The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1378
Aired: 2026-03-19
Duration: 01:31:51


=== The Foreign Student Loan Scam (14:58) ===

[00:00:00]  Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the podcast The Load Seaters for Thursday the 19th of March 2026.
[00:00:05]  I'm Jabai Ferris and Dr. Charles Cornish Dale, otherwise known as Roareg Nationalist.
[00:00:10]  And today we are going to be talking about the massive scam that is foreign student loans.
[00:00:16]  Then we are going to be talking about Iran because things keep happening up to literally the minutes of us preparing the podcast.
[00:00:25]  And then we're going to be talking about the fall of Banksy, which is going to be a fun segment because I fucking hate Banksy.
[00:00:31]  Why?
[00:00:32]  He's such, he's got all the right morals.
[00:00:35]  Well, it's exactly because of that, actually.
[00:00:40]  It's exactly because of that.
[00:00:43]  But anyway, right.
[00:00:45]  The man with the most conventional opinions pretending to be controversial.
[00:00:48]  I hate it so much.
[00:00:50]  We'll get into it later.
[00:00:52]  Anyway, right.
[00:00:53]  So foreign student loans are a real problem in Britain because apparently, I didn't know this was the way it worked.
[00:01:00]  If you were a foreigner, you can come to Britain, get accepted to a university, and then get a student loan at our expense to go through that university.
[00:01:10]  You have a passport to another country.
[00:01:11]  Yes.
[00:01:13]  I know, right?
[00:01:14]  Like, is that how it works?
[00:01:15]  And you're just like, well, hang on a second.
[00:01:18]  Don't like Romanians have access to this system?
[00:01:24]  Not to call out Romania, but we are going to be calling out Romania.
[00:01:28]  Doesn't this leave itself massively open to abuse?
[00:01:31]  How do you go and retrieve the money that you've loaned to these people when they leave the country?
[00:01:36]  And isn't that a good question that was apparently never asked up until literally right now?
[00:01:41]  Anyway, before we begin, on the 11th of April, we have a live event here in Swindon.
[00:01:46]  So go and get your tickets now.
[00:01:47]  Link will be in the description.
[00:01:48]  It's going to be amazing.
[00:01:49]  It'll be three hours for debates, podcasts, and all this sort of stuff.
[00:01:52]  And then afterwards, if you have a premium ticket, you can come and hang out at the bar with us and get drunk.
[00:01:58]  And it's going to be great fun.
[00:01:59]  Anyway, so this is the number of student visitor visas they give every year, according to the latest data we have.
[00:02:08]  429,000.
[00:02:09]  Now, this is a fairly consistent number.
[00:02:12]  Normally, it's a bit higher, but it's always over 400,000 students who are allowed to come and live and study in Britain.
[00:02:19]  And that means live, study, and claim student loans.
[00:02:23]  And this has caused a few problems, especially as our student loan system is a bit out of control as things are.
[00:02:31]  Now, you've probably seen that recently, and it really is recently, that student loan debts and interests have got really out of control.
[00:02:40]  Like, this is wild because when I don't know about yourself, but when I went to university, I had a student loan, but it wasn't that much.
[00:02:47]  And I think I ended up about £16,000 in debt after going to university, which, okay, that's not great, but that's not that bad.
[00:02:55]  As you can see, though, the interest on these debts has gone absolutely through the roof.
[00:03:00]  And so the amount of money, we've got another chart down here.
[00:03:04]  The amount of money that is now owed by students is a quarter of a trillion plus.
[00:03:12]  266 billion by the end of 2024.
[00:03:16]  The whole portfolio was sold, wasn't it, at some point?
[00:03:19]  Oh, I didn't know that.
[00:03:20]  Yeah, I think it was.
[00:03:21]  Yeah.
[00:03:22]  Yeah.
[00:03:22]  Right, okay.
[00:03:23]  I didn't know that.
[00:03:24]  A large part of the portfolio.
[00:03:25]  Yeah.
[00:03:26]  It changed hands.
[00:03:27]  Right.
[00:03:28]  So, I mean, in 2011, student debt in England was about 40 billion, and graduates left education with an average debt of about 16,500.
[00:03:35]  So very similar to when I went in, what, 1999 or something like that.
[00:03:40]  And a year later, David Cameron's coalition government made dramatic changes to the system, tripling the fees that universities could charge and introducing a new system of loans to cover the costs.
[00:03:50]  And as you can see, this has just made a massive impact on the students themselves.
[00:03:55]  And also, this is not just on the students themselves.
[00:03:59]  This is going to be on the rest of the country who will then have to shoulder the burden of the debt that gets wiped out.
[00:04:03]  Yep.
[00:04:04]  So, thank you, David Cameron.
[00:04:07]  That was brilliant.
[00:04:08]  And in 2025, the Times did an investigation into fraud applications to the student loans company.
[00:04:17]  And I'm just going to read out just the data on this, the details on this, because it's actually quite mad.
[00:04:22]  As you can see from the tagline, applicants are suspected of scamming taxpayers out of hundreds of millions of pounds for courses they don't intend to take.
[00:04:30]  Who could have imagined this would be the case?
[00:04:32]  Who could have predicted this in advance?
[00:04:34]  So in 2022, 23, the student loans company identified 3,500 suspicious loan applications, which themselves totaled 60 million pounds.
[00:04:43]  But recent investigation by the Times finds that it could run into hundreds of millions of pounds.
[00:04:48]  The problem is franchised colleges, which are colleges that are a franchise of an established university, and they are essentially an expansion to allow the ability to be able to have such a large number of foreign students.
[00:05:06]  Because of course, 400,000 foreign students a year added on top of the number of British students is a massive burden actually to the system.
[00:05:14]  And that has to be paid for in some way.
[00:05:16]  And if they can be, you know, if you're allowed to triple the amount that you can charge them, which you can, and if they also get student loans and they have to spend loads of money on various things, like books and whatnot at the university, well, that's an industry that you've created there.
[00:05:31]  That's a big foreign industry.
[00:05:33]  And if you give them access to ready credit, well, a lot of that doesn't get paid back, basically.
[00:05:41]  At some universities.
[00:05:42]  I'm surprised by this.
[00:05:43]  Yeah.
[00:05:45]  Yeah.
[00:05:46]  And if you didn't have taxpayer backing, you wouldn't set this up as a business.
[00:05:50]  Obviously, not.
[00:05:52]  Like, yeah, let me lend money to that Nigerian guy.
[00:05:54]  It's not the Nigerians who are the most problem.
[00:05:57]  I'm sorry.
[00:05:58]  I'm talking about the Nigerian prince guy, as opposed to, you know.
[00:06:01]  It's the Romanian guy.
[00:06:03]  Okay, fine.
[00:06:04]  But, you know, I mean, I remember when I started graduate study in 2010 at Cambridge and I did social anthropology.
[00:06:12]  And I remember, you know, like a large proportion of the anthropology students and all of the graduate students were foreign.
[00:06:21]  It was very obvious that there was actually a significantly increased proportion of foreigners among the graduate rather than the undergraduate intake.
[00:06:30]  And yeah, they had to pay triple the fees.
[00:06:32]  Everybody knew that.
[00:06:32]  And so, of course, these master's degrees are cash cows, PhDs are cash cows.
[00:06:38]  But I mean, I had absolutely no idea that there were loans available.
[00:06:42]  But I mean, does it matter whether, at least if you're talking about the universities themselves, I mean, they have no reason to care whether the money is taxpayer money or whether it's money from China or India or anywhere else.
[00:06:53]  Exactly.
[00:06:53]  It doesn't come out of their wallets.
[00:06:54]  No.
[00:06:55]  And so this has been an insane escalation of a system that otherwise was quite a decent one, actually.
[00:07:03]  Again, I don't really want to give Tony Blair any props, but actually, when the new Labour government set up the degree, the loans to go to university, that's actually not a bad idea.
[00:07:14]  I thought it was in 92 that it began.
[00:07:16]  No, I was the last generation that got the first generation to get loans.
[00:07:21]  Before that, it was grants.
[00:07:23]  And so there were much higher standards to get the grants.
[00:07:27]  But what this at least did is say, well, I'm going to shoulder the burden of my own responsibility for my own education.
[00:07:34]  So if you're going to go into higher education, at least you're the one carrying the debt.
[00:07:37]  So you're incentivized to stay in the system and actually get the degree, blah, blah, blah.
[00:07:41]  So it's not, on the face of it, actually a terrible system.
[00:07:45]  And I mean, and I mean, Labour wanted 50% of school leavers to go to university.
[00:07:49]  And I mean, that's not sustainable probably without a, without a, or wouldn't have been sustainable without a change to the system.
[00:07:56]  And so 2006.
[00:07:58]  That itself is a bad idea.
[00:07:59]  Oh, yeah, sure.
[00:08:00]  No, I don't think that's a good idea at all.
[00:08:03]  But I mean, like 2006, when I first went to university, that was the first year of the £3,000 a year tuition fees.
[00:08:10]  But yeah, I mean, if you're sending 50% of school leavers, you've got to have some kind of like system to fund that because it's going to be an increased burden on the system.
[00:08:21]  Well, yes.
[00:08:22]  And so the student loans company has identified a number of franchise providers where basically the students are consistently sending and giving fake documents for their applications.
[00:08:34]  And this has just been increasing over the years.
[00:08:37]  So, I mean, they've noted that there are loads of these colleges that are enrolling students who just can't speak English.
[00:08:43]  So you can't possibly learn the course if you can't understand the language given.
[00:08:49]  But honestly, that's what it was like at Cambridge in 2010.
[00:08:52]  Like doing social anthropology, you know, like you think, you know, a decent degree.
[00:08:58]  And you've got Chinese people there.
[00:08:59]  They'd turn up.
[00:09:00]  They'd sit in the seminars playing with their iPads, wouldn't say anything, wouldn't contribute anything.
[00:09:07]  And then they just walked away with a degree at the end for contributing nothing and kind of doing nothing.
[00:09:13]  When I did my philosophy degree in 2020 and graduated in 2023, I think it was, I went to the graduation ceremony and there were about half a dozen white English people there.
[00:09:24]  And there were hundreds and hundreds of foreign students.
[00:09:28]  Hundreds.
[00:09:29]  The hall was packed out.
[00:09:31]  And I was basically like one of those great replacement meme photos where I was like, okay.
[00:09:38]  But I mean, I think you have to realize that it's not just lesser institutions.
[00:09:44]  I mean, it is Oxford and Cambridge.
[00:09:46]  It's the big universities.
[00:09:48]  They have overseas campuses as well so that they can rake in money.
[00:09:52]  And I mean, public schools now have overseas campuses as well in the Gulf and wherever.
[00:09:58]  So it's not limited to these kind of like Potempkian universities and colleges that are being put out.
[00:10:05]  You're absolutely correct.
[00:10:06]  Anyway, so they discovered that between 35 and 55% of the applicants at some of these universities were Romanian.
[00:10:12]  It's like, right, okay, okay.
[00:10:16]  Well-known Romanian.
[00:10:18]  They know a scam when they see one, don't they?
[00:10:20]  I hate to point fingers.
[00:10:22]  But yeah, and what this will be done is via TikTok.
[00:10:25]  This will be TikToks of people saying, you know, if you just apply in this and this, this, and this, then they will give you £4,000.
[00:10:33]  And I'm not even joking.
[00:10:36]  Some students who, this is from the article, some students who enroll on franchise courses drop out after receiving their first £4,000 maintenance loan and then enroll again the following year to claim the money again, according to one of the university employees.
[00:10:49]  And one franchise college made £234 million in revenue last year, which increased its profits by 1,266% in three years.
[00:10:59]  It's a scam.
[00:11:01]  And the universities know.
[00:11:03]  And the universities know, but they're making a huge amount of money out of this.
[00:11:06]  So there's no money comes from the student loan company, which is backed by the government.
[00:11:10]  So it's not anything other than that.
[00:11:14]  It's like every time you use the taxpayer as a backstop, you know that this is going to become a recipe for scams.
[00:11:20]  Correct.
[00:11:20]  It's just like propping up the financial system.
[00:11:24]  Exactly.
[00:11:25]  It's the same principle.
[00:11:27]  We've got some more information from BBC here.
[00:11:30]  They point out that students, including overseas students with settled status, can take out government subsidized loans to help towards their maintenance costs and to cover the cost of tuition fees.
[00:11:40]  So not only is it the 4,000 they're given for the term, so that's three months, to live on, but also whatever the tuition fees are, which are of course tripled if you're an overseas student.
[00:11:51]  And, okay, that's quite mad, isn't it?
[00:11:55]  Why are we funding these students with our money?
[00:12:00]  The tuition fees are, of course, paid directly to the university, which is why they're in favor of it, because they just get free money from the government.
[00:12:06]  And then the maintenance loan is paid directly into their bank account.
[00:12:10]  They do need to repay the loan, but not until they earn somewhere between £25,000 and £31,000.
[00:12:17]  And after 40 years, the loans are written off.
[00:12:19]  It's like, well, okay, then.
[00:12:21]  That's, I mean, that's just all above board, isn't it?
[00:12:24]  What percentage of these students do you think leave the UK after five years?
[00:12:28]  Yeah.
[00:12:29]  What percentage?
[00:12:30]  It's 80% of them.
[00:12:32]  80% of these students are not in the UK after five years.
[00:12:37]  How are you getting that money back?
[00:12:39]  But it's such a strange thing, isn't it?
[00:12:41]  To have so many people coming and to tie it to remaining in this country for five years.
[00:12:45]  It's like, do you actually want these people to be here for five years?
[00:12:48]  Do you want them to be here for longer than five years?
[00:12:50]  I mean, it's like another backdoor route to massive, massive migration.
[00:12:55]  It absolutely is.
[00:12:56]  It could be.
[00:12:57]  For the tune of around 450,000 of them a year.
[00:13:00]  But there's, I mean, there's obviously the problem of people just going missing.
[00:13:05]  But the point is, you're not getting that money back.
[00:13:08]  If you were just someone from any other place in the country, if I'd gone and lived in America for five years, taken out a bunch of loans, and they were like, hi, could you pay that loan back, please?
[00:13:16]  I'm like, no.
[00:13:17]  No.
[00:13:17]  Yeah.
[00:13:18]  Why would I?
[00:13:18]  Come and get it.
[00:13:19]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:13:20]  Come and get it.
[00:13:20]  You've got no jurisdiction here.
[00:13:21]  You can't get me.
[00:13:22]  I'm obviously not going to volunteer that.
[00:13:24]  And that's, I guess, what the Romanians have figured out, frankly.
[00:13:28]  And so this is just ridiculous.
[00:13:30]  But it's interesting, you know, because the usual argument that you hear about international students, let's say like at elite universities, Harvard, YA, lots of Cambridge, they'll say, you know, like talking about Trump, for example, they'll say, you know, we need the best international talent here.
[00:13:46]  We need the best scientists, the best geneticists, you know, da-da-da, the best economists, da-da-da.
[00:13:51]  And you're imperiling that.
[00:13:52]  But it's not like this is even about talent.
[00:13:55]  This is purely, purely about the farming of money from the British taxpayer.
[00:14:00]  See, before I'd done this segment, I assumed that all of those young people who are from other countries were the children of the elites in those countries.
[00:14:10]  I assumed that they were being paid by money and daddy with the oil wealth, whatever it was their parents did.
[00:14:16]  And yeah, okay, fair enough.
[00:14:17]  I actually wasn't really very adverse to it because it's like, well, I mean, if they're just taking foreign money, putting it into our university, that's fine.
[00:14:25]  Who cares?
[00:14:26]  But I didn't realize they can take student loans from the British government and then piss off back to wherever they've come from.
[00:14:34]  Because I know some PhDs from top universities can't write a sentence in English.
[00:14:41]  I have no idea how they have a PhD.
[00:14:45]  Well, there was that very famous case of Gaddafi's son, wasn't there, at the LSE, where his PhD was ghostwritten by someone else.
[00:14:51]  Well, there we go.
[00:14:54]  So anyway, this is basically shown to be basically a total scam.

=== Ghostwritten PhDs and Theft (07:03) ===

[00:14:59]  There are now currently 370,000 missing graduates owing £13 billion to Britain at this point.
[00:15:09]  That's a drop in a bucket in the total.
[00:15:11]  It is.
[00:15:12]  50 billion.
[00:15:13]  It is.
[00:15:13]  And the idea of saddling your youth with so much debt so early in their lives is ridiculous.
[00:15:20]  It just completely cripples them because all they're working for is repaying that debt.
[00:15:24]  And they don't marry, they don't build families, they don't buy homes.
[00:15:29]  You're destroying their lives with this.
[00:15:31]  And you would imagine that actually what's going to happen, or maybe what has been happening, is that actually, you know, the student loans company is leaning harder on the people who stay here, i.e. British people who are actually going to pay back their loans.
[00:15:46]  That is precisely the problem.
[00:15:48]  And remember, this is just those that they've identified, they don't know where they are.
[00:15:52]  So, for example, if someone's given a fake address, you don't know until you go and try and claim it back.
[00:15:57]  And then you realize, oh, wait, actually, we don't know where this chap is, and we can never find him.
[00:16:03]  So, the actual number of people who they can't get money back from is, of course, going to be far, far higher.
[00:16:09]  This is just what they've identified.
[00:16:10]  But you are exactly correct.
[00:16:14]  The British students are the ones who are going to be left holding the burden on this.
[00:16:19]  And ultimately, it'll be the taxpayer when these are written off by the government.
[00:16:24]  So, we are just funding foreign students to rip us off.
[00:16:29]  That is literally what is happening.
[00:16:32]  And they know that many of them have just returned home.
[00:16:34]  Or the people Brits who have moved abroad are included in this.
[00:16:38]  And so, we're never getting this money back.
[00:16:41]  We're never getting this back.
[00:16:43]  So, pretty sure we shouldn't be funding foreign students.
[00:16:46]  Anyway, Romanians are massively overrepresented in this.
[00:16:51]  They are the second highest student loans claimants after British people claiming student loans.
[00:16:57]  So, you know, don't say that they're not entrepreneurial or enterprising.
[00:17:02]  You know, they saw an avenue and took it.
[00:17:06]  The number of Romanians taking out loans of up to £13,000 is nearly four times higher than the other closest nationality and second only to the 1.1 million British students who do.
[00:17:18]  They're doing this via the franchise colleges.
[00:17:21]  And there's something somewhere between 5 and 10% of the entire higher education population are fraudsters.
[00:17:30]  Is there a breakdown of the type of degrees that these people are taking?
[00:17:34]  No, there's not.
[00:17:35]  They don't give an actual breakdown of the type of degrees.
[00:17:39]  Sure, it's the kind of thing that can be FOIA.
[00:17:42]  It would be interesting to see.
[00:17:43]  Well, in fact, you say that.
[00:17:46]  So just on the franchise colleges, quickly, this is the problem with these franchise colleges because they are expressly a money-making endeavor, right?
[00:17:56]  And so they offer these courses on behalf of the established universities and they require lower grades.
[00:18:01]  And therefore, it's a lot easier to apply, get the loan, turn up briefly, and then leave.
[00:18:09]  And these are a huge amount.
[00:18:12]  And they are also twice as likely to drop out of the universities, which you'd expect a much higher attrition rate if you're not paying back the loans.
[00:18:21]  And they're, of course, far less likely to progress into work or further study than students on national degree courses.
[00:18:28]  But who found all of this out?
[00:18:29]  Well, it was Rupert Lowe MP, who managed to get the Romanian student data from the Department of Education using an FOI request and has demanded a full-scale investigation into the fraud.
[00:18:42]  No other MP cared, not one.
[00:18:44]  It was Rupert Lowe that did this.
[00:18:46]  And they have a quote from him.
[00:18:47]  It is abundantly clear that there is widespread fraud occurring, yet no one seems to care.
[00:18:51]  There's no surprise.
[00:18:52]  I'm calling on the government to investigate, to instigate a comprehensive review into where the money has gone and how we can get it back.
[00:18:59]  Not likely that we're getting it back, I'm afraid, because we just don't have the reach anymore.
[00:19:04]  Well, I mean, I think a government with some muscle and some will could maybe crack down on the foreign aid bill.
[00:19:12]  You know, there are ways that you could actually claw the money back indirectly.
[00:19:16]  You could.
[00:19:16]  You're absolutely right.
[00:19:17]  You would have to put significant international pressure on these governments.
[00:19:22]  But it would be a lot of time, a lot of work.
[00:19:24]  And I suspect that the government will just write it off.
[00:19:26]  Sure.
[00:19:27]  Yeah, it will carry on.
[00:19:28]  And we know how they're doing it as well.
[00:19:30]  There are loads of, I mean, this is in 2001, but 85 fake university websites were taken down since 2016 to 2021.
[00:19:38]  85.
[00:19:39]  That is crazy.
[00:19:42]  And of course, we've got lots of foreigners with their TikTok videos and YouTube videos just explaining to each other how this is done.
[00:19:50]  Like with the Channel Crossing Migrants, they put up their TikTok videos and say, look, these are the shibboleths that you use.
[00:19:56]  This is the magical words.
[00:19:59]  You say you're a gay man.
[00:20:00]  Exactly.
[00:20:01]  Yeah, you come from Libya.
[00:20:02]  You say you're gay, and they give you all of this.
[00:20:05]  And it's literally that simple.
[00:20:07]  And this is the current state of migration and education in Britain.
[00:20:12]  And so it would be interesting to know as well, actually, how hard is it to set up a university?
[00:20:18]  It would be quite like you could get, you know, it would be quite funny, actually, to set up a fake university and just see how easy it is to do and how easy it is to get people to as a form of investigative journal.
[00:20:28]  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:20:29]  As a hash cat.
[00:20:30]  Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no.
[00:20:31]  Definitely not as a cat.
[00:20:35]  But no, you're absolutely right.
[00:20:36]  How difficult is it?
[00:20:37]  I bet it's not.
[00:20:38]  I bet it's not that hard.
[00:20:40]  And anyway, so you can see why we get 429,000 people coming here every year.
[00:20:45]  We're paying for the privilege, just like almost all of the other people who are not directly work visas, as if they're net contributors anyway.
[00:20:52]  But this is just the dilapidated state of this country.
[00:20:55]  We are just in a tremendously ridiculous position where we are being exploited from every angle, everything conceivable.
[00:21:03]  And moreover, everything that's considered in some way sort of sacred to the regime, right?
[00:21:07]  So for example, the foreign, we've covered before how many of the foreign doctors and nurses have fake degrees.
[00:21:15]  Yeah.
[00:21:15]  And they have, literally, one person will do it and then just essentially rubber stamp it for all of their friends and family.
[00:21:20]  Well, it's the same with the students.
[00:21:22]  Like we assume a kind of consistency in the institutions that doesn't exist overseas.
[00:21:29]  And we assume a kind of consistency and good intent that doesn't exist overseas.
[00:21:33]  And it is allowing lots of people to take advantage of us and steal money from us.
[00:21:38]  And we wonder why the country is poor and going to hell.
[00:21:41]  Anyway, Ochdo says, I didn't know there were leering centers in Britain as well.
[00:21:45]  Oh, yes, we have high-class learing centers.
[00:21:49]  And Baystape says, rare white pill for you.
[00:21:50]  Scotland voted no on the government-assisted suicide bill.
[00:21:53]  The government isn't allowed to kill my mum yet.
[00:21:56]  Yeah, well, it's allowed to offer us all mercies.
[00:22:00]  Anyway, let's move on.

=== Coordinated Strikes on Oil (15:03) ===

[00:22:02]  All right.
[00:22:02]  So before we start, I wanted to remind you of the live event on the 11th.
[00:22:07]  There will be drinks, talks, podcasts.
[00:22:11]  Apparently, debates about Star Wars.
[00:22:14]  Okay.
[00:22:15]  But it's going to be a lot of fun.
[00:22:17]  And the drinks afterwards will be a lot of fun.
[00:22:19]  So please do come and join us on the 11th here in Swindon.
[00:22:23]  The link is in the description.
[00:22:26]  How do you think the Middle East war is going, guys?
[00:22:29]  Any thoughts on that?
[00:22:30]  Do you think it's going well?
[00:22:31]  Do you think it's going badly?
[00:22:32]  I've seen some statements from Trump that make me question the plan.
[00:22:36]  You don't think it's been won yet?
[00:22:39]  Well, I mean, I've heard that it's been won multiple times.
[00:22:42]  Well, let me show you what winning looks like.
[00:22:44]  Okay.
[00:22:45]  Let me show you what winning looks like.
[00:22:47]  So yesterday, the Israelis killed the Iranian intelligence minister.
[00:22:51]  In all fairness, probably deserved it.
[00:22:56]  But they also bombed Iran's main gas field, the South Parse gas field.
[00:23:01]  They attacked one of the processing facilities in that field, and that's the one that provides most of the gas that goes to Iran and a big chunk of the gas that goes to Turkey, actually.
[00:23:12]  And it's a field that is shared between Iran and Qatar.
[00:23:18]  And so the Iranians reacted as expected.
[00:23:22]  They attacked the Qatari counterpoint opposite gas field.
[00:23:27]  They blew that up.
[00:23:28]  They attacked two refineries in Kuwait.
[00:23:32]  You had apparently the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon attacking a gas processing facility in Ashkelon in Israel.
[00:23:45]  And you had them attack a Group of facilities in places like the UAE, in Saudi Arabia, and most importantly, they attacked the Yanbar oil refinery on the Red Sea on the opposite side of Saudi Arabia.
[00:24:03]  So I'm not someone who's been monitoring the situation because that's your job.
[00:24:09]  But what I'm seeing here is, and correct me if I'm wrong, the United States, which Donald Trump said was following Israel's lead and helping Israel doing what Israel wanted on this, to start a war with Iran, kill the leadership, and has been bombing them and whatnot, expecting Iran to capitulate very quickly.
[00:24:31]  This has now escalated into a very destructive, destructive of key critical resources that underpin the global economy.
[00:24:40]  Absolutely.
[00:24:40]  Right.
[00:24:41]  Absolutely.
[00:24:43]  And Trump denied that he knew anything about this and said that it was the Israelis acting out of anger and that there are going to be no more attacks on this facility and he'll destroy it if the Iranians attack more energy facilities and the Iranians obviously did continue their attacks on more energy facilities.
[00:25:04]  He said this, what was it, six months ago or whatever, when he had to bomb Iran the first time.
[00:25:08]  Yes.
[00:25:09]  And the Israelis kept provoking.
[00:25:11]  Exactly.
[00:25:11]  And what they've done now is provoked even further to further escalate the conflict.
[00:25:16]  Exactly.
[00:25:16]  Well, I mean, Trump did say, I think when he was getting off Air Force One, he did say something like, I think we have slightly different objectives, us and the Israelis.
[00:25:26]  You don't say.
[00:25:26]  Yeah, but I mean, but it's becoming, I think, much clearer that that is the case and that also it's impossible actually maybe to work with the Israelis in good faith.
[00:25:38]  You know, like you can give them everything they want and they still want more.
[00:25:42]  Pretty much.
[00:25:43]  Well, if they're going to keep provoking and inflaming the situation after you've said don't do this and they've dragged you into like a very pseudo-war a while back with Iran and now they're doing it again and actually causing far greater destruction and escalation.
[00:26:00]  I think it's hard to argue that case.
[00:26:02]  Yep.
[00:26:03]  Well, I think as well, what's interesting actually is if you look at the strike that took place against Kaag Island, the Americans were very careful not to hit any oil infrastructure on the island.
[00:26:15]  They took out the military, the missile launchers and the staging posts, whatever, the barracks, military equipment.
[00:26:22]  They didn't hit the oil refinery.
[00:26:24]  They didn't hit the storage or anything like that.
[00:26:27]  He said, we reserve the right to do that, but they didn't do it.
[00:26:30]  And then you have this.
[00:26:32]  I think it is.
[00:26:33]  Now, to be completely fair, the Iranians had started with some attacks on energy.
[00:26:38]  But my argument has always been that they've been quite restrained about this and haven't actually initiated an all-out energy war.
[00:26:46]  They've been signaling that they could do this if their own energy infrastructure was attacked.
[00:26:52]  And so the Israelis took that signal and decided, right, the thing to do is to attack Iranian energy.
[00:27:00]  And their retaliation has been absolutely devastating to the region because all of these facilities, the ones that are labeled in red, they're all on fire right now.
[00:27:08]  And the most important one is the one here on the Red Sea, in Yanbar in Saudi Arabia, because this is where the loading is happening of Saudi oil that is bypassing Hurmuz.
[00:27:20]  And so the Saudis have figured out they've always had this east-west pipeline going from the oil, which is in this area here in the east, to the opposite side of the country so they can ship it out.
[00:27:32]  They've been increasing shipments through that.
[00:27:35]  And the Iranians hit there essentially saying, we will shut down everything, all of the oil exports from the Gulf.
[00:27:42]  And this is before the Houthi in Yemen even activate.
[00:27:46]  They haven't activated yet.
[00:27:49]  And if Yemen is activated, well, they've struck these facilities here in the past and they can do a hell of a lot more damage.
[00:27:56]  And in fact, the reason the Saudis had to compromise with the Houthi and agree a ceasefire was because the Houthi had blown up an oil storage tank in precisely this area.
[00:28:08]  And then the Saudis were like, okay, now we need a ceasefire with them.
[00:28:12]  This is getting out of hand.
[00:28:13]  As again, someone who's not closely monitoring the situation, the Houthi are essentially kind of like a Taliban-like rebel group, right?
[00:28:21]  They represent the traditional Zaidi monarchy.
[00:28:24]  But what I mean is that they're not based in cities, they're based in like the mountains or whatever.
[00:28:28]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:28:29]  So they're both based in Saada here.
[00:28:30]  They're impossible to route out.
[00:28:32]  Like the Fremen in Dune, sort of, they can actually come out and strike.
[00:28:36]  From anywhere.
[00:28:36]  From anywhere, and they're just a massive pain in the Harkonnen race.
[00:28:40]  So the Saudis bombed them from 2006 to 2023.
[00:28:46]  Yeah.
[00:28:47]  And they're still not.
[00:28:48]  More or less.
[00:28:49]  With very intensive bombing from 2015 to 2023.
[00:28:53]  And the Americans bombed them for 45 days and neither of them got anywhere.
[00:28:59]  And the lesson should have been that you're not going to get anywhere by bombing Iran because it's a much larger country with an open supply line to China and to Russia.
[00:29:10]  But no, the Americans decided that they're going to follow the Israelis into this war.
[00:29:15]  I think you have to remember as well, actually, you know, that the Israelis have been killing all of Donald Trump's alternative candidates to lead Iran.
[00:29:24]  Yes.
[00:29:25]  That's the other thing, right?
[00:29:26]  And he's said this on a number of occasions, kind of jokingly, and it seemed funny, but actually it seems much less funny in light of this as well.
[00:29:34]  It's like, actually, what seems to be happening is you are backing the Iranians into a corner and giving them absolutely no possible way out.
[00:29:44]  Well, what, you know.
[00:29:45]  You're backing the Americans into a corner.
[00:29:47]  Yeah.
[00:29:49]  Trump can't back down at this point.
[00:29:52]  And it's not immediately clear what he can actually do to restrain Israel.
[00:29:57]  He can't attack.
[00:29:58]  I mean, I don't think he's going to.
[00:30:03]  And I don't know what you could.
[00:30:05]  Yeah.
[00:30:05]  I mean, what can he say to the Israeli military?
[00:30:08]  Well, you can say that I'm going to stop giving you money and stop giving you weapons, but that'll cause a political crisis in the United States.
[00:30:14]  Which is, at this stage, looks like the only way out.
[00:30:18]  Because, Because they are talking about sending ground troops into the Strait of Hurmus to try to secure it, which is absolutely impossible.
[00:30:27]  Well, why is it impossible?
[00:30:29]  Because if you look at maybe Harry can pull up Google Maps.
[00:30:33]  Sorry, I'll just take your word for it.
[00:30:35]  And basically, these islands here, they are the size of Okinawa and Iojima.
[00:30:42]  Oh, right, okay.
[00:30:43]  And these required tens of thousands of soldiers each to clear.
[00:30:47]  You could argue you need less than that in modern war, but the Iranians can fire from anywhere around the strait.
[00:30:54]  Plus, if you look at, I think I have a map of where the Iranians have attacked by sea.
[00:31:02]  And no, I do not.
[00:31:06]  But what it shows is that they can attack any ship here.
[00:31:10]  Right.
[00:31:11]  Meaning that this entire area of Iran needs to be secured, not just this.
[00:31:16]  Because all along the coast, it's a shooting gallery.
[00:31:20]  And anywhere in Iranian territory, they can just fire missiles at ships.
[00:31:26]  So essentially, it would require the US to commit to a large ground invasion.
[00:31:32]  And in much better than Iraq.
[00:31:34]  In the numbers of hundreds of thousands.
[00:31:35]  Exactly.
[00:31:36]  Which would be essentially the opposite of what Donald Trump campaigned on.
[00:31:41]  Precisely.
[00:31:41]  For the Israeli government, which has provoked this against Donald Trump's personal wishes.
[00:31:48]  Yes.
[00:31:49]  Right.
[00:31:49]  Exactly.
[00:31:51]  And then speaking about winning, I mean, when you see the Iranians pull off this kind of thing, there are several things that become obvious.
[00:31:57]  Firstly, the fact that they attacked with such speed and such ferocity means that they've been holding back and precision.
[00:32:06]  It means that they'd been holding back and not attacking these targets, which is something that people don't want to understand.
[00:32:13]  The Iranians have other escalation options, and they've just demonstrated that they have escalation dominance.
[00:32:19]  And they had a lot more missiles than everyone expected, didn't they?
[00:32:22]  Well, speaking of that, they are attacking with an increasing frequency, not with a decreasing frequency.
[00:32:32]  Sorry, this is the oil exports.
[00:32:33]  I had another graph there.
[00:32:35]  But anyway, they're actually attacking with an increasing frequency these days, having had a lull.
[00:32:40]  And the reason there was a lull was because they didn't need to attack.
[00:32:44]  They'd shut down energy exports.
[00:32:46]  They'd shut down gas exports.
[00:32:48]  They'd shut down shipping.
[00:32:50]  They'd shut down aviation.
[00:32:51]  So they were just continuing with the minimal level required of attacks to keep the shutdown in place.
[00:32:58]  Now that they needed to escalate, they were instantly able to escalate.
[00:33:02]  Meaning that the talk about having destroyed all of Iran's missiles and 70% of their launch capability and so on and so forth, it's just not true.
[00:33:10]  But also there's a question of coordination here.
[00:33:13]  So I remember them saying, and we talked about this very briefly for the podcast, well, their strategic command and control had been destroyed.
[00:33:20]  If they're still ordering Hezbollah to attack energy assets in the south of Israel, that means that it hasn't been destroyed.
[00:33:26]  Yes.
[00:33:27]  That means that there is still centralized functional command and control.
[00:33:31]  If they can strike.
[00:33:32]  Or that they just have a pre-existing plan that they're sticking to without centralized control.
[00:33:37]  Either way, functionally, it's the same thing.
[00:33:39]  Exactly.
[00:33:40]  Maybe, but the organized, like the coordinated strikes on these from Iran's heartland itself would imply that the military structure is still functioning perfectly capably.
[00:33:49]  Yes.
[00:33:50]  These are strategic targeted strikes on specific targets.
[00:33:56]  Exactly.
[00:33:57]  This is still functioning as they intend it to function.
[00:34:00]  This is still functioning exactly according to commander's intent.
[00:34:04]  Yes.
[00:34:05]  And so it also means that the air defense systems aren't able to protect these key assets, but these are the assets that would be prioritized in any defense.
[00:34:15]  These are second only to the air defense systems themselves.
[00:34:21]  And so if you had a choice between intercepting a missile going into a civilian area and intercepting a missile that's going to your key energy facilities, you'd probably defend the energy facilities, not the civilian area.
[00:34:32]  Well, it's not just that, I mean, that makes it sound callous, but losing the energy facilities is further civilian deaths down the line.
[00:34:39]  Exactly.
[00:34:40]  So they are maybe even more.
[00:34:43]  Exactly.
[00:34:44]  Yeah, but by orders of magnitude larger, possibly.
[00:34:47]  So it's actually not such a callous calculation as it sounds.
[00:34:51]  Exactly.
[00:34:52]  Exactly.
[00:34:53]  And in terms of opening the Strait of Hurmuz, this is some data on Iran's own oil shipments.
[00:35:01]  They're hitting record levels.
[00:35:03]  Iran is still exporting oil out of Hurmuz.
[00:35:06]  Everybody else isn't.
[00:35:08]  And Iran is getting double the price that it used to be getting.
[00:35:11]  But they've also bypassed Hormuz, so they signed an agreement with the Chinese, I think, in 2021 to build a pipeline to, I forget the name of the port.
[00:35:21]  It hasn't been implemented yet.
[00:35:22]  But they are using a port that's outside the...
[00:35:26]  So they have a port outside Bandar Abbas, like further to the south, to the direction of Shabahar, which they have been exporting some things out of, but the majority of exports still go through Hormuz.
[00:35:40]  And they're still exporting through Hurmuz, and they are allowing ships to route via Iranian territory between these Iranian islands to bypass the bits of the strait that they have mined.
[00:35:52]  Right.
[00:35:53]  So they're able to get their own oil out.
[00:35:57]  Now, just before we started the segment, Scott Besant was saying that they might remove sanctions on Iranian oil that is already on the water to relieve the pressure on global markets.
[00:36:09]  That's how well this war is going.
[00:36:12]  And obviously, the reason he says that is because of these oil prices.
[00:36:17]  And the crude coming out of the Middle East is at $128 to $135, in some cases, $150, versus American crude, which is trading around $100, the WTI two indices, versus Brent, which is $113.
[00:36:35]  So these numbers don't mean anything to me.
[00:36:38]  So the price before the war was actually heading in the, like, a couple of months before the build-up to the war, the price was heading towards 60.
[00:36:48]  Oh, right.
[00:36:49]  Okay.
[00:36:51]  And there was serious talk that it was going to stabilize around 55 by people who genuinely know their stuff.
[00:36:58]  So it's essentially doubled.
[00:36:59]  So it's essentially doubled.
[00:37:00]  And they're saying that it could go up as high as 250 in a kind of doomstate.

=== Israel's War Machine Mode (14:38) ===

[00:37:05]  If the Iranians follow through with their threats and blow up the oil processing facilities as opposed to just the gas processing facilities that they've already blown up, then it could easily get there.
[00:37:18]  You see, I wonder in a kind of doomstay scenario, if the Iranians actually do that, whether it wouldn't whether the US would then have anything to lose and Israel would have anything to lose from destroying all Iranian oil infrastructure.
[00:37:32]  Which is why they're holding back, which is why they retaliated very heavily to an attack on their own stuff.
[00:37:39]  It's like, don't go there, don't go there.
[00:37:42]  Which, I mean, and they've proven that they have escalation dominance because they are willing to go after this stuff.
[00:37:48]  Because for them, this is a war for survival.
[00:37:51]  And they are no longer in rational mode.
[00:37:53]  They are in martyrdom mode.
[00:37:55]  And so they will escalate it as much as they want to, to the extent that now they're saying they're going to start collecting tolls for any ship that wants to go through the Strait of Hurbuz.
[00:38:07]  The aspect of martyrdom is something that we haven't touched on before, I think.
[00:38:11]  Right.
[00:38:11]  I think Westerners don't fully understand.
[00:38:14]  Because how old was the Ayatollah Khomeini when he was?
[00:38:17]  86.
[00:38:18]  He was going to be 87 on the 19th of April, I think.
[00:38:21]  Yeah.
[00:38:21]  And we did know that the US fleet was heading towards this region.
[00:38:26]  So the Iranians doubtless already knew that the war was coming.
[00:38:31]  And he decided to stay above ground in his compound.
[00:38:34]  Yes.
[00:38:34]  And the location of this compound is public knowledge.
[00:38:37]  Of course.
[00:38:37]  And so the Americans doubtless were like, well, we can just go and shoot the Ayatollah and the regime will collapse.
[00:38:44]  There'll be an uprising from the bottom and somehow we win.
[00:38:49]  But in fact, he trumped them by making himself into a martyr.
[00:38:53]  Exactly.
[00:38:53]  Because the entirety of Shia ideology is built on the slogan, the victory of blood over the sword.
[00:39:00]  Right.
[00:39:00]  Which goes back to the days of Hussein, the grandson of Muhammad, who went into an incredibly uneven battle with maybe 40, maybe 200 men, maybe whatever, versus an army of thousands.
[00:39:13]  They all got slaughtered, fighting heroically.
[00:39:18]  And that is the foundation myth of Shia Islam, not the arrival of Muhammad.
[00:39:24]  And so What this does is it takes on aspects of sort of Iran war invasion of Afghanistan, where the Americans in their, and not just the Americans, but the Westerners in their naivety thought, well, we'll bring them liberal democracy because surely, fundamentally, they're universal men just like us, and they will be happy with the liberal democracy.
[00:39:42]  Exactly.
[00:39:43]  And now we have started a war with a culture that just don't think like us when it comes to death.
[00:39:50]  I mean, we don't have a concept of martyrdom, for example.
[00:39:52]  Not anymore, no.
[00:39:53]  And yeah, not anymore, especially not in battle.
[00:39:56]  But moreover, the Iranian regime has been there since 1979, and they've known that at some point it's very possible they're going to have hot conflict with the West.
[00:40:05]  In the same way that the Russians had clearly prepared for a long time, so we were not able to judo flip Vladimir Putin's economy.
[00:40:12]  Exactly.
[00:40:13]  They have been preparing for this.
[00:40:14]  Whereas I can't help but feel the Israelis, maybe they have been preparing for it, but the Americans who have been dragged into this with the Israelis have not prepared for it at all.
[00:40:24]  Not in any way.
[00:40:25]  And so you have a very deeply entrenched and well-planned out scenario on one side versus a kind of cavalier, well, we have the strength to pop the leader.
[00:40:34]  Why don't we just do it?
[00:40:35]  Like exactly did with Maduro.
[00:40:37]  It's like, okay, that's great.
[00:40:39]  But as Machiavelli pointed out, wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.
[00:40:44]  And you have not thought about this enough.
[00:40:46]  But also, I mean, with Maduro, all they did was they kidnapped him and they, you know, killed his presidential guard and they made a big show of it.
[00:40:53]  But actually, you know, the regime is still in place.
[00:40:55]  They've just got someone who's more pliant, who's willing to do, you know, to get the oil shipments going and all that kind of stuff.
[00:41:03]  With this, with Iran, what they've done is that they've built underground missile cities that are layered and layered.
[00:41:11]  The Iranians say that some of the depths there are 500 meters underground, meaning that you can blow up all the shafts that you want, but in reality, you can't destroy it because it's designed in a way to absorb these explosions and keep them insulated.
[00:41:28]  Now, they're not all very well designed, obviously, but there are dozens of them.
[00:41:35]  And what we've seen is that when there is an order to sort of escalate the launches, they can very easily escalate the launches.
[00:41:43]  And because Khamenei died in this way, what he did was solidify the position of everybody in the IRGC, from the newest recruit to the most grizzled general, and say, well, I will follow in the footsteps of my leader and fight until one of the two victories, as they present them, military victory or martyrdom.
[00:42:05]  And also, I mean, they've been calling America the Great Satan for a long time.
[00:42:09]  Yes.
[00:42:09]  They know the Great Satan is coming.
[00:42:11]  Oh, that day has finally arrived.
[00:42:13]  Well, we know what we're supposed to do then.
[00:42:15]  Exactly.
[00:42:16]  You know, they've been inculcating into this for 46 years.
[00:42:19]  And now they're firing even more advanced missiles with multiple warheads, with maneuverability, with all kinds of like some of them have flares to distract air defense systems and they are scoring hits.
[00:42:35]  And it's pretty obvious that when they actually want to hit something, it's air defense that's failing, not Iranian missile launch capabilities.
[00:42:44]  And so if you're reading this as a signal, what Trump has in front of him now is a situation where if he continues this war, he's guaranteed to destroy the global economy.
[00:42:57]  And he's guaranteed to end up taking the kind of damage and casualties that the electorate won't accept.
[00:43:05]  He doesn't have a ground option because no one wants to send hundreds of thousands of Americans to secure the Iranian coast.
[00:43:13]  Securing Khurmuz itself physically, even if they sent a ground force and took the islands and took Khurmuz, the rest of the Persian Gulf is still a barrel in which ships can be shot from anywhere along that thousand-mile Iranian coastline.
[00:43:32]  And it is not solvable with the means that are available to Trump, unless he wants to nuke Iran.
[00:43:39]  Which obviously he's not going to do.
[00:43:40]  Which he's not going to do.
[00:43:42]  But also, so it looks like essentially Trump's only option here is to either engage in a massive national war.
[00:43:51]  Because I mean, one of the things that modern states they get away with our wars because we're fighting weak opponents a long way away that doesn't have any particular impact on your life.
[00:44:01]  Exactly.
[00:44:02]  But when you engage in a national full-scale war that would require the mobilization of hundreds of thousands and it would cost unbelievable amounts of money to presumably conquer and capture and pacify a country, I mean, Iran is a much more difficult country to occupy than Iraq, for example, famously.
[00:44:21]  It's more difficult than Afghanistan.
[00:44:23]  Of course.
[00:44:23]  And it would be, it would cost political capital that Trump just doesn't have.
[00:44:29]  No.
[00:44:29]  So the only other alternative seems to be a humiliating climb down and essentially an apology and a treaty that is favorable to Iran.
[00:44:37]  And if this war continues, you can easily see a situation in which countries like Kuwait and Bahrain and even Qatar actually become part of Iran.
[00:44:46]  Yes.
[00:44:46]  Or at least the Iranian sphere of influence, or fully under the Iranian sphere of influence?
[00:44:51]  Because if you're Iran now, your minimum terms are you know, you're not allowed to have American bases on your territory.
[00:44:57]  Yes.
[00:44:58]  In the same way that Russia's minimum terms to Ukraine are, you are never allowed to have NATO bases on your territory for any NATO country.
[00:45:06]  And the problem that Trump has here is that there's just no good Cassus Belli for this.
[00:45:11]  None.
[00:45:12]  The Israelis started this.
[00:45:13]  He allowed himself to get dragged into it.
[00:45:16]  So the moral fault, if he would say, okay, well, can we have a ceasefire?
[00:45:20]  The moral fault would be with the Americans on this.
[00:45:23]  Now, this would be a war of choice that is completely unnecessary, that doesn't fit any definition of just war theory, because there was not, in fact, an imminent threat.
[00:45:34]  The Omanis and the British have both come out and said that there was an agreement, that the Iranians had conceded everything.
[00:45:42]  So Jonathan Powell, the former chief of staff of Tony Blair and the current national security advisor, attended the talks with Kushner and Witkoff and the Iranians.
[00:45:55]  He brought the technical team because the Americans hadn't even brought a technical team to negotiations over the nuclear issue.
[00:46:03]  You can't negotiate something as complex as a nuclear treaty without a fully equipped, very experienced, expert team sitting there.
[00:46:16]  The Americans didn't even bring one.
[00:46:19]  Meaning that now, as things stand, the whole talk about trying to reach an agreement was completely false.
[00:46:28]  And Kushner's job and Witkoff's job was to make sure that there wasn't an agreement.
[00:46:33]  Well, so, I mean, what really matters, I think, then is, you know, who authorized that?
[00:46:40]  Who is responsible for that?
[00:46:41]  Is that Witkoff and Kushner acting on the orders of Donald Trump, just to give the appearance of negotiation?
[00:46:52]  Or is it something else?
[00:46:53]  Is it something more sinister?
[00:46:54]  And well, Benjamin Netanyahu, who used to sleep in Jared Kushner's bed when he would visit their home.
[00:47:02]  We all did that.
[00:47:05]  Okay.
[00:47:06]  Who hasn't had that?
[00:47:08]  You know.
[00:47:10]  Kushner is a major donor to Chabad.
[00:47:12]  He gave them $2 million.
[00:47:15]  And Chabad are an insane supremacist, quasi-messianic cult.
[00:47:21]  And they are the ones who were making the decisions on this because the entire structure of the professional State Department was bypassed in these negotiations.
[00:47:31]  And so this war has broken out.
[00:47:33]  And you ask yourself, why?
[00:47:37]  It seems like Israel wants it.
[00:47:40]  And that's the only explanation.
[00:47:42]  The only explanation.
[00:47:43]  There is nothing else there.
[00:47:44]  It goes against what Trump campaigned for.
[00:47:46]  It goes against everything that was promised to the MA movement.
[00:47:51]  It destroys the coalition of independents, Democrats like Kennedy and Gabbard that joined the Trump team and Republicans.
[00:48:01]  Before we wrap this up, so doesn't Israel feel any kind of existential threat from this scale of war?
[00:48:09]  Why is the Israeli government so cavalier with this?
[00:48:12]  Because they keep, firstly, in their minds, this is the only way to do anything.
[00:48:18]  Well, I mean, Israeli strategic planning, I mean, has focused on maintaining chaos throughout the region.
[00:48:25]  Regional wars, you know, local wars.
[00:48:28]  It's in the benefit of Israel, obviously, for its main opponents to be looking elsewhere, to be disorganized.
[00:48:35]  Well, they're hammering Israel pretty hard.
[00:48:37]  So every hour there are missiles landing in Israel, meaning that the Iranians are maintaining a decent rate of fire.
[00:48:43]  The Israelis thought that they could do this by air, but they couldn't do this kind of war by air against Hezbollah.
[00:48:50]  And even in the last war, now we're seeing Hezbollah activating again, and they're doing bloody impressive things.
[00:48:56]  They're hitting Ashkelon, 200 kilometers away.
[00:48:59]  They're hitting bases 160 kilometers away from the border.
[00:49:02]  Because, I mean, is the Israeli thought that, oh, whatever happens, America will bail us out?
[00:49:06]  That's essentially it.
[00:49:08]  It's the sort of, we're backed by the taxpayer mindset that allows the student loan fraud, that allows the global financial crisis fraud, that sort of relies on Western taxpayers one way or the other to in the end shoulder the burden.
[00:49:22]  But the assumption that American power is essentially unbounded is obviously not true.
[00:49:29]  Exactly.
[00:49:30]  You know, there's a reason that the Russian-Ukraine war is still going.
[00:49:33]  Yes.
[00:49:33]  And that's a massive hole in the American pocket there.
[00:49:36]  And then the Americans have got strategic concerns around Taiwan, which China has been moving against and making noises about.
[00:49:43]  And so you've got essentially the limits of American power are being stretched here.
[00:49:48]  To breaking point.
[00:49:49]  To breaking point.
[00:49:50]  And the Americans are basically going to have to go into a total war national machine mode to get this done or not do it at all and essentially retreat from the area.
[00:50:02]  And retreat from the Middle East completely.
[00:50:04]  Yes.
[00:50:04]  And this is the point.
[00:50:05]  That was the thing.
[00:50:06]  Because the idea of chaos is kind of predicated on the fact that there is someone on the other side to be in conflict with.
[00:50:13]  However, this wouldn't exactly be an unusual thing that the Persians take over all of the Middle East.
[00:50:19]  This has happened many times before, actually.
[00:50:21]  Exactly.
[00:50:22]  And it actually could be that Persian armies just end up absorbing everything in the region.
[00:50:30]  And this would actually be a historical norm.
[00:50:33]  Yes.
[00:50:34]  That would be a very classic return moment.
[00:50:36]  Yes.
[00:50:37]  And Bahrain is already in chaos because it's obvious that the Americans can't protect them.
[00:50:42]  It is 70% Shia.
[00:50:44]  Kuwait is arresting pro-Hezbollah cells every other day now.
[00:50:48]  And these are mainly Kuwaiti Shia citizens.
[00:50:51]  They're 30, 40% of the population.
[00:50:54]  Iraq is right next door to Kuwait, meaning that they could overwhelm it just sort of by walking in if they wanted to, which is what they did the first time in 1990.
[00:51:05]  Oh, I was thinking the first time in about 586 BC.
[00:51:08]  But yes, it's what they did then.
[00:51:09]  Fine.
[00:51:10]  Fine.
[00:51:10]  They've done that every single time because Iraq is just an alluvial floodplain.
[00:51:14]  Exactly.
[00:51:14]  It's very easy to move across.
[00:51:16]  Exactly.
[00:51:17]  And so now that this war has begun, nobody has any idea how it's going to end.
[00:51:23]  And everything Trump said that he was going to achieve with this war is not being achieved.
[00:51:27]  But also, there's a remarkable thing that's being revealed here, which is the American underestimation of their enemies.
[00:51:35]  Yes.
[00:51:35]  This has been a repeated pattern now.
[00:51:38]  Surely Putin's military machine will just get ground down in Ukraine and the Russian economy will collapse.

=== Trump's Failed War Strategy (02:12) ===

[00:51:44]  No, actually.
[00:51:45]  Russian economy is booming.
[00:51:46]  Exactly.
[00:51:47]  And we're actually the ones with the shrinking economy.
[00:51:49]  And now it's like, okay, well, Iran can't possibly defend itself.
[00:51:52]  There'll be some sort of uprising from the bottom.
[00:51:54]  We just take out the leadership.
[00:51:55]  It's like, no, taking out the leadership is actually a key strategical maneuver on their part.
[00:51:59]  Exactly.
[00:52:00]  Because they think differently to you.
[00:52:01]  Exactly.
[00:52:02]  And they've revealed themselves not to be a paper tiger in the way that you thought that they were.
[00:52:07]  And so now they're activating a series of long-held plans, and things are actually going badly for the West in the Middle East.
[00:52:14]  It seems that the perspective that the American administration had, and I don't mean Trump himself personally, I mean, the deep state, the military doctrine in there seems to have been flawed.
[00:52:26]  They think that they've destroyed Iran's ability to launch missiles.
[00:52:29]  This completely disproves it.
[00:52:31]  They think that their air defense is still working.
[00:52:33]  This completely disproves it.
[00:52:35]  They think that they can protect the strategic assets in the region.
[00:52:38]  No, they cannot.
[00:52:39]  Apparently not.
[00:52:40]  And the Houthi haven't activated yet, which means that all of the Saudi ports on the Red Sea can be destroyed in one large salvo if these guys decided to go all out.
[00:52:52]  Then Iran still has sort of strategic reserves of things that it can do.
[00:52:56]  And the Houthi have been recruited.
[00:52:58]  They've recruited half a million men to march on Jerusalem.
[00:53:03]  Which means that they have to march through Saudi Arabia.
[00:53:07]  So has anybody thought this through?
[00:53:12]  Clearly not.
[00:53:14]  Here we are.
[00:53:15]  Anyway, we'll leave that there.
[00:53:18]  The haptification says Trump is hoping the Iranian population will overthrow the regime so he doesn't have to send troops.
[00:53:23]  It looks like he's screwed in the midterms and the Democrats are going to win the presidency in 28.
[00:53:26]  Yeah, this seems to have been a mistake that was just completely unnecessary and really just is essentially doing something about the regime.
[00:53:37]  Whereas in reality, if you look historically, every Iranian election has had a 60 to 70% participation rate.
[00:53:44]  Meaning that this regime is accepted as somewhat legitimate by 60 to 70% of people who are actually going out and voting.
[00:53:52]  And also, should have been reigning in Israel.

=== Banksy's Moral Framework (14:23) ===

[00:53:56]  Frankly, the tail is wagging the dog.
[00:53:59]  Anyway, let's move on to something a bit more jolly.
[00:54:02]  Some good news to end the podcast.
[00:54:04]  I like end of the podcast, some good news.
[00:54:06]  Yeah, good news.
[00:54:07]  Banksy has been unveiled.
[00:54:09]  The mystique has fallen.
[00:54:10]  And it turns out that he's actually a fat 50-something-year-old multi-millionaire public schoolboy from Bristol and not some edgy dissident against the regime.
[00:54:21]  Imagine my shock.
[00:54:22]  Exactly.
[00:54:23]  Try and contain your surprise, please.
[00:54:25]  Before we go on, though, and give you all the lurid details.
[00:54:28]  We've got a live event on the 11th of April in Swindon.
[00:54:31]  Link in the description.
[00:54:32]  It's going to be amazing.
[00:54:33]  Come and join us.
[00:54:34]  We're going to have a great time.
[00:54:35]  We're going to get drunk as well.
[00:54:36]  So it'll be more loose than normal, I imagine, which means it's probably, we will record it for people who have been asking.
[00:54:42]  We'll probably put it behind the paywall, though, you know, to be sure.
[00:54:45]  Anyway, so we've got the mystery of Banksy.
[00:54:48]  Now, this in artistic circles was actually fairly well known, who he was.
[00:54:53]  But of course, everyone was being polite about it.
[00:54:56]  But he went and did some art in the Ukraine.
[00:54:59]  And this meant that his identity had to be revealed.
[00:55:04]  Went to Ukraine?
[00:55:04]  He did.
[00:55:06]  Yeah, to put up some anti-war art, which is very novel.
[00:55:10]  Stunning and Brave.
[00:55:10]  Stunning and Brave.
[00:55:12]  And so this is Robert Gunningham is his name.
[00:55:15]  This is the actual picture of him.
[00:55:17]  There is a picture of a chap.
[00:55:19]  In fact, it might even be in this article.
[00:55:23]  Where is it?
[00:55:24]  I think it's this chap.
[00:55:25]  This is not the chap, right?
[00:55:27]  This is not Banksy.
[00:55:28]  This is a picture of a random builder whose name is George Giorgio.
[00:55:34]  It was falsely identified as Banksy.
[00:55:36]  This is not Banksy.
[00:55:38]  So the poor bloke.
[00:55:40]  I don't know, actually.
[00:55:41]  I mean, maybe he is, actually.
[00:55:42]  Maybe he's Greek.
[00:55:43]  Yeah, it might be Greek as well.
[00:55:45]  But this poor chap went viral because everyone thought, you know, I thought so as well, because I mean, this was the picture of Ron Say, but no, this was not him.
[00:55:53]  It was, in fact, this chap at the top, not that guy, this chap.
[00:55:58]  So, really normal-looking guy.
[00:56:01]  Not exactly a rock star, but he was initially unmasked in 2008 as a former public schoolboy from Bristol.
[00:56:07]  This photograph was taken in Jamaica in 2004, and it's him.
[00:56:12]  But what's undisputed, as they tell us, is that he emerged from Bristol in 1974.
[00:56:17]  So he's about 52 years old and was involved in the street art movement that exploded during the 1980s.
[00:56:22]  And his estimated wealth currently sits at.
[00:56:24]  Does anyone want to take a guess?
[00:56:26]  100 million?
[00:56:27]  Not quite that much.
[00:56:29]  39 million.
[00:56:30]  Well, I mean, that's still more than enough, isn't it?
[00:56:33]  Not bad.
[00:56:34]  Yeah, not bad.
[00:56:35]  Not bad.
[00:56:37]  You know, a little Bristol lad done good for himself.
[00:56:42]  But the reason this is important is because Banksy and this is the problem with led by donkeys, actually, actually revealing themselves, it completely ruins the mystique.
[00:56:55]  When it's an unknown person and these provocative artworks turn up, you think, oh, God, that could be anyone.
[00:57:03]  That could be someone who truly is outside of the system.
[00:57:06]  Genuine revolutionary.
[00:57:07]  Exactly.
[00:57:08]  But no, Banksy is just the same as the rest.
[00:57:11]  In fact, I mean, those of us on the right of politics, the actual dissident side of politics, have long known that, of course, Banksy is just a tool of the regime, which is why he went unmasked for so very long.
[00:57:22]  Imagine if Banksy's artworks were England belongs to the English.
[00:57:27]  I mean, how long would the government allow that man to go unmasked?
[00:57:31]  He would be Sam Melead in a day.
[00:57:34]  Yes.
[00:57:34]  And it's only because Banksy has been swimming with the tide, swimming with the flow, that he has been allowed to gain such reputation and remain at large.
[00:57:45]  Did he do pro-lockdown art?
[00:57:48]  Oh, you know what?
[00:57:48]  I didn't check about pro-lockdown art.
[00:57:50]  Because that's one of the, like, it would be interesting to know, actually.
[00:57:53]  You know, I bet this guy actually does consult with the government in some form, if that's the case.
[00:58:00]  You know what?
[00:58:00]  That wouldn't surprise me at all.
[00:58:03]  I seem to remember images of people wearing masks and hero nurses and doctors and all that sort of stuff.
[00:58:10]  Yeah.
[00:58:10]  You know, there are, yes, there are.
[00:58:12]  In fact, Banksy makes like the BBC have got Banksy art lockdown.
[00:58:18]  So people being shackled by the coronavirus.
[00:58:22]  So literally, it's a coronavirusing, a green coronavirus with a ball and chain.
[00:58:27]  But that's Sweden showed us.
[00:58:30]  Exactly what happened.
[00:58:32]  But no, no, no.
[00:58:32]  That's exactly it.
[00:58:33]  That's saying the government has to do this because of the evil coronavirus.
[00:58:37]  But Sweden has shown us that they didn't have to do this.
[00:58:39]  It was entirely a choice that was governed by state policy, and it was insanely destructive.
[00:58:45]  So, no, you're absolutely right.
[00:58:46]  He did essentially create lockdown propaganda and apologia.
[00:58:51]  So yes, he did.
[00:58:53]  But yeah, we'll go through some of his artworks just to show people just how much he is the renegade artist of the regime because it's just remarkable.
[00:59:02]  Just absolutely remarkable.
[00:59:04]  Now, I mean, you can go to like these sorts of ones.
[00:59:07]  Now, you might think, well, what's this?
[00:59:09]  This doesn't seem important at political.
[00:59:10]  No, it's not.
[00:59:12]  This is the James Felton.
[00:59:14]  This is the cockwomble section of the 2000-era shitlib consensus, right?
[00:59:21]  This is the, ha ha, sub-Monty Python.
[00:59:24]  Isn't this novel and funny for funny sake?
[00:59:26]  It's like, not really, no.
[00:59:28]  But there are other.
[00:59:28]  Mighty Bouche kind of.
[00:59:30]  Yes.
[00:59:30]  Yes, yes, exactly.
[00:59:32]  Where it's like, it's irreverent, frivolous, and totally unfunny.
[00:59:36]  That's exactly correct.
[00:59:38]  But there are, of course, these more iconic ones.
[00:59:40]  Now, this is one from 2004, I think it was.
[00:59:44]  This was the most famous one, and this was the one that made him the most money, I think.
[00:59:48]  Which in itself is not wrong or bad.
[00:59:52]  This is perfectly fine.
[00:59:54]  It's a young girl with a heart bloom that's floating away.
[00:59:56]  There's nothing wrong with that one, right?
[00:59:59]  That's actually pretty normal.
[01:00:00]  Now, he shredded that in a stunt, but that's not such an important thing.
[01:00:04]  Of course, he has the pro-Princess Diana art propaganda and calling politicians just all monkeys, of course.
[01:00:13]  Then he has the love, the flower thrower.
[01:00:19]  This was on the wall, the West Bank wall that separated Israel from Palestine.
[01:00:24]  If only you'd throw flowers.
[01:00:26]  They were throwing suicide bombers.
[01:00:29]  They were literally, the reason the wall was built is because they were sending suicide bombers, blowing up people in buses and in pizza parlors and in cafes and killing random civilians.
[01:00:41]  Yes.
[01:00:42]  This is complete nonsense.
[01:00:44]  This is the theme that underpins his anti-war activism: is shouldn't we all just get along and love one another?
[01:00:50]  And it's like, no.
[01:00:52]  I mean, don't get me wrong, that would be lovely, Banksy.
[01:00:55]  But actually, reality is...
[01:00:56]  It's a lot worse.
[01:00:57]  Yeah, it's a lot more complicated than that.
[01:00:58]  And actually, there are deep fissures between groups of people that they find irreconcilable.
[01:01:05]  And often, the person you're picturing throwing with flowers here is the one throwing the bombs.
[01:01:10]  I bet he took a lot of ecstasy in the 1990s and probably thought that the secret is ecstasy and like rave music.
[01:01:17]  I don't doubt.
[01:01:19]  So anyway, this, but the point of the point of Banksy's anti-war art is to make the incredibly trite point that war is bad.
[01:01:29]  Yes.
[01:01:30]  Let's all be nice to each other.
[01:01:31]  Yes, exactly.
[01:01:32]  Can't we all just be nice to each other?
[01:01:33]  Just be kind.
[01:01:34]  It's the kind of art that Ed Davy would appreciate, right?
[01:01:37]  It's the, and I'm not joking.
[01:01:40]  Exactly.
[01:01:41]  You're spot on.
[01:01:42]  I know.
[01:01:42]  That's exactly right.
[01:01:44]  I know these people inside out because this is the culture I grew up in, right?
[01:01:48]  And I hated it at the time and I hate it even more now.
[01:01:51]  It's, as I said, utterly trite, right?
[01:01:53]  It doesn't resolve any of the issues.
[01:01:55]  It never addresses any of the actual problems.
[01:01:57]  And actually, if you think about it, no justice is ever provided here.
[01:02:01]  Well, let's all assume, oh, well, we can all just get along.
[01:02:03]  And, you know, it's a kumbaya.
[01:02:05]  Imagine all the people holding hand in hand.
[01:02:07]  Okay, but there are loads of terrible people who've done terrible things who will not face justice.
[01:02:12]  And you are going to cover all of that up and say, no, no, no, it's fine.
[01:02:15]  It's fine.
[01:02:15]  It doesn't matter what terrible things they do.
[01:02:17]  We're not going to strike back.
[01:02:18]  We're not going to do anything in return.
[01:02:19]  It's like, okay.
[01:02:20]  So there's an assumption.
[01:02:21]  There's an assumption that underpins this of the fundamental moral rectitude of inaction.
[01:02:27]  That's the assumption that underpins Banksy's moral framework.
[01:02:32]  The person who acts least is the most moral.
[01:02:35]  It's like, no, sorry, Banksy.
[01:02:37]  That's not how life works, actually.
[01:02:38]  You have to set an order.
[01:02:40]  You have to set something.
[01:02:41]  You have to be affirmative.
[01:02:43]  And it is in the goodness or badness of your affirmative actions that morality is found.
[01:02:47]  Non-action is amorality.
[01:02:50]  If you do not act, you are not moral.
[01:02:52]  And therefore, Banksy wants to essentially say, well, we can just abandon morality.
[01:02:57]  And it's like, well, let's assume we could.
[01:02:59]  We have abandoned morality.
[01:03:00]  We have abandoned action.
[01:03:02]  Do the people throwing the flowers abandon action?
[01:03:06]  Ah, right.
[01:03:08]  This is Christianity without natural law, without philosophy.
[01:03:11]  Yes.
[01:03:11]  This is sentimentalism as opposed to actual Christianity.
[01:03:14]  This is post-Christianity.
[01:03:15]  Peak shit libery.
[01:03:17]  Yes.
[01:03:17]  Peak.
[01:03:18]  John Lennon exactly that.
[01:03:20]  John Lennon has imagined.
[01:03:22]  Well, we'll just, if we're just sufficiently vulnerable and peaceful and loving, then our enemies will just say, you know what, look at them.
[01:03:28]  They're too good for us.
[01:03:30]  We can't possibly kill them in cold blood, which is not how the world works.
[01:03:33]  So you've got this childlike morality that underpins everything that Banksy does.
[01:03:39]  And this is, of course, him pushing the open door.
[01:03:44]  You know what we don't like?
[01:03:45]  It's British culture.
[01:03:47]  You know what we're here to debauch?
[01:03:49]  It's British culture.
[01:03:50]  Why not?
[01:03:50]  But also, like, oh, it's lesbianism is really transgressive.
[01:03:54]  I mean, it's like, sorry, no.
[01:03:58]  That's exactly the right point to arrive on there.
[01:04:00]  Not only is this about debauching the memory of Queen Victoria, because she famously didn't think that women could be lesbians, actually.
[01:04:07]  And so this is Banksy saying, no, look, I can draw you.
[01:04:10]  I've drawn you as the lesbian.
[01:04:12]  Therefore, you are.
[01:04:13]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:04:15]  But as you say, it's in no way transgressive.
[01:04:18]  Because from 1997 onwards, every government has believed in and sanctioned and completely endorsed absolutely everything Banksy believes.
[01:04:26]  So he is in no way against the regime.
[01:04:28]  He's not a renegade in any way, shape, or form.
[01:04:30]  What he is, is trying to demoralize us about our own history in the typical shitlib fashion.
[01:04:37]  Yes.
[01:04:38]  And so here we are.
[01:04:39]  This is wonderful.
[01:04:41]  I'm so glad.
[01:04:41]  You can see why he became the sort of token artist of the regime.
[01:04:46]  He is moralizing them to destroy what we had inherited.
[01:04:50]  Here's another one about the devolved parliament.
[01:04:52]  This is a parliament of chimps.
[01:04:53]  I don't know whether you can see it.
[01:04:54]  It's a bit small.
[01:04:55]  But this was in the wake of the Brexit vote, of course.
[01:04:58]  He did this.
[01:04:59]  How could Parliament take us out of the European Union?
[01:05:02]  The holy sacred European Union.
[01:05:04]  Because I, as a dissident, I'm against Brexit, which makes me incredibly edgy, don't you think?
[01:05:13]  Of course.
[01:05:14]  Yeah.
[01:05:14]  I mean, if there was one thing the establishment didn't want, it's to remain.
[01:05:19]  This is deeply apist.
[01:05:21]  I resent the discrimination inherent in the sense.
[01:05:25]  Yes.
[01:05:25]  But there's a secret kind of, or not so secret kind of based reading of a lot of these, actually.
[01:05:31]  Like the, you know, I mean, like, MPs are direct representatives of the people.
[01:05:36]  I mean, the people are apes too.
[01:05:37]  I mean, you know, you could make a kind of anti-democratic case here, like with the one day we'll be in charge thing, right?
[01:05:44]  I like where you're going.
[01:05:45]  Like, no, no, no, no, chimps, you know, like, you know, if ordinary people keep chipping out, but also just like, you know, I mean, we get, we get the leaders we deserve.
[01:05:55]  Let's put it this way: if this was a parliament of Gamanzilla, we'd have a very different country.
[01:06:00]  Yeah.
[01:06:01]  Their reaction would be slightly different.
[01:06:03]  Yeah, and it would be far less flattering, actually.
[01:06:06]  But again, this shows you the ontology of Banksy as well.
[01:06:12]  He thinks that these people are not representative of the country.
[01:06:16]  So he's not actually trying to say that I, as a Bristolian, am a chimp being represented by an Edmund Burkean chimp.
[01:06:23]  Yeah, by a slightly more intelligent chimp, maybe.
[01:06:26]  Exactly.
[01:06:27]  What he's saying is these are a different species to us, and I have nothing to do with them.
[01:06:31]  It just so happens they do everything that I want them to do.
[01:06:33]  They don't want to leave the EU.
[01:06:35]  They are for gay rights.
[01:06:36]  They're for immigration, blah, blah, blah.
[01:06:38]  But no, and so it's the veneer of, oh, I'm against the establishment, whilst supporting everything the establishment does.
[01:06:46]  I hate it.
[01:06:47]  I hate the.
[01:06:47]  Do you notice the sprinkling of diversity where some of the apes are red?
[01:06:52]  Oh, yeah.
[01:06:53]  I mean, a couple of harangues in there.
[01:06:56]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:06:57]  This was from 2019 as well.
[01:06:58]  But this sold for 12 million pounds, this.
[01:07:01]  What?
[01:07:02]  12 million pounds.
[01:07:04]  I'm of the view that all modern art is money laundering.
[01:07:07]  I'm of the view that I'm in the wrong job, just like with the universities.
[01:07:11]  I'm not making £12 million per artwork.
[01:07:13]  Anyway, then you have the two police officers kissing, which of course was deeply controversial and against the regime.
[01:07:20]  Wasn't it David Cameron that legalized gay marriage?
[01:07:23]  Yes.
[01:07:23]  Yeah.
[01:07:23]  So, you know, you can see.
[01:07:24]  Billy Blair allowed civil unions and David Cameron decided that's not liberal enough.
[01:07:30]  The Conservative Party is truly liberal.
[01:07:32]  And so in 2014, this sold for more than half a million pounds.
[01:07:36]  Or half a million dollars, sorry.
[01:07:38]  But in 2014, was this a controversial issue?
[01:07:41]  Was this pushing the boundaries?
[01:07:43]  Sorry, what were we doing here, Banksy?
[01:07:47]  Well, you know, you know what it reminds me of, actually, is it reminds me of Andres Serrano.
[01:07:52]  I'm not familiar with that.
[01:07:53]  Andres Serrano did the cover of two Metallica albums.
[01:07:57]  Oh, right.
[01:07:57]  Load and Reload.
[01:07:59]  And one was Blood and Pierce, and one was Blood and Seaman.
[01:08:03]  But he also did a very famous, maybe his most famous artwork in the 1990s was called Piss Christ.
[01:08:08]  Do you know about this?
[01:08:09]  I've heard of it.
[01:08:11]  It's a crucifix suspended in a vat of his own urine.
[01:08:14]  Right.
[01:08:15]  And supposed to be incredibly transgressive.

=== Piss Christ Controversy Explained (11:27) ===

[01:08:20]  That's how it's taken.
[01:08:21]  But of course, the question is: well, why not piss Quran?
[01:08:25]  Well, piss Talmud.
[01:08:29]  Why not any other religious symbol other than the main religious symbol that has been desecrated for the last 150, 200 years, since the French Revolution at least?
[01:08:41]  You know, it's like you really are pushing on an open door.
[01:08:45]  You think you're edgy, but actually, you're not taking any risk at all.
[01:08:50]  Exactly.
[01:08:50]  Why not continue to flay the native religion that has been flayed to the point of skinlessness anyway?
[01:08:57]  Well, it's like Madonna dressing up as a nun.
[01:08:59]  Exactly.
[01:09:00]  None of this is new.
[01:09:00]  All of this has been done before.
[01:09:02]  And this is all Banksy's entire artistic career has been.
[01:09:06]  There are a few others on this, but we'll go to some more specific political ones, if I can get rid of that.
[01:09:14]  Obviously.
[01:09:16]  Obviously, Banksy's on the side of migrants.
[01:09:18]  You didn't doubt, right?
[01:09:20]  You didn't for a second, didn't for a second think that Banksy was like maybe bringing in tens of thousands of Afghan rapists or Romanian scammers or like African knife murderers.
[01:09:34]  So you're telling me that Banksy and Jenrik are on the same team?
[01:09:37]  Yes.
[01:09:38]  Yes, I am exactly telling you that.
[01:09:40]  I'm telling you that Banksy is on precisely the team that has done all of this to us.
[01:09:45]  How truly rebellious.
[01:09:46]  And this is why he was allowed to be the court artist of dissidents.
[01:09:51]  It's not that you're not going to go too far.
[01:09:54]  You're not going too far enough.
[01:09:56]  I need more.
[01:09:57]  I want more.
[01:09:57]  And then you remember, you may remember Dismal.
[01:10:00]  How this was set up in Western Supermayor in 2015, where Banksy basically parodied the dilapidated state of Britain.
[01:10:09]  And moreover, the because it's set up as a parody of Disneyland.
[01:10:14]  I don't know if we know, we haven't got any more images here, but it's set up as a parody of Disneyland.
[01:10:18]  Again, a dilapidated, run-down, sort of post-apocalyptic Disneyland, actually.
[01:10:24]  Children of men, really.
[01:10:25]  Very, very much.
[01:10:26]  Yeah, very much, actually.
[01:10:27]  And that's a great.
[01:10:28]  I didn't even think to call it that.
[01:10:32]  But what are we doing here?
[01:10:33]  What are we doing when we denigrate Disney World, right?
[01:10:36]  Now, I've taken my kids to Disneyland and it's magical for them.
[01:10:40]  They see the castle, they see all the stuff, and they're just like, wow, this is incredible.
[01:10:45]  What is Banksy in his cynical Gen X materialist mindset doing?
[01:10:51]  He is disenchanting the world.
[01:10:53]  He is actively in the process of disenchanting the world.
[01:10:57]  Anti-artists, if you will.
[01:10:58]  An anti-artist.
[01:11:00]  Do we have.
[01:11:01]  I was hoping there'd be that.
[01:11:02]  I should have got the image of the actual front castle because it's literally the Disney castle, but it's all collapsed and decayed and covered in grime.
[01:11:10]  It's like, yeah, that's the world that Banksy is actually in the process of creating.
[01:11:15]  That's literally what he made in contradistinction to what actually exists.
[01:11:19]  Reminds me of John Cleese, really.
[01:11:21]  At least John Cleese has had his come to Jesus moment.
[01:11:24]  Yep.
[01:11:25]  And I used to go from just literally ragging on John Cleese in his replies to retweeting him because he suddenly, like Rupert Lowe put his video out, and John Cleese's like, oh, yeah, I have to work.
[01:11:34]  And this is like, great, great, get on it, John.
[01:11:36]  But as you can see, it's you, you, in one game, you get to look at the look at the refugee boat.
[01:11:42]  Look at it.
[01:11:43]  Is that what the refugee boat looks like?
[01:11:44]  Hordes of children coming across the channel?
[01:11:47]  No, there are virtually no children coming across the channel.
[01:11:51]  What there are are adult men, and your job is to chase around the refugee children with the little police boat as if they do.
[01:11:59]  As if that's what they do.
[01:12:01]  If only they did this, they escort them over.
[01:12:03]  So complete bullshit, right?
[01:12:06]  This is the problem of Banksy.
[01:12:07]  Complete bullshit.
[01:12:09]  Lies.
[01:12:09]  It's one of Steve Jobs, of course, Migrant Child, anti-migration.
[01:12:13]  Oh, look at this.
[01:12:14]  The ugly grey pigeons to the beautiful foreign bird.
[01:12:18]  Keep out.
[01:12:18]  Migrants are not welcome.
[01:12:19]  Go back to Africa.
[01:12:20]  Keep off our worms.
[01:12:22]  It's like those ugly grey pigeons.
[01:12:24]  But also, again-based interpretation.
[01:12:27]  Well, I'm for a pigeon.
[01:12:29]  Parochial altruism is rooted in deep biology.
[01:12:33]  And you know.
[01:12:36]  Well, that's the point that he can't admit, though, isn't it?
[01:12:39]  Of course.
[01:12:41]  And this is the problem with all the shit that propaganda.
[01:12:43]  Boris Johnson says he's going to send back the letterboxes.
[01:12:46]  Oh, great.
[01:12:48]  He didn't, but you know, good propaganda.
[01:12:51]  But anyway, so you've got all of this pro-immigrant propaganda, obviously.
[01:12:56]  There was an anti-immigration one in Clankton in 2014.
[01:12:59]  That was this one.
[01:13:00]  Because, of course, the people of Clankton were far too based and working class for public school boy Banksy.
[01:13:05]  And so he had to go and explain to them: no, you're bad people for not allowing infinite migration to Clankton.
[01:13:12]  And honestly, good on the people of Clankton for standing up for themselves.
[01:13:15]  Then you have his Brexit stuff: vote to love, not to leave.
[01:13:20]  Oh, the European Union is love, guys.
[01:13:22]  It's just love.
[01:13:23]  It's infinite, unaccountable bureaucracy.
[01:13:25]  It's just love.
[01:13:26]  Paying billions a year to this infinite unaccountable bureaucracy and having no control of your own country.
[01:13:30]  That's what love is.
[01:13:31]  Don't you understand?
[01:13:32]  Banksy is here to morally educate you on what love is.
[01:13:36]  Just unbelievable.
[01:13:38]  I just literally the led by donkeys worldview, and I hate it so much.
[01:13:47]  I hate it.
[01:13:48]  Anyway, then you had his Brexit one.
[01:13:50]  Oh, look at that.
[01:13:50]  The European Union is losing a star.
[01:13:53]  It's being chipped out.
[01:13:54]  Yeah, don't care.
[01:13:55]  I don't care.
[01:13:57]  No sympathy from you whatsoever on that.
[01:14:01]  And anyway, right.
[01:14:02]  So we've had the demystification of Banksy as just the icon of the regime.
[01:14:07]  And that's all he does.
[01:14:08]  That's all he provides.
[01:14:09]  And there's literally nothing else that he can do.
[01:14:13]  And they're coping and seething about it.
[01:14:15]  Oh, this changes nothing.
[01:14:16]  Changes absolutely nothing.
[01:14:17]  Changes everything.
[01:14:19]  Absolutely everything.
[01:14:21]  Exactly.
[01:14:22]  Actually, there is no mystique, which was the reason that Banksy kept his identity secret for such a long time is because the power was within the mystique.
[01:14:31]  As in, Banksy is not a proper name.
[01:14:33]  It's just a handle that he uses.
[01:14:37]  And it could be anyone.
[01:14:39]  Who knows?
[01:14:39]  It's like anonymous.
[01:14:40]  It's like the V for Vendetta.
[01:14:43]  It could be anyone, anywhere.
[01:14:44]  So these things look like an organic expression of the society.
[01:14:49]  Well, it's under this anonymity.
[01:14:50]  Well, anyone could be doing that.
[01:14:51]  It doesn't have to be one Banksy, right?
[01:14:53]  It could be anyone putting up.
[01:14:55]  So what these expressions of the regime are, a moral legitimation that the society itself is producing organically these works of art to support everything the government does.
[01:15:06]  When actually when you personalize it and narrow it down to, oh, it's this one rich public school boy shitlib in Bristol, it changes absolutely everything about it.
[01:15:15]  I mean, Banksy's lawyers have said, well, look, he was working anonymously or pseudonymously to serve vital societal interests.
[01:15:24]  That's their passion.
[01:15:26]  Exactly.
[01:15:27]  I represent an organic upswell of shitlib opinion in the society.
[01:15:32]  And this is particularly important when addressing sensitive issues such as politics, religion, or social justice.
[01:15:38]  It's like, why?
[01:15:39]  You agree with the government on everything.
[01:15:41]  I mean, the minute you say social justice, you sort of reveal your hand, don't you?
[01:15:44]  Yes.
[01:15:47]  Yes.
[01:15:48]  And the author of this article says, I can only imagine this new unmasking will change very little.
[01:15:54]  It's hard to see him embracing the celebrity lifestyle.
[01:15:56]  It's like you don't need to.
[01:15:58]  We've got the picture of the dork who's like, I've never had an original thought in my entire life.
[01:16:04]  And I'm just here to support anything that the progressive establishment says.
[01:16:08]  I am the led by donkeys of this street art movement.
[01:16:12]  And now, who cares?
[01:16:16]  This isn't an organic expression of the society.
[01:16:19]  This is an organic expression of a multi-millionaire public schoolboy.
[01:16:23]  Remember when he was defending the Palestine action guys?
[01:16:25]  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:16:26]  With the sort of judges' mural?
[01:16:29]  This one actually worked out, but he would have completely disagreed.
[01:16:34]  It's only worked out everything.
[01:16:36]  Because he was foolish enough to put the guy with the placard as a white placard.
[01:16:39]  And so people could spray this St. George's Cross on it.
[01:16:42]  That's obviously not the people he's defending.
[01:16:45]  And so, yeah, as you say, it didn't work out.
[01:16:48]  But anyway, I just glad to see it.
[01:16:50]  And I'm glad to see the mythos of Banksy dying out.
[01:16:54]  Because the problem that they have is that they've been relying on the idea of the death of the author.
[01:16:58]  Because as soon as you don't know who the author is, it could be anyone, and therefore it could be everyone.
[01:17:02]  It could come from any section of society.
[01:17:04]  But now we know exactly what section of society it comes from.
[01:17:06]  We know exactly the kind of political opinions he carries.
[01:17:08]  And we know that it's not organic.
[01:17:10]  This isn't a reflection of what people truly believe.
[01:17:13]  And that's how he was able to stay anonymous.
[01:17:15]  I mean, that was the only reason they allowed him to stay anonymous.
[01:17:18]  Exactly.
[01:17:18]  Is that he served that class against the other classes?
[01:17:25]  JM Denton says, I feel that there was a boom of mentality in promoting inaction that permeated every institution, like Fukuyama's end of history, programming people to feel as if action is pointless.
[01:17:35]  Yeah, I think that's a great point because the point of the sort of John Lennon liberal end of history morality is to say, is to essentially locate in action the locus of immorality.
[01:17:48]  And in a way, they're right.
[01:17:50]  In a way, they are right.
[01:17:52]  By taking action, you run the risk of doing something wrong and therefore creating an immoral circumstance.
[01:17:57]  And therefore, it would have been better if you'd not taken that action.
[01:18:00]  Which is the correct interpretation of do not resist evil in the gospel.
[01:18:05]  Yes.
[01:18:06]  But also, the counter is the only necessary thing for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
[01:18:13]  Precisely.
[01:18:14]  Because morality is found in affirmative actions.
[01:18:16]  Exactly.
[01:18:16]  This is actually one of the things that I really appreciate in Nietzsche, actually, weirdly enough.
[01:18:21]  It really resonated with me.
[01:18:22]  It's like, no, you have to move.
[01:18:25]  You can't just be passive.
[01:18:26]  You have to move.
[01:18:27]  And these people, I mean, you can tell by looking at them, would be very happy being passive.
[01:18:32]  And so, yeah, the whole end of history moral paradigm is just wrong, obviously.
[01:18:37]  It's sort of the commodification as well of morality as a series of correct beliefs.
[01:18:43]  Yes.
[01:18:44]  That's it.
[01:18:44]  I mean, these are symbols of correct belief.
[01:18:47]  And it's like you consume these symbols of correct belief.
[01:18:50]  You are moral yourself.
[01:18:51]  Yes.
[01:18:52]  And if you're a multi-millionaire, you can make him very, very rich by buying one.
[01:18:56]  I mean, the amount of money he's made, you know, can't deny the grift.
[01:19:01]  I mean, Jesus, man, you've done a good job.
[01:19:03]  Again, Bristol Boy makes good.
[01:19:07]  I read that some of the prints of his art are being sold for £250,000.
[01:19:12]  Jesus.
[01:19:13]  Just prints?
[01:19:15]  I mean, come on.
[01:19:17]  This is an original Banksy print.
[01:19:19]  It's either original or it's a print.
[01:19:21]  Mandeen points out, well, his crowd are the eat the rich people.
[01:19:24]  He is the rich.
[01:19:25]  It's like, that's correct.
[01:19:26]  And he's been selling his artworks to the rich, telling them everything they want to hear.
[01:19:30]  Again, nothing transgressive or controversial about him at all.
[01:19:34]  And he's definitely been eating too.
[01:19:36]  Definitely.
[01:19:37]  Yeah, he's definitely been doing all it for himself.
[01:19:38]  But, you know, I mean, good for him.
[01:19:41]  I'm all in favor of entrepreneurs.
[01:19:45]  Anyway, we'll go to some of the website comments.

=== Universities Gaming the System (03:34) ===

[01:19:48]  On the bit about the student loans, Jimbo says, we are literally paying for a pyramid scheme designed to help foreigners fill their boots while the natives are coming out impoverished and brainwashed after doing a worthless degree.
[01:19:58]  Yeah.
[01:20:00]  I honestly think if you were to have a serious conversation with the people who set up systems like this and you drill down through the practicalities of it, I think eventually they would arrive on the point of social justice and reparations as the point of these things.
[01:20:16]  They're like, yeah, but the rest of the world is poor and we're not poor.
[01:20:19]  And we have an obligation to give them money.
[01:20:21]  I think that's honestly where they'd arrive at.
[01:20:24]  Sophie says, Nick Shirley, the Somalian guy, daycare guy, also made another video about hospices.
[01:20:30]  And it was the exact same thing again.
[01:20:32]  No one would take his granny Jolene and they just open the hospice, take state funds and make up numbers.
[01:20:37]  Done.
[01:20:38]  Yeah.
[01:20:38]  And that's what government largesse is for.
[01:20:42]  It's really hard to see it in any other way.
[01:20:45]  Henry says, I believe the stat being banded around with the student loan interest that you have to earn over £60,000 before the amount actually owed starts going down.
[01:20:54]  Before that, you're just paying off the interest on the thing.
[01:20:56]  Wow.
[01:20:57]  Which is just bonkers and deeply exploitative.
[01:21:00]  Just by the way, if you're a student, this is the system exploiting you.
[01:21:04]  The system Banksy supports exploiting you.
[01:21:06]  This is their system giving your money, your labor, to foreign peoples and rampant capitalist companies.
[01:21:15]  Sorry, on the 60K thing, the median wage in Britain is what, 27K, 8K?
[01:21:20]  38 for a household.
[01:21:22]  38 for a household.
[01:21:24]  So it's 60K before you start paying off the loan, but it's 38 for a household.
[01:21:28]  That's insane.
[01:21:29]  Yeah.
[01:21:29]  Sorry, what were you going to say?
[01:21:30]  No, I was just going to say, you know, like you come out of university as a young person with £90,000 debt.
[01:21:35]  I mean, that's a mortgage.
[01:21:36]  That's crazy.
[01:21:37]  It is.
[01:21:39]  And then you're going to get a mortgage on top of that.
[01:21:42]  And if you have any problem repaying, then your credit score is going to be ruined.
[01:21:46]  And it's just a nightmare.
[01:21:48]  So even if you haven't sold your soul to usurers, you've sold your body to usurers.
[01:21:52]  Whether you like it or not.
[01:21:53]  Exactly.
[01:21:54]  S. Robert says, I got a free education and a grant with a place on high grades.
[01:21:59]  Was it uni when Blair brought in loans instead and people were not happy?
[01:22:02]  Well, I wasn't happy.
[01:22:04]  I mean, I probably wouldn't have got a grant, to be honest, because I was lazy at school.
[01:22:06]  But, you know, what are you going to do?
[01:22:10]  In hindsight, the main reason for loans and fees was because they decided to offer the same perks to EU students as British students.
[01:22:15]  So we lost our free university because otherwise we'd have been flooded by Euros looking freebies under the EU.
[01:22:20]  Even then, the unis were gaming it for money.
[01:22:22]  My course started with 250 people, had 30 in the second year, and by the third year it had 15 left.
[01:22:28]  Government should have stipulated minimum grades for courses when they let Polytechnics convert to avoid this.
[01:22:33]  Yes.
[01:22:34]  Again, remember, the incentive was just people in universities.
[01:22:38]  They wanted 50% of people to go to university.
[01:22:41]  And in a sense, I mean, I think that whole kind of drive to get 50% of school leavers into university was a way actually maybe to massage employment figures as well.
[01:22:53]  I do genuinely think that.
[01:22:54]  It's like, okay, that's at least three years where you don't have to say these people are unemployed.
[01:22:59]  Great point.
[01:23:00]  But it was also a bribe for the youth vote and it was also a bribe for the establishment vote.
[01:23:05]  You captured the academic institutions, meaning that they don't dissent away from your stupid plans.
[01:23:13]  And you've captured the next generation and sort of channeled their votes to you.
[01:23:17]  Three years of great fun at university, three times fresh as we know.

=== Post-Industrial Economy Capitulation (08:29) ===

[01:23:22]  Exactly.
[01:23:23]  And also as well, like essentially it's a kind of capitulation to the idea that we are a post-industrial economy as well.
[01:23:29]  Saying, no, no, no, everything's gone and it's not coming back.
[01:23:31]  You're going to be working with paperwork in offices.
[01:23:33]  Exactly.
[01:23:34]  And now with the Iran War, you're seeing that actually you need a chemicals industry.
[01:23:38]  Look at the consequence of it.
[01:23:40]  You need an automotive industry at home.
[01:23:42]  You need an energy industry at home.
[01:23:44]  Otherwise, insane lunatics of the Middle East will sort of destroy your livelihood.
[01:23:49]  Blimey.
[01:23:49]  That's a random name says, I think you guys should do a segment on police corruption and brutality.
[01:23:53]  Crime Boller just put out a video exposing Suffolk Police tried to cover up how a 15-year-old almost died because his head was impaled on metal railings because of them.
[01:24:02]  Very graphic.
[01:24:02]  I haven't seen that, but look into that.
[01:24:04]  That sounds horrible.
[01:24:06]  Speaking of the Iran war, Michael says, martyrdom, exactly.
[01:24:09]  Westerners have a hard time comprehending this.
[01:24:11]  It's easy for a ground soldier to understand this, especially one that is studied in the Middle East.
[01:24:16]  Ferraris has an advantage in this analysis as he is a native son of Lebanon.
[01:24:20]  Yes.
[01:24:20]  And actually, but I think I'm pretty good on this sort of stuff too, because of my fascination with the historical Middle East.
[01:24:29]  Yes.
[01:24:30]  And my sheer hatred of the shitlib.
[01:24:34]  The middle-class Bristolian shitlib.
[01:24:36]  I hate these people for the fundamental dishonesty of their worldview and the ignorance they show in being completely uncurious about the true beliefs of other peoples as well.
[01:24:46]  Yes.
[01:24:46]  And insulated from the effects of their voting preferences and beliefs until now, maybe.
[01:24:52]  And I mean, they still largely are.
[01:24:54]  But you are right.
[01:24:55]  The creep is coming.
[01:24:56]  But as you say, the fact that they don't have to pay a price for their beliefs as well is what really annoys me.
[01:25:01]  I hate the entire thing.
[01:25:03]  And I'll be glad when it's gone.
[01:25:05]  Myrmidon says.
[01:25:06]  Ferrariz mentioned that if Trump America continues, it will destroy the global economy.
[01:25:10]  What if that is what America wants to do?
[01:25:12]  Well, why would America want to destroy the thing it sits at the top of?
[01:25:15]  I mean, Trump's obviously reconfiguring the global economy, the tariffs.
[01:25:20]  I mean, that was the kind of big play to, you know, reset the balance of trade and move manufacturing back to the US or closer to the US and secure vital minerals and all this kind of stuff.
[01:25:33]  But yeah, I mean, I don't think that Trump is an accelerationist who thinks it's not just that.
[01:25:39]  I mean, if you're in China, what you do is that you invade Central Asia.
[01:25:43]  The total population of all of Central Asia is maybe 50 million people.
[01:25:48]  And they have all of the resources.
[01:25:50]  They have uranium, they have coal, they have gas, they have oil.
[01:25:54]  Plus, the Chinese have Russia.
[01:25:56]  And Russia has got to prioritize China over everyone else.
[01:25:58]  And also, America can't really strike at you.
[01:26:01]  Exactly.
[01:26:02]  You could hit the Three Gorges Dam, of course.
[01:26:04]  Sure.
[01:26:05]  Which will be tragic, yeah.
[01:26:07]  But the point is, America, you know, you're just going to get away with it.
[01:26:11]  But Michael also says, enjoy Ferraris' clear-headed analysis.
[01:26:15]  Iran has been overdue for a paste thing for almost 50 years, but a ground war in Mantanist territory is, well, messy, especially against the people who've lived in Trainer.
[01:26:22]  Yeah, I mean, I just don't think Trump has the political capital for it at all.
[01:26:26]  How's he going to fall?
[01:26:27]  And again, there was no effort to make a coalition to prepare the Allies for this.
[01:26:34]  It shows that they clearly thought we can go and strike, kill the leader, and then things will just clear up on their own.
[01:26:40]  It's like, no, you just don't understand the Southwark underwear plan.
[01:26:43]  Just, I mean, it's literally the Iraq war all over again.
[01:26:45]  You don't understand these people.
[01:26:46]  Sorry, Go.
[01:26:47]  I mean, there's an America-first case, I think, for preventing Iran from having nuclear weapons.
[01:26:51]  Like, I don't think it's a good idea for Iran to have nuclear weapons because then they can hold the Straight of Formuzz hostage in a different way and the region and whatever.
[01:27:01]  Like, you could make that case, and Trump could have made that case.
[01:27:05]  But the way the war has unfolded, I mean, it's obviously not about that.
[01:27:10]  Yeah, I mean, and this is the difference with them and black bagging Maduro.
[01:27:14]  Black banging Maduro is directly in America's interests.
[01:27:18]  You can see that there's, I mean, obviously, oil started going to Israel as well, blah.
[01:27:22]  But you can see how America's like, no, we want essentially capitalist domination of our hemisphere.
[01:27:27]  Yeah, the reassertion of the Monroe doctrine is the Donro doctrine.
[01:27:30]  I mean, and it was done very cleanly and very quickly, and it was effective because they probably knew a lot more about Venezuela than they did about Iran.
[01:27:38]  Because they negotiated with the actual leadership underneath Maduro.
[01:27:41]  Yeah.
[01:27:41]  Like, what's her name?
[01:27:43]  Don't see what she was in Qatar and the UAE meeting with the Americans and negotiating with them.
[01:27:49]  And that, it seems, where a deal was hatched.
[01:27:51]  Okay, we're going to get rid of Maduro, and then you're going to do what we tell you to, which is exactly what happened.
[01:27:56]  But there's also a kind of fundamental sort of metaphysical agreement between capitalism and socialism, right?
[01:28:01]  Yes.
[01:28:01]  As in, no, we are materialist doctrines.
[01:28:03]  We want prosperity.
[01:28:04]  The question is, how do we get to prosperity?
[01:28:06]  Exactly.
[01:28:06]  Well, the Mullahs are just not thinking like this.
[01:28:08]  No.
[01:28:09]  The Iranian regime doesn't care about that.
[01:28:11]  It cares about paradise and religious orthodoxy and something you have no concept of.
[01:28:16]  So, yeah, something totally different.
[01:28:19]  George says, maybe a part of this plan, the US has secured already the Venezuelan oil, and now they're trying to screw everyone else with chaos in the Middle East.
[01:28:26]  I just don't think it's 4D chess.
[01:28:28]  I think that they've just made a mistake here.
[01:28:30]  And they had a series of assumptions that were born out not to be true.
[01:28:36]  Zesty King, the way you describe Banksy as a man without morality or philosophy, perfectly describes the men of new labor.
[01:28:42]  Those who see themselves as without ancestral baggage, standards, or responsibilities to anyone but themselves, it's a form of selfish idiocy.
[01:28:48]  Well, these are the self-made men of year zero in the liberal revolution.
[01:28:52]  Yes.
[01:28:53]  As you talk about in your book, in fact, well, it's kind of, I mean, it's kind of like the new atheism as well, isn't it?
[01:28:57]  It's like you have a morality that is obviously derived from Christianity, but you deny that it's derived from Christianity, and you say it's just, it's just obvious.
[01:29:08]  It's like Christopher Hitchens, it's just the right thing to do.
[01:29:11]  We just, you know, we're good people.
[01:29:12]  We know it's just the right thing to do.
[01:29:14]  Dawkins and Stephen Fry and people like that.
[01:29:16]  It's exactly the same.
[01:29:18]  We sprang fully formed out of nothing and just happened to land on exactly the correct morality with no prior work being done.
[01:29:25]  How useful is that?
[01:29:27]  Weirdly, I've been having talks, and there are weird Homer Simpson, like Simpson's clips.
[01:29:32]  You know, the one who gets dragged up the mountain by the Sherpa and he wakes up and goes, look how far I've climbed.
[01:29:36]  Yes.
[01:29:36]  That's literally the new atheists.
[01:29:38]  Yes.
[01:29:39]  So anyway, yeah, but Zesti King, you're exactly right.
[01:29:42]  That's exactly how they see themselves.
[01:29:44]  And I just, I can't stand the deception that underpins it all.
[01:29:48]  It's so midwit as well.
[01:29:50]  It's such a midwit thing where it's like, oh, yeah, I've figured it out.
[01:29:53]  Oh, you have, have you?
[01:29:55]  Oh, that's great.
[01:29:56]  I'm glad you figured it out, Banksy.
[01:29:57]  You fucking twat.
[01:29:58]  Yep.
[01:30:00]  Khalain says, the Iranians might have said they conceded the nuclear aspect, but they were immediately in flagrant violation of it.
[01:30:06]  Well, this is a point that you make.
[01:30:07]  They're bad people.
[01:30:08]  You can't trust them, right?
[01:30:10]  Like, I agree.
[01:30:11]  The Iranians probably have killed tens of thousands of protesters.
[01:30:13]  I don't think that's overstated.
[01:30:15]  I know there's a blow.
[01:30:16]  I think they've killed thousands this round.
[01:30:18]  And I mean, overall.
[01:30:20]  Oh, overall, yeah.
[01:30:21]  They're definitely thousands of thousands of people.
[01:30:23]  No doubt.
[01:30:23]  They're not liberals.
[01:30:25]  They don't care.
[01:30:26]  No, they're not allowed to protest.
[01:30:27]  Exactly.
[01:30:28]  I don't doubt that at all.
[01:30:30]  Michael says, this is why Vietnam ended up as it did.
[01:30:33]  Why Afghanistan ended up as it did?
[01:30:35]  Most Westerners are ill-equipped to understand the difference in thought.
[01:30:38]  The East will fight to annihilation.
[01:30:39]  Yeah, and in previous eras, like if America was in the time of Rome and just happened to be exactly as it is now, they would just wipe them out.
[01:30:49]  Like they would just be like Caesar in Gaul.
[01:30:51]  They'd just be wiped out.
[01:30:53]  Kill a third of the population.
[01:30:54]  Exactly.
[01:30:55]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:30:56]  And then rule over the Romanas.
[01:30:58]  But America doesn't have the moral compass or the moral thought in its mind to do something like that.
[01:31:05]  And so it can't really win these wars.
[01:31:08]  And so I'm not advocating that it should do that, by the way, just FYI.
[01:31:11]  It's just this is the position it finds itself in.
[01:31:14]  And I guess we'll end on this one.
[01:31:16]  That's where Anna Maine says, with allies like Israel, we don't need enemies.
[01:31:20]  Well, what I'm saying is Israel doesn't seem to be helping America very much, does it?
[01:31:26]  Anyway, on that note, Charles, where can people find more from you?
[01:31:30]  You can find me on Twitter at Baby Gravy9.
[01:31:32]  I hate that.
[01:31:33]  Yeah, me too.
[01:31:34]  Me too.
[01:31:35]  But it's here to stay.
[01:31:38]  Raw Egg Stack is my sub-stack.
[01:31:40]  I've got a new book out, The Last Men, Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, which you can buy from Amazon, hardcover, Kindle, and audiobook formats.
[01:31:48]  Well, thanks so much for joining us.
[01:31:49]  And we'll see you tomorrow, folks.