The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1394 features hungover Nick Dixon updating on Restore Britain, a party with 127,000 members aiming to win Great Yarmouth via mass deportations. Hosts mock Jennifer Siebel Newsom's "woke" parenting and critique Gen Z's decline in leisure spending due to digital isolation. The episode argues that secular self-improvement fails without divine purpose, promoting Basket Weavers for real community connection while dismissing Reform UK as the liberal order's dying gasp and Green Party policies as unimplementable housing crises. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Restoring Britain's Status00:14:38
Good afternoon and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters, episode 1394.
I am your host today, joined by Charlie Downs.
Good to be here.
Second show of the day.
Yes, second show of the day.
I hope you're not tired of him yet.
We have hungover Nick Dixon, Sadiq Khan for president.
For president, who doesn't understand which country he's in.
And we managed to find this lovely young chap lying on a street corner outside earlier.
What was your name again, Mark?
Yeah, my name is Marek.
Marek.
We've got Marek, and he said that he has some opinions that he'd like to share with everybody.
So we thought, you know what, let's give him a go.
Yes, your deadlift technique is very bad.
I don't deadlift.
The Romanian deadlifts, I'm not willing to risk myself on that.
Oh, I'm from Romania.
Romania, good.
Yeah, there you go.
Keep your pockets to yourselves.
This is ridiculous.
Yes, this is Mark.
You all know Mark, probably.
He's going to talk to us about some things that he's noticed recently.
That's very specific.
And amongst those things that we've all noticed recently that we're going to be talking about, that is going to be whether reform will ever field a white candidate, which is a pressing question.
You're going to be telling us about Gavin Newsom's wife.
Gavin Newsom's insane wife, yes.
The most insane woman in America, possibly, taking over from Hillary and AOC.
It's incredible, the stuff she says.
I'm looking forward to it.
And we're going to end with your segment on whether Zoomers are physically capable of enjoying themselves.
Indeed.
The answer is no, but we'll get to that.
Well, as a.
You're a Zoomer.
The resident Zoomer, I have opinions.
That'll be interesting.
I will be fielding this debate and refereeing.
But first, just to make everybody aware before we get into that, we have.
The live event.
You probably already know about this, but if you don't be there, Mark won't be there.
I don't know if that will entice you further.
But it's tomorrow at 7 till 10 at the Mecca in Swindon.
It's going to be a grand old time, so make sure you come along.
And also after this, we have Lad's Hour where we are going to be physically strapping Carl down and forcing him to watch Monty Python until he laughs.
So there is a risk that we might actually have to cancel and postpone the live event tomorrow if he still hasn't laughed by then.
So fingers crossed for everybody because otherwise, It might just be a big waste of everybody's time.
But with that, tune in and let's get into the news.
Good.
Well, I think I'm first.
So I thought I'd open up with this article here in the New Statesman that was published a few days ago titled Rupert Lowe Wants to Hurt Nigel Farage.
And it's basically an update on where Restore Britain is up to and where Rupert is up to.
And so I thought, as spokesman and campaigns director of Restore Britain, I would come here today, give an update on what we've been up to, and a call to action for everybody listening to this podcast right now.
Now, there was a couple of paragraphs at the bottom of this that I wanted to use to kind of.
Here we go.
So, two weeks ago, Lowe's anger culminated in the registration of a new political party, Restore Britain.
The choice of verb was intended as a credential of Lowe's more hardline conservative approach.
All true so far.
Farage wants to reform the UK to make the country into something new while settling the legacies of successive waves of immigration and cultural integration.
Also true, and this is something that we've been pointing out from the beginning, which is that the framing of Reform UK is actually very telling because they believe fundamentally in this version of Britain.
They believe in the UK, the kind of post 1997, post multiculturalism, post mass immigration.
Consensus.
And what they think it needs is mere reform, tweaking around the edges.
But actually, at its core, it's a good idea.
It's a good project.
We need the foreigners who are willing to fly the Union Jack.
Exactly.
Right?
That's all we need.
Yeah.
And they're quite honest about this when you listen to them.
They will say that Britishness is about British values and they'll basically toe the Blairite line on matters of British identity and so on.
And if you listen to the likes of Leila Cunningham, they are almost indistinguishable from the Conservative or Labour parties.
In her policies for London, her view of You know, again, what it means to be British and so on.
So, this is all correct from the New Statesman so far.
Lowe, on the other hand, wants to restore, to return it to a past that will be recognisable by the ethnic composition of these islands after a programme of brutal mass deportations which fly in the face of the basic principles of natural justice.
Now, obviously, that's loaded full of emotive language, but yes, it is the case that we want to restore Britain to something that it was, you know, certainly close to before, which is a cohesive country at peace with itself and the world.
And yes, part of that will be a program of mass deportations, deporting millions of people.
Bit lazy of them to just cut and paste from your website, isn't it?
Brutal mass deportations.
I'm like, brilliant.
Yeah, well, I was reading this and I was like, is this an endorsement?
They've just flipped the morality by saying fly in the face of the principles of natural justice rather than completely conform with.
Yeah.
It's so funny for them to, like you say, invoke natural law and natural justice, when in fact, the way that the British are living today is completely at odds with any future.
Is this author a particular fan of Thomas Aquinas?
Must be.
You've got this idea of restoration.
It's like the restoration of the status of the British peoples.
It's a restoration of our stamp on the world.
What have we contributed?
What are we continuing to contribute?
And what will be the role of our people in the future?
Whereas, as you say, Reform UK, the UK with the Y project being.
Essentially, a managed liberal global economy unit with no peoples within it, really.
So, just recognizing our peoples is a restoration worth doing it.
Yeah, and this is the thing very quickly.
We don't have to get into all of this right now because it's a little bit high minded.
But this idea of restoration is very important because the analogy that I sort of use in my own mind is one of a house.
And it's a house that was built, it was beautiful, there were people living in it, and then it was allowed to fall into disrepair, there's squatters living in it.
And the various sort of views of the different parties on that house.
Are, well, they're just important to understand to understand the political landscape.
So the Conservatives will say, well, no, the house is still basically all right.
You know, there's people living in it, so it must be fine.
So keeping it the way it is right now, which is decrepit and, you know, the windows are smashed and the door is hanging off its hinges and all the rest of it, and anybody can go in and live in there and all the rest of it, that's fine.
That's all good.
Labour say, actually, it's wrong to even suggest that there is such a thing as an ideal form of this house.
And this house, as it is now, is just as good as it was when it was built 100 years ago or whatever.
Same very much with the Greens.
The Greens think you just need to accelerate further into.
The decline, and actually, that's a good thing.
It's a good thing, it's beautiful to have crackheads living in your house and squatting in your loft and everything.
Whereas we are saying, and reform are saying, if we just tweak some of the things, if we put the door back on its hinges and patch up one of the windows, then everything will be fine.
It's just incremental, minuscule change.
Whereas Restore Britain is saying, no, there is such a thing as an ideal form of this house, of this home, of this country that we can aspire to and which we can use the levers of power, levers, I should say, I'm not an American, to achieve and to create.
And, you know, this country was great before and it can be great again.
It's just a case of having the will to do so and to recognize that that is actually possible if we want it.
And to entertain, like, you know, larger scale sweeping actions that are required, you know, a complete re envisioning of the role of the state, the role of different arms of the state, what services are offered.
You know, again, part of that reform tinkering, if you will, is we've got all of these different services and we will offer all of them still.
And Restore is saying, actually, it's going to be difficult.
We might have to cut some of those services away, and we probably will.
And then you're going to have to step up.
People are going to have to step up.
And even beyond that, you listen to the likes of Robert Jenrick, and he's committing to maintaining the independence of the Bank of England and continuing to listen to the Office for Budget Responsibility and their forecasts, which have been wrong every year since it's been set up in 2010.
Obviously, bottom five every time.
Yeah, it's just absurd.
But they basically do acknowledge that the system as it's currently constituted is basically fine.
It just needs to be tweaked around the edges.
That's not what we're saying.
We're saying that radical change is necessary.
And the vast majority of the British public agree with us in that.
The language here is so similar to something we covered last week.
There was this Aris Rousnos piece in Unheard, and he quoted from the IPPR, who did a sort of survey.
But the language in the IPPR, which is a lefty think tank, they were saying, like, oh, there's alarming talk about mass deportations, and they want to tear up, they kind of use words like natural and they kind of write and things.
This principles of natural justice.
Can see on the left is that it's always been 1997.
You know what I mean?
Like, there, that's the essential thing.
It's like, we're talking about sort of ancient, you know, loyalty to your kindred, you know, your country, these kind of ancient, obvious things that really no one can dispel with.
But they're talking as if like their thing is the absolute baseline reality.
I find that fascinating.
It's complete nonsense.
They do think that, though.
They do think like that.
All these people think like that, whether it's the conservatives or reform or the Greens, like, they all do basically agree that this version of Britain is good.
It's just the degrees to which it should be.
Pursued that differs.
And this is the interesting thing about the Greens, by the way, and I think we'll get into this in this segment.
I've been saying a lot of things recently about the fact that the right way to approach the Greens is not to just say that they're mad and that their voters are mad.
Because actually, if you speak to a lot of Green voters, they are totally normal people, especially when you speak to young Green voters under the age of 30, like me.
Not that I'm a Green voter, just that I'm under the age of 30.
You know, these are people who are listening to the Greens, listening to the fact that they're prepared to talk about wealth inequality, the difficulty that a lot of people have, not just young people, in buying and owning their own home outright.
The way in which our economy has become completely deindustrialized.
We don't make anything in this country anymore, and work is uninspiring.
A lot of people are listening to that and thinking, finally, someone's listening to me, right?
And in the diagnosis of the problems, the Greens are basically correct.
But it's when it comes to the solutions that obviously there is a problem.
But a lot of people are, I think, leaning towards the Greens basically as a burn it all down, screw the system.
They think they're going to get free money.
Well, there's that.
But also, and we were discussing this earlier, Point that came up in my discussion with Pete McCormack is that the Greens are willing to call out vested interests, political and private vested interests.
And the rightist response to it, if it's of a libertarian bent and the kind of way that reform does, makes it sound as though you are simply defending those vested interests, like bankers and billionaires.
The conservatives are notorious for it, for defending housing companies, et cetera.
And so the approach to trying to win over those people is not to recycle old libertarian arguments.
About the necessity of billionaires and creative destruction is to recognize that, no, actually, the actions of billionaires as protected and involved with the political class in this country have their interests screwed over.
All of the young people in this country, anybody outside of their own class and the friends that they socialize with weekly, we have all been screwed by these people.
And it's something with reform as well, is that they're not willing to acknowledge the failures of, yes, the year.
Like, frankly, I'm sorry, but.
Brexit was a dismal failure.
But only if you are a Brexit voter.
You were voting for one thing.
The people implementing Brexit.
Like you said, we were never unclear about what they wanted from it.
10 years ago, Nigel Farage was telling everybody if we get Brexit, we get more Commonwealth wholesome black and browns in this country.
Right?
So, Nigel Farage, as much as he may complain about it now, through the Boris wave, actually got exactly what he wanted, which was a greater variety of slave labor or vested interests.
And we need to be able to call that out.
And if you can't call that out, then the youth are not going to be interested in what you have to say.
And this is what's unique about Restore Britain's position.
We are beholden to no special interests because, for one thing, our leader is one, an elected member of parliament who answers only to his constituents, and two, is independently wealthy and has lived a life of being a businessman, has accumulated his own wealth.
So he doesn't, Rupert does not care about the status of being at these Westminster drinks parties and dinners and all the rest of it.
He doesn't care about making money out of this.
He donates his parliamentary salary to local charities.
And so we have a leader who is, in my view, uncorruptible.
He's not going to be bought off by any of these interest groups that you're talking about.
And he is prepared, we are all prepared, to speak frankly about the architects of the problems that Britain currently faces, many of whom are business elites, moneyed interests.
Lord Wolfson, who was very eager for the Brexit vote to go through so that he would be able to get a better market for cheap labour.
And this is the great irony when it comes to the Greens they will complain of the billionaires and the capitalists destroying our society, but they will not once talk about the fact that mass immigration is the It's the flagship policy of that class because it's in their interest to have, as you say, a massive pool of workers, many of whom come from countries where they would not be able to earn anything close to what they earn in this country and are therefore prepared to take lower wages than the natives.
Yeah, that's a massive blind spot for the left.
I don't know why they're even like that.
But one thing, though, I did ask you this on my podcast, which is available.
But is there a slight difference, though, between Rupert being a libertarian and the younger Zoomers being a bit different on economics?
Yeah, well, again, I mean, Rupert has libertarian instincts.
That's certainly true.
And I think broadly speaking, that's a good thing because he's a believer in just the power of the British spirit, the enterprise, the ability of our people.
And he believes that just needs to be unleashed because it's currently being weighed down by, you know, absolute tons of red tape and regulation and all the rest of it.
And so, in that sense, I think he's absolutely right with his libertarian leanings.
Where there is more, as we spoke about, where there is more, I think, debate within the party, it's just the extent to which the state should be involved in ameliorating some of the problems that we have economically today.
Because Rupert's instincts certainly are.
To just allow the market to do its thing, which is a perspective I can completely understand.
My view is that we are in a position that does demand more intervention from the state to kind of rectify some of the problems we have in the economy and beyond.
I would say when it comes to things like control of labor through the borders and such things like that, because again, that could be.
Of course, the only way to do that is through state action.
Yeah, that being the flagship program of the elites to keep the borders open for a variety of reasons, yes, but the business class certainly support it for the sake of cheap labor.
Mobilizing the Constituency00:15:10
That should be where some regulations come in.
I think one of the benefits of tobacco.
Pulling back regulation in a more libertarian manner would be helping family businesses and smaller businesses and middle class style businesses to actually get on with their lives so that our high streets are not filled with criminal enterprise.
Yeah, because if you do cut immigration, the wages will go up for workers and certain sectors like hospitality might struggle.
But then I suppose you're saying, well, we cut regulation and we help you out in that way.
But that would be the concept gone.
I mean, you can also subsidize in the directions that need to be subsidized, right?
We already know that green tech is.
A long gamble being made by the establishment at the moment.
We know that the Greens want to take that gamble and turn it into a suicidal plunge headlock off a cliff.
But If you take what would be subsidizing, say, green sectors right now, you need a way to redistribute the wealth essentially from the financial sector into those manufacturing bases.
And that could be largely education.
So I can see Restore Britain providing more funding to education in specific industry specific areas.
Certainly.
Well, I mean, something we're going to get onto is the fact that we are working on policy at the moment.
And this is all very much in the works.
But just going on in this article to this next paragraph, some are content to laugh at Lowe and his current piddling efforts.
We'll get onto that.
He announced on Wednesday that he would only stand a handful of candidates in the May local elections, all of them in Great Yarmouth, which is Rupert's constituency.
And I want to get onto that because first of all, to address this idea that what we're doing is, is in any way small or piddling.
So we have been rolling out our branches across the country over the last couple of months since we launched.
We've currently got, I think, about 300 up and running.
So that's 300 constituency branches with volunteers going out every single day.
canvassing, knocking on doors, uh, posting leaflets through doors, speaking to people and getting the word out there about Restore Britain, which is crucial because we've been completely blacklisted from the mainstream media.
You know, they're not giving us any attention right the way, you know, from the BBC right the way through to GB News.
They just don't want to know, uh, which is quite telling because I always say to people, you know, Farage, the idea that Farage is a, an anti-establishment figure, um, in my view is completely discredited by the fact that he's put in front of the British public every single day because you have to ask the question always when somebody is given headlines every single day.
Well, why?
Why is this person being put before the public?
And it's because he's not actually a threat to the political media status quo.
The ultimate goal is to win the election and it's never covered on the TV.
They never mention restore Britain.
Are you just running the country?
That's virtually what they're trying to do, though.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
So I just wanted to take a look at some of these branches and the turnout and the type of people that are coming along.
So this was in Horsham, where me and Lewis Brackpool, our director of investigations, ran the launch event.
It was incredibly well attended.
There was, we were expecting about 40 people to turn up.
That's how many people turned up, which already was impressive, given that this is a Lib Dem constituency, which before going Lib Dem in 2024 was Tory for 150 years, right?
So this is not our, not necessarily our natural heartlands, but we ended up having over 100 people there, uh, not all of whom are in this photograph.
And at one point I asked the room, I said, just out of interest, can we have a show of hands here?
For how many of you is this your first political meeting?
And I kid you not, 90% of the room put their hand up.
And that's what we're finding across a lot of these meetings is these are people who have not until now been politically engaged.
They've not had political representation at the national level.
They've just felt completely disaffected, disenfranchised.
And now that Restore Britain exists, many of these people feel so motivated by the condition of the country and by the agenda that we are putting forward that they're actually prepared to get up off their sofa, come out on a, you know, I think we did this on a Monday night.
I'm going to a meeting tonight down in Kent.
It's a Friday night.
People have probably better things to do.
But we're expecting 100 people to be at that as well.
And this is happening all over the country.
So that was Horsham.
This was Ribble Valley.
Again, good turnout.
And a lot of young people as well, a lot of young faces.
Same was true in Horsham.
This was in Yorkshire.
Again, big turnout.
All of these people who, the majority of whom are, they didn't vote in 2024.
They are not feeling particularly enthused by the offerings of reform or anybody else.
And the people that are showing up to these don't look like, as.
I'm sure the media would like to characterize them as a bunch of loony cranks in the local area.
They look like normal people.
Yeah, they really are.
And this is the thing I mean, again, my experience of going to these meetings and meeting our members, it really is an interesting sort of cross section of our society because it's everybody from 18 year old guys who are still in sixth form or college who feel so motivated by what they're being taught in their school, by what they're seeing in their local neighborhoods or high streets or whatever, that they want to get out and do something.
All the way through to pensioners who fear for the future of the country for the sake of their grandchildren, as well as local business owners.
We've had many of those coming to the meetings who are feeling the weight of the burden that this government is placing on them, and so on.
So it's really like the blood and bones of Britain are coming out for Restore Britain, which I find incredibly encouraging.
And as this post says, we have just exceeded 127,000 members nationwide, which makes us the fourth largest political party by membership in the country, bigger than the Conservatives, which is the oldest.
And most successful political party in the world, in history, and fairly close behind Reform, the Greens, and Labour.
So we're a real contender when it comes to our ability to mobilise people, because that at the end of the day is what politics is all about.
It's about getting people out of their seat and out of their house.
And the idea that Restored Britain's a purely online phenomenon or that this is some sort of small, isolated phenomenon is just not true.
It's really just not.
And I can tell you that because I've been to a lot of these meetings, I've spoken to these people.
And just on that, I mean, the idea that.
Do you have any idea when these people are going out?
Canvassing, what the kind of response they're getting from their local areas is like?
Well, I think this is the thing.
I mean, everybody, well, a lot of people who support reform will say, you know, it's all well and good what you guys are saying, but nobody knows you.
Nobody knows Rupert.
Nobody knows Restore Britain.
So it's not going to go anywhere.
And that, look, I mean, we're a new party, obviously, and Rupert's only been an MP since 2024.
So it's definitely the case that we are lower profile than Nigel Farage and reform.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing because Nigel Farage is very famous in that a great, you know, like 94% of the public know who he is.
But the majority of that 94% don't like him.
I think he's got the second highest disapproval rating after Starmer of any politician in the country.
So, plenty of people like him, yes, but plenty of people really don't.
And so, we are in a unique position whereby we can actually kind of have a fresh start in terms of our brand and what people think of us.
And from what I understand, the response has been very, very good so far from the people who've been volunteering.
You are all well known enough to be getting articles written about you in New Statesman, was it?
Yeah, they've done a few about us as well.
As have The Telegraph, as have The Guardian.
I mean, you know, and it's all been negative, obviously, because.
It's always going to be that.
All the Telegraph Ones were by Tim Stanley, to be fair.
It was about 16.
And he was the most reliable of all of their faces.
Our nation's greatest journalistic mind.
Anyway, so this is the point Restore Britain is massive, basically.
And it's quite overwhelming in a way to be involved with something that has been this disruptive and explosive.
But I really think the sky's the limit with what we're doing.
So, with that said, I want to talk a little bit about our strategy for the local elections, which is obviously the next opportunity for parties to.
You know, show the public what they have to offer them.
And we've been clear that, you know, we set up as a party, we were registered with the Electoral Commission, you know, what a matter of weeks ago.
And we've only been set up as a party for less than two months.
And the priority in that time has been rolling out our local branch infrastructure, as I've just been showing you.
And that's been tremendously successful.
And I think within the next month, we're going to have all constituencies in the country covered.
Everywhere we'll have a local official Restore Britain branch.
And we're going to be publishing the details of all the ones that currently exist later today.
On our website.
So if you don't know whether you have a branch in your local area or whether one needs setting up, check the Restore Britain website later today and that information will be available.
And if there's not one in your local area, volunteer, you know, put yourself forward.
You can use this form here, which is linked in the show notes, to put yourself forward to be a branch organiser or indeed a local or national candidate.
And the more people we have, the more people we will be able to mobilise and just kind of raise awareness for Restore.
Because as I said, it's not going to be the mainstream media.
That does that for us.
It has to be us.
Those of us who are motivated enough to get involved with something like this, we have to be the ones to spread the word.
So, as I say, do this form, sign up for it now.
And that then does bring me on to our local election strategy.
So, a lot of people were hoping that we'd be standing nationwide in the local elections because we are a political party.
We're looking to win political power.
But to be frank, and we made a statement on this last week or the week before, we're just not in any position to do that, right?
We've been setting up the local branch infrastructure.
And vetting the people running those has been the priority to make sure we are using people who are competent, who are motivated, who agree with us and our agenda.
Because this is not something that other parties do very well.
I mean, reform, we know, for example, in the 2024 election, they did not have a full slate of candidates.
So they stood hundreds of paper candidates.
And they're doing the same thing at these local elections, which is just unbelievable given that they are a party of that size.
Yeah.
So, you know, they're in a position where they actually can't stand a full slate of candidates.
And we don't want to, you know, we have no interest in just kind of arbitrarily just standing in these elections in as many seats as possible just for the sake of it, because that's not going to do anybody any good.
It's not going to do the party any good.
And the people standing, you know, it's not going to sort of, they may not be the right people, right?
And so the people putting their faith in us won't be well served by us doing that.
So we're just focusing on Great Yarmouth, which is Rupert's constituency, because we've been preparing to stand in the local elections there for several months because we've got a local party set up there called Great Yarmouth First, which is working.
In collaboration with Restore Britain.
And we're hoping to sweep the board there and basically use Great Yarmouth as a proof of concept to show that actually where we stand, we win.
We can mobilize a huge number of activists, and the agenda that we're offering is genuinely popular.
And it's looking like that's possible right now.
Well, this is the funny thing.
I mean, many people, including Farage himself, have said, well, you know, when it comes to actually standing, they'll only poll 1%.
And if Rupert was to stand again in Great Yarmouth, he wouldn't win.
Based on the polling that we've seen, Great Yarmouth First is currently polling at about 50%.
In Great Yarmouth, which is like one party state type territory.
So we're very confident that we're going to win all of the seats that are being contested.
And if we do that, we can use Great Yarmouth Council.
As a kind of proof of concept to show what we can achieve in local government.
So, with that all said, I would encourage everyone listening right now who's able to, to sign up to this different volunteer portal, to come up to Great Yarmouth and to volunteer for us.
There's a number of dates on there, which are our kind of key action days, which you'll see if you go through this.
And yeah, I mean, if you believe in Restore Britain, if you believe in what we're trying to achieve, it's essential that you come out and help us out in Great Yarmouth.
And it will be probably a lot of fun.
I mean, we're all, you know, the whole Restore Britain team is going to be up there.
I expect to see you lads up there as well.
Well, I'm a massive restore Britain supporter, though I do find it hilarious the idea of Great Yarmouth as a one party state with Rupert as just Kim Jong un into the north of it.
The posters around the place, they'll be out marching for him soon.
And then we get rid of democracy.
Get rid of democracy across the country.
I'm not looking to do anything like that.
I've been up to Great Yarmouth a number of times with Rupert and the rest of our team.
And honestly, the reputation he has there is just unbelievable.
Because he's not from Great Yarmouth and he's made no secret of that fact.
But he is absolutely adored by his constituents.
And that's because he is genuinely a fantastic constituency MP.
He's done a lot for Great Yarmouth.
I've just pulled my laptop out because I want to make sure I've got the dates right so that everybody can know when they need to go up to Great Yarmouth.
So the dates that you need to go up there, if you want to support Restore Britain, if you want to help us out with what we're trying to achieve, are the 18th of April, the 22nd of April, the 23rd of April, and the 2nd to the 7th of May.
So the 7th of May is polling day.
That's when the local elections are actually happening.
So, if there's any day you want to come up, make it that one.
And it will be most appreciated.
I mean, as I keep saying, we can't do this by ourselves.
And if you believe in what we're trying to achieve, you know, come up, come and help us out in Great Yarmouth.
It will be a lot of fun.
And really, I mean, that's all I had to say about where we're up to with Restore Britain.
Realistically, one of the greatest criticisms that I think most of us have of the kinds of spheres that a lot of us operate in is that it falls to internet politics.
Yeah.
There's a lot of people talking and talking about doing things, but not a lot of people who then put their money where their mouth is and go out and do something.
So, if you have been frustrated, like many of us have, with that state of affairs and you believe in the message of Restore Britain, then now kind of is the time to actually say it's time to move out of the internet and into the real world where we can start to try to effect real change.
Yeah, we're not going to get another shot like Restore Britain, is my view.
And that's why I work for Restore Britain.
Like, I genuinely believe that it is a viable vehicle.
For the kinds of things that we want to see happen in this country.
Because, like you say, I mean, I've been in the kind of online right space for a number of years, and the amount of talk there is about organization and all of this kind of stuff, and the very little of that that's actually happened is quite telling.
And so now that we actually do have not just an organization, but a registered political party, the fourth largest in the country by membership, with an MP who's currently in parliament as its leader, who's prepared to, you know, the policies that we're offering.
Are the most radical, I think it's the most radical agenda that any party has offered in this country, probably since Enoch Powell.
I mean, the positions that we're taking on deportations and all the rest of it, like this is seriously radical stuff.
And if you want to save the country, that's what's going to be necessary.
Just to bring it back to the human level as well, you mentioned that it's going to be a fun time.
It's going to be a good day out.
And every single person who's ever attended any of the live events that we've had put on, that Shieldings have put on, who are obviously friends of the show, and that the Basket Weavers have put on, Which obviously I like to represent when I'm on here, say that every single time you get together with real people, there's just something about it.
There's that intangible quality that shows that you're doing something that is going to form a core memory for you that's way stronger than anything you can do just yapping on X or on Facebook.
So get down there, lads.
Totally, totally.
Yeah, go to the links in the show notes, sign up to be a member and a volunteer for Restore, and yeah, let's Restore Britain.
The Random Chimp Update00:03:04
Well, here's hoping, lads, and good luck to everybody.
We do have quite a few rumble rents from during that segment, so I'll go through those before we move on to the next one.
Pat J. Reed sending in a whopping $200 donation.
Thank you very much, Pat.
That is very generous of you.
Saying, Wish I could be there tomorrow, but I must be somewhere else.
Please have a round on me.
We shall do.
I hope that whatever you're doing is fulfilling.
And then Ryan Damon.
Ryan Daman.
There we go.
Says, Some money for the Mad Lad sending in $10.
Thank you.
Say hello to my daughter, Mackenzie, from the Great. State of New Hampshire live free or die.
Well, hello to you, Mackenzie.
We hope you're having a great day.
Based Ape.
Unfortunately, I'm not going to make it down to Swindon tomorrow due to having to take care of my puppy.
Completely understandable.
Take my donations and get the boys a drink on me.
P.S. The prequels suck.
I hope you get destroyed.
Well, I've been re watching Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones as of last night and this morning, and they are fantastic movies.
You're completely wrong, but we will accept your $10.
Thank you very much.
Sigilstone.
Can we get an update from Josh on the random chimp event currently occurring?
I do not keep up to date with the random chimp news that he does, although he will be in later, so we can ask him then.
Tom Rat, I put myself forward to coordinate for West Yorkshire for Restore.
Haven't heard back, but wanted to check if you have someone or not.
I have an ex community ready to hand over in either case.
Yeah, so I believe we do have a branch set up in West Yorkshire.
That's just off the top of my head.
I might be wrong about that.
As I say, check later on our website and the full list will be published.
If not, and you have applied, check your junk folder on your email because that is something that's happening.
Like our applies are going to people's junk.
Because that happens.
It happens with everyone.
But I mean, if you haven't heard anything, you know, chase it up.
All right, Tom Rat, again, setting up the local branches before fielding candidates is the right first step before fielding paper candidates.
The next is to create the ideological backbone that will inform a future manifesto.
Yeah, I mean, I should have mentioned that in my segment, actually.
But that's another thing that we are working on at the moment alongside rolling out the branch infrastructure is building our, you know, policy foundations.
We've got a number of policy papers, like full policy papers in the works, using a number of, You know, vetted, I hesitate to use the word experts because it's such a tarnished phrase these days, but actual experts, people who know their stuff about the field that they're writing about on all issues from energy through to national security through to tax, through to, I mean, basically every area is currently in the works.
But this stuff, and again, this is where like we're just not interested in lying to people and giving people like false hope and comfort and all that sort of thing.
Like this stuff takes time, it's hard, it's, you know, it's not a dull thing.
Yeah, it's dull.
Whether that's the standing in local elections, Leafleting door to door, setting up the branch network or creating the policies.
This stuff all takes time and money and effort from a huge number of people.
But it's all happening.
And in time, I'm confident we are going to be like the best positioned party to take government in 2029.
Beyond Left and Right00:14:52
And Dragon Lady Chris with the last one so far.
Polling day is my birthday.
Do it for me, lads.
So there you go.
Even more reason to go out and win this one.
Let's move on to the next segment where Nick can tell us about Gavin Newsom's mad wife.
All right.
Well, a bit of fun after that fairly serious segment.
This is just partly just banter.
That is interesting for the future of American politics where it's going to go.
So Gavin Newsom's wife is completely insane.
Not only that, she is cryogenically frozen at the moment of peak woke.
In her mind, it's just we're just still living in woke times.
Nothing's changed.
And she just sounds absolutely mental.
And completely out of touch in a series of shocking videos.
So I'll just play this one first.
You sound like a sun headline.
I'm trying to sell it.
I'm thinking about your YouTube views.
I'm like, how do I sell this at the start?
A series of shocks.
Some of them are old, some of them are new.
They're all absolutely bat, bleep, crazy.
This one starts off with a somewhat sympathetic thing about her sister and then gets into the mad thing.
So I do recommend, I'm not a monster.
There is a sympathetic element, but let's play this one.
When we interviewed the, the young men who were juvenile offenders in San Quentin, um, I told them about my own loss where, um, my, my, I lost my older sister a few days before my seventh birthday and I blamed myself for her death.
And I share that, um, because that they ultimately were accused of committing these violent crimes and sentenced for life.
And I think it shocked them that this, you know, blonde lady who was, you know, the, Interviewing them had a similar story, was perhaps in the wrong place at the wrong time, and but wasn't punished the way they were because clearly it was an accident, but theirs was probably an accident too.
So, anyway, I share that just because I guess you know, I quite enjoy spending time with people and being real and unmasking and showing them that it's safe to unmask themselves.
Beautiful.
She's addicted to the therapy session.
She's like, oh, I went and I explained myself and it's decompression for me.
And this man, he said to me, I murdered my wife and her three children.
And she's like, oh, it's so bad.
It's totally relief.
It's probably relaxed.
Yeah, I can relate.
And they're all unmasked, even though no one knows what that is.
I tripped and the knife just happened to stab her 27 times.
There was a load of banana peels.
Do you remember that Simpsons bit with the rakes?
It was like that, but with banana peels and me and a knife and my wife.
Right, because losing a sister is horrible.
But then you go, and that is very sad.
But then you go.
But it says here, like Gavin Newsom's wife recalls telling prisoners at San Quentin about running over and killing her sister with a golf cart.
So she lost her sister by accidentally running her over.
So she was seven by accident.
And then the question is, what were the parents doing and things like that?
It's very strange.
But then you go, but that doesn't mean that all hardened criminals are just there on accident.
It's like, oh, what did you do?
Like you say, slipped on the rake and committed a string of murders.
It's like, what are you talking about?
It's like when I packed the machete into my bag this morning, I thought, this is an accident.
Waiting to happen.
But I needed to be prepared.
Yeah, exactly.
So the idea of it in the left's head and her head, particularly, is like no retributive justice.
It's all about rehabilitation.
Criminals are the real victims.
Anarcho tyranny, absolutely mental.
I mean, it's like in that episode of The Simpsons where Snake is like, hey, that was self defense.
Those nuns came at me first.
I don't really buy that.
It's just.
We've got plenty of these, don't worry.
You're not going to hear about how boys shouldn't be right wing.
We just want to quite say it, then she ends up just saying it, like, stop being right wing, guys.
Boys, we all know, I think, are increasingly realizing that boys are moving away from sort of the more progressive.
Boys that spend time online are moving a little bit.
I'm trying not to be political here, but are moving to the right.
And being sort of influenced by the Andrew Tates and some of that sort of alt right socialization online that we know is very, very dangerous.
My husband and I were alarmed when our kids were watching sports online, and my son knew about Andrew Tate and thought he was pretty cool and thought that he was a Republican grandfather who's not a Trumper but a fiscal conservative.
Sorry, I'm sorry.
Boys, is she just complaining that her children are becoming Groypers right under her nose?
The next generation of newsrooms is there watching Nick Fuentes.
She's like, Why does my young son like the guy smoking cigars, driving fast cars, and going on about women and kicking people in the face?
Not the things that we provided, not his doll, which we'll get into in a minute.
She's like, My son isn't gay.
I'm really disappointed.
I'm not going to trans son here.
Come on.
I live in California.
I've tried so hard.
Charlie Staron has like four.
She's an actor.
I was an actor.
I lived in California.
Can you not get me?
I've got four kids, none of them are trans.
What are we doing here, people?
It's like, surprise, surprise.
Boys are rejecting the feminine frame and becoming masculine.
I don't know why.
Shakes fist at Sky.
Yeah, absolutely insane.
We found some TRT in my son's bedroom, but it wasn't the kind of hormones we were hoping to find.
He just wanted to improve his bench fest.
Foiled again.
Am I evil for swapping my boys' TRT for estrogen?
It kind of amazes me.
I mean, I don't know when these clips are actually from, but.
Somebody with the political nous of Gavin Newsom, and I'm not saying that he's amazing or anything, but he clearly is to some extent reading the room with where politics is going.
The fact that his wife is out saying this stuff in 2026 is mind blowing.
You'd think that he would have a chat with her.
So that's the great thing.
He's there doing podcasts with Steve Banner going, I'm reaching out across the aisle.
That's the kind of guy I'm, it's like, I'll talk to Steve Banner.
Look at me.
I'm kind of like the new centrist Democrat.
Oh, you can save to vote for me.
I'll make gay jokes on my Twitter.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Probably vote for me in like the flyover state.
And she's like, uh, But it's that face.
You forgot to check with someone.
Meanwhile, Rubio and Vance are saying, Jennifer, she's called Jennifer, keep getting out there.
You're doing such great work.
It's great for them because she is tanking Newsom single handedly.
Gabby, that is.
She's also Newsom.
She's Jennifer Siebel Newsom.
I forgot to bother saying her name because no one really cares.
This one why her son should have a doll.
Let's just watch.
I've given our boys dolls, even if they tear the head off.
I've given them dolls to learn that care and caregiving is not just.
An activity that's reserved for women, but that it's also an activity that is a responsibility of men.
What I've done with both my daughters and my sons is if I'm reading a book and the protagonist is a male, I just change the he to a she.
And it just normalizes for my sons in particular.
It's not even, I don't even just do it for my girls.
I do it for my sons because I want them to see that women can be the center of a story.
I just, yeah, I just turn on Netflix, turn on anything.
Oh, I just want them to know that women can, I think we knew that women could be the center of the story.
Number one.
Number two, changes the protagonist.
Like, and Frodo Baggins, who was a woman?
You know, you're like, what are you doing?
More just like he could be non binary.
I don't want to assume his pronouns.
And then they went to Mordor.
But I'm just curious, it was like, gave them a dot.
I remember my, my, Mother gave me a doll when I was a child.
Not because it was my doll, but because.
I explained so much.
And I drove him to the right.
But because my sister had a doll house, right?
And she wanted us to play together or whatever.
So she handed me a doll, and I immediately turned it into a gun.
Yeah.
And then you're.
And then you're smacking the baby around, the little baby doll around.
When she said about like.
I mean, I was thinking.
When she said about like.
I was thinking of dolls' heads off.
I was like.
I imagined in my mind that.
Of course.
Every single thing.
My sister had like one of these.
I was watching Andrew Tate MMA movies on it.
You're just like.
For goodness sake, you know, it's just not what we're interested in.
We want a stick, a big stick.
A stick that looks like a gun, ideally.
I used to collect like gun sticks as a kid.
It's built in.
She's like, oh, nature spoiled me again.
Life finds a way.
I will make everything a gun, mother.
Yeah.
I will.
Right.
She's going up against nature.
It's completely insane.
We all know women are the heroes of everything.
It's the last thing that men need when they're already like absolutely hated.
She's raising, you know, hopefully, like, ostensibly, like, boys who are.
Why is she trying to chin them and gay them out?
Gay them out?
Is that to.
Just to.
Don't ask me.
To treat her seriously for a second, it is borderline.
You are denying your sons any kind of role model, any kind of idol, any kind of sort of theoretical mentor figure, someone who expresses the values that your parents can point to, because your parents can't be switched on all the time, right?
I'm assuming Gavin and Jennifer are very busy people.
And so, like, Presumably, when he's alone and he wants to read a book and he wants to read Conan the Barbarian or something like that, you know, I'm not saying everything Conan does is something to be aspired to, but he's like the masculine strength and ideal in there.
You can say, oh, that's a positive value that's there.
But she's just stripped all that away.
And she says, when Conan goes to the shop, she.
Goes in, you know.
She subjugated her enemies.
She wants to see your husband subjugated at the lamentation of the men.
Yeah.
This is causing real problems in relationships.
I actually know someone who's separated from his wife because of this exact example and a series of other examples like it, where she keeps trying to give the kid, he's like, stop trying to give my son dolls.
I'm like, why are you doing it?
Because they listen to like feminist podcasts and all this kind of thing and then think it's your duty to give your son a doll.
It's like, stop.
Well, we also have to take into account, obviously, it all sounds completely pathologic.
I don't know what kind of audience that she's speaking to here.
She could be embellishing a bit.
I don't doubt that she actually is mental, but she could also be embellishing in the same way.
You know how Democrats love to play to their audience?
Like when Kamala Harris or someone will get up in front of a black audience and they'll go, I really love me some KFC and watermelon.
And they'll go, When Hillary does it, it's worse.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, that southern accent is burned in my head.
Yeah, yeah.
When Hillary Clinton, they try to play to the audience.
So she might.
Be thinking like, oh, this will play so great to the audience.
I think she's a true believer.
Maybe I struggle to believe that somebody could be quite so cruel to their own son, but at the same time, I'm not a mental leftist.
No, they will.
They'll sacrifice their own children for their social status, for their career, for their ideology.
It's that sick.
And just another mental one, we'll have a look.
There's so much to learn from same sex couples who have learned to communicate and who also are like, well, look, you know, someone's got to do the care work in a same sex male couple.
Someone's got to do that.
So Josh.
I'm just going to do it.
And this is like, and not be afraid or ashamed because it's part of being human.
We're all on a spectrum, right?
It's just how society kind of pushes us and pressures us into these limiting gender roles.
But again, it's like a 2012 talking point or something.
We're all on a spectrum, guys.
Like a spectrum.
She sounds like an airhead.
Yeah.
I was just going to say, she doesn't actually sound like she knows what she's talking about.
No, she's dumb as a rock.
There's all sorts of stuff.
This is the sort of clip that I would expect to see played on like an Instagram reel just before it cuts to like two guys halfway up a mountain in a blizzard, getting locked in, you know, that sort of thing.
She's also obsessed with caregiving, which comes up like several times in these clips.
And you sort of realize at the end, she just doesn't want to change it.
She wants Gavin to change all the nappies.
Like she's upset.
As if she hasn't got like a maid anyway.
She keeps talking about caregiving.
She hates the idea that a woman should care for the children.
She wants to make up for Danny.
Yeah, and she wants to be the bloke.
This is what's happening.
Let's have a look.
Patriarchy here.
Trust me, I'm not a fan of Pam Bondi nor Christy Nome.
But I need to call out that it's no surprise to me that the first two prominent people pushed out of this administration were women.
Let me explain.
The conservative women that Trump handpicks, who align themselves with an agenda that controls women, restricting our rights, limiting our autonomy, and pushing us back into this straitjacket of femininity that is only in service of men, there's a familiar pattern here.
Women are brought in, packaged Mar a Lago style, and lifted up as long as they commit to wholeheartedly serve the interests of the patriarch at the top.
Now, it looks like power.
She just said patriarchy, seriously.
And this must be recent because she's talking about Pam Bondi.
Yeah, yeah.
So, like, she's seriously using the word patriarchy.
And she sort of goes, it's a very long video, but she goes on to say that this is the real power, guys.
She's basically saying it's not about left and right anymore, guys.
She's like, let's step out of that.
It's about men versus women, and men are evil.
Oh, the gender war?
I haven't heard that in a long time.
I know.
But also, it's just like she's talking about them being pushed out for not adhering to a hierarchy in politics.
Like, all politics is exclusively hierarchy.
It's everyone sweeping her out.
Again, just on the obvious dumbness of her, it's just buzzword.
Buzzword, buzzword, buzzword.
I know that patriarchy people think patriarchy bad.
I'm talking about something I think is bad.
So I'll just keep saying the word and people will assume that I'm making some kind of point.
All the while, she's presenting herself as like the most feminine woman.
The most feminine Aryan woman.
Imagine.
Four kids in California, blonde hair.
And that's what I was going to say.
And that's what I was going to say.
Like, a trad family.
They've got like a dynasty as well, the Newsom family.
Like, there's so many, they've had so many kids.
And she's presenting herself in a way that's very obviously feminine.
She's wearing makeup and everything, which is all fine from my perspective.
She's pulling up the ladder, damn it.
Part of me wonders if Gavin Newsom has just sort of gone, okay, there's the scale.
We all know the scale.
There's the hot to crazy scale.
And he's just gone all in.
He's just bet it all.
And he's just hoping the children will turn out, oh, God, she's giving the kids dolls now.
She's making my boys read about when he sees it.
Yeah.
And one thing about, I totally agree.
I think she's doing it to be like a bit quirky.
Like, she's the most sort of straight down line person, you know, four kids, normal family sort of thing.
She's like, Yeah, but what you don't realize is I'm kind of like interesting.
I'm kind of like, I care about the patriarchy and I've got kind of interesting opinions.
Like, you're just saying the same as all your brunch friends.
They all say this rubbish.
So boring.
Anyway, and she also, yeah, the buzzwords thing.
I watched all these.
She's like systemic, deconstructing, patriarch.
She just says all these buzzwords in lieu of an actual brain.
What about this one?
I can't remember what this one is.
Something annoying.
Like, every problem that we have in society right now, Will be fixed when women come together and partner with our male allies and other allies, but when more women are in the rooms, making decisions, changing the status quo, and transforming not just our culture, but our society and our economy.
Quirky Political Baiting00:05:17
I'll give you sure.
I mean, Angela Merkel, Theresa May, Hillary Clinton, massive Jacinda Arden, just success after success when women.
It's literally like 20.
I mean, that's just 2024.
This is like 2014, 2015 level talking points.
Does someone come after her with a neuralizer?
That's what I want to know.
I know she's there you go 2024, so it is now, but as you say, cryogenically frozen and peak woke.
This one is just funny because Gavin has to sit there and just listen to it.
We women, naturally, whether we give birth or not, have been socialized to care about children, their health.
Heaven forbid.
We shouldn't be, right?
That's all socialized.
They've been brainwashed.
The environment, et cetera, et cetera.
You care about that, I believe, through your own socialization of being raised by a single mom.
Yeah, that helped.
Your aunts and your sister surrounded by a more feminine energy that ultimately embraces caregiving.
We have to.
Cool, Gavin.
Entertain our kids, care for our kids, feed our kids.
That eyebrow guy looks like.
I'm getting some big bait and vibes.
Yeah, kill him.
It's like really bad.
No, I'm with you.
Totally with you.
He's thinking about how he's going to move the heads in the fridge later.
I was just thinking, like, you can believe that this guy goes out at night and just carves people up.
Would you blame him after this?
The other thing is that she's.
Is if she stamps on his balls, like, To embrace the feminine energy, sort of.
She's quite masculine.
She's wearing a lot of heavy jewelry in that earlier clip.
She's trying to be masculine.
She wants him to be feminine.
She's talking about socialize.
It's all socialized.
She doesn't believe in nature at all.
It's all nurture, 100% nurture.
Everyone was just a grey liberal ditto blob at the beginning of the day, and then we were all turned into what we are now.
Thankfully, at the end of the day.
Did you say Rousseauian, or will certain commentators from America and Romania start complaining?
Yeah, we don't know.
I saw Bretton lose a lot of voters.
Yeah, Baz down the pub.
He's not going to be happy with that.
He'll lose the Rousseau vote immediately.
So, this is just an article.
What's interesting about this was just that she used the term first partner instead of first lady.
That's the only reason I've heard of it, which is just so classic.
She's like, when Newsom won the race, she's like, she chose the gender neutral title of first partner of California.
So, you get the idea what she's like.
But what do we know about her, really?
Well, she claimed that Harvey Weinstein had a word we probably can't say on YouTube, let's say, assaulted her in 2005.
But what's interesting about it, the jury couldn't decide on that one, even though they could decide in other cases that definitely Weinstein had done it, but not in her case.
What was interesting is that in 2007, she went to him asking for advice.
So, quite strange.
In 2005, she makes the accusation.
But in cross examination, the defense attorney for Weinstein questions Siebel Newsom about a donation Weinstein later made to her now husband's political campaign and the email communication she had with him in the years after the alleged assault, including a 2007 email to him asking for advice dealing with the media.
When she was dating her husband, who was the then mayor of San Francisco.
So this guy assaults you on a sofa.
It's a traumatic, terrible thing.
Two years later, you're like, any advice, Harvey?
By email.
Steam's interesting.
I'm just saying.
Interesting.
I'm just giving you a background of this kind of people that pretend to be super woke and holier than now.
What are they actually like?
Would you say she's an actress?
She was a former actress, yes.
Yeah.
Expensive.
It makes sense, doesn't it?
Gavin Newsom's wife and her firm pocketed $3.7 million from her gender stereotypes charity.
So, of course, she has.
So, she's a cynical opportunist, which does kind of.
How dare you?
Which does kind of lend credence to my theory that she's just.
Throwing out buzzwords to the audience that she thinks will make because she's in California, she thinks it's going to make her popular with people in California, whereas really, she's just trying to get their money.
Yeah, well, that hasn't loaded apparently, but yeah, what she did was she's got this representation project that's the name a charity that fights against intersectional gender stereotypes and harmful gender norms.
That's her whole life, just the idea that these gender norms are harmful.
So, in its accounting year ending March 2021, they received just over a million in donations and grants before in expenses and paid out a total of 300,000 to Siebel and her company, or 28%.
Next year, she paid herself and her company $302,500 from again just over a million.
So she's paying herself a third and her company a third of the charity's money.
And it's a nonsense charity anyway.
It's BLM style stuff.
She's raising awareness, Nick.
Don't you understand?
Yes.
Just interesting about and how it could destroy Gavin Newsom if she keeps talking because he's trying to be Mr. Centrist.
Tim Poole had an interesting idea on his show today that the Democrats are going to split off from the current Republicans and we're going to have Tulsi Gavard, Joe Kent, And RFK versus Vance and Rubio, and the kind of mad this type of person Democrats are going to be put away.
Interesting theory.
I don't know if it's true, but the Democrats.
I mean, Newsom would presumably in that situation try to align himself as a sensible Democrat to try and crowd out the former Democrats who are currently within Trump and being kicked out of Trump.
Well, his theory there was that Newsom would just become a more minor figure, essentially be put away.
Generational Gaps Explained00:12:48
Who knows?
I mean, if this keeps happening, he certainly will be.
But so you're hearing things that the Democrats have realized we can't go full mental.
Terrorist all the time and win any votes.
The wives haven't got the memo yet, but exactly.
But she hasn't got the memo.
What if there's 4D chess and he's gonna use her as a platform and say, Look what I have to deal with every day?
Civil servants, not a problem, yeah.
I'm gonna be even more in favor of him.
That is it, anyway.
Something a bit more lighthearted, but um, yeah, God help us, yes, fun, God help America, fun videos for us all to enjoy.
Do you want me to read any of these, Harriet?
Uh, we've got two of them, you can read them if you'd like, I don't mind.
So, if I can see them.
So, Sigilstone says same sex couples that have learned to communicate.
Does she mean like lesbians that speak in Thai?
I can't read that, can I?
I don't know.
Domestic violence statistics are available online.
I couldn't see because my mic was in the way.
So, I started quite confidently, then backed out.
So, Logan17pine says in California, we recently had a huge scandal over $1.5 billion in Ford in LA alone.
The state hasn't been fully audited.
So, the iceberg is huge.
Interesting.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Again.
Cynical opportunist.
And let's get into the Zoomer question then, Mark.
Indeed.
You're a millennial, aren't you?
I am just about a millennial, yes.
Which is the worst generation, would you say, Charlie?
Boomers, Gen X, or millennials?
Well, my parents are Gen X, so I have a lot of the three I have the most experience with that generation.
And obviously, being that my parents are from that generation, I've got a lot of time for them.
I mean, you know, they raised me on like the films and stuff that they were watching.
So I've got a kind of, I think, quite a good understanding of that generation.
And then of the other two, look, I mean, I grew up in kind of millennial culture.
Like I grew up when the internet was kind of a big part of my life from the age of about 12.
Yeah, it was awful, wasn't it?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you know, it was, I was like the kind of last generation to not grow up from birth with the internet.
So, I kind of.
You're more of a zillennial like myself.
Well, 2001 was.
Oh, wait, no, nowhere near, actually.
Never mind.
I didn't realize I was that much older than you, Paul.
Yeah, so it's humbling moments.
Oh, my God.
So, with that said, no offense to present company, but the millennials.
Do you know what?
We're just the worst.
I'm not offended because the millennials suck, but the zennials are a chosen golden generation.
They're protected from it.
Yeah, the ones in the.
It's 76 to 83, I believe.
It's just the perfect generation.
Does that help you sleep at night, though?
I'm speaking objectively.
Well, you know, there's Carl.
There's Neiman, a Zed, there's a whole load of it.
All of these deplorables, a basket of deplorables.
He's a phasenot, if you will.
He's presenting himself well, isn't he?
I never put myself in it, but it is a golden generation.
What are you, Mark?
You're too young to say anything.
Oh, I'm 94.
Just normal millennial.
Just super woke.
He's a super woke millennial, as you can tell from the hipster beard.
You agreed secretly with all those videos.
I was just like, oh.
Whereas Evan Newsom's wife, Jennifer, Jenny, speak to me, girl.
I, being born in 96, cross over into Zillennial.
Territory.
It's like a Zenniel, but better.
I've seen.
And I would say best is.
Partly Zoomer Brain.
Next best after Zillennial is probably the Zoomers.
Zillennial is just someone who's woke but can't watch an entire video all the way through.
Like, there's attention deficit woke.
And yet, it's a great appreciator of the Star Wars prequels.
Exactly.
Well, all Zoomers like them.
Of course, makes me far superior.
But I'm in the.
I guess I'm original Star Wars because I'm old.
All right.
Humbling.
Well, I'm here to talk about.
We've had the super serious segment campaign for Restore Britain, that side of things.
We've had the.
Look at how insane this woman is, segment for a bit of a laugh.
And now I'm going to bore you with some statistics, but we'll talk a little bit about the leisure sector, by which I mean, do Zoomers know how to have fun?
Zoomers are.
I think we do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, just about, and that sort of thing.
But how you have fun, that's the interesting thing.
Oh, that's where the moralizing.
That's where the gorgeous.
We're not sat indoors playing with ourselves and our Funko pops.
So the issue is not necessarily that you're having fun in the wrong way.
Although we'll get onto that.
But as much as you're all broke and that you aren't spending very much on leisure, and so attitudes to leisure are changing.
Less avocado toast and Netflix subscriptions is what I hear.
I see that you've been following a very particular X account that's arisen in the last week.
But yeah, if you look here, you can see total net leisure spending over the past 10 years, where it's basically a flat line, right?
You see this huge discrepancy where it dropped in.
COVID, but and then recovered.
But then it's basically been in this sort of minus 11% average over the entire data set.
And if I think if you exclude these big drops as well, it's still pretty, pretty dire, despite the fact that we added 5 million people, at least officially, to the population and possibly 10 million.
Yeah, but all of their leisure activities are black market.
Oh, that's the question, isn't it?
So you say if we go down and see sort of what people are spending on.
You can see going to the gym has increased slightly, but even since 2019, it's down.
So, sort of the overall trend is up, but the local change is down.
Attending live sports events, down, down, down, down.
Everything's down across the board.
Except some small spikes in drinking and betting and gaming.
So the question is then for people well, what are, if you're not spending your time in the pubs and the bars, if you're not spending your time, you know, at sports events and things like that, what's going on?
So, sort of bolster my argument here a little bit.
Oh, this is just a little Reddit thread where a millennial has weighed in.
And it refers immediately to Reddit.
There's just someone saying, why is Zoomers online?
So anti fun.
I don't see it much at my college, but a ton of it online.
People just so anti fun.
Everything's under a microscope.
People aren't allowed to let loose what gives.
That is a big part, isn't it?
You think everyone's going to be on video, but you're out.
It's on the internet forever.
So that's true.
There's this assumption that one, everything will be filmed, but also, like, that means that when you are having fun and you are recording it for whatever reason, posterity or whatever it is, then you are.
It's not that you're holding back something, but you kind of treat it like a film shoot.
I've got to say, it's like a professional thing.
You know, this is something that I think about a lot.
So, like, I have a rule, which is that as soon as a camera comes out in like a social situation, it doesn't really matter where it is, unless it's with family, I just shut down.
I just won't say anything, I don't do anything.
I just go like that.
And if the camera's in my face, I'll just go like no, like that.
And I've always done that.
And that's a very, I mean, I've never even thought about the fact that that's quite a weird and novel thing for people to have to think about.
But, You were thinking about the entire career the whole time.
Well, I mean, it's just, it's just, it's just, you don't want embarrassing stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I totally get it.
Or it's just the environment.
I do remember there used to be a page on Facebook back when Facebook was relevant called Lad Bible.
And before it got bought out by its corporate overlords and turned into a sort of slop article manufacturer, it used to post sort of the Daily Lad.
And it was whoever had done the stupidest thing possible or the like most.
Based possibly, uh, and uh, and post it, you know, it's like someone's taken a dump in a urinal or something at a party, and you're just like, and someone caught that on a camera, like digital, actual digital camera at the time, and it's like, uh, you're there, you are mad lad, um, and just some nonsense, like, where are they now?
That's my where are they now, right?
Where Zoomers have grown up in an environment where the cameras are everywhere all the time, uh, and so there is that sort of sense of, um, someone might be watching, you know, the panopticon is in the room, um.
And just to get back to this particular thread, it says, this millennial says, you never got taught.
It's not me.
I'm not working tomato.
Thank you very much.
You never got taught how to have fun as an adult.
It's truly bizarre, right?
Now, regardless of that, a lot of the complaints on this thread, which I see, which I'm saying, where do I hang out with that won't require us to spend money?
Right.
It's giving advices and things.
Free concerts, where do you find those?
I've never actually heard of them.
Go back up for a second then, Mike.
There was something interesting.
Yeah, go on.
That one.
I mean, this, I don't know whether this is a UK or US subreddit or whatever, but like you, yeah, Walmart, Home Depot.
So, yeah, it's American.
But, you know, the countryside being paved over and they're being like, where does it say?
I saw something about people smoking meth.
The crack addicts, man.
Major meth smoking destination.
Like the park in my hometown used to be so nice.
And I used to go there when I was a kid.
And then as I was growing up into my late teenage years, you couldn't go there anymore.
Certainly after sort of six o'clock, because there'd just be junkies everywhere.
And it was just, you know, and that's the story for a lot of places now.
And I think that's another part of, you know, why Gen Z are struggling to, I don't know, to have fun in a way that millennials think is appropriate.
It's not even, so it's like, okay, you've got this generational gap between what millennials think.
And I will bring up some polling data about what people of different generations, notably the Zoomers are absent from it at the moment, but that's why you're here, basically, aside from your representation.
So you've got this idea of like nature, and then you go, well, nature's constantly under attack from all these different things, or I live in a city and it's really difficult.
To get out and things like that.
But there's also this idea like, you can see my buddies and I used to just hang out, play board games, write comedy sketches, books, play songs together.
But because everything is terminally online, because you have access to a camera and your phone and the internet at all times, there's also a sense that you kind of feel like you're wasting time if you're doing any of those pursuits purely for pleasure.
So it's like, oh, if I play board games, why am I not running a board game centric podcast with my friends and suddenly turning this into a profession or something?
Well, that's something interesting when I've seen that guy, Clavicular.
A clip of him where he's where people are asking, like, why do you film everything you do with the whole IRL live streaming thing?
And he says, it's like, well, why wouldn't I just monetize my entire life?
If you're not monetizing your entire life, you're just wasting time.
Why would I waste my time like that?
Yeah.
So, so there is this sort of, you know, I imagine there's a lot of Zoomers who are sitting there and going, right, like, okay, there's all these things that I kind of want to do, but like, anytime that I am providing doing an outlay because things are so tight, like, I either is stressing me out because I should be monetizing it in some way, or like I'm a failure for not having done so, or I'm making a mistake basically by doing it.
I do also think part of this is also a kind of dopamine hit thing because those things listed there, playing board games, writing comedy sketches, and so on.
I mean, that sounds kind of fun, but I know that I wouldn't have the attention span to do a lot of that stuff.
Oh, no.
Charlie Lenin's size down.
That's interesting.
You know what I'm talking about?
Well, you've got these things, but they're not necessarily inherently.
Competitive, except maybe the board game thing.
I'm kind of joking, by the way.
I do like it.
I like playing board games.
Doom scrolling, TikTok, Scrabble, TikTok.
Doom scrolling and bed rotting.
That's an open maxing.
That's quite an easy dopamine hit, whereas all of these things are more difficult.
And that's the other thing.
More difficult.
If I move on, so first I'll just give this as the example.
This is some chap who's like, I built a fashion business for 100K a year, a little loan from daddy, but we won't mention that.
After starting a side hustle.
And being a young entrepreneur and that sort of thing.
But it's more that, like, that person who then has a following on Instagram or whatever, who's then like dozens like him get deluged into people's feeds when they are doom scrolling.
And it's like, oh, right, well, now I'm feeling this sort of fatigue of, like, I'm not doing anything like that.
Why should I do it?
Sigma grind set every day.
And so your mind doesn't, I've heard it on the internet.
Your mind doesn't go from that to, like, I want to decompress now.
I'm going to go for like a five mile walk.
It goes to, Ah, what am I doing with my life?
Like, I should be.
Can I not put something together that's going to make me rich so I can escape this nightmare that I'm currently living in?
Soaring Leisure Costs00:05:14
And you can see as well that just the price of admission for different leisure activities just precipitously gone up.
It's the same for everything.
It's just like just going to the pub, for example, is like insane.
Yeah, it's really the United teams got worse that whole time and the money and the price has gone up.
But I wonder, I couldn't find this data on like what the actual ticket sales were.
You can find lots of revenue figures, but the actual number of tickets sold.
So you wonder how much of the price hike is just sort of greedy, sort of scraping from sort of 45 year old middle aged men or whatever.
And how much of it is the fact that they can get enough people in the seats?
Because I didn't want to say, you know, if suddenly football was booming to a level never foreseen, I didn't want to say, oh, well, clearly that's where they're finding their enjoyment.
But I think the price of admission has gone up.
There's also a case of people, again, going back to that Reddit thread where they're complaining about lack of access to different leisure activities.
So I'll go back to these popular activities, but you get to things like swimming pools, something pretty basic.
But most of it has a lot of it's disappearing.
We've lost four to five hundred swimming pool closures in the past five years, 76% of which disappeared since 2020.
So I don't swim.
You don't swim.
One of the things is that the only people I know who go to swimming pools regularly are those who are actively focusing on it as a form of exercise or people taking their families to the swimming pool.
And as people who are younger are both poorer and less likely to have families these days, then that does limit the amount of people who'd be going.
Absolutely.
And the young people are looking then for their sort of cheaper leisure options, which are almost entirely either solo pursuits or can be done from an internet connection.
You know, video gaming, price per hour for video gaming, way cheaper than swimming.
Even then, with what you were saying before about monetizing, I'm sure a lot of them are thinking to themselves, why am I just wasting my time playing video games when I could be doing a let's play or streaming and trying to monetize it?
Well, absolutely.
But it's more, then you've got two sides of that, which is there's a personality which will tend towards that.
But there's also the personality of like, we're social animals, you know, and people will play.
It used to be the first person shooter, and now it seems to be more sort of, I don't know, my mind's going to things like Deep Rock Galactic and Helldivers 2 and things like that, where there's a big social sort of scene where it's like you and three friends against a horde or whatever.
Can I say on this very quickly?
Yeah.
Another point here, potentially, I don't know about any data on this, but I couldn't tell you the last time I went to a public swimming pool.
But something I do like to do is what is today called wild swimming.
We're just like swimming in rivers and in the sea and that sort of thing, which is one, free, and two, a lot more enjoyable.
It's a lot more enjoyable than being in the sterile swimming pool.
I can see that.
We've also sort of discovered where your eventual scandal will come from.
Oh, yeah.
It's like man discovered free swimming, as he called it.
I'm a citizen of the river, is what he said.
I'm a sovereign citizen.
I can swim where I like.
I can swim where I like.
Sir, this is polluted.
I do wear speedos for the avoidance of doubt.
I'm not naked.
I didn't say skinny dipping.
You've brought that up.
Interesting, interesting.
Right.
And then obviously, swimming pools, obviously, somewhat of a niche interest, but pubs have closing down.
So, 15,000 pubs in the last 25 years and seemingly going down, down, down.
Now, obviously, a lot of that is like pubs are not willing to put the price of a pint to £15.
The ones who have survived have put sort of a lot more food on the menu.
You know, you used to get a lot more sort of drinking bars, and now food is where the profit margins are.
And soft drinks, interestingly, but, um, Pubs are down over 15,000.
There used to be loads of articles which came out when I was at university, for instance, which said no students are using the bars.
No students are using the student bars.
I went to my student bar and it's like, well, the prices are more expensive than Wetherspoons here.
Yeah, all the supermarket.
And the supermarket has massively undercut this.
I mean, supermarkets, frankly, for all of their convenience, have been a complete disaster for independent businesses of all stripes because they do sell everything.
You find a supermarket effect in lots of towns where loads of independent butchers, independent greengrocers, and such.
End up shutting down because people choose to go with the slightly cheaper, more convenient option.
So, I don't really like supermarkets in towns most of the time because of that effect, especially small towns.
But also, yeah, pubs are expensive.
I still try and frequent my locals and go to the pub maybe once a week with my friends in town.
But there was a music festival in my town recently where most of the pubs were still relatively reasonable, a lot more expensive than they used to be, but relatively reasonable.
And then my friend happened to be playing in the one bar.
Where, say, a double whiskey and coke would be like, I don't know, £7.50, £8.
In most of the other pubs, he managed to be playing in the one place where it was over £12.
I mean, that's a double.
Cocktail prices, right?
AI vs Real Connection00:06:18
And so I was there like, you are fucking lucky that I really want to see you play around.
Well, it's just a question of spaces where people do their leisure.
You know, I'm not even saying that this is an effect that has happened due to a decline in attendance for whatever reason.
And we're putting it down to a lack of funds.
But it's also, as I say, it's the convenience is king and always will be.
And if you have access to, you know, a machine that can provide a social experience, in quotes, by not having to leave your house, a lot of people will be keen on that.
But it's not even like when I was a kid, and if you wanted to play multiplayer with people, You all got together, right?
Because it was split screen or whatever at home, or you took turns.
But now it's all this remote stuff.
And so you see this additional factor, which is that loneliness is just massively increasing.
So we're more interconnected than ever, but we're suddenly like the loneliest generation is the Zoomer generation.
Well, it is because of all of the surrogate activities which are on offer.
You can get any of the different social aspects of life catered to you now.
From inside your own home, oftentimes within your own bedroom, and you never actually have to step outside.
And there is a cumulative effect because you get social isolation because you spend all day playing video games.
A lot of people will substitute romantic activities and sexual activities for pornography and things along those lines.
Romantic activities as AI chatbots are becoming a thing and people are starting to fall in love with AI chatbots.
That might become more of a problem as the technology becomes more available and develops.
Added on top of that, if you spend all day at home getting no sunshine, you're probably eating like shit, and then you're not exercising at all, you're incredibly sedentary, your hormones will mess up as well.
If you're a man, your testosterone will probably crater, which will lead to depression and lead to you not wanting to go outside even more and sinking even more into those surrogate activities.
So it's just.
It will be a sort of a compounding effect that happens with it all, but it's what I'm really trying to get at as well is just that.
What is leisure then?
If this is actively causing people distress, right?
This cycle of behaviors, which are ostensibly made of things which are designed to hit your dopamine.
That's also a concept that we're thinking of.
You used to do things because you enjoyed doing them, right?
And you didn't think about like what particular chemical imbalance it was going to cause in your favor or not.
That's the medicalization of society, which comes in.
But then your mind is then thinking in these terms all the time.
This idea of, you know, Your own medical condition and whether you need therapy today or not because you haven't been able to see your friends.
And in the same way as you say, you outsource all these social activities to the machine, essentially, right?
Whatever app is trying to profit from you, then you get to the point where, like, what is leisure, like, as a concept to you, right?
Like, is it this thing which you're actually doing for fun or is it just the thing that sort of staves off the void to fill the time before you have to work again?
And I think it's actually quite an important question how do we help people to, or not we necessarily as a group of lads here, but more as a society?
How do we help incentivize people to do things which are going to be much more beneficial for?
I mean, to be fair, as an individual involved with basket weavers, you do actually try to help people with this kind of thing.
Well, yes.
It's funny you should mention the basket weavers.
The basket weavers is a social club for people of our particular political bent.
So, basket weavers.
Marxists.
I thought Oat Not Hate said fascist.
Sensible center.
So, Basket Weavers is a community building service, which is basically all about.
We've been in operation for Yonks now.
I'm an ardent supporter of theirs, although I don't run it directly.
You can also find them on xbw.net as the account handle.
But essentially, it's all about getting people together and to do things in real life to help you build your network and your community.
One of the points that I didn't really come onto earlier was.
The fact that doing things outside and doing things in a group together is the opportunity for spontaneity in a way in which your curated experience of choosing which game to play, for instance, at home, doesn't exist.
And so the networking opportunities that you'll have, right, which is a very corporatized way of putting it, but like basically, if you want to find some more friends, you've got to be in places where you can find friends.
If you want to make connections within a particular niche interest, you know, everything from Warhammer 40k up to.
Uh, you know, some sort of extreme sport, I don't know, snowboarding or something, then you need to be in the places where those are done.
And people only really seem to be going out to those places where the niche interest demands it.
But I'm just saying you can go out and about and explore things with your friends, and it doesn't necessarily need to be that direct plan or that direct thing that you're playing.
Uh, you can just have fun.
I will say, as a gentleman who enjoys video games, I think, all in moderation, yeah, all in moderation.
Just to make sure we're not just hammering video games as an activity, because I also think there's a lot of artistry to the creation of them.
Of course, yeah.
Certain ones.
You could also, Basket Weavers, recapture the Golden Age.
All of you get together.
The Basket Weavers LAN party.
Get yourselves an Xbox 360, Halo 3.
Oh, yes.
Just get on the sofa together.
Have fun like that.
The real Golden Age, I mean, I'm old, but the real Golden Age is Goldeneye on the N64 4 player.
You could do that.
License to kill one shot kills.
There's a sea in every town.
There's an infinite distance grappling hook, yes.
There is another option, which is commit yourself to the political struggle.
Of course, yes.
Written, which is what I would recommend personally.
You can do all of these things, to be fair.
Yeah.
Self Improvement Routes00:10:27
My prevailing wisdom is.
My prevailing wisdom, as always, is to get out there and try something new and break that bubble and that mold.
And if you're part of these people who say, everything's too expensive, there are options out there for you.
The basket weavers will help arrange things with you and so on.
You know, say there's this split in Gen Z.
I don't want to make it all negative.
Gen Z is opting for a different kind of holiday.
We're all broken.
We're not doing shag aloof.
So instead, people going out on holiday.
Apparently, this woman really loves cows.
But look at them.
They look lovely.
They do look lovely.
She is doing a Wojak pose.
She's in the lakes, my home.
It's more charming when it's done for, hey, look at these lovely cows than it is for, look at my Nintendo Switch or look at this fake chicken.
Sure, absolutely.
I'm trying to be positive.
I'm trying to be hopeful, Mark.
I thought that's what this was about.
It's all about being positive and hopeful, Harry.
Just because it says Lake Windermere, which many argue is a tautology because Mia means lake.
That's where I went to school.
It's Lake Winder Lake.
Yes.
I see.
Nice.
That's based.
So it's like the River Avon is the River River.
You just not Manaport the Lake.
Whoever wrote this is probably a zoomer.
So, yeah.
I think my segment is basically.
I've got one other thing to add.
Shameless self plug here.
So I wrote an article earlier this year for the Catholic Herald, because I'm a Catholic.
To your shame.
Titled, well, hey, titled Self Improvement is Not Salvation.
And it was basically reacting to a series of stories that came out around the beginning of the year saying that the New Year's resolutions of Gen Z are very different to those of their parents.
So it's less your kind of fad diets and that kind of thing and more.
Kind of ice baths and mindfulness and meditation and all this kind of thing.
Manifestations, the one at the moment.
But what the case that I made in this article was as somebody who, especially during COVID, pursued a lot of those kinds of things.
Like I chose to use the sort of lockdown period to sort of lift weights all the time.
I did the carnivore diet.
I sort of did my, had a go at meditating and all that kind of thing.
What I quickly came to realize was that way of living is at once better than the alternative that's offered to us.
Because in, I mean, for me personally, There's certainly two sides to my personality.
One is the kind of self improvement, working out, you know, kind of go getting side.
But the other side is the kind of sit around and smoke weed and play video games type side, which, you know, I did my fair share of when I was younger.
And I've sort of put that all away now.
But it's certainly, you know, I think that's part of all Zoomers' experience is living that way, at least for a certain time and realizing that it's terrible and that it's no way to live.
We were discussing this earlier.
Yes, yes, we were.
So, you know, those are kind of presented as being the two options that Zoomers have.
So you can either go down the kind of self improvement route.
Which, at its very best, I kind of think of like Jordan Peterson 12 Rules for Life back in the kind of sort of 2016, 2018 kind of era when he was really at his peak before he became whatever he is now, which is very sad, I think.
But that kind of self improvement, where it is about building yourself up and turning yourself into somebody that can be relied upon, turning yourself into somebody serious, that's fantastic.
And it's better than just being a degenerate and a hedonist.
For sure.
But even that is not a source of meaning, ultimately.
Even that runs dry.
As a source of meaning.
And this was the case that I made in my article that can sustain you for even years.
If you do like the kind of waking up at six in the morning and working out and running and doing sports and eating a really regimented diet and counting your calories and doing meditation and all of these kinds of things, that's all good stuff.
And it's better than just being, as I say, completely unregulated in your life.
But ultimately, you will find that on the other side of that, It's still nothingness.
It's still like meaninglessness.
It has to ultimately be towards an end.
It can't be an end in and of itself.
Yeah.
And what you realize, I mean, what I realized in my experience was all of those things that I was doing were typologies of essentially living a religious life.
So, meditation and mindfulness is basically just prayer without God.
And fasting was another one of these New Year's resolutions that a lot of Gen Z committed to.
And that's obviously a practice associated with basically every religion.
I was going to say, isn't the whole self help movement in America basically.
A sort of denomination of Protestant evangelism.
That's basically the point I made a lot of these practices that Gen Z are organically rediscovering in their search for meaning are essentially religious in nature.
And so the solution to what we're talking about here, that I would propose, is a recognition of the fact that all of this that exists around us is not just coincidental, it's not just kind of arbitrary.
Like it's here for a reason, it was created.
There is therefore a creator.
An author to all of this.
You're here for a reason.
There is such a thing as objective reality.
And it's your job to live in a way that is in accordance with that rather than against that.
Because we support this.
You're also a steward of it, right?
As much as you're a steward of yourself and you're a steward of your area, part of Basket Weavers, which I should add, is not just for UK members, it's an international sort of not organization, but kind of movement.
There's this idea of having great stewardship over your local area.
And you'll care more about it if you care about the people in it.
And so, the idea is to introduce you to more people, to make more friends, to then become a force to be reckoned with.
And that is the greatest meaning I'm sure you can find without religion itself.
So, there you go.
Wonderful.
Well, I hope we've given you a lot to think on there and a lot to work on as well.
So, we do not have any more rumble rants.
Samson, do we have any video comments?
We'll do them next week.
Let's get on to the written comments from the website then.
And would you like to read yours first?
Yeah.
So, yeah, this is on my segment on Great Yarn.
I do not have a great angle of either of the screens, right?
So, Russian Garbage Human, who I have met in person multiple times now.
Good chat.
I've been to dozens of reform events, even volunteered at some.
Average age is invariably 50 plus.
Reform are the dying gasp of the liberal world order.
One last term until 2030 when the technocracy becomes impossible to escape.
Yeah, I mean, look, reform, I've been to plenty of reform events in my time because I was a supporter of the party up until, you know, basically when they kicked Rupert out.
Because I thought, like many people, that they were the most viable vehicle that we had.
And there's great people in the reform membership base, there's fantastic people.
There's like minded people.
I'm sure people who listen to this podcast, many of them will be reform members.
And so the base of reform is really not the issue.
It is the case that increasingly they're being viewed as the party of boomers, especially with their commitment to keep the triple lock.
And also this thing that came out today of Farage rewarding this kind of wealthy boomer.
In this prize draw that they did, free energy bills.
So they are increasingly viewed as being for a certain generation, which I think is not to their credit.
But look, I mean, we shouldn't knock the reform membership because many of them almost exclusively are good people who care about the country.
And as well, there are plenty of boomers in that as well.
Because I do think people are a little bit too harsh on the generational gap there.
Obviously, we have criticisms of all of the various generations, but people go particularly hard on the boomers who are.
A product of their environment as well as much as anybody else.
And so I don't want to alienate people because it does alienate some people when you go quite so hard against them.
Whereas the stereotype of them does have a lot of factual basis.
But also, there are plenty of boomers who do want to help out the younger generations who do see what's happening.
And there's plenty of boomers who are coming to the Restore meetings as well.
Plenty of boomers who, you know, and just people of all age demographics who are joining Restore.
So, like, yeah, as you say, this kind of intergenerational warfare thing.
Look, there's a frank conversation to be had about certainly the distribution of wealth between the generations, but that doesn't mean we have to be antagonistic to each other.
And I think that's only in service to the system if we are.
Kevin Fox says, The Greens have a lot of ideas.
Some are okay.
Many are from cloud cuckoo line land or whatever.
Their main problem is they have absolutely no idea how to implement or pay for these ideas and how to deal with the downstream chaos that these ideas will bring.
Zach talking about the balance of payments showed that we don't have a deficit.
It's not real money.
It's not going to work on the international stage.
Well, yeah, I mean, look, my point on this is that.
When the Greens speak about the problems facing the country, a lot of people, especially those under 30, who perhaps don't pay a huge amount of attention to politics, but who do pay attention to their own pay packet and their own neighborhood and their own high street, when they hear Zach Polanski talking, you know, in a relatively charismatic way, I mean, and the competition is not particularly great, about the fact that people just can't, people are sort of struggling to keep up in this country, a lot of people listen to that and think, yeah, I mean, this guy gets it.
He just thinks, the Greens just think that they can lock every billionaire in the country and prevent them from leaving without scalping them.
And then also, that like all of their cash is immediately liquid at any one time.
Yeah.
So, I mean, and that's the thing like, this is what needs to be made clear to everybody thinking of voting Greens on the basis that I just laid out, which is to say you're not an ideological leftist.
You just want to, you know, stick a middle finger up at the system, essentially.
You know, the solutions that the Greens propose to the problems that they're rightly identifying would exacerbate all of those problems because they believe in more immigration, they believe in wealth taxes, as you said, both of which would make the housing crisis worse, would make wages worse, and would make the overall level of wealth in the country substantially lower.
which would mean that everything would start to just grind to a halt, even more so than it is now.
Zesty King.
Some, nice name.
Some say every time Nigel Farage is called a racist, he finds the nearest brown person and makes him a reform candidate.
I mean, it's incredible that reform, a party which has committed, as a matter of policy, to stripping voting rights from Commonwealth citizens, which they currently have, by the way, which is an absurd policy, will at the same time stand candidates in the local elections who are themselves foreign nationals.
So, under a reform government, if you're a citizen of India or Bangladesh or wherever else, or Nigeria, you can come to the UK, you can't vote, but you can stand in elections.
That makes sense.
It's just absurd.
Genius.
Focus on the Big Picture00:01:52
I think there's one relevant one here that I'd like you to address from Mother of Hate Monsters, who says, Charlie, I love Restore, but for the love of God, talk to an individual about sorting your graphics out.
You can't have a superior meme game than fall flat on the leaflets and magic eye wall of text.
Address that for us.
Yeah, look, I mean, so we saw all of the criticisms about that graphic yesterday.
And it's like, look, we're not going to get it right every time.
We're a small team.
We're still, as I said in my segment, building up our kind of HQ team and our national infrastructure.
And we don't have to like freak out about every little thing that happens.
And Frank, I mean, that graphic did really well on Facebook and Instagram, which is really where it was for.
It wasn't 4X and it was on X that it was kind of panned, but it's one graphic.
And those leaflets are doing the job.
And look, I know everybody wants everything to be absolutely perfect.
And if there's one thing I've learned doing Restore, it's that everybody has an opinion on how these things should be done.
And all of that is valued.
Like, your feedback is very much valued.
We are big believers in listening to the opinions of our base and our supporters.
And I recognize that it all comes from a place of wanting Restore to do well.
But all I would say is just like, Let's just think about the big picture.
Yeah, think about the big picture and focus on what's actually important.
Like one graphic is like, you know, it's not the end of the world.
All right, then.
That is about all we have time for right now.
So thank you all very much for joining us.
Mark, thanks for coming down to the studio, as with both of you.
It's just been me surrounded by guests today.
As you can see, Nick's about to break the bottle straight back out again.
He's got some Jack Daniels hiding under the desk.
Go and even drink.
Charlie, yeah, it makes it all the more confusing, really.
He's going to Blues Brothers his way out of here.
Dum, And Charlie, thank you very much for joining us.
Nice family.
Everybody watching, if you're subscribed, remember to tune in in about half an hour for the lads hour where we are going to force feed Carl Monty Python until he laughs.
We'll see you then.
For everybody else, have a great weekend and we hope to see you at the live event tomorrow.