The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1076

00:00:00.080 Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters episode 1076. I'm your host Harry, joined today by Carl, and we have special returning guest Harrison Pisson. How are you doing, Harrison?

00:00:10.620 Very well, thanks for having me, gents.

00:00:11.600 Anything you'd like to update the audience with now that it's the new year?

00:00:15.260 Nothing too major. Well, there's been a bit of a change of things at Eurocon, and I'm not going to be as much on the online edition anymore, but I will still be available in the print, and I'm looking to take the bulk of my writing services elsewhere, so stay tuned for news on that front.

00:00:28.420 Stay tuned for where you'll be able to find Harrison going forwards, but as it matters, today we'll be talking about how we need to keep up the pressure against Labour, the scouring of Los Angeles, and how Mark Zuckerberg might not be as anti-free speech as people think.

00:00:46.720 So that should all be interesting, and for all of our subscribers to the website, you should also be aware that we've got Lads Hour again this afternoon at 3 o'clock, the first one of the new year, so we're all looking forward to it.

00:00:57.440 We're going to be making our predictions for our 2025 bingo card. That should be a lot of fun, so stay tuned for that, and with that, let's get into the news.

00:01:06.760 So, speaking of things that people probably didn't predict, who would have thought that Elon Musk would go on a more than week-long tirade about the grooming gangs in Britain?

00:01:16.280 The great thing about this is that Elon Musk is just too big for them to get a handle on.

00:01:22.460 For people outside of the UK, basically, there's a kind of dome that overpins, that overarches over our political life, and it is the sort of Westminster media class's protective bubble.

00:01:38.380 And when a story bubbles up and tries to seek to break through, they close ranks and form this protective shield across the establishment.

00:01:47.960 And Elon Musk is just above this and has just come down from above and just smashed straight through it,

00:01:52.940 and made the grooming gang issue essentially front and centre, and forced them to accept that there has been a lack of accountability

00:02:00.560 on the part of the political class, the institutions of this country, and the communities who have been involved in it.

00:02:09.100 And this has been difficult for them to deal with, and they have tried the usual tactic of closing ranks,

00:02:15.260 circling the wagons, and saying, well, hang on a second, everything we've ever done is perfect,

00:02:19.440 and in fact, you're just an evil far-right bigot, but this is an argument whose time has passed. 0.54

00:02:25.140 The problem is clearly too deep and too, honestly, too morally abhorrent to cover up anymore.

00:02:33.160 If you would like to know in detail what has happened, go watch Connor's latest Tomlinson Talks,

00:02:38.560 in which he goes through the grooming gang scandal historically and in the present day in great detail.

00:02:45.760 That's essentially the prerequisite to this segment.

00:02:49.180 So it begins with the narrative crumbling.

00:02:51.900 As you can see, James O'Brien, our favourite LBC commentator,

00:02:58.020 is complaining that Robert Jenrick has gone, quote,

00:03:00.540 full Yaxley-Lennon, full Mr. Robinson.

00:03:04.560 So, essentially, Tommy Robinson's opinion is that Islam as a culture has, well,

00:03:11.860 medieval attitudes towards women and is not from Britain,

00:03:16.000 and that is also Robert Jenrick's opinion,

00:03:18.560 and he articulated this in a perfectly reasonable manner the other day,

00:03:22.420 and James O'Brien has been losing his mind over it.

00:03:25.800 Of course.

00:03:26.520 What was his reaction going to be?

00:03:28.500 Yeah.

00:03:28.980 No, James O'Brien's right.

00:03:30.680 Islam isn't alien to Britain, and it's completely normal to treat women in that way.

00:03:35.320 No, of course.

00:03:36.060 The narrative is completely crumbling.

00:03:37.700 And the thing is, they knew this was coming.

00:03:41.460 This is a conversation he had with a British-Pakistani caller,

00:03:45.340 whose mother said one day, well, they've let us in, and one day they'll kick us out.

00:03:49.260 I said, okay, but why would we do that?

00:03:52.200 Why would we, why would you worry about that?

00:03:55.140 It's a topic I'm going to do something more on.

00:03:57.300 It's such a benefit to the country.

00:03:58.800 Yeah, it's something I'm going to do more on, because there's something to that.

00:04:02.720 But anyway, so the Conservative Party decided they were going to try and force a vote

00:04:08.180 on an amendment that would institute a national inquiry into the grooming gang scandal,

00:04:13.920 which you would think is a good idea.

00:04:16.900 We've had plenty of inquiries, but they've always been local,

00:04:19.660 and it's come to light that it's at least 50 different towns and cities across England

00:04:24.200 that have had grooming gangs operating in them,

00:04:26.720 often with the knowledge and tacit consent of the local council, the police,

00:04:32.280 the social workers, and the Labour MPs who were in charge of them.

00:04:36.360 And so Labour obviously decided, no, we're not going to do that.

00:04:40.560 Keir Starmer employed the whip to make it compulsory for Labour MPs to vote against

00:04:46.540 this national inquiry, which does very much make him look like he is just on the side of the

00:04:52.080 grooming gangs. And of course, they had the vote, and not a single Labour MP dared speak out. 0.88

00:05:00.080 The rest of the left-wing parties, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, also voted no,

00:05:06.400 because for some reason they thought, you know what, we're not complicit enough

00:05:09.780 in the grooming gang scandal. We would like to be more complicit in that,

00:05:13.500 and so we'd like to deny the national inquiry.

00:05:16.060 But what we did have is Rupert Lowe. And Rupert Lowe has distinguished himself in recent months

00:05:23.500 for being completely fearless towards the hegemonic narrative of the progressive left

00:05:29.520 and the media in Parliament. And he just stood up and gave them both barrels.

00:05:33.800 I'll let you watch it in your own time, because we've got a lot to go through.

00:05:36.460 But he did a superb job saying, well, look, this is a scandal that we've never seen before,

00:05:43.180 and you've done everything you can to cover it up. We would like, and he names,

00:05:47.440 Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs as the issue that needs to be addressed. And of course,

00:05:51.960 for reasons of political correctness, it hasn't been addressed. And so enter one Mrs. Phillips.

00:05:59.460 Because Elon tweeted about Jess Phillips, calling her a rape genocide apologist. 0.98

00:06:05.840 And a witch. 1.00

00:06:07.780 And a witch. And a witch. Which is strong language. And this has allowed Jess Phillips to become, 0.98

00:06:16.880 in some way, a distraction to this issue. And I think they've done everything they can

00:06:23.100 to make this about her. As you can see here, is it Kathy Newman?

00:06:28.580 Yes.

00:06:29.300 Yes.

00:06:29.920 The woman who became famous for interviewing Jordan Peterson. She decided to sit down and

00:06:36.740 take Jess Phillips' advice on what Elon Musk should do, in fact. I think maybe Elon Musk

00:06:42.780 knows about how to run his own life better than Jess Phillips.

00:06:45.760 Yes. And also, I mean, who is it they're saying, I would suggest getting a bit more shut-eye?

00:06:49.800 Is that...

00:06:50.300 Elon.

00:06:50.620 Of course, but Jess Phillips saying that.

00:06:53.480 I mean, the results in Elon's case speak for themselves, don't they?

00:06:57.080 I think so. I mean, I actually don't know how he manages to cram in all of the tweeting

00:07:01.600 that he does do. But nevertheless, it's not as though SpaceX is crumbling. It's not as

00:07:05.380 if Tesla is crumbling. He's doing...

00:07:07.040 Some have argued he outsources some of his tweets.

00:07:10.200 People have argued.

00:07:11.280 There seems to be a unity of style. Too much of a unity of style for that to be the case.

00:07:15.580 But the point being, I think the richest man to have ever lived probably knows how to

00:07:20.480 run his life better than Jess Phillips does. But the point being is they wanted to make

00:07:25.080 Jess Phillips the story, as Posey Parker points out. I would genuinely love to hear her say,

00:07:30.440 let's not make this about me, when thousands of girls were and are still being raped.

00:07:34.520 Well, there's... The human there is, of course, imagining Jess Phillips saying, let's not make

00:07:40.080 this about me.

00:07:40.720 Yes. She's a narcissistic idiot. 1.00

00:07:43.900 Yes. 1.00

00:07:44.360 That's all she knows how to do.

00:07:45.820 Yes. And she's thrilled with being the center of attention. You can tell because she's always

00:07:50.680 got a little smirk on her face when she's in these interviews. She's trying to act like

00:07:55.820 this is a terrible thing, but suddenly the glow of the center of attention is upon her,

00:08:01.600 and you can tell that she's enjoying it.

00:08:02.740 Well, talking about the media closing ranks as well, you're absolutely right about that,

00:08:07.140 Carl. They see it as their job to protect the regime against legitimate criticism from

00:08:14.140 outsiders, even if those outsiders... Obviously, they would prefer those outsiders to be people

00:08:17.840 like Stephen Yaxley and like Tommy Robinson, because they're more easily smearable. We would

00:08:23.300 resist many of the ways in which he is smear, but it's much more easy to contain that kind

00:08:28.820 of populist energy than it is a billionaire with the success that Musk has. And talking about

00:08:35.180 the media closing ranks, when Keir Starmer held that press conference, when he was... Because

00:08:39.980 he had... Again, this is the whole point. He has to address what Musk says in a way that

00:08:42.760 he doesn't really have to address what panons online say. All of the media, apart from GB

00:08:47.080 News' Christopher Hope, to give him credit, all of the questions were about Musk's tweets,

00:08:52.080 about Jess Phillips' safety being compromised. It was only Christopher Hope who sort of applied

00:08:57.700 proper pressure, and the media likes to congratulate itself on being the fourth estate, democracy

00:09:03.580 dies in darkness, and all the rest of it. But they're very selective about when they choose

00:09:08.440 to care for journalistic standards and when they close ranks.

00:09:10.520 Well, they know exactly what they're doing here. I mean, Beth Rigby, she gave a brilliant

00:09:14.780 analysis of the situation, all about Jess Phillips. So they've decided, and again, you can just

00:09:20.800 read through this, it's just Jess Phillips, Jess Phillips, Jess Phillips. I mean, it couldn't

00:09:25.180 have been more complimentary to Jess Phillips if Phillips had written it herself. And so they're

00:09:31.460 using Jess Phillips as a shield to try and avoid this issue. But, I mean, look, I mean,

00:09:36.780 literally, you've got Ian Hislop saying, well, this is medieval misogyny to call Jess Phillips

00:09:42.180 a witch. And it's like, really? Really? That's, I mean, A, the high watermark of witchcraft

00:09:49.480 in England was actually in the 17th century, so it was post-medieval. But I think, actually,

00:09:54.120 industrial rape gangs are a bit more misogynistic and a bit more medieval, Ian. I don't want to

00:10:01.340 invoke Norm Macdonald already. But I think the real problem was the raping. I'm sorry, Ian. 0.97

00:10:09.340 Well, to lovies like Ian, it's the lack of proper manners when discussing it that makes it the

00:10:15.120 problem. Because, of course, we can't be going into our nice, liberal upper echelon dinner parties

00:10:20.260 with this kind of talk now, can we?

00:10:22.600 And that is, honestly, that is 100% what the issue is. But, like I said, Elon Musk has just

00:10:29.360 rocketed this into orbit. And he's still tweeting about this. He's still hammering this point home.

00:10:34.260 So that is superb. And, of course, they are like, okay, well, holding up Jess Phillips as the shield

00:10:40.880 didn't work. Okay, what's the next thing? Oh, there's an extreme right-wing group called Blood

00:10:45.180 and Honour. Is there? Is there? That's news to me. Reasonable grants suspected involving terrorist

00:10:52.140 activity. Well, okay, but what's that got to do with the conversation that we're having?

00:10:56.420 Have you ever heard of these guys? No, I'm not going to say I haven't. It sounds like a fed operation.

00:11:00.600 Well, that's the thing. With a name like Blood and Honour...

00:11:03.060 It's a bit too on the nose, isn't it? Yeah, come on. Come on.

00:11:06.280 Even if it isn't, they're nobodies. Yeah, exactly. Even if it's not, okay, but who are these

00:11:11.060 people? And, okay, if they're an extremist potential terrorist group, do something about

00:11:15.920 them. That's your job. Like, this is, like, you know, I'm not going to congratulate the

00:11:20.440 cashier at Tesla for running through my goods. After Prevent decided to put most of its resources

00:11:25.500 to tracking down white identitarian and other such movements, the news is going, we found

00:11:31.100 one! We found the one! Thank God! And so the Jess Phillips thing, oh, that didn't work

00:11:36.600 right. No, no, no, look at this, look at this, look at this. No, no. I don't know who they

00:11:40.500 are. I don't care. Arrest them if they've committed crimes. Otherwise, shut up. So

00:11:45.640 the next thing that they had to do was go, okay, right, well, that didn't work either

00:11:48.620 because literally the entire response, in fact, it's just people like, no, never heard

00:11:54.900 of them, don't care, right? So the next thing was for them to go, well, actually, you know

00:11:59.900 who really is responsible for bringing the grooming gang problem to the fore? That's

00:12:04.040 right, us, the left-wing establishment. We're the ones who are championing this as if

00:12:09.780 anyone believes this, right? As if this is not going to fool anyone. Oh, if it wasn't

00:12:15.100 for these left-wing women, this would still be going on. It's like, really? Is that the 1.00

00:12:19.740 case? Oh, you know what? Andrew Norfolk actually broke the grooming gang story. Let's see if

00:12:24.200 there's a community note on this. Oh, wait, there is. There is. Oh, that's not true, says

00:12:28.820 the community note. Here's a source. No kidding. Again, anything to get around this.

00:12:33.700 At the very least, with the previous post that you had up on screen there, I agree with the

00:12:37.380 ultimate message of it, which is that you need action. Sure. Now, we need some kind

00:12:43.140 of national tribunal, not a national inquiry. Can I make one quick point as well? There's

00:12:48.780 a bit of a slippage in the argument there as well, because on the one hand, they're saying

00:12:51.940 that, no, no, it was courageous women. And even if you do want to praise people like Sarah

00:12:56.760 Champion or people like Anne Cryer, who can rightly be classed in some way as whistleblowers,

00:13:01.460 they always say, and it took them such courage to do this. Well, why would it take, why would

00:13:05.920 it demand courage? It's because of the, it's because our culture militates against pointing

00:13:11.420 these sorts of things out.

00:13:13.120 Sarah Champion was, wasn't she on the Labour front bench or something? She was, she was

00:13:17.820 a part of something.

00:13:18.740 So she was on the, I believe she was on the shadow Labour front bench when Jeremy Corbyn

00:13:22.800 was leader of the Labour Party. And because she, she got deselected. She got decent. I

00:13:27.800 don't think she got deselected, but I think she got kicked out of the shadow front bench

00:13:30.580 and back onto the back bench or something like that.

00:13:32.860 It was something that she got in trouble for. I can't remember exactly what it was. But

00:13:35.200 the point is, drawing attention to this, it was.

00:13:37.060 Yeah. It requires courage because there's, there's an anti-racist cult, which, which inhibits

00:13:41.960 our ability to get to the heart of issues and to enforce justice. That's what's going

00:13:44.940 on here. And so that's why it demands courage.

00:13:47.600 Absolutely. And you were exactly right to point that out. But, but of course they, they claim,

00:13:51.500 well, actually it was our left-wing journalists who did this. And it's like, not really. Andrew

00:13:55.880 Norfolk did, as the community said, talk about this, but he had to admit that he had to stop

00:14:01.380 doing it because essentially all of his peers were like, we don't want to talk about this

00:14:05.960 at our dinner parties. Is this is better out of sight, out of mind. Thank you very much.

00:14:10.500 And so it took someone like Mr. Robinson to continually bang the drum and become the sort

00:14:16.200 of totemic evil to say, no, this isn't going away and you can't just hide this.

00:14:19.660 And again, I think it's always worth hammering home that one of the reasons that they were

00:14:22.880 more than happy to ignore it at their dinner parties and not just because of the fact that

00:14:25.940 it was like poor manners to bring it up is because, well, the people it's happening to 0.99

00:14:30.100 are working class scum anyway. So who cares? 1.00

00:14:32.780 Yeah. It's never going to be their daughters, which is the reason that all of this has gone

00:14:36.920 on. Anyway. So the next thing to do is to try and change the subject, try and distract you.

00:14:42.220 Oh, by the way, do you remember, do you remember the, uh, the, the, the gangs crossing the channel

00:14:47.100 and invading Britain that we're putting up in the hotel still for some reason? Uh, we're going to 0.99

00:14:51.140 do something about them. It's like, yeah, we've heard that before and you haven't done anything

00:14:54.220 yet. And I don't believe you. And why am I still paying for these people to live in hotels?

00:14:58.280 Just deport them instantly. What? Why wouldn't hang? So again, no, nobody, as you see from all

00:15:04.440 the replies, no, nobody is buying any of this. This is all part of, uh, the distraction tactic.

00:15:11.300 Like, don't let them get away with it. Um, you've got still victims being targeted by

00:15:16.260 the institutions. So as Samantha Smith here points out, uh, the police are trying to get

00:15:22.540 her to stop talking about the subject. The same with Sammy Woodhouse. She was, she received

00:15:27.900 a phone call from South Yorkshire police saying, look, you've got to stop talking about this

00:15:31.300 on Twitter on X. Why? Why would they say this? And of course the problem is they know that

00:15:36.800 there are community tensions that are going to be created by the fact that this has gone

00:15:41.660 on. And so the best way to prevent them in their minds is to silence them.

00:15:46.580 Yes. And this is another reason why there are so many reasons why national inquiry, a definitive

00:15:51.240 comprehensive national inquiry with subpoena power led by a relatively impartial judge would

00:15:56.720 be preferable to the ones that have already gone on. One reason is that the one, the J report

00:16:00.640 is national in its focus, but it's about child sex abuse in general. And so it doesn't touch

00:16:06.040 on this particular issue. And I think the, I think Charlie Peters wrote a very good piece

00:16:09.580 in the standard where he was talking about how the word Pakistani is only mentioned two

00:16:13.120 or three times in that whole report. So clearly mentioned once and Telford, because these sort

00:16:18.460 of live in, these loom large in our mind, but Charlie Peters estimates there are as many,

00:16:21.940 well, he says he's certain there are over 50 of these towns. So there needs to be a comprehensive

00:16:26.300 inquiry. But another reason why there needs to be one is that the J report didn't really lean

00:16:30.080 very much on the testimony of victims. It was much more about interested in, in, in,

00:16:33.420 in officials and local inquiries. You've basically got a case where councils are marking their

00:16:37.000 own homework. And in them, it may be the case that the council officials, local officials

00:16:40.600 have been responsible in the coverup. There's the old Roman Latin principle,

00:16:44.420 nemo judex incursus, so you can, no man can be a judge in his own case. The national inquiry

00:16:48.600 would be, would be properly comprehensive on the one hand, would touch all of these issues

00:16:51.800 and it would be completely immunized against conflict of interests.

00:16:55.420 People who weren't complicit in it because the South Yorkshire police are complicit in this.

00:16:59.420 These institutions still have people in them who are covering up for it when it was going

00:17:05.800 on for the historic cases and for the ones that are currently still going on. These people

00:17:10.760 can't be trusted to mark their own homework, as you might be pointing out. And of course,

00:17:15.640 lots of, lots of people like, well, are you sure the victims want this? Yeah, of course the

00:17:19.680 victims want this. This is a victim who phoned up Andrew Marr and was like, no, I'm thrilled

00:17:23.800 that Elon Musk is amplifying this and getting our voices said. Finally, finally some people

00:17:28.760 could be punished for what's happened. Because the, the thing that we do in Britain and we

00:17:33.480 think that this smooths the whole thing over is, well, let's just take the ringleaders of 0.98

00:17:38.600 the gang and lock them up for five or ten years, as if that's long enough, and then let

00:17:43.900 them back out into the public. We won't deport them. And then we'll say, look, job done.

00:17:48.160 That's our hands. Justice served. And their victims will be able to run into them at the

00:17:51.660 local shops as well, which has happened. And so none of the councillors, none of the

00:17:56.220 social workers, none of the police, no one else involved. I mean, there are thousands

00:18:00.800 of rapists wandering around in these communities who have not been arrested, right? Because

00:18:05.040 these, these were pimp gangs that were trafficking them from town to town and selling them. Often

00:18:10.260 just, there are tens of thousands of rapists wandering around this country. Not, not speak

00:18:16.180 of the people in authority who just turned a blind eye, covered it up, or where they were

00:18:20.380 involved. There are at least two Muslim police officers who are currently in jail for being

00:18:23.940 parts of the Grimm gang.

00:18:24.780 And the Lord. Well, not in prison, but...

00:18:27.440 Well, no, I...

00:18:28.260 Was it Lord Ahmed?

00:18:30.280 Oh, no. Lord Ahmed is out now. He... 0.93

00:18:32.360 Oh, okay.

00:18:32.860 He wasn't a police officer.

00:18:34.340 Oh, fantastic.

00:18:35.380 First Labour Lord, turns out to have been part of the...

00:18:37.220 But the scale of this is extraordinary. And the other thing as well is that have you noticed

00:18:41.700 Channel 4's recent... I don't know if you're going to get to this, but have you noticed

00:18:43.840 Channel 4's recent attempt at a kind of narrative counterpunch?

00:18:46.480 I have. I actually forgot to include that.

00:18:48.200 Yeah, well, during the whole Me Too period, of course, if you were to, if you, if people

00:18:51.520 like us, generally was people like us, were to complain, well, you know, due process is

00:18:54.600 important here. False accusations are possible. We're talking about individual cases. There

00:18:58.460 were all sorts of hoaxes across American campuses in particular, particularly where you had like 0.97

00:19:02.440 white jock guys who were being accused of raping women on campus. And in many, there 0.81

00:19:08.980 were cases which were legitimate.

00:19:10.220 The Jula Cross case.

00:19:10.520 The Jula Cross case springs to mind. And the media wasn't at all interested in the false accusation

00:19:15.560 cases. They were part of the whole operation. They helped me to a moral panic that we lived

00:19:19.600 through in that, in that period. Whereas now the evidence could not be staring us more in the face.

00:19:23.160 It could not be more definitive. The scale of it could not be clearer. And yet they have managed to

00:19:28.280 zone in on the one case where a white working class girl falsely accused a Pakistani gang of, of

00:19:35.160 engaging in this, in this kind of abuse. It really is extraordinary.

00:19:38.040 Yeah. And notice how widely spread that's being. I think the BBC were doing something about it as

00:19:42.920 well. And so what the, and you know that the reason they're focusing on this to such a degree

00:19:48.040 is to essentially try and discredit the other victims and say, well, there was this one woman

00:19:52.520 who's lying about it. Are you sure the rest? Anyway.

00:19:55.080 The title of the documentary is called The Fake Grooming Gangs.

00:19:57.520 Yes.

00:19:57.760 That's what it's called.

00:19:58.400 Yeah. And again, they know, and they know so many people will see the title, but not watch the actual

00:20:04.040 content as well. Of course. So, um, so anyway, the victims are happy to be heard and you, uh,

00:20:10.280 get again, excellent reporting by people like Charlie Peters who go and interview the victims.

00:20:14.760 And they say, well, look, uh, like he was trying to film, uh, interviews in Rotherham for the reaction

00:20:19.880 to the vote. And he says, and no one would speak to us. Pakistanis at the markets claim they didn't 1.00

00:20:23.800 know what was going on. A white man warned anyone who puts their head above the parapet gets shot.

00:20:28.120 Just silence. So everyone knows everyone's afraid. Everyone doesn't know where this ends.

00:20:33.240 And as he says, no one wants us to go on camera, even anonymously. There's a lot of tension,

00:20:38.520 anger and denial over this. And so the point that the people in our space have to, uh, I think,

00:20:46.040 take away from this is keep on the pressure, right? This is a pressure cooker. They can't

00:20:51.080 keep a lid on this forever. And Elon Musk has done a great job. And you can see this because frankly,

00:20:56.760 they admit that this is the problem and this is still going on. Like throughout all of this,

00:21:01.880 all of the distraction with Jess Phillips, she did still come out and say, well, yep, 0.87

00:21:04.920 they're in every single part of our country. Okay. Then we don't need to talk about you.

00:21:10.120 Let's talk about the gangs. Let's talk about this problem. Even people like Sarah Champion saying,

00:21:15.160 well, look, I actually, we do need to implement the child protection recommendations

00:21:19.160 to prevent this. This hasn't been done. Right. And of course, then you have, uh, Andy Burnham,

00:21:25.560 the mayor for Manchester, Labour mayor, uh, who decided to break ranks with Keir Starmer and say,

00:21:31.000 look, we do actually need this inquiry. Uh, is Keir Starmer going to kick him out of the Labour Party?

00:21:35.960 This has been a hard line for Keir Starmer. What's the consequence going to be? Now, so far,

00:21:40.200 this happened yesterday. So far, nothing. So far, radio silence from Keir Starmer on this.

00:21:44.760 But the point is you can see the cracks are being exposed in the Labour coalition.

00:21:49.640 Even the ones who are most vociferously trying to deny admit this is a problem.

00:21:54.360 Even the ones who are saying, well, look, we, we, we kind of spoke up about it.

00:21:57.400 We need to do something about this. Labour mayors are now coming out and saying, look,

00:22:01.960 yeah, the prime minister is wrong on this. So just keep up the pressure. This will work.

00:22:06.920 Certainly a problem that's going to go away.

00:22:11.640 Um, you've got that one. Sorry. Uh, Scanline says, uh, can we push back the,

00:22:15.800 on the idea that David Armes was killed because of online rhetoric and not Islamic ideology?

00:22:20.200 I keep hearing it across the news outlets and it's allowing Islam to get away with more. 1.00

00:22:24.120 Um, I don't know, to be honest. I've noticed that whenever there's a,

00:22:29.080 it's very rare, the Islamist attacks, obviously much more common, particularly when you wait 0.95

00:22:34.360 it for per head of Muslims in the population as compared with whites in the population,

00:22:37.400 then so-called far right terrorist attacks. But I've noticed that whenever there is a,

00:22:41.480 a kind of terrorist attack, which codes far right, they're interested in the message and

00:22:45.640 the ideology of the perpetrator. Whereas whenever there's an,

00:22:47.960 an attack that is obviously Islamist in terms of its character, they become very interested in, 0.87

00:22:51.720 in the mechanism by which they were radicalized, such as online content,

00:22:55.160 because then it becomes a pretext for censorship. You've got to be on guard against those,

00:22:58.840 those, um, highly selective double standards as well.

00:23:01.320 Uh, that's a random name says, I feel like Jess Phillips narcissism, uh,

00:23:06.120 narcissistic personality. I can't read that. I can't.

00:23:10.840 It is quite entertaining though. So entertaining, but I, I don't want to get in trouble.

00:23:14.120 Thank you very much. Carl has already made one apology. He doesn't need it.

00:23:17.000 Yeah, I don't have to make any more. Thank you.

00:23:19.960 Goodness me. All right, then. So onto the next story. And that is that Los Angeles is burning down.

00:23:26.280 Currently, this is an ongoing news story, but the beginning of each year seems to bring,

00:23:31.560 new and interesting stories. Last year, we had the tunnels underneath New York.

00:23:37.720 This year, what I was not expecting to happen was that Los Angeles is burning down, and it's

00:23:43.960 happening quite rapidly. And I want to make it clear, I do not want to make light of this story,

00:23:48.760 because hundreds of thousands of peoples are having their lives ruined, their lives completely

00:23:54.680 upturned, and who knows what's going to happen for most of these people. But there is one thing that I

00:23:59.000 know, which is the reason for all of this happening seems to be a complete and utter failure of

00:24:04.600 management of Los Angeles and its climate, because this isn't this isn't necessarily climate change.

00:24:11.160 This is the fact that Los Angeles is an incredibly warm city in the middle of the desert, and things

00:24:18.120 catch on fire quite often. And generally speaking, it's been pointed out that they've been very,

00:24:23.720 very lucky that the entire city hasn't burned down before, because the winds just haven't been blowing

00:24:28.760 the right way to push fires all the way through the city. This time they were. And there's also

00:24:34.040 the question of how the fire started. Did it start because of natural reasons? Did it just naturally

00:24:39.400 spark up? Was there a lightning strike or something? Or was it arson? And 95% of all of the wildfires in

00:24:45.320 Los Angeles and California seem to be man-made. And there are already people being arrested for

00:24:52.360 being potential arsonists. Is there a distinction between people who arson on purpose and by accident?

00:24:57.240 Well, in this case, the person who's been arrested, let's just skip straight to the end here. Why don't

00:25:01.640 we? So the Times have been reported, the Telegraph, sorry, have said that an alleged arsonist suspected of

00:25:06.840 starting, sparking the latest fire in Los Angeles was found with what neighbors describe as

00:25:11.960 a large propane tank and flamethrower. That doesn't sound accidental. No, it certainly doesn't

00:25:17.160 sound accidental. So this is the latest fire because there are multiple fires all blazing at

00:25:21.880 once across different parts of Los Angeles. But I would be unsurprised if it turned out that another

00:25:27.720 arsonist, or maybe even the same person, is the one who started the original fire in the Palisades.

00:25:33.480 But just to give a little bit of information of what's been going on to start off with. So several

00:25:39.640 major wildfires burning in Los Angeles County. At least 10 people have died so far, but officials

00:25:45.320 warn that the actual toll will remain unclear until it's safe for investigators to access

00:25:48.760 neighborhoods because who knows how many people got trapped in their homes and are currently stuck

00:25:52.600 among the rubble burnt to a crisp. Horrifying, horrifying thing to think about. Tens of thousands

00:25:57.000 of people have been impacted by evacuation orders since the blazes began. I believe the BBC have said

00:26:02.280 it's about 130,000, but that was as of yesterday, so today it's probably even more as the fires spread.

00:26:08.440 As many as 10,000 structures have already been destroyed between the Coastal Palisades fire,

00:26:13.960 which is now the most destructive to ever hit Los Angeles, and the Eton fire, which has now

00:26:19.720 devastated more communities. So of the fires, there's the first one that started, which is,

00:26:24.680 of course, the largest, the Palisades, and that started on Tuesday. So it's only been a few days,

00:26:29.720 and it's already destroyed so much of California, and some of these other articles will have images

00:26:34.440 of that. Then there's the Eton fire, Lydia fire, Hurst fire, Sunset fire, which is right next to the

00:26:41.640 Hollywood hills, and there was lots of images coming out of the Hollywood sign burning, but that all

00:26:46.680 turned out to be AI, because otherwise it would prove that God had a sense of humor, but that was

00:26:54.040 all AI. A sixth fire, the Woodley fire, started in the Van Noys neighborhood in LA on Wednesday,

00:27:00.040 and a new brush fire, the Kenneth fire, broke out on Thursday afternoon. So I assume that that being

00:27:05.320 the latest one is the one that this arsonist has been arrested for. What else is going on in the

00:27:10.920 news here regarding this? Despite the efforts of the firefighters, the biggest blazes remain totally

00:27:17.560 uncontained, and weather conditions and the underlying impact of climate change, which the BBC and a lot of

00:27:23.240 other outlets are trying to make seem like the only thing that's caused this, are expected to continue

00:27:28.520 fanning the flames for days to come. Even the larger Palisades fire, the Eton fire, remains

00:27:33.800 totally uncontained. Meanwhile, Sunset fire in the Hollywood area, need 2,000 structures known to be

00:27:39.320 destroyed. So this was an article from yesterday. I'll carry on. Among the celebrities who've lost

00:27:44.280 their homes are Leighton Meester, Adam Brody, and Paris Hilton. I also saw that Mel Gibson was on

00:27:50.840 Joe Rogan. I watched it. Yeah, and while he was on Joe Rogan, his house burnt down as well

00:27:55.800 in Hollywood. So loads of celebrities have their houses burnt down. The insurance industry is

00:28:01.720 fearing this could prove to be one of the costliest wildfire outbreaks ever. Insured loss is expected

00:28:06.760 to be above eight billion dollars. If mansions are burning down. Yeah, if Hollywood Hills mansions are

00:28:13.240 starting to burn down as well, then yeah, it's expensive. And people are also upset at the fact

00:28:18.520 that Donald Trump has been making some comments about it, pointing out that LA and Gavin Newsom in

00:28:23.080 particular are mostly to blame for all of this for not controlling the amount of dry brush

00:28:29.000 that has been all over the Hollywood and Los Angeles forest floors for decades at this point

00:28:34.760 and just allowed to dry out. This has been a long-running complaint actually. Yeah.

00:28:38.280 I assume it's they think it's natural and sort of a rewilding effort or something like that,

00:28:44.200 that. Nature has its own ways of clearing this stuff up.

00:28:49.320 Obviously they get similar problems because it's a hot place. You've essentially got to

00:28:53.320 rake through the, I don't really know how it works, but you've got to make sure that it's not full of

00:28:57.080 dry tinder basically, which seems like a reasonable point to make. An entire county is a tinder box,

00:29:03.720 almost the entire state. It's also just emblematic of the way that the left weaponizes

00:29:08.920 science TM in grand terms in order to pursue these highfalutin projects while just neglecting

00:29:13.640 basic fundamental duties. They're trying to do the Herculean without doing the basic there. So

00:29:18.440 this is actually reflected in California's budget I was reading about. Whereas the, you know,

00:29:24.440 the ill-defined climate change budget has been sort of soaring steadily upwards. They've actually cut

00:29:29.480 their wildfire prevention management budget, which would include precisely those sorts of activities.

00:29:33.960 There's also been massive cuts to the actual just firefighting budget in Los Angeles itself,

00:29:38.840 which has been something that people have been complaining about. An LA City Council member,

00:29:45.000 Tracy Park, said on Wednesday that there's been chronic underinvestment in the city of Los Angeles

00:29:50.600 and public infrastructure, which is at fault for the devastating fires all across the city.

00:29:56.200 The circumstances of the last 48 hours were 100% predictable, she said in an interview,

00:30:01.800 noting that the city's failure to invest in water systems, fire stations and other infrastructure

00:30:07.080 contributed to the lack of resources to fight the fire. Also, there's been a lot of people talking

00:30:11.160 about how apparently there's one billionaire couple who owns about 80% of all of the water

00:30:16.040 reserves in California, due to a lot of backhanded business dealings that have been going on with

00:30:22.360 city officials since the 90s. I think it's the Resnicks is what they're called, possibly.

00:30:27.320 But also worth bearing in mind that, I mean, I looked at California on a map, there must be

00:30:32.760 hundreds of kilometers worth of seaboard. I mean, desalination isn't particularly expensive.

00:30:39.080 Presumably, this isn't a sort of a developing landlocked country. This is a supposedly highly

00:30:45.400 developed, what they used to call it, the land of milk and honey when the original sort of pioneers

00:30:49.880 were coming out west.

00:30:51.240 Up until like maybe the 60s and 70s, Los Angeles and California in general were seen as a paradise

00:30:57.000 on earth.

00:30:57.480 And also as a quite right wing, both Nixon and Reagan came out of California.

00:31:02.600 Reagan ruined that for the story. 0.57

00:31:04.200 What I'm saying is that in terms of its cultural and social capital and in terms of its economic

00:31:09.080 capital and in terms of its geographic location, it should have, regardless in terms of the Resnick

00:31:15.000 family or whoever they are owning 80% of the water in California itself, they should be able

00:31:19.400 to contend with challenges like this, given their proximity to the sea and the cheapness

00:31:23.480 of salination techniques.

00:31:25.000 It should be complicated.

00:31:25.960 I don't, I recall hearing that it wasn't that the reservoirs were empty or anything like that.

00:31:32.520 It seems, I think, Harry's getting at it. It's just mismanagement.

00:31:35.720 Yes, exactly.

00:31:36.920 Oh yeah, it is. And again, this woman is pointing out Tracy Park. She says that

00:31:42.360 Pacific Palisades, where the first fire started, relies on the LA Department of Public Works to

00:31:47.000 supply water to fire hydrants via a series of reservoir tanks. Park said she will look into

00:31:51.480 why firefighters struggled to battle the blaze as hydrants ran dry, which she saw firsthand.

00:31:57.880 So you've got these enormous wildfires going on, and the fire hydrants just run out.

00:32:05.560 Again, in what is essentially an enormous desert.

00:32:07.960 Yeah. 0.98

00:32:09.000 Absolutely ridiculous. After the fire erupted, demand for water in Pacific Palisades quadrupled,

00:32:14.680 in part because fleeing residents left hoses and faucets on, according to Park, and there was an

00:32:19.480 unusually high strain on the system. And by that time, 80 mile per hour winds as well, so they were

00:32:24.760 having hurricane force winds, prevented firefighter officials from dropping water by air. Instead,

00:32:30.520 they called in mutual aid, but the city was very, very limited for it. And those winds were, of course,

00:32:36.040 helping to spread the fire and fan the flames. Los Angeles has some 3,400 firefighters, the same number

00:32:43.160 it had 50 years ago, despite its much larger current population. She also added that the city needed

00:32:48.840 more firefighters and 62 new fire stations. When the latest fires erupted, the city had nearly 100

00:32:54.280 fire trucks and ambulances out of service because it doesn't have enough mechanics to fix them.

00:32:59.080 Just failures on every level here. Because again, as she said, as everybody has been saying for ages,

00:33:07.880 this was always going to happen. This is entirely predictable.

00:33:11.160 Not to discount the courage of female firefighters if they exist as well, but I would also like to look

00:33:15.240 at the sex proportions of the fire, because it might not only-

00:33:20.040 Oh, we've got a little bit on that.

00:33:21.080 Oh, great.

00:33:21.400 We've got a little bit on that.

00:33:22.360 I'll hold my gunpowder in reserve then.

00:33:25.080 So when Donald Trump appeared on Joe Rogan, he was even saying that they need to build more

00:33:29.160 reservoirs and manage their forests better to prevent wildfires. So Trump's been saying

00:33:33.720 this for a little bit.

00:33:34.440 Yeah, that's the reason not to do it, isn't it?

00:33:36.680 Yeah, after the last massive wildfire that spread through California,

00:33:40.440 Donald Trump was there to say, hey, maybe we need to do some forest management around here,

00:33:44.920 guys. Joe Rogan, back in July, was saying that he'd spoken to a California firefighter

00:33:50.760 who said that, yeah, LA's probably going to burn down one day because of all of these problems.

00:33:55.960 But what did Gavin Newsom have to say on the matter back in 2021 when-

00:33:59.880 He was a racist?

00:34:00.360 Well, when peace came back to America with the benevolent Biden regime, well, he said,

00:34:06.440 don't worry, we'll solve all that problem now, because we've got a president on our side.

00:34:11.320 We've got Joe Biden on our side. So this is never going to happen again, except it didn't,

00:34:15.960 and Donald Trump called him Gavin Newsom on Truth Media and said that this is a complete failure

00:34:22.040 of Gavin Newsom and LA and California. And what do you think Gavin Newsom had to say about that?

00:34:28.600 Don't politicize this matter.

00:34:30.680 Oh, wow. You must have some premonition abilities or something, man.

00:34:35.640 I don't know if this video is going to load now, but basically, yes, he says,

00:34:38.760 I can't believe he would politicize it like this. I don't even have the guts to

00:34:43.240 say what I want to say to Donald Trump, but I'm just trying to solve the problem now.

00:34:47.480 This problem that never should have happened in the first place.

00:34:51.640 The problem that he was calling attention. The problem he did nothing about.

00:34:53.400 And loads of people have been pointing out, like, uh, libs of TikTok posting this Fox News clip

00:34:57.960 where they were saying that Los Angeles was not refilling the water reservoirs,

00:35:01.720 which is one of the reasons why all of the fire hydrants were running out incompetence on the highest level.

00:35:07.160 And also there was an enormous budget cut to the Los Angeles fire, um, uh, fire department of 17

00:35:14.920 million dollars from 2024 to 2025. And what was, uh, what was the mayor after she signed that and

00:35:23.240 this all happened? What did she have to say about the matter when she was confronted by journalists?

00:35:28.360 Do you owe citizens an apology for being absent while their homes were burning?

00:35:31.960 Do you regret cutting the fire department budget by millions of dollars, madam mayor?

00:35:39.400 Have you nothing to say today?

00:35:43.080 Have you absolutely nothing to say to the citizens today? 0.90

00:35:47.560 Elon Musk says that you're utterly incompetent. Are you considering your position?

00:35:55.320 Madam mayor, have you absolutely nothing to say to the citizens today?

00:35:58.520 And it goes on like that. Yeah. No, no. My favorite part of democratic governance is the, uh,

00:36:04.840 eagerness to take accountability that our representatives have. I mean, good God,

00:36:09.640 all of that's happened. Literally, the city you're in charge of is burning down slowly.

00:36:14.680 And you just, do you know where she is? Nothing to say. She was in Africa.

00:36:18.280 Yeah, she was in Ghana. She was in Ghana.

00:36:19.800 Because Ghana had the first female black president, and she was going over there to show Solidarity. 0.65

00:36:24.760 I think it's interesting as well, because it's very interesting that Gavin Newsom,

00:36:27.000 I won't labor this point too much, but it's very interesting that Gareth Gavin Newsom's response

00:36:29.720 was, I know we didn't get to see it, but don't politicize this. It's because California is now

00:36:35.080 effectively a one party state, and there are no politicization of issues. There are no,

00:36:38.760 there are no real political debates that you get this kind of complacency on the part of officials.

00:36:43.000 Because she, I'm guessing she's a Democrat. She, she, she, she, no, what gave it away?

00:36:47.800 She knows that she is not going to be politically challenged. And so they fear politicization in

00:36:52.440 their state, because it, because it would, it would count against their current claim as a

00:36:56.760 state to be a one party state. They don't want political issues to be debated in this sort of,

00:37:01.080 you know, cacophonous way. They want there to be a uniparty, they want there to be, 1.00

00:37:04.840 to treat these issues as purely settled. And so I think that's one of the reasons why she doesn't

00:37:08.520 seem very phased by these questions. And she doesn't know she's probably going to be able to

00:37:12.280 stay as a crony in power. And she doesn't have an answer, because she's, she's never had to produce 1.00

00:37:17.560 an answer to these kinds of questions. It doesn't select for good officials who, who, who fear

00:37:21.960 accountability. And that's what, that's what politics does. It gives you that.

00:37:24.520 And another issue with the, uh, you know, we, we don't want to politicize this. Well,

00:37:29.000 that's because there's only one way in which to point the fingers. Yes.

00:37:33.320 It's not any of the Republicans. Well, you're going to, you're going to point your finger at me,

00:37:36.360 the man who was in charge the whole time. Well, that's just not fair.

00:37:39.400 Yeah. And my party, the, the one party state that is California. I mean,

00:37:43.640 who else are you going to point the fingers at? There's just no way.

00:37:45.800 All quick as you can blame me. This is just culture war BS. Let's try and avoid it.

00:37:50.520 And what does it lead to? Well, it leads to these being the extent of the fire.

00:37:54.920 Bear in mind that the Los Angeles County is enormous. So this fire alone, I think is, uh,

00:38:01.880 like twice the width of Manhattan. And that's just on the outskirts of LA. And then it's,

00:38:08.360 and then you've got multiple all breaking out at the same time. Again, it seems very likely that

00:38:13.720 arsonists have a lot to do with this, especially given that even outside of one person already

00:38:18.520 being arrested, most of these fires in these areas tend to be started by people in the first

00:38:23.400 place. Some have even speculated it might be insane environmentalists who want to prove a point.

00:38:30.120 I've seen suggestions to that effect.

00:38:32.440 Yeah. And, uh, I think it was on this article they had, maybe it was, maybe it was this article,

00:38:38.200 maybe it was some of the others. I mean, look, look at this, uh, there's the, the smoke plumes

00:38:43.000 in this little video here emanating from California, just from LA. That's a little representation.

00:38:50.440 And, uh, and some of these you have just represent, uh, these images before, after this is thousands

00:38:57.640 of people's lives completely turned over. And how do you recover from this?

00:39:03.880 And this didn't have to happen.

00:39:05.240 No, it didn't have to happen.

00:39:07.000 Let's not politicize this.

00:39:08.600 And look, this is, this looks like it's still got the fires burning in the trees around this area.

00:39:14.360 Is some of the images that have come from this is all is, is frightful. And again,

00:39:18.840 like it's right by the sea. So you'd think that, oh, you've got easy water access right there. No.

00:39:23.720 Has anyone seen that film 2012, which sort of portrays an apocalypse? It, the images are

00:39:28.600 very reminiscent of that.

00:39:29.640 Yeah. It, it, some of it is truly apocalyptic images. So while they were cutting the fire

00:39:34.840 department budget, what was the, um, Los Angeles spending its money on? Can you guess? Yeah.

00:39:42.600 Really gay choirs, trans caps and social justice art. 0.75

00:39:46.040 Yeah. They gave 100 grand to the civil and human rights and equity department for a midnight

00:39:51.080 stroll transgender cafe. Uh, they gave the cultural affairs department special appropriations budget, 0.99

00:39:57.800 gave $100,000 to the NAACP for their awards ceremony. Uh, they gave almost nine grand to,

00:40:05.160 for the one institute, the international gay and lesbian archives budget. Also allocated 13 grand for

00:40:12.840 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender heritage month programs and 14 grand for to the gay men's

00:40:18.280 chorus of Los Angeles. It also appropriated $170,000 in total for social justice art worker

00:40:24.840 investments.

00:40:25.560 Was that the one that sang we're coming for your children? Uh, yes. Yeah. The, the gay men's chorus 1.00

00:40:30.520 of Los Angeles. Yeah. Yeah. They, they just get 14 grand and, uh, the LA fire department was

00:40:36.360 blasted for promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in its 2023 to 26 strategic plan,

00:40:44.760 saying that DEI was one of its key goals. A stated priority of the city's first LGBTQ and woman fire

00:40:51.720 chief, Kristen F. Crowley is promoting a culture that values DEI, but not putting out fires.

00:40:58.600 You haven't even congratulated them on how diverse their culture was. Well, I mean, it's getting

00:41:03.320 more and more diverse because now, um, you can also be a fire department employee if you're a criminal,

00:41:09.080 because they've employed 800 incarcerated firefighters. What I assume this means is

00:41:14.440 prison labor. They're scripting the prisoners. Yep. It's funny how none of this ever is political.

00:41:21.800 Yeah. No, no, no. But wanting to redirect the state, uh, duties to encompass, you know, a bare

00:41:28.120 minimum of security for the people in the home, a bare minimum of environmental, uh, uh, preventive

00:41:33.240 activity is the political point here. And, and LA also has a, uh, deputy chief of the fire department

00:41:38.760 who is a fat, diverse woman. Um, literal description. Uh, and, uh, this is what she had to say, uh, 1.00

00:41:46.920 when talking about responses to fires starting. This is before or after hours. This is before.

00:41:52.200 This is what I think she might decide to frame it a little bit differently if she was giving

00:41:55.960 this interview now. You want to see somebody that responds to your house, your emergency,

00:42:01.320 whether it's a medical call or a fire call that looks like you. It gives that person a little bit

00:42:06.040 more ease knowing that somebody might understand their situation better. Is she strong enough to do

00:42:11.080 this? Or you couldn't carry my husband out of a fire, which my response is, he got himself in the

00:42:15.880 wrong place. If I have to carry him out of a fire. Yep. That's if, if, if your house was burning

00:42:24.440 down in LA over the past few days, that's the kind of attitude to greet you. Well, maybe if you

00:42:30.520 didn't want your house burning down, you shouldn't have built it so close to the fire. Yeah. That's,

00:42:34.440 that's the kind of attitude that's being presented there. Yeah. Sorry. I'm in danger. Can you please

00:42:39.240 help me and help my job? Not strong enough. You should have thought about that before you got

00:42:42.520 done. Yeah. You should have thought. Just complete absconding of their own moral duty

00:42:47.160 to do their own jobs. It's just, it's disgusting. It's unbelievable. It is disgusting. And the thing 0.95

00:42:52.680 is, if you'd made up a parody of this and you had her say that people were like, come on, they're not

00:42:58.600 going to say that. It's a bit on the nose. Yeah. It's too ridiculous. No one would buy it. And yet that

00:43:03.000 was her response. Yeah. But this isn't to denigrate all of the, I'm sure, very competent and,

00:43:08.840 um, and brave firefighters that are currently out trying to fight fires and save people's lives.

00:43:15.240 Yeah. All of the non-diverse hires and even some diverse hires that might also be decent at their

00:43:20.440 job. Just not that woman. But also courage and competence are not the same thing. Like I, 0.97

00:43:24.440 I admire in a way when I see those, it's a bit ridiculous, but when you see those sort of five

00:43:29.400 foot two women, uh, being police officers in Westminster, when I'm walking through there quite frequently,

00:43:34.360 I sort of think, well, at least you, you are putting yourself in the line of duty. So you're

00:43:37.960 a courageous person, but I don't, I don't estimate your ability to, to, to, to, to drag a six foot

00:43:43.800 five criminal to the ground. At least she might try. Whereas with that woman, sadly, she's on 0.99

00:43:49.240 break right now. She's doing badly on both the courage and the competence. She on break,

00:43:53.640 not her job, not, not her job. And the result of all of this is LA burning down. Um, the fires are

00:44:01.080 still going. Who knows how long this is going to last? Are they going to, is it going to take out

00:44:04.600 Hollywood? Is it going to take out the entire city? Is this some kind of divine retribution

00:44:10.040 for insults against God? These are all questions that we're asking. And some of the footage and

00:44:14.520 photos really make it seem apocalyptic. Like this was the red sun rising over Los Angeles as it was

00:44:23.560 rising above the flames. These are the sorts of fires that are going on. Just imagine looking out of the

00:44:30.840 window and seeing that. And then knowing I've got to leave my home now because people have been

00:44:36.520 saying that they saw that there were the fires going on the Palisades the day before, or even

00:44:40.840 like, Oh, I heard about this five hours ago. Now my home's burned down and I've had to leave and

00:44:45.320 evacuate. And it is important to remember that this is all politically decided. This is a consequence of

00:44:52.200 a series of decisions made by deeply irresponsible people using your money. Yes. That's, that should be our

00:44:59.560 response as well, because they always try and accuse us of politicizing things by responding to

00:45:04.120 often decades worth of politicization on their part. It should always be that we found the

00:45:08.520 situation in a political state and we were addressing it on the, on that terrain. But you

00:45:12.440 decided the terrain, not us. That, that should be our response. Yeah. Here's the most apocalyptic

00:45:17.080 site for Americans out there. If you are American watching this right now, cover your eyes. This might

00:45:22.040 really upset you as your RFK. That's your RFK. Which is... Look at the fire on these trees.

00:45:28.600 On the trees. Yeah. It's scary. Like, hurricane of fire, because each of those embers being blown

00:45:36.040 as well might, might set fire to something else. They might set fire to your house. And who's going

00:45:41.720 to take advantage of all of this? Well, it's LA, so you've got criminals going around. Oh,

00:45:46.680 some, someone's house is about to burn down, but that's not, it's not gone yet. Great. Fantastic.

00:45:51.880 It's abandoned. Time to make some money, boys. So this is LA as it exists right now, which might

00:45:59.160 not exist for very much longer. Uh, we'll see how it goes. I, um, you know, hope for the best for

00:46:05.560 everybody who is directly affected by this. I hope that the death toll is as low as possible. Uh, but

00:46:11.480 this could have all been avoided and California's representatives, uh, really need to face justice

00:46:17.160 over this. Can I pitch a mouse back? Yes, you can. Thank you. Um, uh, Wim Pilsi says without

00:46:24.440 control burns and forest maintenance, social fire, uh, SoCal fire was inevitable, uh, equals

00:46:29.720 environmentalist causes. Yeah. I've seen nothing, but it's on the, on British media. They're like,

00:46:33.480 well, climate change for you, climate change for you. It's like, no, it's always been hot in California.

00:46:37.720 The Californian climate hasn't actually changed. It's, it's a desert. It's a desert.

00:46:42.440 It's literally always been a desert. You know, this isn't new. This is bad management.

00:46:47.080 In fact, uh, EC says the mismanagement of forest lands in California began in earnest in the nineties,

00:46:52.200 as did the degradation of standards in the LAFD. This is willful and malicious. Uh, yep. Uh,

00:46:58.120 cranky Texans says Californians are so angry. They're going to vote for a completely different

00:47:02.280 set of progressives in the next election. Yeah. I've seen a lot of people say, well,

00:47:06.520 is California going to flip red now? No. Probably not. But you know, I mean,

00:47:12.280 it's burning red for a bit. Never, never rule anything out to be honest. You don't know what

00:47:16.360 will happen, but, um, but yeah, it is entirely political. They've chosen this themselves.

00:47:21.640 If you want to be a one party blue state, then expect this kind of response. Uh,

00:47:27.080 that's a random name. I'm not reading that.

00:47:33.160 Bobo bad says you heard about that joke that he made one for the green room. I think

00:47:38.840 bad says can't say that not building reservoirs and not managing forests and enabling massive

00:47:42.760 wildfires to own the chuds is a good move on Newsom's and the Democrats part. Yes. 1.00

00:47:46.840 Yes. And, uh, this is indeed cutting off. I'm not going to read that either. Um,

00:47:51.400 and, uh, Johnny says in the UK, you have to go through a fitness and strength test through

00:47:55.560 practicals and a classic blep test to even be considered the bleep test. Uh, that that's

00:48:01.400 because we have some standards left still. Well, yeah, if you're expected to save somebody's

00:48:05.480 life from a fire, being able to carry the average weight of a person, it's probably a good start.

00:48:10.920 It's not even in any way unreasonable either. No shock, right? I shouldn't have to say that,

00:48:19.400 but, um, but anyway, one, one thing, one, another positive thing that has happened in 2025,

00:48:25.880 and there have been quite a few of them actually so far. It's what? Nine days in now. Uh, and

00:48:32.280 sorry, 10 days. Oh, it's 10 days now. Right. Okay. 10 days in, not even two weeks. And there's

00:48:36.360 been a cavalcade of good news actually. And, uh, one, one piece of good news I thought was,

00:48:43.240 uh, Elon Musk and the things he's doing with Twitter and the effect that this has had on his

00:48:49.080 fellow tech billionaires. So we did a round table on the website, go and sign up, support us,

00:48:53.880 and watch this because it was a very good discussion on what Elon's forthrightness means in all of this.

00:49:00.520 I heard something else.

00:49:02.680 I missed you for a moment.

00:49:03.800 Forthright, we thought you were saying, we both thought you were saying Forthright.

00:49:09.400 That's good. Cause that's what I was. Is that what you thought?

00:49:12.680 You were saying Forthright. Of course. Okay. Forthright, we thought. Oh no, Forthright.

00:49:18.120 That's what you thought, right, Harry? That's what I heard. Yeah, exactly.

00:49:21.960 His Forthrightness on, on the issues that actually matter.

00:49:24.680 Wow. Elon really has been radicalized by his own platform.

00:49:29.400 I do think that has happened actually. I do think he's become a little bit radicalized by Twitter.

00:49:33.800 But in the right way, which is good. And this, we discussed in this round table, so go watch it.

00:49:38.840 And the effect this has had on his fellow tech billionaires has been liberatory.

00:49:45.480 And I'm actually quite sympathetic to a lot of the tech billionaires.

00:49:49.640 Now, I know a lot of people are very angry with them and are passionate opponents of them.

00:49:55.320 But I actually think they've been in a kind of an impressive atmosphere themselves and been unable to actually morally assert themselves.

00:50:04.440 So I think that most of the tech bros suffer not from the problem of being evil, but being weak.

00:50:10.040 And Elon doesn't have that problem. He's not weak. He's quite happy to stand on his own two feet and say, no, I think this is right.

00:50:16.840 And I think that's wrong. And I'm going to assert it.

00:50:18.760 And one of the things that he did was community notes.

00:50:22.600 Now, this seemed, I thought, like a very good idea.

00:50:27.240 But it was remarkably well, poorly received by, of course, the powers that be.

00:50:31.560 Because what he said was, look, rather than employing however many thousand people Twitter employed as fact checkers,

00:50:38.280 I can just outsource that to the community and people can provide the real information themselves.

00:50:43.720 And this saves me money. But it also democratizes the discourse.

00:50:48.920 If someone is taking advantage of things, well, the fact checkers have a political agenda.

00:50:53.400 They have a political bias. And what this will allow is every political persuasion to be able to have an input into the knowledge production discourse.

00:51:03.460 And that's a very, very well-meaning thing to do.

00:51:06.300 It should be worth saying as well that if it were just democratizing it, that might be a problem because the demos can be wrong.

00:51:10.860 Sure.

00:51:11.260 But it's democratizing it while also building in very strong and robust epistemic standards, which select for truth over time.

00:51:19.980 So I'm certain it's not as though every single opinion is given equal weight, which is a risk if you're democratizing too much.

00:51:25.740 That isn't.

00:51:26.300 It's a decentralized system which is pursuing truth. And it clearly selects for that.

00:51:30.160 I mean, there have even been cases, to be fair to Musk, where he has been community noted himself.

00:51:35.600 For getting things not entirely accurate.

00:51:37.600 In fact, it's not even that rare that he gets community noted if he said something that's wrong.

00:51:41.840 And we should say as well that the problem with these sort of third-party content, there are sort of two, I've said before, there are sort of two rough theories of truth running in our society.

00:51:52.260 There is a kind of top-down managerial understanding of truth, which says that there exists an expert class whose every word should be honored and acknowledged on every major topic.

00:52:05.020 And obviously, the problem with that is that they have agendas of their own.

00:52:07.900 They're often prone to groupthink.

00:52:09.200 There's no sort of institutionalized disconfirmation of bias is the opposite of that.

00:52:12.820 Whereas with a kind of decentralized algorithmic system that Community Notes tries to model, you get the – there is a more organic, emergent theory of truth.

00:52:22.180 Exactly.

00:52:22.720 And it seems to be working.

00:52:24.260 And it's encouraging that Zuckerberg is copying it.

00:52:28.280 Well, that's precise what I'm going to talk about.

00:52:30.360 But yes, the issue is, of course, having a dictatorship of experts who are all of one particular political stripe prevents accountability, frankly.

00:52:40.220 And they have not only been wrong, which, of course, anyone is capable of being wrong, but a lot of the time they have lied, knowingly and on purpose.

00:52:49.720 And so Community Notes is a superb intercession into the dialogue.

00:52:56.340 And actually, Elon's done a good job implementing it as well.

00:52:59.360 One of the important parts, I think, was very, very good, was preventing a post that has been noted from earning revenue.

00:53:10.380 This actually has – there is a lot of slop.

00:53:13.360 I'm not going to say there's not a lot of slop.

00:53:15.240 There's a lot of engagement farming because, of course, the monetization of Twitter, while a good thing, I think, did come with this downside.

00:53:22.580 And so at least telling overt lies that can be easily disproven by providing a source isn't financially incentivized.

00:53:31.240 So that is actually a good thing.

00:53:32.660 It's a brilliant thing, yeah.

00:53:33.280 Good move.

00:53:34.340 When did he make that move?

00:53:35.640 I can't say – I haven't quite noticed that taking full effect on my Twitter feed.

00:53:39.360 Well, stop posting lies and you'll see your money got down.

00:53:42.120 No, no, I mean a lot of slop accounts still seem to be doing very well.

00:53:44.700 Yeah, well, I've seen a lot of people – well, I complain a lot about the slop accounts.

00:53:49.300 And recently, yesterday, I did a daily video talking about all of these new Facebook-tier threads where it's like 15 images that will change your life.

00:53:57.600 And everybody says, well, just go on the following tab then.

00:54:00.500 But the For You tab will actually expose you to new accounts that you've not seen before and new information.

00:54:06.940 Sometimes if you're going on following because it's purely chronological, you'll miss things, interesting things that people have said.

00:54:12.220 So there is still worth your time occasionally to go on to it.

00:54:16.460 But you've got all of these top ten images that will make you give up your job and go and live in the desert.

00:54:25.020 And I hate them.

00:54:25.740 I hate them so much.

00:54:27.740 They're not actually, like, true or false, right?

00:54:29.860 So they can't really be –

00:54:31.480 You get 130 million views.

00:54:33.900 How much money is that person making? 1.00

00:54:36.600 We're in the wrong business.

00:54:38.000 Good God.

00:54:39.780 But basically, with those, just block them.

00:54:42.160 There aren't actually that many of them.

00:54:43.520 So if you just block them when you see them.

00:54:44.960 And Elon's done well on the bots as well.

00:54:46.560 It's much less of that.

00:54:47.740 But lots of left-wing media outlets, of course, don't like community notes.

00:54:51.580 And a lot of people are like, ah, the Guardian's quitting Twitter.

00:54:55.520 Why is that?

00:54:56.000 Well, they say, well, it's because it's a right-wing hellhole now.

00:54:58.960 But it could also be they kept getting community noted.

00:55:02.420 And it's kind of humiliating.

00:55:04.000 Because wherever that post then goes, the community note goes with it.

00:55:07.880 And so everyone knows that you're lying because you work for the Guardian.

00:55:10.780 And not popular with the media.

00:55:12.860 But it is popular with people.

00:55:14.240 I mean, there's a subreddit with 170,000 people following it.

00:55:18.860 Just about community notes and what they have done.

00:55:22.700 And so you can see that the other tech billionaires are looking around at this and saying, well, this is actually a model that's working.

00:55:29.200 And maybe, in fact, we could follow it too.

00:55:31.840 Which is why Mark Zuckerberg has decided that he will do the same for Facebook and Instagram.

00:55:36.560 Which I think, again, is just a superb step in the right direction.

00:55:40.740 Now, I want to defend Mark Zuckerberg slightly.

00:55:44.100 I realize that Josh did this the other day.

00:55:45.580 But I feel like doing it as well.

00:55:46.540 I don't think that Mark Zuckerberg is an insane woke tyrant. 0.99

00:55:50.940 I think Mark Zuckerberg is a moral coward. 0.99

00:55:54.080 He's a weak man who is surrounded by people. 1.00

00:55:57.880 This is a defense. 0.96

00:55:59.980 This is the defense.

00:56:01.220 The case for the defense.

00:56:03.000 I just think he's a socially awkward autist. 0.98

00:56:05.100 Yes, exactly.

00:56:06.020 Yeah.

00:56:06.420 He's a Chad now, isn't he?

00:56:07.660 There are two kinds of socially awkward autist.

00:56:08.900 I don't know if you want to call him a Chad.

00:56:10.460 I know that he's grown his hair out a bit curly.

00:56:12.540 He's got a bit of a tan.

00:56:13.460 He's got lats.

00:56:14.100 And he's doing jujitsu.

00:56:15.760 But even still, photos taken from certain angles, he still looks a bit reptilian.

00:56:20.900 A bit dweeby, yeah.

00:56:21.800 Sure.

00:56:22.780 And his famous I was a human once club is probably always going to come back to haunting.

00:56:29.620 I still remember.

00:56:30.620 But you've got two types of billionaires, tech bro billionaires.

00:56:34.940 Those that are, they enjoy the cut and thrust of it, and those that don't.

00:56:40.060 And Zuckerberg is clearly on the, I don't enjoy this.

00:56:43.160 Elon is obviously on the, I do enjoy this side of things.

00:56:47.140 But like I said, I don't think that makes Zuckerberg a bad person, actually.

00:56:50.680 And he's actually had some very strange run-ins with the people who want to censor free speech.

00:56:57.040 So he put up a post about this.

00:57:00.500 And in this, I'm just going to quote a bit.

00:57:03.100 He says, in his 2016 speech at Georgetown University, Zuckerberg argued that free expression has been the driving force behind progress in American society and around the world.

00:57:13.280 And inhibiting speech, however well-intentioned for the reasons for doing so, often reinforces existing institutions and power structures instead of empowering people.

00:57:21.700 He said, quote, some people believe giving more people a voice is driving division rather than bringing us together.

00:57:28.300 More people across the political spectrum believe that achieving the political outcomes that they think matter is more important than every person having a voice.

00:57:35.400 I think that's dangerous.

00:57:36.580 So, okay, great.

00:57:38.740 I agree with you.

00:57:40.600 But why did you then essentially collapse into, we'll just have the progressive world order and have all the fact checkers and censor lots of important things.

00:57:51.700 Then standing on that point of principle, right?

00:57:55.100 You could have done this.

00:57:56.160 And it was the same with Jack Dorsey at Twitter.

00:57:58.480 Jack Dorsey, when Twitter was first created, their slogan was the free speech wing of the free speech party, which was meant to be the Democrats back in like 2006 or whenever it was.

00:58:08.860 Obviously, that collapsed as well.

00:58:10.400 And you could see in the conversation that he had with Tim Pool, Joe Rogan and Vijaya Gaff.

00:58:14.340 Luke Jaded, didn't he?

00:58:15.600 Even to be there.

00:58:16.700 Yeah, he didn't even need to be there.

00:58:17.960 He was clearly being long-housed by a bunch of progressive people.

00:58:21.440 Who was that dreadful Indian woman who was clearly the brains behind the censorship operation at X before? 1.00

00:58:26.140 Of course.

00:58:26.560 I won't try and pronounce her name.

00:58:27.320 You know who I mean.

00:58:28.220 She was the one who was sort of enthusiastically giving all the answers.

00:58:30.280 This is why we censored him.

00:58:31.120 Jack Dorsey just seems, Jack Dorsey, I agree with you, he seemed jaded to be there.

00:58:34.180 He didn't seem like a...

00:58:35.060 He seemed stoned.

00:58:35.800 Well, maybe that's true.

00:58:36.600 Possibly that, but I...

00:58:38.040 He doesn't seem like a sort of an enthusiastic censor.

00:58:40.940 No, exactly.

00:58:42.060 And in fact, you can tell the tech bros, they began their lives as free speech activists.

00:58:48.000 They were like, no, it is good that we have free speech.

00:58:50.540 This is a liberal value.

00:58:51.560 And of course it is.

00:58:53.040 But they weren't morally strong people, unlike someone like Elon Musk, who perhaps is just too

00:58:58.120 autistic for them or something.

00:58:59.180 I don't know.

00:58:59.720 You know, he's just like, no, I can't even understand why.

00:59:01.180 He does seem further along this spectrum.

00:59:04.280 And so it...

00:59:05.500 He does.

00:59:07.200 It's not that these people are themselves naturally inclined.

00:59:11.400 And the most remarkable thing that I think Zuckerberg ever did in the cause of free speech

00:59:17.000 was defend Holocaust denial, actually.

00:59:20.280 Defend the right to Holocaust denial, I think.

00:59:23.520 He wasn't starting to get his calculator.

00:59:27.320 Maybe I should have...

00:59:28.540 I would be very surprised if Jewish man Mark Zuckerberg decided to do that. 0.99

00:59:33.640 Bookshelves is brimming with David Irving.

00:59:36.640 But he had a very, very good point on this.

00:59:40.060 And it was a good couple of months that he defended this, six years ago, when they were 0.98

00:59:45.500 really getting on his arse about it.

00:59:49.100 But basically, he didn't want to deplatform Alex Jones and Infowars from Facebook. 0.95

00:59:53.560 And he said, look, he would like to reduce the distribution of that content, but would not

00:59:57.840 censor the page.

00:59:58.860 And he said that Holocaust deniers were deeply offensive, but I don't believe that our platform

01:00:02.640 should take that down.

01:00:03.440 Because I think that there are things that different people get wrong that I don't think

01:00:08.500 they're intentionally getting wrong.

01:00:10.180 It's hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent.

01:00:13.140 I just think, as abhorrent as some of those examples are, I think the reality is I also

01:00:18.760 get things wrong when I speak publicly.

01:00:20.620 That's actually a very noble position.

01:00:22.160 And it's, I won't go on.

01:00:24.840 It's a fair and down the line sort of position.

01:00:26.880 Yes, it is.

01:00:27.640 But it's also, I don't want to recite all of this, but John Stuart Mill's case for free

01:00:32.360 speech is very similar to this.

01:00:33.700 He says, a perspective can either be fully correct, it can either be fully wrong, or it

01:00:38.340 can be half wrong and half correct.

01:00:40.440 That's what John Stuart Mill says about propositions.

01:00:42.260 And then he adds how in each one of those cases, making the conversation maximally free and

01:00:47.420 decentralized and unregulated and uncensored, does favor and select for truth value in

01:00:54.580 every single case.

01:00:55.840 And this is with Holocaust. 0.84

01:00:57.160 We don't want our understanding of the Holocaust to become complacent or to become atrophied.

01:01:03.020 And if we don't allow people, maybe very disagreeable people, to question things, then

01:01:07.260 the case is going to have, yeah, it's going to become atrophied and people are going to

01:01:12.540 be less able to defend it.

01:01:13.420 So even when something is fully true, and you're confident that it's fully true, all

01:01:17.360 the more reason to subject it to discourse, because then it confirms that truth with greater

01:01:23.300 solidity.

01:01:24.200 And this is not exactly a popular position to publicly defend in front of hundreds of

01:01:29.800 millions of people, which is the potential audience that would have known about Mark Zuckerberg

01:01:35.560 suddenly leaping to the defense of Holocaust denial.

01:01:38.220 And it's not that Alex Jones was a Holocaust denier or anything like that, but he was using

01:01:42.020 that as the worst possible example, and he said, look, I don't want to take them off

01:01:45.640 Facebook either way.

01:01:46.600 Now, he collapsed on that argument eventually, and then installed Nick Clegg as, of course,

01:01:52.940 the content moderator of Facebook, and it's been a progressive hellhole since, and basically

01:01:57.500 I stopped using it.

01:01:59.180 And now things have changed.

01:02:00.860 He's decided he's going to bring in a community notes style regime, fire the autocratic 0.74

01:02:06.400 fact-checkers, and replaced Nick Clegg with a Bush-era Republican.

01:02:13.160 I thought he was...

01:02:14.100 I'm sorry, just this image of Zuckerberg.

01:02:18.040 He looks like he's trying to sell the guy some drugs.

01:02:23.700 Give him a break.

01:02:26.820 I thought he brought in Dana White, or has that got nothing to do with the community notes

01:02:29.840 thing?

01:02:30.640 Oh.

01:02:31.000 He's brought in Dana White?

01:02:32.400 Yes.

01:02:32.780 But what for?

01:02:33.420 Oh, gosh, I was assuming this was going to come up.

01:02:36.960 Dana White's going to be on the board of Meta all of a sudden.

01:02:40.720 Oh, really?

01:02:41.180 Really?

01:02:41.660 I didn't even hear about that.

01:02:42.820 Is Zuckerberg going to start his in-ring WWE career soon as well?

01:02:47.240 Is that what he's been training for?

01:02:49.440 I mean, he's in decent shape.

01:02:51.280 He goes to more or less every UFC event.

01:02:53.280 He's in the corner of Alexander Volkanovsky, who's a sort of featherweight legend.

01:02:58.680 Oh, right.

01:03:00.200 He's having a sort of high-T character arc going on at the moment.

01:03:03.780 It does select, in fact, right-wing news.

01:03:05.800 I need Taker to come out of retirement for one last match against the Zuck. 1.00

01:03:10.560 But anyway, he's putting a Bush-era advisor in charge of Facebook now.

01:03:14.640 A bit better.

01:03:16.540 Yeah, exactly.

01:03:17.180 A bit better.

01:03:18.100 But that's fine.

01:03:19.600 And so, like I said, Josh covered a lot of this.

01:03:21.440 But what I wanted to cover, really, is the response.

01:03:25.520 Now, the response has been exactly as upset about this as you can imagine.

01:03:31.060 The fact-checkers are not happy with this.

01:03:34.540 Wait, I'm in this image.

01:03:35.120 They fact-checked that false, actually.

01:03:36.940 Sorry?

01:03:37.620 Well, of course.

01:03:38.520 I mean, they're going, this is my job, actually.

01:03:40.280 Yeah, no, exactly.

01:03:40.760 I can't be bad at my job because this is how I get paid.

01:03:43.260 Exactly.

01:03:43.760 If you interfere with the man's money, he'll be very angry with this.

01:03:46.980 One fact-checker said, quote,

01:03:48.440 But I don't believe that we were doing anything in any form with bias.

01:03:56.300 All right.

01:03:57.020 Okay.

01:03:57.720 Yep.

01:03:58.540 This is the real reason why.

01:03:59.480 Neil Brown, one of the, he runs PolitiFact, one of the fact-checking partners.

01:04:04.620 And it's like, that is just a remarkable thing to say for the kind of academic left,

01:04:11.820 since they only believe that a human being can be biased.

01:04:15.100 And to be honest with you, on that score, they're probably right.

01:04:18.440 So the very fact that, okay, well, we weren't doing anything with any bias.

01:04:22.540 It's like, well, okay, we disagree with you.

01:04:25.260 We think you were very biased.

01:04:27.140 And in fact, there's an entire wing of politics that thinks that.

01:04:30.640 I like his next sentence as well.

01:04:32.420 There's a mountain of what could be checked, and we were only grabbing what we could.

01:04:36.560 And I'm sure it was a complete random, objectively, no bias involved in that either, guys.

01:04:43.100 Good job.

01:04:43.820 Used an algorithm to randomly generate numbers.

01:04:45.780 The great thing about the community notes thing is that it models the institutionalized disconfirmation of bias.

01:04:53.200 And so rather than having to trust these people who rather fancy themselves as an accredited expert class,

01:04:58.400 outsourcing it to a truly disinterested AI is much, much more reliable.

01:05:03.640 And it means that it's far less likely to become agenda-driven.

01:05:06.160 And honestly, so far, I've only seen the community notes being used appropriately as well.

01:05:13.300 I don't think I've seen a single bad example.

01:05:15.120 Yeah.

01:05:15.700 And I think there's a general sort of ethos in the community that uses community notes.

01:05:20.520 That is, well, you have to provide the evidence, which is good.

01:05:23.000 Yes.

01:05:23.180 And anyway, so I thought we'd just briefly move on from this sojourn through the tiers of the community, the fact-checkers.

01:05:32.740 Just to have a quick look at five times I got it wrong.

01:05:35.740 Basically, four of these are, of course, surrounding COVID and the jabs. 0.71

01:05:40.360 And then, of course, the Hunter Biden story, which is the laptop story, which we were assured was Russian disinformation, which turned out not to be.

01:05:48.800 But the response from the left has been pretty good.

01:05:51.260 This summarizes basically much of it.

01:05:54.240 It's like, oh, this is just a cynical power play.

01:05:57.280 And the framing on this is amazing.

01:06:00.340 In a video posted this week, presumably from a secret lair hidden beneath a volcano somewhere,

01:06:05.700 the meta CEO announced plans to scrap the fact-checking on his platforms in favor of crowdsourced community note system.

01:06:12.280 So you can see already it's, oh, he's now become the evil villain because he's democratizing the epistemological sourcing of information on Twitter.

01:06:22.480 Okay, well, sorry that you guys don't like that.

01:06:25.480 We're very, very sorry, Mark.

01:06:27.800 But he is actually, I mean, he's actually always kind of been on this side anyway.

01:06:32.300 And it was artificial that you were keeping him on your side of it.

01:06:36.360 And, of course, he points out, well, this is just as Donald Trump is preparing to return to the White House.

01:06:40.560 It's like, yes, that is true.

01:06:42.840 Suddenly, a bunch of people who, I guess you, I mean, I bet if you were to ask Zuckerberg,

01:06:47.880 you'd be able to describe what has happened to him as a form of oppression.

01:06:51.860 Like, he would probably say, yeah, no, I didn't feel like I was able to properly assert what I truly believe.

01:06:55.580 Certainly a form of strong-arming.

01:06:56.960 Yeah, absolutely.

01:06:58.040 Brow-beaten into it.

01:06:58.940 I mean, he's a dropout from Harvard, I believe.

01:07:01.020 He's clearly got a quite independent, buccaneering mindset.

01:07:04.180 I imagine that intuitively he codes in quite a libertarian direction, like most of the tech brothers.

01:07:08.420 And a disproportionate number of them are cottage dropouts, which is to say that they are intelligent,

01:07:12.040 but they don't particularly like the regimented nature of class structure.

01:07:15.260 So there's a sense in which he is an intuitive libertarian.

01:07:17.440 It might just be the lack of moral fibre, and libertarianers do tend to lack that.

01:07:21.280 It might just be that which is making, and now that there's a new sort of vibe shift,

01:07:27.000 he's just going along with it, and it's more consistent with his libertarian principles,

01:07:29.900 and so he feels quite happy about it.

01:07:30.960 I think your case is compelling, Carl.

01:07:32.240 I think it is, and I think you're summarising exactly, and the correct people are all getting

01:07:36.600 very upset about this, such as Brazil's communist government.

01:07:39.660 No, I just feel like you made more of the case.

01:07:43.000 Sure, but I think he's summarising it very well.

01:07:46.800 But yeah, no, Brazil's communist government is very upset by this, and I think that's

01:07:50.760 superb.

01:07:51.180 Anything that upsets Brazil's communist government is probably going to be at least worth paying

01:07:55.360 attention to, if nothing else.

01:07:56.440 Anything attributed by the mainstream as being bad for democracy sounds good to me.

01:08:00.880 Well, that's literally exactly what it says there.

01:08:04.560 They say the decision was, quote, bad for democracy, because without fact-checking, you

01:08:08.760 don't have control.

01:08:09.780 You don't have control of the spread of hate, misinformation, and fake news.

01:08:14.260 And that's what democracy's always been about, right?

01:08:16.940 An unaccountable oligarchy.

01:08:18.700 That's exactly right.

01:08:20.920 I'm not joking here.

01:08:22.320 That's literally what they think it is.

01:08:23.400 In the name of saving democracy, we need to radically limit the range of news and opinion

01:08:27.800 to which the demos has access.

01:08:29.240 Yes.

01:08:30.120 Otherwise, democracy fails.

01:08:32.940 And they say that's the problem.

01:08:34.580 We need to have control.

01:08:36.000 We need to regulate social media.

01:08:37.740 That's what's happening in Europe.

01:08:39.080 It's like, yes, but that's bad.

01:08:41.320 Like, that's not a good thing that that is happening in Europe.

01:08:44.240 Please don't look to Europe for good examples.

01:08:46.660 Exactly.

01:08:47.720 And then the very final attack is just, oh, did you forget these super rich guys?

01:08:55.140 All right.

01:08:56.280 Reheat some, you know, what's the Occupy Wall Street lines?

01:08:59.360 What kind of a gotcha is that?

01:09:01.080 Well.

01:09:01.520 Rich man is rich.

01:09:03.120 Well, think about it.

01:09:05.420 What happens to rich men?

01:09:06.820 Um, they shag beautiful young women. 0.99

01:09:10.820 Or sometimes they get shot. 0.96

01:09:12.280 That also happens.

01:09:13.440 Ah, interesting.

01:09:14.380 Yes.

01:09:14.640 So saying, well, look, he's got a $900,000 watch, Luigi.

01:09:18.720 Yeah.

01:09:19.140 Have you thought about that?

01:09:20.460 You know, he's going to be, he's going to be spreading misinformation.

01:09:24.120 Like, there's, I feel like the Luigis of the world are slightly less, uh, disturbed by Mark Zuckerberg spreading misinformation than they are, um, health care people denying their family members health care. 0.75

01:09:39.420 You don't know where this ends.

01:09:40.320 It is interesting how the left, after BLM, after the Great Awakening, wherever you, whenever you want to date that from, sort of relaxed a lot of the class warfare stuff.

01:09:47.800 And they started amping up the race warfare, the sex warfare, the, um, ethnic warfare, all these sorts of things.

01:09:52.480 When the billionaires were on their side.

01:09:53.440 Yeah, when the billionaires were on their side.

01:09:54.740 But now that there are some coming out again, they're sort of reheating some of those Occupy Wall Street talking points, um, which is very curious.

01:10:00.860 Yes, precisely.

01:10:02.760 And, uh, and they know that it's an environment where there's a large percentage of the left who are like, yeah, I'm actually in favor of, uh, Luigi shooting, uh, CEOs.

01:10:10.400 Um, this, and we know that they're ramping up their own security.

01:10:14.680 So, again, this isn't an accident.

01:10:17.260 They know what they're doing. 0.98

01:10:18.360 Random Italians, communists shooting rich men in the streets. 0.67

01:10:22.260 We really are back in the 20s, aren't we? 0.83

01:10:24.180 Yeah.

01:10:25.300 It's something that's arrived back here.

01:10:27.240 But, um, but anyway, like I said, uh, I think the tide is actually turning here.

01:10:31.940 I don't think the tech bros were bad.

01:10:34.020 I think they were just weak.

01:10:35.480 And it was, thankfully, strong moral leadership from Elon Musk and Donald Trump on these.

01:10:41.580 Let the way.

01:10:42.220 That has, uh, one thing.

01:10:44.160 And so 2025 looks like it might be quite a good year.

01:10:48.920 All right, let's go through the rest of the rumble rants and then we can get to the video comments.

01:10:53.720 You're right there, Harrison.

01:10:54.680 I thought Kyle was going to quote something from Milton's Ariel Pagettington.

01:10:57.480 I was looking forward to that.

01:10:59.140 You kind of presaged it.

01:10:59.500 Oh, I was looking forward to that.

01:11:00.620 Yeah, sorry.

01:11:02.100 You did kind of presage it.

01:11:03.240 You cut him off.

01:11:04.300 Oh, no.

01:11:04.460 I thought I wouldn't.

01:11:05.120 I do like Milton on the free speech.

01:11:06.460 Uh, yeah.

01:11:07.000 Uh, Skitton says, uh, California, like Oregon, can't flip bread because we've had fake mail-in voting since 1987.

01:11:12.780 Yeah, now, I don't want to go off on this, but this is the thing.

01:11:14.980 I, I just think the Californian Democrats just cheat.

01:11:19.060 Non-stop.

01:11:19.940 Right.

01:11:20.120 Yeah.

01:11:20.500 So, I, I, even if, and I, I think, because, like, California, like, was 40% Trump in the last election.

01:11:27.080 That's a huge amount.

01:11:28.180 But they are just going to keep pumping out fake votes in the cities until...

01:11:32.140 Oh, and if that doesn't work, they'll just keep importing more and more Democrat voters.

01:11:36.000 And scaring off more and more Republican voters who will seek their fortunes elsewhere.

01:11:39.320 Yeah.

01:11:40.080 And hopefully not vote blue.

01:11:41.520 Zuckerberg, but I do know the FBI pressured a lot of people and said to the Senate and Congress, well, that's another point that I didn't even get to.

01:11:46.680 It's like, we know there was something like 70 FBI agents working at Twitter or something like that.

01:11:50.120 Musk is on, oh, sorry, um, Zuckerberg has admitted to this.

01:11:52.880 Yeah.

01:11:53.300 Yeah.

01:11:53.460 We don't know how many are going to be at Facebook, but there are going to be loads.

01:11:56.220 And, again, does Zuckerberg have the moral fortitude of Elon Musk to just say, no, get out?

01:12:00.740 No.

01:12:01.720 Um, uh, and, uh, yeah, the FBI personally asked Zuckerberg to squash the laptop story.

01:12:07.900 Uh, I bet that rattled him too.

01:12:09.160 Yeah, I bet it did.

01:12:09.880 And, and to be honest with you, I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm, I would like to think if the roles were reversed, I'd be like, no, I'm definitely going to.

01:12:17.200 But I don't know what they threatened him with.

01:12:19.220 You know, I don't know what the circumstance was.

01:12:21.560 So, you know, I'm not, I don't want to be too judgmental when the state starts sending their feds after you.

01:12:27.020 Like, you know, it's a scary situation.

01:12:29.420 Yeah.

01:12:29.700 And certainly not one that he imagined he'd find himself in when he was setting up Facebook.

01:12:33.200 Yeah.

01:12:33.780 So that he could judge women.

01:12:35.280 That was the initial.

01:12:35.940 It was, it was quite a, quite a based reason.

01:12:39.380 To start a social media platform.

01:12:41.560 Let's be honest.

01:12:43.740 Not even to meet women, to judge them.

01:12:46.460 Yeah.

01:12:46.920 From afar.

01:12:47.160 A lot of people hate on Zuckerberg, but I don't think he's that bad.

01:12:50.340 Speaks, uh, speaks Mandarin, doesn't he?

01:12:51.800 Yeah.

01:12:51.980 Um, Buka says, uh, I think Zach, uh, must put Andrew Tate on the board in the name of DEI.

01:12:57.340 Uh, we need to have a Muslim and a person of color, so not look bigoted.

01:13:00.600 Uh, I want to hear, hear, then about all the woke neoliberal arguments against it.

01:13:04.840 Well, I don't think he's going to, but, um, there we go.

01:13:07.760 Yeah.

01:13:07.900 Apparently, also, according to the Habsification, Rupert Lowe's put a bill in the Commons to 0.97

01:13:12.300 ban quantitative easing.

01:13:14.020 God, Rupert Lowe's so good.

01:13:15.440 That would, that would be-

01:13:16.480 Are you going to shoot it down?

01:13:16.940 I was going to say, that would be great if it passed, but if it passed, Rupert Lowe would

01:13:20.820 immediately be assassinated.

01:13:22.640 This is actually one ironic way in which democracy does need saving from itself.

01:13:25.980 Because the people often, they want things, but they don't like the costs that come with

01:13:30.900 them.

01:13:31.220 And so, there's a sense in which you can just-

01:13:32.660 Well, like, destroying international banking gets you immediately murdered.

01:13:35.940 That's a big cost, to be fair.

01:13:38.100 They're very- people are easy to bribe with their own money, is what I'm saying.

01:13:40.240 Oh, yeah, yeah.

01:13:43.080 This is a guidebook on how to convince your friends and your acquaintances and your family

01:13:49.380 using a mixture of bullying, shaming, and berating them.

01:13:55.160 I use a combination of lies, manipulation, cheating, stealing, gaslighting, bullying,

01:14:02.100 insulting, and flexing to make sure that everybody in my office stays under my thumb.

01:14:08.680 Even the women. 0.90

01:14:09.380 I dominate them. 0.62

01:14:10.460 I dominate the women in my workplace. 1.00

01:14:13.020 Okay?

01:14:16.800 I'm glad that somebody got the reference that I was making there.

01:14:20.600 Can you imagine James O'Brien trying to, like, flex on his staff members in the office

01:14:26.220 as well?

01:14:27.060 What would he do?

01:14:28.680 Flex his child-rearing hips at them. 0.79

01:14:30.880 To be fair, I submit, I submit, I'm sorry, James, no!

01:14:37.460 Please stop flexing at me.

01:14:42.200 Hi, Lotus Eaters.

01:14:43.700 It's very late, but I still wanted to wish you guys a very happy new year and show you

01:14:48.380 guys some fresh snow.

01:14:50.820 I've been waiting a long time for this, so hopefully it stays and doesn't melt and turn

01:14:55.420 into sludge.

01:14:56.080 Our snow is one of my favourite things, even though I don't like the cold all that much.

01:15:01.480 But yeah, hope you guys have a great year ahead.

01:15:03.660 Thank you very much.

01:15:06.040 Very sweet.

01:15:06.640 Yeah, lovely imagery.

01:15:07.900 It's been snowing a lot in Swindon.

01:15:09.780 Yeah, we did have some snow.

01:15:10.560 The past few days.

01:15:12.120 It's...

01:15:12.600 I got up early in the morning and it settled, but by the time I got out of the office, it's

01:15:16.740 just gone.

01:15:17.340 Very nice on the mountainside, it's coming in, I was just on the train, of course.

01:15:20.060 It's settled in the countryside just outside of Swindon.

01:15:22.820 It's very nice.

01:15:23.240 Does anybody else remember this story?

01:15:26.140 A women's firefighting conference in Canada held to promote diversity and inclusion in

01:15:31.380 a male-dominated field didn't go well.

01:15:33.620 They sent fire to their own national park.

01:15:35.740 Took five helicopters raining down buckets of water to get the fire under control.

01:15:39.200 They say we had 50 participants on site.

01:15:41.240 They were female for the most part. 1.00

01:15:42.500 We had a few men and a few folks that were non-binary.

01:15:45.140 They're all highly trained firefighters.

01:15:47.220 Jane Park, who was responsible for all aspects of the emergency response, could not be reached

01:15:51.080 for comment.

01:15:51.540 Ah, it was the wind.

01:15:53.080 Patriarchy strikes again. 0.76

01:15:55.560 Clearly, climate change and patriarchy and everything else.

01:15:59.420 How could it be wrong?

01:16:00.580 Did you see the picture of them all smiling?

01:16:02.440 How happy they were?

01:16:03.620 Yes.

01:16:06.160 Talk about cocaine hippos. 0.65

01:16:08.460 Can we stop for a moment?

01:16:09.420 Sounds like we've got some echo.

01:16:10.780 I don't know if the audio is coming from the television and the speakers at the same

01:16:14.280 time.

01:16:14.740 Is there any way to stop it echoing?

01:16:17.800 So, I've just...

01:16:18.460 Hippos are good eating.

01:16:19.480 I think I have a solution here.

01:16:21.540 Americans.

01:16:22.700 You rang?

01:16:23.820 Many Americans like going on hunting holidays.

01:16:26.060 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:16:26.540 Tell me about the project. 0.84

01:16:28.000 Yeah, you shoot the hippo. 0.99

01:16:29.000 We'll grab it. 1.00

01:16:29.680 We'll carve it up.

01:16:30.420 You'll have hippo burgers.

01:16:31.580 It'll be amazing.

01:16:32.060 Splendid.

01:16:32.520 I'm in.

01:16:32.940 We had a cultural tradition of slaying hippos.

01:16:36.320 Like they're dragons.

01:16:37.760 I think it would help.

01:16:38.940 Never fear.

01:16:39.560 We'll slay it by 10 and be back in camp for 11 seats.

01:16:44.220 Nice. 0.95

01:16:45.700 Hippo slaying.

01:16:46.520 Sounds good to me.

01:16:47.340 Any more?

01:16:49.200 Okay.

01:16:49.620 I think that's all of them.

01:16:50.800 So, let's go through the written comments from the website then.

01:16:54.440 Do you want to read through yours, Carl?

01:16:55.640 Yeah, I'll do it.

01:16:56.640 That's all right.

01:16:56.940 Umar says, Carl's video answering Elon's question as to why this was allowed to happen goes a

01:17:01.500 long way to explaining James O'Brien's behavior.

01:17:04.300 That little gremlin has an entire career that hinges on smug comebacks and snide remarks 0.99

01:17:08.040 founded on liberal ideas.

01:17:09.980 Again, it's really remarkable reading because it's so much more introspective how not to

01:17:16.020 be wrong where he just talks about how he has this just innate feeling in him.

01:17:21.160 Any conversation that he's in, he has to almost sabotage by turning it into an argument that

01:17:27.400 he can win and he has no morals whatsoever about how he wins that argument.

01:17:33.160 We already know in How to Be Right that he admitted only one time, only one time ever,

01:17:37.900 never did it ever again to lying, to lying as part of the conversation so that he could

01:17:42.520 win against somebody else.

01:17:44.140 So yeah, I think a lot of these people are insecure narcissists who feel that if they're

01:17:48.280 not dominating a conversation, that they're somehow lesser, whereas in fact, you're just 0.97

01:17:53.300 being a twat does not make you a good person.

01:17:56.960 Yeah, especially when it turns out that you start doing things like making excuses for 0.99

01:18:01.680 national scale grooming of white working class children.

01:18:05.100 Yeah.

01:18:06.700 Thomas says, uh, Labour kicking a national inquiry into the long grass is a gift.

01:18:11.260 Reform can now set the terms, start the process, extend it to Parliament, and put it in the

01:18:14.480 manifesto for the next general election.

01:18:16.400 Prism for the non-spologists. 1.00

01:18:18.280 Yeah, I mean, to be fair, Nigel Farage did say he was going to do that, and okay, maybe

01:18:22.780 he will, let's hope something comes in.

01:18:24.860 Okay, do it then, do it.

01:18:26.340 Yeah, exactly, just get on with it.

01:18:27.420 That's my main complaint with most politics recently, which is just a lot of people talking

01:18:32.620 and I'm there screaming at the edge of the, from behind the bars going, just do something!

01:18:37.100 Just do it then!

01:18:38.200 I do like the way that Thomas Howe has talked about reform setting the terms then, because

01:18:42.640 one of the problems, intrinsic problems with populism is that it's usually very reactive

01:18:46.140 rather than, rather than trying, usually what populism tries to do, it kind of settles for

01:18:50.180 a very subordinate role.

01:18:51.260 We're going to meet public opinion where it is, and then we're going to champion it over

01:18:54.680 elite opinion, whereas what you should be trying to do is reshape both elite opinion and public

01:18:58.460 opinion.

01:18:58.840 And by staging an inquiry in this way, obviously it would have limited powers, it wouldn't

01:19:01.760 have subpoena powers, but it could still, nevertheless, restructure the terms of our national conversation

01:19:06.980 and that is urgently needed.

01:19:08.140 It needs a Bowdoin-esque, based revolutionary mindset.

01:19:12.660 Someone's been reading the French 17th century philosophy.

01:19:16.060 This has been a long-standing complaint about Nigel Farage, is that he's always the step behind

01:19:20.920 the cutting edge of the wave, and in fact, leading the charge on this unimpeachably one-sided

01:19:27.500 moral issue, would be nothing but a win, there's nothing to lose, only anything to gain.

01:19:34.000 So if you are going to be cynical and just purely politicise this, okay, but at least

01:19:38.900 this is an issue that really needs doing.

01:19:41.360 And you could get some Musk money, rend the fences with Musk and then get some Musk money

01:19:45.860 to fund this whole operation.

01:19:46.880 I'm sure Musk would throw a million or two at that.

01:19:49.280 Exactly, yeah.

01:19:49.800 Say, look, we need five million to do this national inquiry.

01:19:52.420 He'd probably do it.

01:19:54.140 Chair Koala says, the Grimmengangs are reminding me of a lot of the legend of Theseus,

01:19:57.500 and the Minotaur, young people being willingly given up by the ruling class to be devoured

01:20:01.760 in order to keep the peace, and now we find a political labyrinth in order to frustrate

01:20:05.220 efforts to actually address the problem.

01:20:06.700 That's good.

01:20:06.920 Well, to be honest with you, it's actually a great metaphor for what has happened here.

01:20:12.820 Will Farage be the Theseus?

01:20:15.420 Face Tape says, to be fair to Jess Phillips, she was correct. 0.61

01:20:18.000 We do live in a rape culture where elites ignore and cover up crimes to protect the attacker. 0.99

01:20:22.220 She just didn't tell us she was the one doing it.

01:20:24.160 Well, the thing is, people have got to remember that almost everything the left says is a

01:20:28.240 confession, so we should have taken them more seriously to start with, maybe.

01:20:33.220 Good point.

01:20:33.980 You are those.

01:20:36.720 Justin says, anyone that added no on any national inquiry into grooming gangs needs adding into

01:20:42.900 the list of those to investigate for it.

01:20:44.720 The only reason that people would not want one is if they are afraid their guilt will be

01:20:48.360 uncovered too.

01:20:48.800 Well, the thing is, the guilt's already been uncovered enough for the Labour Party, the

01:20:53.100 councils and the police.

01:20:54.320 We already know that they're implicated in all of this, and they have been for decades.

01:20:59.220 So, in a way, yes, of course they're not going to be.

01:21:01.960 A lot of local councils have vetoed local investigations taking place, because they have the liberty to

01:21:06.760 do so.

01:21:07.200 That's another reason why it should be national.

01:21:08.620 Yep.

01:21:09.220 And, like I said, checking their own homework.

01:21:11.380 It's like, why would we entrust them with that?

01:21:14.480 We found that we did nothing wrong, weirdly enough.

01:21:16.360 A dude in the nude says, I think we should be thankful to Andy Burden for having the

01:21:21.400 courage to speak out against his own party and supporting further investigation into

01:21:25.100 the grooming gangs.

01:21:26.040 We should always praise those who stand by their principles, even if they're our opponents.

01:21:30.360 Yes, I mean, it is the bare minimum that we can do to say, yes, maybe we shouldn't just

01:21:35.480 allow child rapists to get away with it, but...

01:21:37.840 I think the bar should be a little bit higher than politician doesn't protect paedophiles. 1.00

01:21:43.760 Yes.

01:21:44.960 Personally.

01:21:46.360 But you are still right.

01:21:48.340 Good on Andy Burden for actually doing the right thing in the face of...

01:21:52.600 For not trying to actively protect paedophiles.

01:21:56.280 Sorry?

01:21:57.120 Yeah, good on Andy Burden for not actively trying to protect paedophiles.

01:22:01.280 Well, I mean, he does...

01:22:02.220 He is mayor of...

01:22:03.000 He is mayor of Manchester, so...

01:22:05.280 Yeah.

01:22:05.820 But, I mean, let's be fair.

01:22:07.260 The mayor of London, not doing that.

01:22:09.480 No, no, that's fair.

01:22:10.560 The mayor of any other city, not doing that.

01:22:12.160 Hey, there's a reason I quite like Manchester more than most cities in this country.

01:22:15.680 It's not just because of Stockholm Syndrome, all right?

01:22:19.040 It's a nice place, kind of, sometimes, in parts.

01:22:22.960 I didn't much care for it when I went.

01:22:25.180 I need to take you to some good clubs, mate. 0.95

01:22:26.740 All right, cool.

01:22:27.140 We'll do it.

01:22:27.440 Charlie says... 0.98

01:22:30.480 That sounded so gay. 0.92

01:22:34.160 Charlie says, the Trump comment about the dry brush isn't without validity. 0.80

01:22:37.760 In Australia, there have been periodically control-burning dry brush since the Aboriginals arrived. 0.99

01:22:41.940 Then the government stopped it in the name of climate change, and lo and behold, Australia had one of their worst fires in 2020.

01:22:47.020 Well, this is why I mentioned the Australians, because they've been banging on them about this for ages. 1.00

01:22:49.920 Yeah.

01:22:50.560 Because it's obviously something that has to be done.

01:22:53.140 Again, these things are completely predictable.

01:22:56.120 Yeah.

01:22:56.740 That if you've got lots of dry brush in a place that might set on fire every so often...

01:23:02.020 I'm no expert, but...

01:23:02.660 It's all going to set on fire.

01:23:04.700 Yeah, and it really doesn't take any genius.

01:23:07.060 What do you mean if I threw a match onto this gasoline, it was going to set on fire?

01:23:11.240 I could have...

01:23:11.880 No one could have predicted that.

01:23:13.380 Let's hope there's no arsonists around.

01:23:15.500 Yeah.

01:23:17.240 Fingers crossed, guys.

01:23:18.520 I mean, talk about wanting to live in a high-trust society, right?

01:23:22.040 They just presume that, well, you know, we all trust each other that nobody's going to set fire to LA, right?

01:23:27.220 And all of these weird Guatemalan migrants who definitely wouldn't burn someone to death on the New York subway or anything. 1.00

01:23:31.660 Yeah, well, too bad. 0.98

01:23:33.040 You live in a world where everybody's trying to set you on fire.

01:23:35.700 Yeah.

01:23:36.660 Baron Von Warhawk says,

01:23:37.640 It's really interesting.

01:23:38.880 The really interesting event is going to happen soon,

01:23:41.240 when the newly homeless people of LA now have to compete for welfare with the 75,000 known homeless population.

01:23:47.680 The unknown homeless population in the illegal immigrant community.

01:23:50.960 Once again, they will have to deal with the consequences of their voting patterns.

01:23:53.840 Yeah.

01:23:54.420 Well, yeah, but the...

01:23:56.060 As always, I feel bad for red Californians. 1.00

01:23:59.020 Yeah.

01:23:59.540 Yeah, obviously.

01:24:01.580 But...

01:24:02.780 They're not going to vote differently.

01:24:05.480 I certainly feel bad for anyone dying,

01:24:06.940 and I don't want to engage in any kind of schadenfreude crowing at the misfortunes of others,

01:24:10.800 but there is a sense in which, as a general political, cultural matter,

01:24:15.960 it is preferable for the luxury, believe, class to be living close to the consequences of their decisions,

01:24:21.900 as opposed to them being able to siphon them off into other districts,

01:24:24.780 and to want to saddle poorer communities with them.

01:24:27.120 Yeah.

01:24:27.280 Why is my mansion on fire?

01:24:28.660 Well, there's actually an actionable political reason for that,

01:24:31.200 that you voted for repeatedly,

01:24:32.940 and condemn people who even considered voting the other way.

01:24:36.040 Exactly.

01:24:36.400 So that's why your mansion's on fire, actually.

01:24:39.240 It's better than something else.

01:24:43.260 Justin saying,

01:24:44.100 people are yelling at the insurance companies for cutting fire coverage.

01:24:46.900 However, it seems that California passed laws

01:24:48.740 that said they had to cover people regardless of the risk,

01:24:51.280 and were not allowed to charge an unreasonable amount.

01:24:53.300 So apparently, the insurance companies are just starting to pull out of California completely,

01:24:57.480 as the risk was too high.

01:24:59.440 I didn't even know, but there's echoes of the housing crisis there as well.

01:25:03.860 Well, yeah.

01:25:04.340 Listen, you've just got to give mortgages to these un-mortgageable people with terrible credit,

01:25:10.100 because otherwise you're being racist.

01:25:13.300 That was literally...

01:25:14.400 Yeah, but what's the downside?

01:25:16.200 A very under-reported part of the subprime mortgage crisis.

01:25:18.960 Well, yeah.

01:25:19.660 I mean, that was what Thomas Sowell wrote about in his book on it,

01:25:22.200 and it was very, very interesting,

01:25:24.080 where he's just like, 0.73

01:25:24.540 yeah, all of these people who had terrible credit happen to be black,

01:25:27.900 doesn't mean you should just give them credit.

01:25:29.520 Arizona Desert Rat says,

01:25:33.280 I'm wondering where all these displaced people are going to go.

01:25:36.380 Well, interestingly, probably Arizona.

01:25:38.960 There's limited housing in most of California.

01:25:41.700 Most developers don't like building in California,

01:25:43.320 due to all the regulations and red tape they have to deal with.

01:25:45.640 Building in California just isn't worth it.

01:25:48.000 And that's obviously true.

01:25:50.580 And again, there's another consistent point that Trump and Musk are pointing out.

01:25:54.480 It's like, these regulations aren't helping you, are they?

01:25:56.200 Joe Schmo says,

01:25:58.540 In 2018, LA experienced a wildfire that destroyed 97,000 acres

01:26:01.780 and caused 6 billion of damage.

01:26:03.660 The fires will happen next year, too.

01:26:06.180 I mean, they could literally decide to just do the job properly at any time.

01:26:10.660 They could literally just decide.

01:26:12.700 That's way too difficult for California.

01:26:14.500 Yeah, well, I mean, Trump said maybe you should do the job properly,

01:26:16.660 so of course Gavin Newsom has to start setting fires himself, I imagine.

01:26:21.120 Look at what you made me do, Donald.

01:26:23.340 Yeah, it was.

01:26:24.320 It's literally the, what would Hitler do?

01:26:26.700 Me, the Austrian chap said.

01:26:30.160 All they say is, what would Hitler do?

01:26:31.640 Hitler would prevent the fires. 0.89

01:26:33.020 Therefore, I have to start the fires.

01:26:34.100 Gavin Newsom shows up like that Simpson supervillain with the flame threat.

01:26:38.360 Yeah, yeah, yeah, basically, yeah.

01:26:40.300 Jimbo says,

01:26:41.000 Seeing a lot of panic from certain communities that undermet his new policies, 0.89

01:26:44.420 people will be able to accurately describe them as mentally ill. 0.56

01:26:47.320 Oh yeah, that was the thing I forgot to include.

01:26:49.120 Facebook and Instagram, you will be able to point out that people who think they're born in the wrong body,

01:26:55.560 and are in fact a different gender, are mentally ill, which you'd get censored for a couple of months ago.

01:27:02.020 So that's a start.

01:27:03.740 My question is, who still uses Facebook?

01:27:07.960 I mean, Instagram, amazingly, I can call thoughts, thoughts again, with no consequences.

01:27:14.280 Community noted, correct.

01:27:16.060 Wild West.

01:27:16.780 But Facebook, yeah, other than boomers, who are already, like, conspiracy posting 24-7 anyway. 0.69

01:27:24.580 I mean, you know, fair play.

01:27:25.780 If we can get more insane Facebook conspiracies out there as a result of this, I think that's only a good thing.

01:27:31.160 Yeah, I mean, to be honest with you, I use Facebook to keep in contact with friends and family.

01:27:35.180 Yeah, that's all I use it for.

01:27:36.560 Follow, like, hobby stuff and video games stuff.

01:27:38.440 Every so often I'll go on the page and go, like,

01:27:40.220 How are all the people I used to know 10 years ago? 0.99

01:27:42.100 Oh, they're all retarded. 1.00

01:27:44.700 But, you know, that doesn't mean they're bad. 0.99

01:27:46.780 Um, yeah.

01:27:48.620 Joshua says, uh, the last 25 years we have lived under the tyranny of the drama club,

01:27:52.280 and it looks now as if the techno nerds are taking over.

01:27:54.920 Will their tyranny be any better?

01:27:56.320 Will we at least get flying cars?

01:27:58.240 Um, yeah, no, I think that the, uh, the reign of the tech bros will be better than the reign of the drama club.

01:28:03.520 Um, because they're going to be less sense.

01:28:05.160 I just don't want, I just don't want a chip in my brain.

01:28:08.620 You don't, I don't think it'd be mandatory.

01:28:10.380 Not yet.

01:28:11.800 These things, the slippery slope is undefeated.

01:28:15.200 That is true.

01:28:16.780 And that is a genuine concern.

01:28:19.220 But, I mean.

01:28:20.540 I don't want Elon, well, Elon wouldn't censor my brain.

01:28:24.640 But somebody would.

01:28:26.060 Yeah.

01:28:26.520 I can't even say it in my head anymore.

01:28:28.480 No!

01:28:29.420 No!

01:28:29.780 Well, I mean, it's not going to be Zuckerberg either.

01:28:32.540 He's going to be like, no, you can deny the Holocaust all you want.

01:28:34.860 Wait, what?

01:28:35.680 Why are you accusing me of it?

01:28:37.500 I'm not accusing you of anything.

01:28:38.780 I'm just saying that Zuckerberg, he's pretty laissez-faire when it comes to this sort of stuff.

01:28:42.900 So, you know, that's good.

01:28:45.580 George says, community notes are the same problem as fact checkers, though.

01:28:48.880 It really depends who's allowed to write them.

01:28:50.760 Well, the thing with the community notes so far is that it's been pretty open.

01:28:55.360 But you are right.

01:28:56.060 It's definitely, they will try to gain control of who is allowed to author the community notes.

01:29:02.420 So, that is something you're going to have to worry about.

01:29:06.380 And Snopes.com says fact check.

01:29:08.400 Carl said forthright.

01:29:10.000 I didn't.

01:29:11.420 Got him.

01:29:12.020 I said forthright.

01:29:13.200 You've been fact checked, Carl.

01:29:13.920 Again, don't believe the fact checkers.

01:29:15.600 Where's my community note?

01:29:16.880 They're not biased.

01:29:17.860 There's a mountain of information.

01:29:19.140 They just happened to pick that one.

01:29:21.360 Okay?

01:29:22.320 So, you can't say anything about it.

01:29:25.720 All right.

01:29:26.440 And with that, I think that's all we've got time for.

01:29:29.420 So, thank you very much for joining us.

01:29:31.320 Thank you, Harrison.

01:29:31.960 Great fun.

01:29:32.260 Thanks, James.

01:29:32.600 Thanks for joining us, as always.

01:29:33.800 And remember to stay tuned to see what Harrison is doing in the future.

01:29:36.980 And please join us at 3 o'clock, where we'll be going on Lads Hour through our 2025 bingo card.

01:29:42.220 See you then.

01:29:42.900 And if you're not watching that, have a great weekend.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - January 10, 2025

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1076

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