from having conventional defense weapons.
[00:05:36]  Faraz, can you help us out?
[00:05:37]  Why do we go to war?
[00:05:40]  There doesn't seem to be a logical reason for it other than the Israelis wanted it.
[00:05:46]  Yes, well, that was one of the other things that Rubio said in a press conference that then the day after to the person who asked him the question in the first place, he said that he didn't actually say, despite there being recorded footage of him saying it, which was that the calculation was made that there were going to be attacks made against Iran anyway, and that by Israel, and that if America didn't make those attacks first in a kind of preemptive defense manner, then American casualties would have been higher than if they had let Israel take those attacks without them doing it first.
[00:06:16]  So sorry, just to be clear, the US went to war on Iran because Israel was going to go to war against Iran, which Israel couldn't do on its own.
[00:06:28]  That's an important detail.
[00:06:29]  The Israelis don't have the capability to fight Iran on their own.
[00:06:34]  If it wasn't for American missile defense systems, American aircraft shooting down Iranian drones as they come in, a whole network of integrated air defense in the region that exists primarily to defend Israel, without these capabilities and without American money and without American jets and armaments and so on and so forth, the Israelis would decisively lose any war that they had to fight.
[00:07:04]  Even in the Gaza war, they were dependent on endless shipments and, I think, $40 billion, endless shipments of weapons from the United States and $36, maybe $40 billion from the United States to be able to fight that war.
[00:07:21]  So the idea that they could beat Iran on their own was always laughable.
[00:07:26]  But Rubio said that the Israelis were going to do it anyway.
[00:07:30]  And instead of saying, we fund you and we arm you, you will do as we say, the Americans said, oh dear.
[00:07:39]  Well, I guess that settles it.
[00:07:41]  We have no choice now.
[00:07:42]  So I think I'm getting a little bit closer.
[00:07:44]  Well, there is also a general catch-all argument, which is that Iran is a global funder of terrorism.
[00:07:51]  They've been arming the Houthis.
[00:07:52]  They've been arming Hezbollah for who knows how long.
[00:07:55]  They have been funding terror attacks within Britain, they say.
[00:08:00]  They also, I don't know where the evidence of this came up.
[00:08:03]  People just started saying it one day that in 2024, they were behind the two assassination attempts of Donald Trump.
[00:08:10]  Donald Trump in one of the press conferences said after Khomeini was killed, that, well, I got him before he got me.
[00:08:18]  But this seems to be kept in the back pocket as a general catch-all for any argument that comes out of this of, well, they fund terrorism across the world, which is true, but also seems to be one of many disparate and disconnected arguments that they use to justify this, which get interchanged at random.
[00:08:38]  Also, depending on which member of the administration that you're asking and which day it is and which way the headwinds are blowing.
[00:08:44]  So I can accept that terrorists are bad because terrorists go around the world blowing stuff up and blowing people up.
[00:08:49]  Like, you know, school kids, that kind of thing.
[00:08:53]  So I accept that's bad.
[00:08:54]  And I think I've got a bit closer to your explanation because you were explaining to me that the US had to go to war with Iran, otherwise Israel would go to a war with Iran.
[00:09:05]  And they had to go first because Israel wouldn't be able to go to war with Iran.
[00:09:09]  Yes.
[00:09:11]  Which is right.
[00:09:12]  You could just say no.
[00:09:14]  Okay.
[00:09:15]  Yes.
[00:09:16]  The other thing that sort of took me by surprise a bit is on my way back to the airport, I was thinking, oh, I'm going to be on the podcast tomorrow and what kind of things are likely to be topical.
[00:09:26]  And I was fairly convinced that, you know, it was going to be the Epstein files.
[00:09:30]  Yes.
[00:09:30]  Because that was a big thing when I left.
[00:09:32]  And there was clearly more to come out, more blowback to come from it.
[00:09:35]  More than 100%.
[00:09:36]  We covered some of it on the Bo show this morning.
[00:09:38]  Remember to tune in to breakfast with Bo every morning, Monday through Friday.
[00:09:42]  But I was thinking to myself, well, we must be right into the bit where people are getting arrested at high levels all over the US and UK and the rest of the Western world by now.
[00:09:51]  And I come back to discover that there's actually very little conversation, if any, about the Epstein.
[00:09:59]  Now, if anything, the blowback from the Iran war and the unpopularity of it amongst voters across the West has been used as a way for certain political actors in a similar way that Greenland was with European Eurocrats.
[00:10:16]  It's allowed them to build back some of their political capital, which had been hit otherwise by the Epstein stuff.
[00:10:22]  Like, we were talking about a month ago about how Keir Starmer was actually being hit quite hard by the Mandelson allegations and the association, and how some people, like McSweeney, had been taken out of the Labour Party.
[00:10:35]  We were saying, after everything, perhaps this will be what gets Starmer, some salacious sex scandal.
[00:10:40]  When I left, it looked like he was on the verge of quitting.
[00:10:43]  Yes.
[00:10:44]  Instead, Starmer took quite a fair stance against Donald Trump and said, we don't necessarily want to be sending people to die in another war.
[00:10:53]  Obviously, there is the aspect where Cyprus is being used as something of a stadium.
[00:10:58]  Yes, and other bases.
[00:11:00]  But that might have actually got him some political capital back with people who are unhappy with this war in the first place.
[00:11:08]  Well, there's one thing about the Epstein files that came out today.
[00:11:12]  Three Israeli-American brothers who had been mentioned in the files were today convicted of smuggling, drugging, and raping girls.
[00:11:23]  And they were mentioned in the files, but their names were redacted.
[00:11:26]  And now, I think yesterday or today, it's been exposed that, you know, they have been convicted.
[00:11:32]  But they were convicted for something unrelated to what they were doing with Epstein.
[00:11:37]  So, yes.
[00:11:38]  There's some things going on with the Epstein files.
[00:11:41]  There's been more releases on Peter Mandelson's role.
[00:11:44]  Okay.
[00:11:45]  Keir Starmer.
[00:11:46]  Hearings with Bill Clinton.
[00:11:47]  There were hearings with Bill Clinton asking him about his relationship with Epstein.
[00:11:53]  There were leaks about Mandelson just yesterday and today saying that actually Kier Starmer had a very good idea about the continuing nature of the relationship between Mandelson and Epstein.
[00:12:06]  But essentially people who were going to be arrested anyway have been arrested.
[00:12:10]  Yes.
[00:12:11]  But the effect of starting the war on Iran on behalf of Israel has had the happy side effect of shoring up the positions of the people in the Epstein files who were not going to be arrested anyway because they were not just a family.
[00:12:25]  That's just anti-Semitic.
[00:12:27]  Yes, I mean I did like this tweet from Khomeini and the fact that he is still posting even after being killed just lends weight to the theory that some of us had that he wasn't doing his own social media posting.
[00:12:42]  Yes, that might have been true.
[00:12:43]  Yes.
[00:12:44]  I mean he was a boomer.
[00:12:47]  He was literally a boomer.
[00:12:49]  Yes.
[00:12:49]  So born in the earlier 80s, wasn't he?
[00:12:54]  Oh yeah, so actually he might have been part of the silent generation.
[00:12:56]  Born a bit earlier.
[00:12:57]  But you can rest assured Ayatollah Khomeini is dead and was replaced by his son Ayatollah Khomeini.
[00:13:06]  Oh okay, and his force ghost is still tweeting bangers.
[00:13:09]  So very good, very good.
[00:13:10]  Well that's the thing is that Heg Seth himself came out and said that this isn't a regime change operation and then he looked straight into the camera and said with a great deal of self-assurance, but the regime has changed.
[00:13:22]  Yes, it's changed from Khomeini to Khomeini.
[00:13:25]  And in fact, the rest of the government apparatus was still there.
[00:13:30]  So this wasn't billed as a regime change operation at the beginning then?
[00:13:34]  Actually.
[00:13:35]  It wasn't it wasn't.
[00:13:37]  You're dealing with Schrodinger's war.
[00:13:38]  It's about everything that they say it is about and it's about nothing that they say it's about and they keep changing their minds as to what is this war actually about.
[00:13:48]  We still have no definitive win criteria except for Donald Trump coming out and saying unconditional surrender.
[00:13:55]  But then was it yesterday or this morning he came out and said, actually, we've already won the war.
[00:14:00]  He said it a couple of times now.
[00:14:01]  Yeah.
[00:14:01]  Oh, the war's already been won?
[00:14:03]  Well, yes.
[00:14:04]  So this bit here, the straight of Hormuz, that's open now, is it?
[00:14:07]  No, but the war has been won.
[00:14:09]  Right.
[00:14:10]  And there wasn't a regime change.
[00:14:12]  But the war has been won.
[00:14:13]  okay i mean the other thing i think about this is i mean there's a couple of points on this um I remember they wanted to change the regime in Syria.
[00:14:23]  Yes.
[00:14:23]  And let's just have a look at that.
[00:14:25]  So here we got Iran, which is a very big country, going to war with this very small country over here.
[00:14:32]  And then you've got this sort of, well, still relatively small country over here.
[00:14:37]  How long did it take them to change the regime in Syria?
[00:14:40]  It was over a decade, wasn't it?
[00:14:42]  It was just 13 years.
[00:14:44]  13 years.
[00:14:45]  So how did they think that they were going to change the regime in this considerably larger, considerably more prepared, considerably more mountainous, considerably more populous country in the space of my holiday?
[00:14:58]  Well, the war has been won.
[00:15:00]  Okay.
[00:15:01]  Well, let's not also forget, Firaz, remind us, when they changed the regime in Syria, who did they put in charge of that regime?
[00:15:08]  Al-Qaeda.
[00:15:12]  But Iran is the funders of global terrorism.
[00:15:15]  Yes, but they're the good guys.
[00:15:16]  But the Al-Qaeda are the good guys now.
[00:15:18]  They went to the White House and they went to the World Economic Forum.
[00:15:20]  Just to be clear, the ICAL did Al-Qaeda do 9-11.
[00:15:24]  Well, but they're the good guys now when they went to the World Economic Forum.
[00:15:28]  So says Howard Lutnik, who just happens to not be on the trade center that day.
[00:15:33]  Yes.
[00:15:34]  Are we talking about the same jihadis who make a point of killing as many Christians as possible whenever they can?
[00:15:40]  They've moderated, it seems.
[00:15:42]  So now they just kill a large number of Christians periodically.
[00:15:46]  These days they've been focusing on the Alawites and the Druze, but Christian's turn will come.
[00:15:53]  Right.
[00:15:53]  Okay.
[00:15:54]  They're planning to invade Lebanon, you see.
[00:15:56]  They're massing their soldiers along the border with Lebanon in order to invade Lebanon and help Israel clear out Hezbollah.
[00:16:08]  Right.
[00:16:08]  To be replaced with who?
[00:16:10]  Al-Qaeda.
[00:16:13]  Oh, and also, just randomly, there was a Wall Street Journal article about maybe targeting Turkey next.
[00:16:19]  Well, yes, Turkey has become the next Iran officials are saying.
[00:16:23]  Turkey's on the other side.
[00:16:26]  Yes.
[00:16:27]  Because you've always been incredibly cynical about this.
[00:16:29]  I could say that, I don't know, I pick a certain country in this region.
[00:16:34]  I draw a circle around it.
[00:16:35]  Right.
[00:16:36]  And that's the sort of target list.
[00:16:38]  Yes.
[00:16:42]  And how is this American first?
[00:16:47]  That's an anti-Semitic question.
[00:16:49]  Right.
[00:16:51]  Because I've got a theory on this.
[00:16:54]  It's probably an anti-Semitic theory.
[00:16:57]  It probably is, actually, but you know how...
[00:17:00]  This isn't...
[00:17:02]  I mean, this shouldn't be funny, but there is a massive element of farce to the whole thing.
[00:17:06]  Yes, yes.
[00:17:07]  Because of how incompetent, disorganized, unpopular even within different factions of the regime it seems to be.
[00:17:15]  There are many parts of the regime outside of the White House that don't seem to have been on board with this.
[00:17:23]  Well, I mean, with Iraq, you had the full cooperation of Britain at the time, a lot of other European countries, whereas European countries, mainly because they seem to be still preoccupied with Ukraine, just don't want anything to do with this.
[00:17:36]  Yeah, I'll come back to my theory, but all this stuff about containing Iran, I can't help but think that that was Iraq's job.
[00:17:44]  Wasn't it once the case that Iraq and Iran didn't get on, and they basically spent all of their time constraining each other?

=== Iran As Regional Hegemon (02:20) ===

[00:17:52]  And then we came along and took out Iraq, which left Iran as the strong player.
[00:17:57]  And that's why we're having to basically go to war with them because Iraq is no longer the counterweight to them because we'd already gone to war with Iraq.
[00:18:04]  Well, exactly.
[00:18:05]  And it's sort of important to just mention a couple of details here.
[00:18:10]  In the 90s, before the Iraq war, the Iranians tried to reach out to the Americans.
[00:18:16]  And what they did was they gave a major oil contract to CONOCO in the hope that bringing in American oil companies would sort of help relations with the United States.
[00:18:27]  Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Epstein's friend, sanctioned Iran because they dared give an American company a major oil contract.
[00:18:38]  And then in 2001, before the Afghanistan invasion, the Iranians reach out to the United States and literally give them the entire order of battle of all of the Taliban everywhere in Afghanistan.
[00:18:52]  And that then became the actual military plan that the Americans used to bomb the Taliban.
[00:19:01]  And they had their allies in the Northern Alliance that sort of were the main enemies of the Taliban, who were allied with Iran.
[00:19:09]  They sort of helped the Americans work with them.
[00:19:12]  And that was how the Taliban was cleared out.
[00:19:16]  So the Iranians were saying, look, can we please come to terms with you?
[00:19:23]  And that's why in 2002, George Bush said that the Iranians were part of the Axis of Evil.
[00:19:28]  Okay.
[00:19:29]  Well, there was also the 1996 Clean Break document written by people like Richard Pearl, I believe in collaboration with Benjamin Netanyahu himself for an Israeli think tank that laid out the list of countries and plan for establishing a greater regional hegemony of Israel within the region that laid out the list of countries that included Iraq,
[00:19:51]  Syria, all of the ones that you'd expect with Iran kind of being considered the jewel in the crown being the actual regional, well, the dominant regional hegemon at the time.
[00:20:02]  And of course, people involved in that, of course, you've got Benjamin Netanyahu in charge of Israel at the moment and Richard Pearl later.
[00:20:08]  Well, Benjamin Netanyahu is in charge of Israel.
[00:20:11]  Just Israel.

=== Epstein Files And Diplomatic Oddities (02:18) ===

[00:20:13]  Well.
[00:20:13]  Well, Richard Pearl, who was one of the co-authors, I think the lead author on that document, then went on to have a very important advisory role within George W. Bush's administration and was featured in the meetings on the 12th of September 2001, the day after 9-11, where they all went into a meeting about how they need to target Afghanistan.
[00:20:35]  And then everybody was very surprised when at the end of the meeting they'd all decided that they need to go to war with Iraq.
[00:20:41]  Okay.
[00:20:41]  And then Wesley Clark confirms that actually the plan has become to target Libya, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, and Iran, seven countries in five years.
[00:20:56]  It didn't happen that way.
[00:20:58]  Instead, it's these countries have been targeted over 20 years.
[00:21:02]  They've all been.
[00:21:03]  But going to Harry's Netanyahu point, I mean, who were the key advisors on this around Trump?
[00:21:10]  And do they have any Netanyahu connections?
[00:21:12]  Well, there's Jared Kushner.
[00:21:15]  Yes.
[00:21:16]  Netanyahu used to sleep in his bed when he was a child because when he'd visit the Kushner family home.
[00:21:23]  Was Jared Kushner in it?
[00:21:24]  No, Jared would have to give up his bed.
[00:21:27]  I see.
[00:21:27]  And Netanyahu would sleep in his bedroom, essentially.
[00:21:30]  Okay, so they're quite close family friends then.
[00:21:32]  Yes.
[00:21:33]  Okay.
[00:21:34]  And Kushner is responsible for the negotiations with Russia and alongside Steve Witkoff.
[00:21:42]  By the way, even when that was first announced, that just seemed like a completely bizarre pair of people to throw into diplomatic international relations.
[00:21:49]  But isn't Lutnik the key guy on this?
[00:21:53]  Lutnik is the Secretary of Commerce, and he's been in a very deep relationship with Epstein.
[00:22:01]  Right.
[00:22:02]  He's mentioned in the Epstein files as well.
[00:22:04]  Well, he lived next door to Epstein.
[00:22:06]  Didn't he buy his mansion for $10?
[00:22:09]  Probably.
[00:22:10]  I can't confirm that for certain.
[00:22:11]  I do remember the interview where it came out when he was asked about living next door to Epstein and then said, oh, I visited once.
[00:22:19]  He described to me that he would get massages on this massage table that it was in the middle of his house.
[00:22:24]  And me and my wife, we decided never to ever go there again on the spot.
[00:22:28]  We thought this guy was a big creep.
[00:22:29]  After buying a mansion off him for $10.

=== Cutting Off The End (15:32) ===

[00:22:31]  Um...
[00:22:32]  Well, this is when they were living next door.
[00:22:33]  I don't know if that was who was purchased from him.
[00:22:36]  And then, of course, in the Epstein file document releases, it came out that they were in.
[00:22:40]  So shall I outline my theory, which definitely isn't an anti-Semitic theory?
[00:22:44]  But you know how on the right, for whatever it was, for 20 years, you couldn't have a conversation about anything without basically being shut up by people saying that's racist.
[00:22:56]  Yes.
[00:22:56]  And then you had to shut up.
[00:22:57]  Yes.
[00:22:58]  And eventually we discovered that the only way that we could possibly have a conversation about anything is when they called you a racist, you just had to say, I don't care.
[00:23:07]  And you just kind of got on with whatever it is you wanted to say.
[00:23:10]  Yes.
[00:23:11]  It kind of feels like we're getting a bit close to that about being called an anti-Semite.
[00:23:16]  Yeah, this is one of the ways that they shut down Pat Buchanan for a very long time.
[00:23:20]  Lot of the stuff that I'm talking about and that I'm referring to can be found in a lot of the books that Pat Buchanan was writing around the early 2000s, such as Where the Right Went Wrong, where he discusses the neocon takeover of the Republican Party.
[00:23:34]  So we got this, we got this, you know, this Strait of Hormuz, which apparently, despite the war being won, as you say, that's still closed down.
[00:23:44]  And it's only 33, was it 33 kilometers wide?
[00:23:48]  But the shipping lanes, the bit you can actually get ships, are only three kilometers wide in each direction.
[00:23:52]  Yes.
[00:23:53]  So it's not that difficult in order to try and stop it.
[00:23:56]  And as a result, oil prices have been a little bit, should we say, spicy.
[00:24:02]  Yes, you could say that.
[00:24:04]  You could say that.
[00:24:05]  That's the one day's thing.
[00:24:06]  Let's put that on the year.
[00:24:11]  It's cutting off the end from our point of view.
[00:24:13]  Oh, brilliant.
[00:24:14]  That's helpful.
[00:24:16]  Wonder the one month does it a bit better.
[00:24:19]  There we go.
[00:24:20]  I mean, it's still cutting it off, but you kind of see the point I'm making.
[00:24:22]  It's heading off.
[00:24:24]  There we are.
[00:24:25]  Heading off to the over $100 per barrel.
[00:24:30]  And something like 20% of the world's oil goes through this straight.
[00:24:33]  25% of the liquid natural gas goes through it.
[00:24:36]  Yes.
[00:24:37]  And of course, because it's a global market, even though it's mainly servicing China and Asia, this straight, a 20% reduction in capacity does not mean prices go up 20%.
[00:24:49]  In fact, it means that they could go up quite considerably more than that.
[00:24:51]  I mean, they already have, as a tragically, a diesel car driver.
[00:24:56]  Yes.
[00:24:57]  Prices for diesel in this country have already skyrocketed.
[00:25:00]  Yes.
[00:25:00]  Well, I mean, the 1973, I think, oil embargo was a 7% reduction in global capacity, and that resulted in prices going up 300%.
[00:25:08]  And the 1979 Iranian revolution, that was only a 5% reduction, and that was 150% increase.
[00:25:16]  And then the 1990 Gulf War, that was only a 4% reduction in oil capacity, and that was 100% increase.
[00:25:22]  And now we're looking at 20% increase.
[00:25:25]  So what you're saying is that this could get much worse.
[00:25:29]  Well, considerably worse.
[00:25:30]  I mean, I vaguely remember the formula for calculating price differences.
[00:25:33]  Dan, the war has been won.
[00:25:36]  Well, yeah, but the strait is still closed.
[00:25:38]  Are you calling Trump a liar?
[00:25:40]  Well, I'm a bit confused because I haven't really had a satisfactory explanation yet as to why we went into the war and how it's for regime change first.
[00:25:50]  But it's not for regime change.
[00:25:51]  Yes.
[00:25:52]  It's to stop the nuclear program, which has already been obliterated.
[00:25:56]  Yes.
[00:25:57]  And actually, it's because the ballistic missiles proved to be very effective.
[00:26:02]  Right.
[00:26:02]  And the Israelis wanted to destroy those.
[00:26:06]  So they got the Americans to go to war on their behalf.
[00:26:09]  Which has now led to a lot of missiles being used to bomb American Gulf State allies to let them know that America's not maybe the greatest ally for you all to have.
[00:26:19]  Yes.
[00:26:20]  I mean, there's some interesting comments.
[00:26:21]  I mean, I'll just sort of close up.
[00:26:23]  There's some interesting comments coming from the chat.
[00:26:24]  Some people are saying, oh, you've got to free Iran from Islamic terror as if you got rid of when Libya went.
[00:26:33]  Yes.
[00:26:34]  Gaddafi was the first guy to fight al-Qaeda.
[00:26:37]  People forget that Gaddafi was the first guy to fight al-Qaeda.
[00:26:41]  Yes.
[00:26:42]  And they got rid of him.
[00:26:44]  And now Al-Qaeda runs pretty big parts of Libya.
[00:26:47]  I mean, I appreciate that Iran is a bit oppressive.
[00:26:51]  But it's not completely head-banging.
[00:26:53]  I mean, there are actually Christian churches and even synagogues in Tehran.
[00:26:58]  Yes.
[00:26:59]  I mean, it could get a hell of a lot worse than it currently is.
[00:27:02]  Yes.
[00:27:03]  Other people have been saying, well, Iran, they literally say deaf to America, and that's all the reason you need.
[00:27:10]  I mean, I, for one, can't think of any reason why they would have any reason to be upset with the people who blew up a school full of children.
[00:27:17]  Well, American universities are full of people who say death to America.
[00:27:21]  Well, yeah.
[00:27:22]  And they import more, and the American universities themselves teach them to say death to America.
[00:27:27]  I mean, it it isn't there.
[00:27:30]  I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, they're coming back and saying a bit oppressive.
[00:27:32]  Well, yeah, I mean, it is oppressive, but I mean, we live in a country where more people get arrested in this country for things that they say proportionally than ever got arrested for what they say in the USSR.
[00:27:43]  Yes.
[00:27:44]  In America, you have your kids taken off you if you don't agree with them being trans at school.
[00:27:50]  And yet, at the same time, if America said, we're going to liberate you, Britain, from your oppressive regime, and the first thing that they did was volley a bunch of missiles at school children, I would say, I do not want your liberation, please.
[00:28:08]  Yes, I mean, if it was targeted directly on Whitehall, I might have to think about that.
[00:28:12]  But if it was schools, yeah, that would be an issue.
[00:28:17]  And just my sort of final point.
[00:28:19]  I mean, isn't this, I mean, not that I've been able to properly understand why we did it in the first place, but I did look up some of the objectives, and it seems to have achieved the direct opposite of every single objective that it wanted, like stability in the Middle East and so on.
[00:28:33]  I mean, aren't we just in the transition between who can provide better security for the region if you're a regional partner?
[00:28:40]  Because it seems like if you stick with America, well, they're going to start wars on behalf of Israel, and that's going to mean that you can't ship your oil out, and if you can't ship your oil out, you can't get your imports back in again.
[00:28:53]  Well, if you want to be very, very cynical.
[00:28:56]  Yes.
[00:28:57]  Basically, the Americans want these assets destroyed so that they can build their own in Venezuela and in Canada and in the United States.
[00:29:05]  Ah, now that does start to make more sense to me.
[00:29:08]  Because that is the only coherent explanation I've heard so far.
[00:29:11]  But on the personnel side, and how the personnel were convinced, you can't forget Ellison and Edelson backing Rubio.
[00:29:21]  You can't forget Deal backing Vance.
[00:29:24]  And you can't forget Trump saying in the Israeli Knesset that he recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and gave them the Golan Heights because the Edelsons paid him.
[00:29:34]  So let's just go.
[00:29:36]  Very finally, let's just go with that slightly conspiratorial angle because for whatever else it might be, it is coherent.
[00:29:44]  And say, okay, let's say we understand that we're in a great power situation where regional control is transitioning over to China as opposed to the US.
[00:29:54]  The US is making the calculation that it basically needs to refocus on South America and Western Europe as its core zone of influence.
[00:30:03]  If it understands it's going to have to leave the area, does it want to leave it in a A1 condition?
[00:30:10]  Or does it want to leave it in a degraded state before China gets it anyway?
[00:30:14]  Well, the problem is that this drives China to do things like build pipelines even more into Central Asia and to get more coal and nuclear out of Central Asia.
[00:30:28]  And that makes it an even bigger landmass power.
[00:30:32]  Yes.
[00:30:33]  So even that argument, which has been presented and, okay, it's a potential coherent argument, it's not that coherent.
[00:30:42]  But at the same time as well, the regional stability and the kind of deal that's being presented to the Gulf states who've been aligned with America for so long are not the only regional partners that are being affected by this.
[00:30:54]  Already we're seeing Thad missile systems being moved from South Korea.
[00:30:57]  And the question there is, is America going to be able to continue to help defend South Korea when they've got the North right on their doorstep?
[00:31:05]  Well, quite.
[00:31:06]  What it reminds me of, it's not one for one, but what it reminds me of is During the Second World War, the British Empire pulling out a lot of its colonial resources from places like Singapore and bringing them over to North Africa so that they could help to support the war effort against mainland Europe, right?
[00:31:27]  And what ends up happening after that?
[00:31:28]  Well, you get a lot of places either striking out on their own or deciding to renegotiate deals with other geopolitical large superpower partners.
[00:31:37]  Yes.
[00:31:37]  Because they realize, hold up, these guys haven't got our best interests in mind.
[00:31:42]  We might be better off with these people.
[00:31:44]  Okay, well, thank you, gentlemen.
[00:31:46]  I'll wrap up this segment there.
[00:31:47]  I'm sure you are now as clear as I am as to why we went to war.
[00:31:52]  Yes, glad we could help.
[00:31:53]  We've got plenty of rumble rants from that if you'd like to read of them.
[00:31:59]  You like that.
[00:32:01]  Let's have a look.
[00:32:03]  Cassandra says, reform bots on Twitter, stop splitting the right wing and focusing on meaningless issues like demographic replacement and English identity.
[00:32:11]  We've got a country to save from the loony left.
[00:32:14]  Yes, and only the Boris Johnson government again can help us do that.
[00:32:19]  Sigil says, you're ignoring the most obvious answer.
[00:32:22]  There is no war.
[00:32:24]  There is no war in Iran.
[00:32:27]  The Pentagon even said it's a special operation like Russia in Ukraine.
[00:32:31]  Okay, well, that helps.
[00:32:32]  They called it a special combat operation, not a special military operation, because that was taken.
[00:32:36]  Yeah, but when Donald Trump announced this, he did literally say we're going to war.
[00:32:40]  Shh.
[00:32:43]  JDK says, does Fras think the US should invade Canada because they dared do a deal with China that reduces terrorism.
[00:32:49]  That's never my argument, but okay.
[00:32:51]  Dwight says the easiest way to answer your question, Dan, is to copy and paste all of the justifications they used to invade Iraq and just change the Q to an N.
[00:33:01]  Yes.
[00:33:02]  I haven't heard chemical weapons mentioned this time, but I suppose they're similar.
[00:33:06]  And then we've got Joe Hanna says, hey, Dan, sorry you didn't do better in Hope Not Hate rankings.
[00:33:14]  You really seemed like you have a solid effort over the last year.
[00:33:17]  Yes, if anyone from Hope Not Hate is watching, I'm literally willing to buy a full page in the next edition.
[00:33:22]  Reach out to me and just give me your rates.
[00:33:25]  Hope not hate funded by Lotus Eaters.
[00:33:29]  Hilarious.
[00:33:30]  But if it's the only way I can get in, I mean, you've got to do what you've got to do.
[00:33:33]  And Hapsification says, let's not forget Cuba as a potential next target.
[00:33:36]  Ah, yes.
[00:33:39]  So let's take this war discussion to a slightly more, I hate to say it, but slightly more boring and serious direction.
[00:33:48]  And the starting point here is Catholic just war theory.
[00:33:51]  What do Christians actually think about what justifies a war and when is war legitimate?
[00:33:57]  And there are several conditions here.
[00:34:00]  Having a just cause, the reason for the war should be logical and coherent as opposed to what we just heard.
[00:34:08]  Yes.
[00:34:10]  Being a last resort, you can't go to war when there are other options that might, you know, relieve us of that evil.
[00:34:17]  Being declared by a proper authority, you can't just sort of declare that I'm waging war against the French, tempting as it might be, and go and try another Normandy invasion.
[00:34:29]  It's supposed to be congressional, isn't it?
[00:34:32]  Let's not get into those details.
[00:34:33]  Right.
[00:34:34]  Yes.
[00:34:36]  Possessing right intention.
[00:34:38]  You can't go to war just because you're greedy, or just because you want to reconfigure the global economy, or just because you want more oil.
[00:34:47]  You have to have a reasonable chance of success.
[00:34:50]  So if you're going to go to war and you're absolutely certain that you're going to be totally annihilated, then you need to find another way of solving the problem.
[00:35:00]  Also, it suggests you've got to have clear objectives going in.
[00:35:02]  Well, yes, obviously.
[00:35:07]  And the ends and means being proportionate.
[00:35:11]  If you're trying to kill a combatant, you can't kill 70 civilians with them.
[00:35:18]  And you have to separate between combatants and non-combatants.
[00:35:23]  These are the rules of war as detailed in Catholic thinking.
[00:35:27]  And really, they've informed Christian thinking to a huge extent.
[00:35:31]  So I have a document here from Britain explaining what laws apply in armed conflict.
[00:35:41]  And if you go through it, it's more or less the same thing, but less philosophical.
[00:35:47]  You have to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.
[00:35:50]  You can't use, you know, a nuclear weapon when a bullet would suffice.
[00:35:56]  You have to protect the injured.
[00:35:59]  You can't just kill all of the wounded, etc., etc. etc.
[00:36:04]  And this is the way in which Christian armies have traditionally fought.
[00:36:10]  There was obviously the exception of World War II, and there could be all kinds of arguments, but the arguments are all framed in Christian logic.
[00:36:21]  As in whether or not it was right to nuke Japan is framed as would this have spared more lives rather than should we have nuked every single Japanese city.
[00:36:33]  That's how the argument has always been presented.
[00:36:35]  And that is how war is always been argued.
[00:36:40]  And then it goes further.
[00:36:41]  In the catechism of the Catholic Church, which I have right here, which discusses war, firstly, it says that war should be avoided because God commands us to avoid the destruction of human life.
[00:36:58]  And it says that all citizens and governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war.
[00:37:05]  This is a moral duty to avoid war.
[00:37:09]  However, as long as the danger of war persists and there is no international authority with the necessary competence and power, governments cannot be denied the right to lawful self-defense once all peace efforts have failed.
[00:37:25]  And that's a critical phrasing here.
[00:37:28]  The peace efforts must have genuinely failed for war to actually be just.
[00:37:35]  So did the peace efforts in relation to Iran actually fail?
[00:37:40]  Well, ostensibly, this war is about Iran's possible acquisition of a nuclear weapon and preventing that.
[00:37:48]  And to prevent that outcome and to prevent that war, the Americans, as they've done numerous times in the past, enlisted the Omanis to act as mediators between them and the Iranians and to find a way to avoid conflict.

=== Moral Limiting Factors In War (15:08) ===

[00:38:03]  And here the Omani foreign minister, Badr al-Busaidi, gave an interview to CBS in which he explained a few things about what had been achieved in negotiations already.
[00:38:18]  And he says, the single most important achievement, I believe, is the agreement that Iran will never ever have nuclear material that will create a bomb.
[00:38:30]  This is a big achievement.
[00:38:32]  This is something that is not in the old deal that was negotiated during President Obama's time.
[00:38:37]  And he would know because it was the Omanis who mediated that deal.
[00:38:43]  It really makes the enrichment argument less relevant because now we are talking about zero stockpiling.
[00:38:51]  And that is very important because if you cannot stockpile material that is enriched, then there is no way you can actually create a bomb, whether you enrich or don't enrich.
[00:39:02]  So what the Omanis who were mediating this deal, who were basically working with Witkoff and Kushner on the American side and with the Iranian nuclear team on the other side, were saying before the war began, a day before the war began, was that the main issue, Iran's ability to acquire nuclear weapons, had in fact been resolved.
[00:39:29]  So slightly off topic, but something that leaps out at me.
[00:39:32]  Surely Iran would have acquired nuclear weapons when the USSR fell.
[00:39:36]  They didn't.
[00:39:38]  The American intelligence assessments say that the Iranian weaponization program was stopped in 2003.
[00:39:46]  And that's been the consistent position of various national intelligence assessments that have come out of the United States, including during Trump's term.
[00:39:57]  Okay.
[00:39:58]  One of the other things that needs to be pointed out here that I don't hear spoken about as much as it should with this is that what we are saying here is that the US and Iran were in negotiated dealings when they attacked.
[00:40:10]  This is the same thing that happened last year when Israel first bombed Iran and set off the 12-day war is that Iran was in dealings with the US.
[00:40:23]  Both of these were sneak attacks done two years in a row.
[00:40:27]  And what this means is that Iran last year when the US and Israel backed off said, okay, we will back off as well and we may be able to resume negotiations, which they did.
[00:40:43]  Now it's done again, and not only have they sneak attacked them again, they also killed their religious leader in the process of doing so.
[00:40:52]  If they want an off-ramp, if Donald Trump wants to pull back and say, let's go back to negotiations, it's not happening.
[00:41:01]  They've done it two years in a row.
[00:41:03]  Iran, and this will have signaled to other people in the region, other leaders in the region, now know that U.S. negotiations are all done in bad faith, simply to buy time for the staging of further sneak attacks.
[00:41:18]  And just to add to that point, when Trump offered a peace deal to Hamas, Hamas' leadership went and met in Qatar, and then the Americans allowed the Israelis to bomb Qatar to try to kill the negotiators.
[00:41:35]  This is just the way that America is known to operate in the region now.
[00:41:39]  And this wasn't always the case.
[00:41:41]  And this is new.
[00:41:43]  This was not always the case.
[00:41:45]  There were times where countries in the region believed that they could trust American mediation.
[00:41:52]  To be fair to any Americans, the Europeans are exactly the same at this point.
[00:41:56]  Yes.
[00:41:57]  They just lack the capabilities to do the strikes most of the time.
[00:41:59]  But I mean, the way they've treated other countries has been exactly the same.
[00:42:03]  So we are in this situation where, you know, war must be avoided, and it could have been avoided, and it was launched anyway.
[00:42:13]  So just in terms of the basic legitimacy of a war, it has to be a last resort.
[00:42:22]  And it has to be for a just cause.
[00:42:24]  And if you can't actually explain the cause of the war, you can't have a just cause.
[00:42:31]  But when there is war, there are still rules about the conduct of war.
[00:42:37]  There are still a lot of rules in Catholic teaching about how war should be conducted.
[00:42:42]  The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave and certain.
[00:42:49]  The Iranians building weapons in their own country doesn't really quite sort of apply there.
[00:42:54]  And they can be deterred.
[00:42:59]  The next point is for a war to be legitimate, all other means of putting an end to the threat from the enemy, that is, must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective.
[00:43:10]  Nobody has shown that deterrence is ineffective.
[00:43:12]  Deterrence works.
[00:43:14]  So even if the Iranians did acquire a nuclear weapon, they can be deterred.
[00:43:19]  And they were on the verge of surrendering any possible pathway, however theoretical, to acquiring a nuclear weapon.
[00:43:27]  There must be serious prospects of success.
[00:43:30]  If your aim is to overthrow the regime, it doesn't get done from the air.
[00:43:36]  Regime change never works from the air.
[00:43:39]  It didn't work on Serbia.
[00:43:41]  It didn't work on Iraq in the Zaddam's case.
[00:43:45]  Just continually bombing Germany over and over and over again didn't work in Germany.
[00:43:50]  They had to have a ground invasion from the east of the Soviets.
[00:43:53]  Exactly.
[00:43:54]  The only one that you could argue it worked on is Japan.
[00:43:57]  Yes.
[00:43:57]  That is the only time in history I can think of where a bombing campaign secured a surrender.
[00:44:05]  Yes.
[00:44:05]  I mean, they were also in the process of a grand invasion in the surrounding islands and regions, though.
[00:44:10]  Well, yeah, and they were also not just from the Americans, but from the Soviets coming from Manchuria as well.
[00:44:14]  So there were a number of different factors, but you can grant maybe Japan.
[00:44:19]  Maybe.
[00:44:19]  Maybe.
[00:44:21]  The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated, which means that the corollary, the power of modern means of destruction, weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.
[00:44:35]  As in, you can't just erase cities.
[00:44:39]  And these are the elements that constitute just war theory.
[00:44:44]  And always there should be a distinction between combatants and non-combatants.
[00:44:50]  So gay schools, for example.
[00:44:51]  Say again?
[00:44:52]  Gael schools, for example.
[00:44:53]  They would be a non-combatant.
[00:44:55]  They would not be recognized as a legitimate target, according to these crazy Catholics.
[00:44:59]  Okay, and so targeting missile sites, that would be fine, but desalination plants and cutting off the water supply to civilians, that would be bad.
[00:45:07]  Precisely.
[00:45:08]  Yes.
[00:45:08]  Okay.
[00:45:08]  Precisely.
[00:45:09]  You could even maybe say that those are terror methods.
[00:45:13]  Yes.
[00:45:14]  In fact, I mean, just one of the things that I have seen is a number of people who are very supportive of this kind of U.S. action resort back to some kind of flimsy, one-dimensional, might-makes right argumentation, which, first of all, I would just say you can call me a moralist.
[00:45:33]  You can say that I'm an idealist.
[00:45:35]  Is no way for a ruling hegemonic superpower to be able to contextualize its own actions.
[00:45:41]  You need some kind of moral limiting factor on national leaders if you don't want them to just go around the world committing atrocities for no reason.
[00:45:49]  Exactly.
[00:45:50]  Which is one of the positions the Pope used to hold within Europe, for instance.
[00:45:55]  But secondly, I see this as completely bad faith in the first place, because when Iran starts to hit back and when Iran is doing things within its own borders to its own citizens, that's then used as Cassus Belly for why we need to go in the first place.
[00:46:11]  Rights don't matter until it's our enemies doing something bad about rights, and then they do matter, and that's why we need to.
[00:46:20]  They don't matter domestically.
[00:46:21]  They only matter in foreign countries.
[00:46:24]  Yeah.
[00:46:25]  It's a completely bad faith, contradictory argument, and they will only use it to justify what they're doing against you.
[00:46:32]  Exactly.
[00:46:33]  And so, in terms of the details of the conduct of the war, you had basically the Americans or the Israelis bombing this place, Ferdosi Square, which has a nice statue of the poet Ferdosi, but it also has a bunch of banks and money changers.
[00:46:52]  And the money changer is you have to have them because the Iranian currency keeps collapsing.
[00:46:58]  But these are not exactly a military target.
[00:47:01]  This doesn't serve to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.
[00:47:05]  I won't show you the footage.
[00:47:07]  There's a dead man in there.
[00:47:09]  You don't want to see it.
[00:47:10]  But this is a sort of square that doesn't have clear military value.
[00:47:16]  And the people who did this to Gaza, and I'll let the video run while we speak.
[00:47:24]  The people who erased Gaza in this way clearly don't make distinctions between civilians and non-civilians.
[00:47:32]  Mind you, obviously, the people who conducted the 7 October attack did not distinguish between civilians and non-civilians.
[00:47:40]  Yeah, it just seems to be an overriding morality of a lot of the people within this region of the world.
[00:47:45]  Precisely, precisely.
[00:47:47]  I mean, but similarly, there was that recent notorious Piers Morgan clip where I think it was a former head of the IDF or something was asked, Well, you're always justifying this on the basis of Hamas and other terror groups using civilians as meat shields.
[00:48:02]  Where are the IDF bases?
[00:48:04]  Where are the IDF headquarters?
[00:48:06]  And he said, Oh, we've nestled them within civilian areas.
[00:48:09]  They're not nestled off in some kind of strategic zone where it's all military and IDF bases.
[00:48:14]  They've put them in civilian areas as well.
[00:48:16]  So, again, this seems to just be like local tactics.
[00:48:19]  So, basically, the Kiriyat or the Kiriya, which is the headquarters of the Israeli military, the Unit 8200, all of these assets are fully within Tel Aviv and with all kinds of civilian assets around them.
[00:48:36]  And that is where they're placed.
[00:48:39]  And what the church says is that the church and human reason both assert the permanent validity of moral law during armed conflict.
[00:48:49]  The mere fact that war has regrettably broken out does not mean that everything becomes licit within the warring parties.
[00:48:57]  And what we see in the Middle East is that neither side actually abides by this.
[00:49:02]  Hamas does hide its weapons in civilian areas, and it does hide its combatants and its leadership in hospitals.
[00:49:10]  They do that.
[00:49:12]  And the Israelis don't actually care about only targeting military assets.
[00:49:18]  They target civilian areas brutally, and so did Hamas.
[00:49:24]  And we saw basically squares being bombed in Iran that have no military value, but we also saw the Iranians using cluster missiles that, by their very definition, cannot be aimed and make no distinction between civilian targets and military targets.
[00:49:44]  And the objective there is just to damage as much of central Tel Aviv as possible.
[00:49:51]  Killing who cares how many innocents at the same time from the Iranian perspective.
[00:49:55]  Nobody cares.
[00:49:56]  From the Iranian perspective, they don't care.
[00:49:59]  The thing is, I mean, even the Second World War was a uniquely brutal war, but even during that, there were still rules of conflict and treatment towards non-combatants.
[00:50:08]  Like when you had the American invasion of Italy, for instance, there were a number of very high-profile court-martials of American soldiers who were hanged because they had raped Italian women who were non-combatants.
[00:50:23]  Famously, Emmett Till's father, Louis Till, was one of the men who had been hanged for raping, I believe, two Italian women.
[00:50:31]  So even during the most brutal war that we can think of in recent history, there were still rules applied to the conduct of soldiers towards non-combatants.
[00:50:41]  But when you're dealing with this kind of long-range bombing wars that we're seeing here, all of a sudden, anything like that flies.
[00:50:49]  Anything goes.
[00:50:49]  Anything goes.
[00:50:51]  And here we see the Israelis blowing up storage tanks, claiming that these are used by the IRGC, as if you could have a modern economy without fuel storage and fuel refining.
[00:51:05]  And we see the Iranians running around bombing all kinds of civilian assets in the Gulf.
[00:51:12]  I mean, the whole Iranian tactic of closing off energy is intended to cause pain to non-combatants and make them suffer to use that as a political pressure test.
[00:51:22]  And then they've gone after desalination plants in the whole region, haven't they?
[00:51:25]  They hit with drones two desalination plants to threaten, essentially, which is an illegitimate threat under any kind of Christian morality.
[00:51:36]  And the Israelis have blown up one of their desalination plants.
[00:51:42]  You're saying both sides are, they have crossed the line, but they're still showing an element of restraint.
[00:51:48]  There's still an element of restraint.
[00:51:49]  There's still an element of restraint.
[00:51:51]  This could be much worse.
[00:51:53]  But they are both sort of normalizing the crossing of lines.
[00:51:57]  And they are both targeting civilians.
[00:51:59]  And here you see the streets in Tehran literally on fire because of one of the attacks.
[00:52:06]  And there is no way of saying this is legitimate, just as there is no way of saying that Iranians lobbying cluster munitions at Tel Aviv is legitimate.
[00:52:15]  And just as you can't say that the Iranians blowing up refineries in Bahrain is legitimate, as we see here.
[00:52:21]  Like the point that I'm trying to lead towards is that neither side has any morality that Western armies would recognize.
[00:52:34]  Neither side is operating in a way that would be recognized as acceptable from a Christian moral framework.
[00:52:41]  Because that's Western armies, whether you like it or not, are operating on a Christian moral framework.
[00:52:47]  problem i often find with the desert people in general is that they bloody well deserve each other i don't want to say that but i know i'm being a bit harsh but it kind of leads me to my earlier thought which is and that's why we shouldn't be involved in this stuff Quite.
[00:53:02]  Exactly.
[00:53:03]  Exactly.
[00:53:04]  And so you have people in Tehran who were saying, yes, we actually did hope for regime change, but they're bombing us.

=== Christian Frameworks For Just War (03:44) ===

[00:53:11]  They're not bombing random regime officials.
[00:53:17]  They're bombing civilians.
[00:53:19]  And the last one here that I want to bring up, sorry, I just want to, for the sake of time, I just want to get to two points.
[00:53:25]  Here, you had people in Lebanon who had run away from the war.
[00:53:31]  They didn't find anywhere to stay, and they camped out on a beach.
[00:53:36]  And so what the Israelis did was bomb them there.
[00:53:40]  Clearly non-combatants, clearly civilians.
[00:53:43]  And the Israelis, one has to say, they developed something called the Dahi Doctrine, which is a military doctrine that says that they will destroy civilian infrastructure and homes and wipe them off the map and flatten them.
[00:54:00]  And then they labeled that a military doctrine.
[00:54:02]  That's just murder.
[00:54:04]  Yes.
[00:54:05]  They should target economic interests and the centers of civilian power that support the enemy.
[00:54:12]  And by saying that this is used to fight terrorism, they legitimize it.
[00:54:18]  This is official doctrine.
[00:54:19]  This is official doctrine.
[00:54:21]  This is like the Romans salting the fields.
[00:54:23]  Yes.
[00:54:23]  Poisoning the wells.
[00:54:25]  Yes.
[00:54:25]  But they only did that to Carthage.
[00:54:27]  They didn't do that all over.
[00:54:30]  And the Israelis are saying that this is exactly how wars should be fought.
[00:54:35]  And that this is good and moral because first they tell the civilians to evacuate.
[00:54:40]  But the civilians that do evacuate end up receiving this.
[00:54:45]  Literally getting bombed as they're sleeping in tents on the side of the road.
[00:54:54]  So, neither side here is and like there are a couple of more links detailing how the Israelis have developed this doctrine.
[00:55:01]  I won't bore you with them for the sake of time.
[00:55:04]  But now you're seeing Israeli military officials, former military officials, saying that they should apply this doctrine of flattening entire civilian areas to Tehran.
[00:55:16]  This one is saying that it should be done to Lebanon again, and this one is saying that it should be done to Tehran.
[00:55:22]  But I mean, there isn't a military objective here.
[00:55:24]  This is just we hate you people so much, we just want you all dead.
[00:55:27]  Well, yes, and the way that the Israelis fought the 1993 and 1996 wars in Lebanon was basically they said we can't beat Hezbollah on the ground, so what we're going to do is create a massive refugee crisis and kill huge numbers of people, and that'll put enough pressure on Lebanon to force Hezbollah to back down.
[00:55:47]  So, they've been using this tactic for quite some time.
[00:55:49]  They've been using this arguably since the siege of Beirut in 1982, arguably with the massacres that led to the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 in the War of Independence.
[00:56:03]  So, this is not morality that Christians would recognize, and this is not morality that Christians would support.
[00:56:10]  But this is exactly what's happening in this war.
[00:56:13]  Hezbollah is bombing civilian areas in Israel.
[00:56:15]  It's saying that it's retaliation against the Israeli bombing of civilian targets.
[00:56:20]  The Iranians aren't saying that.
[00:56:22]  They're just sort of lobbing missiles with cluster warheads into civilian areas.
[00:56:28]  The Israelis are saying they're going to flatten Tehran completely and began by attacking civilian targets.
[00:56:36]  This is a war that corrupts people's souls if they support it.
[00:56:40]  And if they support either side in it, this is the kind of war where if you pick a side, it rots your soul.
[00:56:48]  Don't.
[00:56:49]  You don't recognize their morality.
[00:56:51]  It isn't yours.
[00:56:52]  Yours is Christian morality.

=== Foreign Infiltration Concerns (15:12) ===

[00:56:56]  All right, we've got two rumble rants here.
[00:56:59]  First one, you can't use the Catholic just war theory here because none of the people in charge are Catholic.
[00:57:05]  They're using different just war theories.
[00:57:08]  That's true.
[00:57:09]  Cranky, if you can control a country's access to energy, you can control its government.
[00:57:13]  Energy-rich countries outside of the system, like Venezuela, Iran, and Russia, undermine that control.
[00:57:18]  Well, but you can't control everything.
[00:57:20]  I mean, this is the lesson of the Tower of Babel.
[00:57:23]  You can't control everything.
[00:57:25]  All right, so for this last segment, let's move away from the Middle East.
[00:57:30]  And yes, and let's go back to the sunny shores of Britain and talk about reform UK and an interesting new tactic that they're going to be trying to use to vet candidates that I will question how it will end up helping to save Britain, if that is even indeed the goal.
[00:57:50]  Now, I say this as somebody who has sat on the panel today who has been the victim himself of reform's somewhat spasmodic vetting process, would you say?
[00:58:02]  Oh, yeah.
[00:58:03]  So, me and Bo were candidates for reform before the last election.
[00:58:09]  And basically, they sort of pushed out the list of everybody to hope, not hate.
[00:58:15]  They would then go through everything they could find from us.
[00:58:19]  And in my case, they found a tweet the day after the Manchester Arena bombing where I said that these people should be deported.
[00:58:26]  And that was considered so heinous that I got a very sniffy cut-and-paste email saying that we don't want you all tight around here.
[00:58:33]  And Bo got chucked out for similar reasons for saying just standard things.
[00:58:38]  I believe with Bo, it was because of the fact that he'd made some jokes about Scotland.
[00:58:43]  Because, God forbid, an Englishman in Scotland have some banter.
[00:58:46]  Yes.
[00:58:47]  And because of the fact he had had the gall to write an article for the Mallard about how reform would implement its own mass deportation policy.
[00:58:56]  Well, they had quite a shopping list with Bo because he had been on the Lotus Eaters for a while.
[00:59:00]  But in my case, my policy actually turned up on page three of the reform manifesto come the election.
[00:59:06]  So the main problem is I was one inch to the right of Farage one day early.
[00:59:10]  Yes.
[00:59:10]  Well, reformers now deciding that they are going to go ahead and use MI5 to potentially vet some of their future candidates.
[00:59:18]  isn't confirmed yet but it is on the on the horizon and it is likely that it will happen and as i'm saying burying the lead here Didn't MI5 offer to vet their candidates?
[00:59:32]  Yes.
[00:59:33]  I will get to that as we go along.
[00:59:35]  But just to say, of course, that reform, as mentioned there, do have somewhat of a history of using dubious organisations to vet their candidates.
[00:59:43]  Now, what you're talking about was that the party back in 2024, they wanted a candidate for every Conservative candidate who would be standing as well.
[00:59:52]  But they had already by this point, and this was an article written in, what, April of 2024, had dropped 10 candidates who were reported to have made or liked racist, sexist, and homophobic comments on social media according to the standards of organisations like Hope Not Hate, because Richard Tice had released the candidates list for all of those standing in 2024.
[01:00:14]  And because they didn't have the internal infrastructure to be able to vet it themselves thoroughly, they left it to third-party organisations.
[01:00:23]  And of course, Bo was removed as the candidate for South Swindon after a Hope Not Hate investigation.
[01:00:29]  A number of other people were removed because of social media posts.
[01:00:33]  And I would assume that organisations like Hope Not Hate had a lot to do with removing them as well.
[01:00:38]  I mean, there was another guy, and I've had him on Brokenomics, and his thing is psychology, and he was actually working at Reform HQ.
[01:00:44]  And he had said something to the effect of that Hitler had an interesting psychological profile or something like that.
[01:00:52]  And they banned him.
[01:00:53]  They chucked him out of the party for anti-Semitism.
[01:00:55]  The guy's Jewish himself.
[01:00:57]  But I mean, if he didn't, then why are there so many books studying Hitler's psychology and why he did what he did?
[01:01:05]  What a bizarre thing.
[01:01:06]  It looked like they were just looking for any reason.
[01:01:07]  Probably, the likely reason was he associated with us.
[01:01:12]  No, we didn't know him at the time.
[01:01:14]  Did we really not?
[01:01:15]  No, we didn't know him at the time.
[01:01:16]  And I did meet, and me and Bo have had this conversation.
[01:01:18]  We met other reform candidates while we were doing our thing, and lots of them were just, I mean, I don't want to be rude, but I will be, paper candidates.
[01:01:27]  They're basically people who have no opinion outside of, I saw this on the news last night.
[01:01:33]  They can't articulate anything.
[01:01:36]  They're literally sort of blank slates.
[01:01:38]  They just get programmed in, programmed.
[01:01:40]  I mean, you had conversation with them as a conversation with the TV.
[01:01:44]  Right?
[01:01:45]  And those are the candidates that they actually want.
[01:01:48]  What they want is two or three people at the top who run everything, and then everyone else just lobby fodder with no opinion or no depth whatsoever.
[01:01:56]  Blank slates to tow the party line.
[01:01:57]  Exactly.
[01:01:58]  That is entirely what they want.
[01:01:59]  Because after this, and after they'd purged a number of people who were not towing the party line as well as they could, or having the gall to actually write an article explaining how they would achieve their party line, quite remarkably, right before this revelation, Richard Tice himself had posted an article written by Douglas Murray about the sinister tactics of hope, not hate, which just goes to show the...
[01:02:26]  They were using hope, not hate.
[01:02:28]  Yeah.
[01:02:28]  Yes.
[01:02:29]  Somewhat inconsistent and hypocritical there.
[01:02:32]  Of course, as well, at Gorton and Denton, he didn't do very well, but part of the party right now is Matt Goodwin, who has written previously about how to contain the right and written articles alongside Hope Not Hate director Nick Lowell's.
[01:02:49]  So that's an interesting connection.
[01:02:51]  Wasn't one of the first things that Matt Goodwin wrote, an article for Hope Not Hate explaining how you could infiltrate and subvert right-wing parties.
[01:02:59]  I think that's part of what this is.
[01:03:00]  It's the Chatham House document from voting to violence, new evidence on far-right supporters.
[01:03:05]  This was research done by Matt Goodwin in collaboration with a number of other people alongside Nick Lowell's.
[01:03:11]  There is a separate Chatham House document, which you can still find online, all talking about how to infiltrate and contain right-wing parties and movements in Britain.
[01:03:22]  It's lucky he's changed his mind since then.
[01:03:24]  It's quite remarkable, really.
[01:03:27]  Nigel, earlier on this year, just last month, after Rupert had announced that he was going to run Stand Restore as a party rather than just a political movement, had this to say about the reasons that he removed Rupert Lowe from the party in the first place.
[01:03:43]  People think, oh, Farage has done it.
[01:03:45]  We'll just set a party up.
[01:03:46]  It'll be marvellous.
[01:03:47]  We'll sweep the next election.
[01:03:49]  It just isn't as easy as that.
[01:03:51]  Now, does he have a profile on X?
[01:03:52]  Yes, he does.
[01:03:53]  Is anyone going to support him?
[01:03:55]  Probably.
[01:03:56]  But you see, when he stood up and said that we've got to consider the mass deportation of entire communities, including those born in the United Kingdom, that just moves way beyond the point of reasonableness, of decency, of morality.
[01:04:16]  And that was the moment at which, you know, I realized we just had to get rid of him and get rid of him as quickly as we could.
[01:04:22]  And I think, in terms of the way we dealt with that, we were probably more brutal than the other parties.
[01:04:28]  But you know what?
[01:04:29]  That's the way it's going to be.
[01:04:30]  Well, if Farage got rid of him because he wants to do mass deportations, why is Farage worried?
[01:04:35]  Because Farage has already told us that mass deportations are literally impossible.
[01:04:40]  But then also many reform supporters are saying that Farage and Lowe have completely identical policies.
[01:04:46]  Seems to be challenged by what Farage is saying.
[01:04:50]  Also, this has just nothing to do with the reasoning given this time last year when Lowe was removed from the party when we were told that the reasons for it was that he was bullying Zaya Youssef and bullying team members within his own office.
[01:05:04]  Just one thing.
[01:05:05]  I can never get out of my head the story of that girl who was raped three times by different groups just walking round the street in one of these incidents.
[01:05:19]  I forget where.
[01:05:21]  But if there is this possibility that three groups of men will encounter a girl and each of them will find it proper to rape her and call their friends to join them, then I don't see what merciful answer there is other than mass deporting everybody in that community.
[01:05:41]  And we know that when men like that get taken to court, their wives, sisters, mothers turn up and jeer and point at what they call the slut and blame it on her and say that their man did nothing wrong.
[01:05:53]  And then you see the fact that this is happening with families cooperating together to use rape as a business.
[01:06:01]  And I just don't understand what the issue is with deporting people who behave like that.
[01:06:09]  Well, Farage obviously thinks it's impossible.
[01:06:12]  These are all very reasonable concerns, but not only does Farage say that they're impossible to achieve, but also that he wouldn't want to alienate these communities as well.
[01:06:22]  Whilst at the same time saying that the very idea of it is too extreme for him and goes beyond the realms of decency and morality.
[01:06:30]  So that's Nigel Farage's line, which then translates to the reform line.
[01:06:34]  And making this even more worrying is, of course, as mentioned, that Reform UK has said that it is very interested in taking up MI5 on its offer to help political parties vet candidates amid fears of hostile states meddling in British politics.
[01:06:50]  Now, this is all being couched in concerns about foreign infiltration, but I'll fill us all in as we go through this on why that is not the only concern to have here, because frankly, this is going to end up being the British state marking its own homework on who can be allowed into the British state.
[01:07:07]  Clearly they link to this article and i'll read through some of it.
[01:07:11]  So it was last month, february of 2026.
[01:07:14]  The MI5, Britain's domestic intelligence agency, said that it would help political parties with candidate checks for potential foreign interference risks.
[01:07:22]  This was in a meeting that it held with high-ups in this party in in the parties.
[01:07:26]  Ken Mcallum, the director general of MI5, made the offer.
[01:07:29]  A cross party briefing with Uk political parties last month alongside security minister Dan Jarvis.
[01:07:37]  Three people with meeting of with knowledge of the meeting told Politico.
[01:07:41]  The offer from Mcallum is part of a wider effort by the Uk government and security services to shore up British democracy amid a wave of espionage activity from hostile states in the past six months.
[01:07:53]  Of course I always have to state in such um in such cases we wouldn't have such worry about espionage activity if we didn't have so many foreigners in the country in the first place.
[01:08:04]  And this does seem to suggest something of the idea of dual loyalty among any foreign candidates who might want to stand for these political parties, at which point I would just have to say that that's.
[01:08:14]  That's a canard, my friend.
[01:08:15]  Dual loyalty is quite the offensive canard.
[01:08:18]  How dare you say so?
[01:08:19]  In the past six months, several foreign and Uk Born citizens have been arrested on suspicion of working for Iran, Russia and China, and I can only assume why not Pakistan?
[01:08:29]  Why not India?
[01:08:30]  Curious, but I can only assume that the people caught working for these people, that a lot of them would have themselves been Iranians, people of Russian background and Chinese background as well, potentially.
[01:08:44]  The examples they give here though, are that earlier this month, three former label labor officials, including the husband of a sitting labour mp and former candidate for North Wales police and Crime commissioner, was arrested by UH counter-terrorism counter-terrorism police on suspicion of spying for China.
[01:09:02]  Last year, the former Reform UK leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, was jailed for accepting bribes to make Pro-Russian statements while he was a member of the EU Parliament for Reform's precursor Brexit Party.
[01:09:12]  Britain's political parties have no standardized systems for vetting those who want to become MPs.
[01:09:17]  Each party has its own internal and in some cases external processes for probity checks.
[01:09:22]  Reform leader Nigel Farage in 24 blamed a reputable vetting company for oversights in helping to sift its candidates ahead of the next general election after one praised Hitler, that would be the guy you were talking about, and backed Russia's war in Ukraine.
[01:09:38]  He apologised, adding, we have been stitched up politically and it's given us problems.
[01:09:42]  Now, of course, it's one thing to say that the MI5 will help you to vet potential foreign interference, but that won't be as far as it goes.
[01:09:51]  MI5 has a domestic authority as well over threats that it considers to be domestic threats from the far left, independent groups and, relevant here, the far right.
[01:10:04]  And we'll see the kind of standards that they use to determine whether you are a far-right extremist in a moment.
[01:10:10]  MI5's role in vetting, it says here, is limited to its own staff and certain levels of security clearance for specific government and official roles in Whitehall.
[01:10:19]  Its offer to candidates is expected to be limited in helping parties assess foreign interference risks, note expected, rather than any official security clearance.
[01:10:29]  Politico asked the six main Westminster parties if they will take up the MI5 on its offer, and they all declined to comment, except for Reform who said, if this offer comes to fruition, we'd be very interested in taking up the MI5 on it.
[01:10:43]  We must do all we can to stamp out foreign interference in our politics.
[01:10:47]  We've seen just last week with Labor-China spy scandal and just how deeply embedded this issue is.
[01:10:54]  So, reform's all for it.
[01:10:56]  So, obviously, there is the foreign angle to this, but that won't be where it stops.
[01:11:01]  And people have been commenting on this, pointing out the obvious that this won't be where it stops.
[01:11:05]  What other concerns do the MI5 have regarding potential candidates for reform who are looking likely or have been looking likely for a while in the polls to potentially be the next government?
[01:11:18]  Who is the MI5 going to want to keep out of the next government if reform were to get in there?
[01:11:23]  Well, cultural nationalists, for one.
[01:11:27]  Cultural nationalists who have concern over mass migration, terrorist ideology according to prevent.
[01:11:35]  This was taken a few years ago now from an online training course hosted on the government's website for prevent lists, which listed cultural nationalism as a belief that could lead to an individual being referred to the de-radicalization scheme.
[01:11:49]  It encompasses a conviction that Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups.
[01:11:59]  Is that not supposed to be?
[01:12:00]  I've been told that the party line of reform is exactly the same as restore.
[01:12:05]  So, in that case, is that not the reform party line?

=== Prevent Lists And Cultural Nationalism (07:09) ===

[01:12:08]  By that logic, Nigel Farah should be on a terrorist list.
[01:12:11]  Exactly.
[01:12:12]  So, is MI5 going to come in and say, Right, we're just going to have to shut this entire party down, or is the party going to be acceptable to this kind of standard from the internal security services?
[01:12:23]  Two things, if I may.
[01:12:24]  Of course.
[01:12:25]  First, the fact that Nigel Faras doesn't see what a trap this is, in the sense that he's happy to warn him.
[01:12:34]  Maybe, but if he does say, Well, actually, I disagree with MI5, that is going to be the headline.
[01:12:41]  Second, the idea that a domestic intelligence agency should be vetting who people vote for from the outset is itself insane.
[01:12:54]  It means that the deep state gets to control everything even more than it already does.
[01:12:59]  And your first point is good.
[01:13:00]  There's no, as soon as the MI5 says somebody says we have questions about somebody, there's no way they can't get rid of them.
[01:13:06]  Because otherwise, the headline in a year's time will be: MI5 warned them not to take this person, they took them anyway.
[01:13:12]  So, they're just handing complete control to the deep state.
[01:13:15]  Completely.
[01:13:15]  Well, you might also say sorry, and if you say that actually, I think fighting a land war against Russia on its own borders is a bad idea, and it makes no difference to British interests where the border between different Slavic people sits.
[01:13:33]  Well, that automatically means that you qualify with Russian interference.
[01:13:37]  If you say there shouldn't be a war with Iran because it doesn't benefit Britain, well, clearly, that is support of Iran and foreign interference.
[01:13:49]  Anything can be cast in this way, given how MI5 actually operates and given the ideology that seems to be animating the British state.
[01:14:00]  And so, not seeing that this is a disastrous proposition, how dare MI5 even offer to say this?
[01:14:08]  Well, you're saying it's an obvious trap.
[01:14:11]  It is an obvious trap that some are more than happy to walk straight into.
[01:14:14]  Might say to yourself, well, Prevent is part of the Home Office, which is separate from MI5.
[01:14:20]  So, therefore, why are you worried?
[01:14:21]  Well, it says even in this article, even if a person was subsequently deemed to require, quote, no further action, their name would risk remaining on police and other databases that could be accessed by MI6, the Home Office, Border Force, HMRC, Charity Commission, and local safeguarding teams, and MI5.
[01:14:39]  So, if you are referred to Prevent, because, for instance, let's just say you're not even posting about cultural nationalism, you're not even worried about mass migration.
[01:14:49]  Maybe, for instance, you've just been reading some Tolkien and C.S. Lewis recently, and that you want to post about that on your Facebook so that all of your friends can see that you're really interested in fantasy literature recently.
[01:15:00]  That might get you referred to Prevent, and then your name goes on a list, and then MI5 has access to that list forever.
[01:15:10]  Because these are the kinds of standards.
[01:15:12]  This was a report from February 2023, an internal report from Prevent.
[01:15:18]  Reading the works of Tolkien and Lewis could lead to radicalization.
[01:15:23]  Also, 1984, watching a BBC documentary series following former Conservative Minister Michael Portillo on train journeys across the country.
[01:15:33]  Additionally, according to a report, key signs that people have an affinity for the far right in Brexit, apparently associated with extremism, including watching the TV series Civilization and the Thick of It, reading classics of political philosophy like Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke's Two Treaties of Government, and Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.
[01:15:53]  The works of Thomas Carlyle and Adam Smith are also on the list.
[01:15:58]  So, if you become a reform candidate, you run the risk of being flagged up on this system and basically becoming a deep state enemy.
[01:16:07]  And who knows where that leads?
[01:16:08]  But I mean, for a start, you won't be able to make it through an airport without being detained every time you come back.
[01:16:13]  If they go ahead with it, just being a basic bitch conservative will mean that, oh, sorry, reform don't want you will be flagged as an enemy of the people.
[01:16:20]  Sorry, we're only taking Labour MPs now who go on about how much they love the food.
[01:16:26]  Well, I think it's the point I made earlier.
[01:16:27]  Ultimately, what they want is people who have zero opinions, who are just reflecting whatever they heard on the news that day.
[01:16:34]  But also, there is another question that I want to end on here, which is, by what right do the MI5 really even have to be able to assess foreign interference now when in 2023 they removed the nationality requirements for the parents of recruits?
[01:16:54]  And they did this so that they could hit their summer diversity internship quotas.
[01:17:00]  So the internal intelligence department has to meet diversity inclusions, and that is defined as having non-Brits.
[01:17:12]  Yes.
[01:17:12]  Diversity and inclusion 2022 to 23.
[01:17:16]  Recruitment of staff from underrepresented groups rose during the 2022-23 financial year.
[01:17:21]  MI5 exceeded national representation levels in both the recruitment of women and ethnic minorities, achieving rates of 60% and 22%, respectively.
[01:17:32]  MI5, alongside SIS and GCHQ, changed the parental nationality rules for applications to agency roles, removing the requirement for at least one parent of an applicant to be British or from an approved list of countries.
[01:17:46]  So by what right does this organization even have to vet chances of foreign infiltration when they explicitly went out of their way to invite in potential foreign infiltrators?
[01:18:00]  I mean, just as a callback.
[01:18:02]  We're in a retard government run by retards for retards.
[01:18:06]  We've got brown spastic MI5 checking whether you're a foreign threat and saying if you like Tolkien, you can't run for reform who are supposedly going to save the UK.
[01:18:16]  I mean, I'm just wondering: do we think that Israel has a requirement that you have to be Israeli to join Mossad?
[01:18:21]  Do we think that the Iranians have a requirement that you have to be Iranian in order to join their secret intelligence service?
[01:18:27]  When you cannot.
[01:18:28]  I mean, it's so baffling what you just told us.
[01:18:31]  It makes no sense whatsoever.
[01:18:34]  Yeah, I mean, look, they launched a disability and neurodivergence in the UK intelligence services electronic brochure.
[01:18:42]  Right.
[01:18:43]  So they want to make sure that MI5 is full of foreign neurodivergent people.
[01:18:51]  We're going to give all of our top secrets to the guy with Tourette's.
[01:18:54]  Yes.
[01:18:55]  Who could be Iranian?
[01:18:57]  He's going to go back to his Pakistani family and just blurt them all out.
[01:19:01]  Yes.
[01:19:02]  Well, why not?
[01:19:02]  I mean.
[01:19:04]  So, yes, I end again on the question I started on.
[01:19:07]  How exactly does any of this help save Britain?
[01:19:13]  I'm remembering the Stone Toss comic.
[01:19:15]  Yep, the burger.
[01:19:16]  Yeah, the burger?

=== Optimizing Games For God's Love (03:13) ===

[01:19:18]  Sell burgers?
[01:19:19]  That's not what we're here for.
[01:19:20]  Breaking news, Sigil Stone.
[01:19:22]  Nigel Farage successfully clones himself, boots clone from reform for trying to be better than him.
[01:19:27]  So true.
[01:19:28]  Do we have any video comments today?
[01:19:32]  Let's see.
[01:19:35]  We have three.
[01:19:36]  Let's go through them.
[01:19:45]  This headline stood out to me so much I had to share it with you.
[01:19:48]  Look at how this is framed.
[01:19:49]  An Islamophobic far-right protest with no mention that the perpetrators were Muslims who threw bombs into the crowd the headline has just demonized.
[01:19:55]  I checked the source and it seems to be genuinely not satirical.
[01:19:58]  Combined with the economist's report on the Ayatollah, they've since edited the article, by the way.
[01:20:02]  This reveal of allegiance in reporting surely has to make even the normies realize it's something strange.
[01:20:06]  It's at times like this that I seriously consider setting up a news outlet to compete with the Swindon advertiser, which, according to some friends of mine, one of whom is a parish councillor, is declining in readership and quality.
[01:20:17]  I can't believe that the Swindon advertiser, a publication filled with migration success stories into Swindon, is not being read by many people.
[01:20:30]  Shocking.
[01:20:31]  Shocking.
[01:20:33]  With the rising ram prices due to the AI bubble, it's probably going to drive innovation and optimization.
[01:20:40]  That's just nerd talk for folks looking into getting better performance on lower-tier hardware.
[01:20:45]  Well, I don't think there will ever be brain-in-a-jar gaming computers due to the sensitivity of wetwear.
[01:20:51]  I do wonder how the hardware requirements for brain simulations would compare to getting the same result using hard-coded behaviors.
[01:20:58]  Imagine playing Call of Duty against a flybrain.
[01:21:02]  That would be interesting.
[01:21:04]  Yeah, I would like to see a drive with all of the RAM stuff for game developers, particularly big AAA ones, to actually have to start optimizing their video games again.
[01:21:14]  No more 120 gigabyte downloads where the game still runs like crap on the latest hardware.
[01:21:20]  All right.
[01:21:21]  Optimize your games for the love of God.
[01:21:26]  And now, after sitting through Harry's history of the gay rights movement, part two, well, here's a palette cleanser.
[01:21:35]  There she is, Sakra.
[01:21:38]  Nothing like a dog video to help get that nasty taste out of your mouth.
[01:21:44]  Beautiful dog.
[01:21:45]  And thank you very much for watching the Stonewall Myth.
[01:21:50]  Wait until I get around to finally doing the Weimar stuff.
[01:21:53]  The script's written.
[01:21:55]  Everything's ready.
[01:21:56]  We just need to get all the pre-production and planning done for that.
[01:21:59]  And then we'll shoot ahead with that.
[01:22:01]  That one's even more fun.
[01:22:04]  But if you've not watched Stonewall Myth yet, please watch it.
[01:22:06]  It's available for subscribers on the website right now.
[01:22:10]  You made me and Faraz do a reaction video to men having gay sex in the back of a van or something.
[01:22:17]  Of a lorry, okay.
[01:22:19]  Parked at the Hudson River.
[01:22:20]  Yes, all right.
[01:22:22]  Some comments.
[01:22:23]  Flatten more.
[01:22:24]  Yeah.
[01:22:24]  Yes, get your gay fun with Harry is what we're saying.
[01:22:28]  Yes.
[01:22:29]  Comments from the website.

=== Contradictory Administration Messaging (07:12) ===

[01:22:31]  Dreadnought Logan says, I'll put it simply why they called death to America for years.
[01:22:37]  They were given their just desserts now.
[01:22:40]  Well, I mean, put it this way, right?
[01:22:42]  I'm on the YouTube, and every day I see comments of people being very, very rude about me and wishing me ill and stuff like that.
[01:22:53]  And what I don't do is come around your house and kill you.
[01:22:57]  I just feel slightly sorry for you that you don't like me because obviously that's a deficiency of yours.
[01:23:05]  Why can't they just take that approach?
[01:23:06]  I mean, if somebody doesn't like you and they're in no position to do you any harm, just bloody ignore them.
[01:23:13]  Also, that's great and everything, but you still need a plan with defined goals.
[01:23:19]  You need a win criteria.
[01:23:22]  You need contingency plans for if it goes long terms.
[01:23:25]  You need to be able to assess your military capabilities versus their military capabilities.
[01:23:32]  Maybe assess whether, well, they are right next to the Gulf states that we work with.
[01:23:37]  They have access to control of the Strait of Hormuz.
[01:23:41]  There are all of these different considerations that have to be taken into account.
[01:23:46]  If you decide that for the sake of them saying death to America, you're going to go to war with them.
[01:23:51]  None of these seem to have been taken into account at all.
[01:23:54]  It seems to have been, it really does seem to have been, shit, Israel's about to attack.
[01:24:00]  Let's take out Khomeini and hope that the people will just rise up.
[01:24:07]  Well, and I'm something.
[01:24:09]  Harry, you and I won the 2020 US election night stream.
[01:24:13]  2024, yeah, yeah.
[01:24:15]  Oh, 2024, yes, U.S. election night stream.
[01:24:17]  And the reasons, I mean, some of the reasons why we liked Trump were that he wanted American first policy.
[01:24:25]  Now, we like that because we thought, well, hopefully that will lead to a Britain first policy arising at some point in Britain.
[01:24:30]  But I don't see how this is America First.
[01:24:32]  We also liked it because of the no-new foreign wars thing.
[01:24:35]  Yeah, there are a number.
[01:24:36]  People say, oh, well, if you go back to this obscure interview from the 1980s, Trump says this about Iran.
[01:24:42]  If you find this random tweet from 2013, Trump says this about Iran.
[01:24:48]  Yeah, well, the official GOP channels in 2024 were putting out big posters saying Trump and Vance is the pro-peace ticket, no new wars.
[01:24:59]  Yeah.
[01:24:59]  And if you voted for that, then you might feel slightly aggrieved.
[01:25:03]  Russian says, the rise in fuel prices is radicalizing me.
[01:25:07]  I've been priced out of trains into my car.
[01:25:09]  Now I'm being priced out of my car.
[01:25:11]  Yeah, and that's ultimately how these things stabilize.
[01:25:15]  Because what will happen is the price will go up.
[01:25:17]  The oil price will go up 150%, 200%, 300%, whatever it is.
[01:25:21]  It's inelastic in the short term, but eventually you just get demand destruction and then you'll get a recession.
[01:25:26]  And that will be how they stabilize the balance in the end.
[01:25:30]  It's the high prices doing the work here to stabilize.
[01:25:33]  The oligarchs.
[01:25:35]  We know from the Epstein emails that the oligarchs would have known about this in advance.
[01:25:40]  They would be getting richer as you get priced out of your car.
[01:25:44]  Yes.
[01:25:44]  Just as a smaller reminder.
[01:25:47]  And just to answer a comment in the chat, no, I don't have back pain.
[01:25:50]  I'm just a natural sloucher because I don't know why.
[01:25:53]  I've got time.
[01:25:54]  No, I don't need to do any more.
[01:25:57]  I'll hand over to you, Feres.
[01:25:59]  All right.
[01:26:01]  Michael Rubellbis says, how do we know it isn't a war?
[01:26:04]  No troops on the ground.
[01:26:05]  Nudge, wink, wink.
[01:26:06]  Yes, exactly.
[01:26:08]  Dreadnought Logan says, how about an emperor seeing that the empire will be weaker later and with a bigger foe later making moves now to ensure that a greater war will be belayed at least?
[01:26:23]  That is so speculative that you can't base morality out of it.
[01:26:27]  It's like saying that somebody might grow up to be a criminal, we kill him now.
[01:26:30]  That's just not how it works.
[01:26:32]  That's not how morality works.
[01:26:35]  Actually, I remember Ben Shapiro being asked, this was a couple of years ago, he was asked the question, would you go back in time and kill baby Hitler?
[01:26:41]  And he said, no, because that's a baby.
[01:26:45]  But suddenly, when it's a country, well, it's Palestinians, it's okay.
[01:26:49]  Yeah, but when it's a country, that's fine.
[01:26:51]  You can kill the babies then.
[01:26:54]  It's obscene.
[01:26:55]  It's obscene.
[01:26:56]  If you have an economic problem with a country, the answer is to build up your own energy capabilities, shut off your markets if you have to.
[01:27:03]  Use tariffs, use all kinds of other tactics to become stronger.
[01:27:06]  Not just, you know, maybe if I invade Iran, China will be weaker.
[01:27:11]  That's just, like, you know, if I don't like Harry, maybe I should shoot Dan.
[01:27:16]  What?
[01:27:18]  Go for it.
[01:27:18]  Do it.
[01:27:19]  Yeah, go on.
[01:27:19]  No, go on.
[01:27:20]  Yeah.
[01:27:22]  Try me.
[01:27:26]  Arizona Desert Rat says, I can understand sending in a military unit to make sure the evacuees are not terrorists and making sure they move on to a safer area.
[01:27:34]  However, I know they have to take into consideration the resources they have available.
[01:27:38]  If there's no unit available, there's no unit available.
[01:27:40]  In short, the whole situation is just a mess.
[01:27:43]  Well, yes, clearly.
[01:27:45]  But also, I just, and I'm not trying to pick on you, Dreadnaught.
[01:27:50]  The sort of logic that you've presented there is a prime example of the fact that the actual administration's messaging has been so contradictory, so spastic and unclear that the people, like people like yourself, are having to come up with your own reasons to explain why you've gone to war with Iran when really there should be one party line coming straight from the president delivered directly to you.
[01:28:17]  We're not trying to insult you or target you or anybody else who is trying to come to similar conclusions to you or just find a reason in the first place.
[01:28:27]  This is a failure of the administration in its messaging.
[01:28:32]  Michael Dre Balvis for mine.
[01:28:33]  Nigel sounds like the type of person that visited Stonewall or a lorry parked by the Hudson River.
[01:28:40]  Maybe not.
[01:28:41]  Nigel, from what we know about Nigel and his own personal affairs, he's a very straight man.
[01:28:47]  But many of his supporters, you're right about.
[01:28:51]  Omar Awad, it's a nasty bit of gaslighting for Farage to claim others think they can just start a party like he did after buying his way in and parachuting into a safe seat.
[01:29:00]  Not to mention that he reneged on an agreement to return personally funded campaign contributions to the guy he replaced.
[01:29:06]  Also, as well, like the guy who was chairman of reform and is now head of which part of is Yusuf head of nowadays?
[01:29:14]  Well, probably.
[01:29:15]  I mean, he just bought his way in.
[01:29:17]  He just bought his way in.
[01:29:18]  It's supposedly cheap as well.
[01:29:19]  It's like 300 grand or something.
[01:29:20]  200 grand.
[01:29:22]  Nigel makes 200 grand.
[01:29:23]  Nigel makes 1.2 million a year.
[01:29:25]  Yep.
[01:29:26]  Still can't resist praising Ian Watkins on cameo for 16 grand a year, though, can he?
[01:29:31]  Idiot.
[01:29:32]  Dirty Belter.
[01:29:33]  These people don't comprehend that mass deportations is the compromise.
[01:29:37]  If the anti-nativists keep refusing to compromise, this will become a battle of wills where only one side can win.

=== Buying Your Way Into Power (00:26) ===

[01:29:43]  Well, ask some of the Zoomers what their policy is.
[01:29:46]  It's not as mild as what we're advocating.
[01:29:50]  No.
[01:29:51]  And on that note, that's all we've got time for.
[01:29:53]  Remember to visit the website and check out all of the amazing subscriber content there is on there, including my documentary, The Stonewall Myth, and also maybe pick up a ticket to the live event whilst they're still available.
[01:30:07]  I've been Harry, joined by Dan and Firaz.
[01:30:09]  Thank you for watching.
[01:30:10]  Take care.