The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： The Future of Britain ｜ Interview with Harrison Pitt

00:00:00.000 Hi, folks. Thanks for joining me. I have the pleasure and privilege of sitting down and

00:00:03.660 having a chat with Harrison Pitt from New Culture Forum, European Conservative, and

00:00:07.340 lots of other things that you do. Thanks so much for being here.

00:00:11.000 Pleasure.

00:00:11.360 And taking the time to sit down and have a little chat. So I thought we would just talk

00:00:15.720 about the state of Britain and British politics, right? Because at the moment, there's a strange

00:00:21.720 tendency, and I don't know whether you've seen this, for government by Netflix special.

00:00:26.460 And this, of course, was evident with the Netflix documentary that Keir Starmer mistakenly

00:00:35.000 called this fictional program Adolescence, which became something of a moral panic amongst

00:00:41.580 our ruling class. But also, Channel 4 recently put out a documentary about the grooming gangs,

00:00:48.220 and I saw Sarah Champion retweeting this today, the Rotherham Labour MP, who was honestly one

00:00:54.300 of the first people to start speaking out solidly about this, so to her credit, saying that

00:00:59.120 we need proper investigations or inquiries or something done about the grooming gangs.

00:01:06.840 But this kind of is a bit of an issue, isn't it? Because, I mean, one, we know everything

00:01:11.020 that happened. We've had lots of inquiries. We know why it was done. We know who it was

00:01:15.080 done to. We know the tremendously awful results that have occurred from it and the fact that

00:01:19.140 it's still going on today. So I'm not even sure what an inquiry or investigation or whatever

00:01:22.680 it is they want would actually accomplish. But I'm also worried about the fact that our

00:01:27.620 MPs are so dim that generally this seems to be Britain is governed by whatever the most

00:01:33.560 compelling piece of TV they've watched is. What do you think about this?

00:01:37.480 Well, it's a classic textbook case of elites who already know what they want to achieve

00:01:43.220 in politics and already know the kind of policies that they want to promote, trying to manufacture

00:01:47.060 consent for them, and also trying to neutralise a populace that is feeling increasingly seized

00:01:56.020 by righteous indignation because of what has been happening to the British people over the

00:02:00.540 last 30 to 40 years. Certainly since 1997, despite endless imported horrors from endemic 1.00

00:02:07.820 knife crime, industrial rape gangs you mentioned, of course, Islamist intimidation in local and

00:02:12.720 national politics, even terrorist incidents. There is always this need to try and maintain

00:02:17.540 the ragged tapestry of multiculturalism as best they can. And therefore, at best, to imply that 0.99

00:02:24.500 yes, we face these imported challenges, but we also face some horrible indigenous challenges that also 1.00

00:02:29.240 need to be kept under wraps. And gosh, we need to make sure that you have this kind of phantom threat

00:02:34.760 of the far right. So there's this sort of false pursuit of balance to try and make out that the problem

00:02:39.880 isn't really what the problem is. And that's the best version of it. And the worst is to engage

00:02:44.200 in deliberate falsifying propaganda that effectively invents crimes where they do not exist.

00:02:50.940 And so in the case of adolescence, you actually watched it. I've not watched it. And so you actually

00:02:55.300 had quite an interesting take on it I saw on the podcast, which was quite meta. And I expect

00:02:59.000 beyond the intentions of the actual creators, I should expect. Namely that it is a very, in many ways,

00:03:09.380 quite a powerful artistic testament to the loss of manliness in our societies, I suppose

00:03:13.700 was your point.

00:03:14.700 And the current state of affairs as well, because since the sort of institution of the, I hate

00:03:21.560 to just crassly call it the Blairite paradigm, but that's really what it is. The loss of authority

00:03:28.480 in the institutions themselves as well. And so generally, the quality of everything represented

00:03:34.380 in adolescence is very poor. Nobody likes the place they're in. Nobody's going to do

00:03:38.700 their jobs. And it's a cascading series of failures on every single level.

00:03:44.240 Yes.

00:03:44.560 So yes.

00:03:45.240 Yes. Well, I just think that this might have worked. So this attempt to manufacture consent

00:03:52.200 for policies that have, well, it's not even manufacture consent. You're trying to retroactively

00:03:55.820 justify policies that have already been pursued, and potentially manufacture consent for more policies,

00:04:01.500 in particular online censorship, to try and tame British public opinion. The problem today,

00:04:07.940 of course, is that this isn't true of all generations, but particularly of my generation,

00:04:12.420 the Zoomers, and even to some extent of millennials, people opt into their own sort of media experiences

00:04:18.440 these days. We're not living in the age where there are just, say, five TV channels and everyone's

00:04:23.600 watching the same thing, and can therefore be supplied with a uniform media diet. We do to some extent

00:04:30.380 choose our own media diet. And so it isn't noticeable in a way that they did choose to put this on

00:04:34.860 Netflix rather than on something like Channel 4, because Netflix is a testament, is in fact one of

00:04:41.220 those companies that testifies to the way in which our media ecosystem has been disrupted. So maybe that

00:04:47.020 was a clever move on their part. But I also think that people in Britain, they're not hugely

00:04:57.580 knowledgeable about the exact situation in which we find ourselves. So for example, we mentioned this on the

00:05:02.620 podcast today, a good chunk, the vast majority of British people think that net immigration, or the median

00:05:08.180 British voter, thinks that net immigration is running at about 70,000 a year, when in fact, it's north of a million.

00:05:14.060 And so, but, so they're not very well informed about the nuts and bolts and the details, and nor should they be.

00:05:18.060 And you're probably a little bit mental if you take too obsessive an interest in, in what's going on in

00:05:23.100 day-to-day politics. But they do have very strong intuitions. And they are, they are aware that whenever

00:05:27.900 they do read about a stabbing, and when, or whenever they do read about a terrorist attack, or whenever

00:05:33.100 they do read about, or see an instance online of, you know, third world behavior on the streets of 0.93

00:05:38.940 Britain, when they see, or what they see in their daily lives, or when they see Birmingham filled to

00:05:43.420 the rafters with, with rubbish, that they know what the true sources of social dysfunction in our

00:05:48.940 society are. And it's not, you know, like, you know, innocent looking 13 year old white boys who 0.93

00:05:54.780 are causing these problems. And so the attempt to try to try and race swap, I don't think is going to

00:05:58.460 be successful. And I will make one more point as well. I forget whether it was juvenile or Cicero,

00:06:03.740 who said that if you want a docile population, give them bread and circuses. I think it might have been

00:06:08.380 juvenile, actually. And this is a very clever way in which you can, rulers who are badly motivated,

00:06:15.500 can sap the people over whom they're ruling of the kind of civic virtue that would give them the

00:06:20.780 power to resist and to say, no, we're not going to tolerate that. It makes sense for a tyrant or

00:06:26.460 for a tyrannical regime to want their people to be as domesticated as possible. And to some extent,

00:06:32.620 Netflix already performs this function, as does, I would argue, pornography and all the

00:06:37.100 video games and Deliveroo. And it's not to attack those things necessarily, because I'm no

00:06:42.540 certain person in this room who's very keen on video games.

00:06:45.020 I'm not, but it doesn't seem to have domesticated you.

00:06:49.180 No, Joe Rogan got in a lot of trouble a couple of years back by saying, well, video games are kind

00:06:52.700 of a waste of time. It's like, yeah, they're entertainment, you know, they're relaxation.

00:06:56.380 I just want to keep the audience on side.

00:06:57.820 Yeah, well, you know, I like video games as much as anyone else, but like, it's true they're not productive.

00:07:02.220 It is. Yes, indeed. And I think our elite political class is Mr. Trick here. And rather,

00:07:08.380 as I did with the Gamergate thing, it makes more sense given their long-term goals, which are very

00:07:12.860 unjust. But basically, we're talking about the successful end of replacement migration being

00:07:22.140 achieved. If you're trying to do that, it makes sense to keep people as docile and as domesticated

00:07:26.300 as possible. And if you're then invading the very things that do that, like Netflix or gaming,

00:07:32.140 with your own very brazen political messaging, it's going to have exactly the reverse effect.

00:07:38.140 It's going to radicalize them, which I think is a good thing.

00:07:40.780 Which is how we're here now.

00:07:41.900 Which is why we're here now. And certainly in your case, in your origins with the Gamergate.

00:07:47.420 But I'm unaware of anyone, apart from people who already agree with the objectives of the regime,

00:07:53.100 who sees adolescents as anything but a very brazen case of regime propaganda. And so,

00:08:01.100 if anything, it's more likely to wake people up than it is to send them further to sleep,

00:08:04.620 which you would imagine should be their plan. So, I think they've missed a trick there.

00:08:07.020 So, what's interesting is there was a natural reaction to adolescence before anyone had even

00:08:11.980 actually seen it. When it was announced, people understood, oh, it's a white boy who's at Stabberism.

00:08:17.100 And so you're exactly correct. We learned the other day that there was 150 stabbings a day in Britain,

00:08:21.500 which I just was not the case when I was young. When I was your age, this just didn't happen.

00:08:27.500 But what I find interesting is you say, oh, this is a conscious effort by the regime,

00:08:33.340 a narrative control and about controlling people's thoughts. You know what? I have trouble believing it.

00:08:39.820 I think they might actually be captured by their own emotions, because I think I agree completely

00:08:45.180 with your characterization that the Blairite Multiculti Internationalist project is fraying at the edges.

00:08:51.260 It's fraying in the middle. The very center of it is coming apart. And I think that the people

00:08:56.540 in parliament at the moment are overwhelmingly committed to the paradigm. They are either

00:09:01.660 themselves DEI hires. They were on short lists in both Conservative and Labour, and have worked their

00:09:09.100 way up through the system by parroting the system's own sayings and phrases and morality. And so I think

00:09:17.500 the fact that it's clear that there's something else coming out from under it is frightening to them.

00:09:23.020 And I also think they're a bit thick. I can't help but notice that, I mean,

00:09:29.100 with Jacob Rees-Mogg gone, it's hard to think of a particularly bright politician.

00:09:33.420 Even Nigel Farage is smart enough, but I don't think he's conceptually advanced enough to establish

00:09:40.460 this kind of meta-understanding of the current state of the country, right? I think he's still

00:09:44.780 very much trapped in the institutions are failing, quality of life is going down, therefore we just

00:09:49.260 need to improve the institutions to restore the quality of life. It's like, no, there's something

00:09:53.500 much broader going on here. And we need to be able to really tangle with this. And I just don't

00:09:59.900 think our politicians have got that kind of capacity. And so I think that actually when

00:10:04.940 something like adolescence is thrown at their feet, I think a lot of them are kind of genuinely

00:10:10.060 taken in by it, genuinely taken, oh, here's, here's a way we can get the point across that

00:10:14.460 we've got to stop young boys from watching Andrew Tate or else, or else the entire thing goes down.

00:10:19.980 It's like, look, Andrew Tate isn't the, the, the, the, the hinge upon which the entire multicultural 0.97

00:10:25.660 project revolves. Actually, there are way worse problems than Andrew Tate. Uh, and so I, I think

00:10:30.780 it's actually kind of a desperation that they're latching onto this thing. And because I think

00:10:35.500 they can feel the sand slowly slipping through there. Yes. I expect that a great many of them

00:10:40.220 are taken in by the propaganda more than they are manufacturing their own propaganda, more than they

00:10:45.660 see themselves as cynically manufacturing it. And I think that they're as, as in most cases,

00:10:51.660 most processes that go on in the world, there's very rarely a kind of single guiding intelligence.

00:10:56.860 It, these sorts, which isn't to say that conspiracies don't happen. When people say you, you, you're

00:11:01.580 conspiracy mongering, this is a very foolish way of thinking. Yeah. Yeah. There's a foolish way of, 0.99

00:11:06.380 foolish way of thinking. I mean, Julius Caesar was killed by a conspiracy. So conspiracies do exist. 0.99

00:11:11.260 Um, why, why has Fauci been pardoned retroactively back 2014? Sorry, I don't believe they don't exist.

00:11:17.100 Exactly.

00:11:17.820 Just wherever it's appropriate.

00:11:19.100 And this sort of, yeah, that's, that's, that's exactly the point. Um, but even when they do exist,

00:11:24.380 often they are the result of a congruence of interests coming together, not, and not every

00:11:29.900 single person involved necessarily has the same motivation. So I, or even knows that there's a

00:11:35.020 conspiracy. So I, I suspect there are quite, quite a lot of people, maybe even the creators themselves,

00:11:40.860 but certainly I would imagine the, the actors who are unlikely to be very bright, uh,

00:11:45.020 who are not likely to be very bright in adolescence. And indeed the politicians who've been

00:11:48.460 taken in by it and have been like having these sorts of like theatrical seminars in Whitehall about

00:11:53.980 how can we fight this fictional problem?

00:11:55.740 Nadia Whitten stands up and pines on it. It's like, okay.

00:11:59.740 Exactly. And, and you know, people, I don't much care if it can be bad or not, but people

00:12:05.100 trying to rake her over the coals for not having watched it, which is just absurd. And frankly,

00:12:08.460 I think she's handled herself very well when she's been, when she's been pressed on, on those sorts

00:12:12.140 of things, but yes, it will be a congruence of interest. But I, I do suspect that, and I can't

00:12:15.980 prove this, but there must've been people involved some way along the line in the process who are well

00:12:21.980 aware of what crime rates in Britain really are like. And it, and, and who are well aware of what,

00:12:29.180 like disaggregating crime according to ethnicity and race and religion will yield in terms of

00:12:35.420 statistical demographic results who nevertheless decided that it would be more politically correct.

00:12:42.140 And it would be to, to, to basically pin many of these imported problems on innocent 0.92

00:12:52.460 young members of the host population, like people like me, like people like my, my, my younger brothers.

00:12:56.460 I think it is a, I think it is like a grotesque instance of race swapping. And I think that some,

00:13:00.700 many of the people involved would have known exactly what they were doing, even if Nadia Whitten

00:13:04.380 isn't enough to scratch on it.

00:13:06.060 See, I, I'm genuinely worried at this point that, and loath as I am to

00:13:13.740 rake my, uh, hoist myself in my own petard here. But I mean, the, did you watch Chernobyl?

00:13:20.220 Right. So in that they do a very, they do a very good job of representing the kind of communist mindset

00:13:25.100 of it's, it's not even that they are, they know something's wrong, but they don't necessarily

00:13:31.660 know the exact details of what's wrong. Uh, but because for political reasons and reasons of

00:13:36.460 ideology, um, they don't look into it all that hard. Right. And so when, when it finally gets

00:13:42.060 to the point where the guy's like, oh, look, the nuclear power plants explode and there's graphite

00:13:45.660 on the roof. The other guy says, and there's no graphite on the roof because logically,

00:13:49.340 according to the ideology, there's not, uh, I'm not sure that our politically correct establishment

00:13:56.300 have looked sufficiently at the statistics. Uh, and the, the people involved in creating

00:14:00.700 adolescence, I'm not sure they do know. And it's, it's not that, I mean, I think to them,

00:14:07.180 this is a kind of part of their mind that they have to kill off say, well, no, that would be far 0.74

00:14:10.780 right. So I, I can't look into that, but you know, I mean, I think they'll just look at the aggregated

00:14:17.020 statistics and say, knife crimes, 150 a day. Well, I'm not going to break that down by a testy.

00:14:21.580 Uh, and so for them it might, and I'm not saying this is true. I, like I said, I can't prove this

00:14:26.620 either, but I, I genuinely worry that we're being guided by people who are too afraid to look at the

00:14:33.500 details, uh, and are genuinely not all that bright and are ideologically captured. And so this, this is

00:14:42.460 a real concern I have. I mean, I, like I said, I don't know if it's true or not, but.

00:14:45.260 Well, yes, I think that, um, it's hard to think of a time in, uh, in British history where

00:14:51.980 the caliber of MP has been as low as I would argue it is today. Like many of them are just

00:14:58.940 pretty like, like naked ethnocentric tribalists. Like we've got, we've got at least four of those 0.69

00:15:04.140 people. And that's the best of them. And that's the best. Oh, and not for us, by the way.

00:15:08.940 Not for us. That goes without saying. We've got the thickies.

00:15:11.420 Yes. And even the other day, I, again, I'm, you and I both slightly, well, quite considerably,

00:15:16.220 considerably disappointed in the way that Faraj has been operating lately. But leaving that aside,

00:15:20.220 when he was speaking, um, in parliament on Wednesday, which is to say yesterday,

00:15:25.740 we're filming this on Thursday and, and pointing out how many of the people coming in on small boats

00:15:30.860 and, and, you know, being given bed and board at taxpayers expense and often loitering outside

00:15:35.420 playgrounds and loitering outside schools and all this sort of thing come from alien cultures.

00:15:39.740 That's the word that Faraj used. All of a sudden, I think they were Lib Dems or maybe Greens on the,

00:15:44.860 on the bench just behind him, which is like, just looked absolutely horrified that he would,

00:15:50.620 that he would point out what seems to me to be the blindingly obvious. And so you're,

00:15:53.740 you're, they must be from alien cultures. Otherwise how are they illegal?

00:15:56.940 I mean, alien just descends from the Latin word for other.

00:16:00.140 Exactly. How could they not be alien to our culture? They're not the British refugees. 1.00

00:16:05.660 Yes, exactly. So it's, it's absurd. And you're right. It's not that they,

00:16:10.940 like we're talking, what we're talking about here, we're talking about, um,

00:16:16.220 we're talking about the difference between people who use ideological projects as a pretext for what

00:16:23.580 they want to do, which is more cynical and the difference between them and true believers.

00:16:28.220 Yeah. And it's very difficult to know. Like we only really know from, we can, we can try and

00:16:32.540 infer from people's actions, of course. So for example, let me see if I can think of an example

00:16:36.540 of this. Okay. I would argue that someone like, um, Owen Jones is in large part, like a genuine

00:16:46.140 true believer in the, in the whole sort of like woke utopian drive. Jeremy Corbyn.

00:16:50.700 I think Corbyn as well. I think he's obviously a true believer. Clearly. And so here, so for those people,

00:16:55.980 their opt in to this ideology is having read the requisite thinkers. It is maybe not on Corbyn's

00:17:01.820 case, but in Jones's case, having read the requisite thinkers, um, really believing it,

00:17:05.980 that this is what justice in the real world looks like. And I think they're wrong about all this.

00:17:09.900 And it may be true that they're partly driven to it by unhappiness in their own personal life as well.

00:17:13.660 But leaving that aside, just like engaging with the arguments themselves and like what

00:17:17.260 has driven them to that position. It is genuinely a sort of disinterested moral theory

00:17:21.900 about how the world should be. And those, those are your true believers. And those are the people

00:17:26.300 who are going to be ideologically blinkered when it comes to noticing, uh, facts that, that, um,

00:17:33.020 count against their ideological presupposition. So here we're talking about the kind of people who,

00:17:37.260 when I would, if I were to say, well, why don't you disaggregate that data according to ethnicity,

00:17:41.100 they wouldn't even say, oh, I've done it. And I've come to this conclusion. They'd say,

00:17:43.740 what a horrifying thought that we should even do that. And they may even say, well, this very

00:17:47.900 epistemic, this epistemic tool is itself tainted by white supremacy. That is the argument that many

00:17:52.620 of them do make. If they knew what the word epistemic meant.

00:17:54.940 Which they don't. They would absolutely say that.

00:17:57.260 They would cite thinkers who do know what the word epistemic means in order to make the claim

00:18:00.620 that there is something illicit about even taking an interest in this sort of, in this sort of data.

00:18:05.180 So those are your true believers. And so these are people who are ideologically blinkered,

00:18:08.220 and they obviously have varying degrees of intelligence, but they, there is that, sorry, morally,

00:18:12.620 morally disinterested commitment to a certain worldview. I think other people are,

00:18:16.300 like, and a good example here would be someone maybe like Humza Yusuf. Like,

00:18:20.300 we know for a fact that Humza Yusuf isn't against.

00:18:22.540 Probably Sadiq Khan too.

00:18:24.300 And Sadiq Khan, probably true. We know for a fact, certainly in Humza Yusuf's case, 0.99

00:18:27.580 this is not a man who's against, say, blood and soil, ethnic nationalism in principle.

00:18:31.500 He's very public about it.

00:18:33.580 Very publicly in favor of it in Pakistan. When he went there, he even said,

00:18:36.620 I speak to you as a son of the soil of Pakistan, which is the sort of thing which,

00:18:39.900 if an actual Celtic Scotsman said about Scotland, Humza Yusuf would probably-

00:18:45.420 Declare him white. 0.97

00:18:46.380 Declare him white, and probably try and throw him into prison. 0.99

00:18:49.100 So, and obviously he's not first minister anymore, but, so in other words, I think that

00:18:55.020 Owen Jones's opt-in to what we might call race communism is, to some extent, morally sincere,

00:19:00.700 and driven by disinterested moral belief. Whereas I think someone like,

00:19:06.860 the more tribalistic minorities in parliament, they just see this as a very convenient way to further 0.69

00:19:12.460 certain ethnic objectives, which are actually not morally disinterested whatsoever, but they're

00:19:16.060 actually very ethnically partial. So I think that Jones is, to some extent, a universalist about

00:19:23.260 the importance of the ideology, whereas other people just see it as a tool to achieve very

00:19:26.700 particularist ends. And sometimes those ends will be, like, the furtherance of ethnic ends.

00:19:30.940 And maybe in other cases, it will just be the desire to acquire more and more power.

00:19:34.060 And it might have nothing to do with ethnicity.

00:19:36.060 The leader of the Scottish Labour Party just came out and said this the other day.

00:19:41.500 We will have more Pakistanis in charge. We are going to gain power in this country. 1.00

00:19:44.940 And it's like, oh, I didn't, I didn't realize that was on the table.

00:19:48.700 Yeah.

00:19:49.340 I thought that we were a disinterested moral universalist.

00:19:53.020 Exactly.

00:19:53.420 But the, and the thing that worries me about what you're saying is, I think you're correct, right?

00:19:57.740 I think that is correct. And I, the thing that worries me is that the number of

00:20:02.540 cynical Machiavellian agents in the British Parliament who are native British is very low,

00:20:12.220 I think. Because I think the system has self-selected for Owen Jones-style true believers

00:20:18.540 in the Blairite project. And I think that's why Tony Blair himself, the arch Machiavellian operator,

00:20:24.780 is coming out and essentially reining in the excesses of the Labour Party. Because he's like,

00:20:29.180 what, what are you fools doing? Didn't, don't you know the plan? You're going to ruin everything. 1.00

00:20:33.580 And I think that's one of his main and their main complaints about the Conservative Party.

00:20:36.780 Look, Boris, I don't think he's actually that Machiavellian. I think he's a moron. Well, 1.00

00:20:41.100 not a moron, but like, he's frivolous. 1.00

00:20:44.300 Yeah. He, I think he believes that he is a lib, right? He's fundamentally a lib. And I think he's 1.00

00:20:49.340 got the dreamy lib opinion that actually all of this can just work. And so the Conservatives,

00:20:54.860 is when they're just like ratcheting up the immigration. I don't, I think that Tony Blair's

00:20:59.580 objection is that they're going to cause the system to crash. They're going to ruin the

00:21:02.940 Blairite project by making it awful. They're going to bring it into disrepute. 0.99

00:21:06.300 Yes. That's, yes. Maybe that is what he thinks. And I genuinely think that's why he's interceding

00:21:11.340 with Keir Starmer right now. Because I think Starmer himself is a true believer. He's,

00:21:15.660 there's plenty of him explaining his philosophy and humorous. I mean, like before he was the Prime

00:21:19.980 Minister, Keir Starmer would go to places like Jamaica and intercede on behalf of child murderers

00:21:26.700 to get them off the death penalty for free. He would do this pro bono. It's like,

00:21:31.900 you have to be a true believer. Yeah. If you would like to see the full version of

00:21:35.180 this premium video, please head over to lotuseaters.com and subscribe to gain full access to all of our

00:21:40.860 premium content.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - May 05, 2025

PREVIEW： The Future of Britain ｜ Interview with Harrison Pitt

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