The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1167
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 30 minutes
Words per Minute
156.26202
Summary
In this episode, we discuss the Romanian presidential elections, the pride cult and the manufacturing of consent for WWIII. We also talk about the second round of voting in Romania and whether the EU went out of its way to make sure that a pro-EU candidate won the election.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hello everyone, welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Seaters. Today it's Monday the 19th of May
00:00:05.940
2025. This is podcast number 1167. I'm your host Stelios and today I'm joined by Firas and Stephen.
00:00:13.700
Hey, hi. So we are going to discuss the presidential elections in Romania,
00:00:20.340
the pride cult and the manufacturing of consent for World War III. So buckle up,
00:00:25.760
this is going to be a really good podcast. There were several elections in Europe. There were
00:00:31.440
elections in Poland, elections in Romania, elections in Portugal. We're going to talk
00:00:36.100
about them, but for this segment we're going to talk about the presidential elections in Romania.
00:00:41.780
Right, so before we talk about them, we are doing courses. We have the trivium that you may be
00:00:47.000
interested in. It's about classical education, grammar, logic and rhetoric, things that the
00:00:53.060
current educational system doesn't educate students with sufficiently. So definitely check out. We
00:01:01.120
have the individual courses, foundations of writing, foundations of logic and foundations of rhetoric,
00:01:05.840
but also we have the bundle in a great offer. Definitely check it out. And we have also the
00:01:12.740
webinar. If you want to find out more information about it, you can sign up for this meeting and see
00:01:20.080
if it is for you. This is 7 p.m. UK time for Thursday, the 22nd of May. So by all means, this is free.
00:01:30.540
Check it out. Sign up for it and see if the courses are for you. I think you're going to like them.
00:01:36.820
Right, so we are talking about now presidential elections in Romania. And I think this is the first
00:01:43.640
segment we are doing about Romania and its presidential elections. But we have been following what happens
00:01:49.880
there pretty closely. And we are definitely going to talk about the wider context and especially
00:01:55.880
the presidential candidacy of Kalindro Jesku that was annulled back in December and after his performance
00:02:06.200
at the first presidential elections at the end of November 2024. But the main contestants of this
00:02:14.960
presidential elections of the second round were Niko Jordan and George Simeon. So we're going to talk a bit
00:02:22.640
about them, what they represent, what happened in those elections. And then we're going to talk to you
00:02:29.920
about the wider context and whether the EU went out of its way to be very authoritarian in ways that
00:02:37.840
arguably it didn't have to. Definitely we are going to talk about what happened there. So this is Niko
00:02:45.680
Jordan. He is the mayor of Bucharest, elected twice as a mayor of the capital of Romania, who yesterday won
00:02:55.760
the elections. That was the second round. What happens is that for a person to be elected president in
00:03:03.600
Romania, they need more than 50 percent of the vote. In the first round, he secured around 21 percent,
00:03:11.280
whereas George Simeon, who lost yesterday, got 41 percent. But there were three other candidates
00:03:17.600
who had a large share that disproportionately went for Niko Jordan on the second round.
00:03:25.600
So let's see what's going on. So are they saying with 100 percent of the votes counted, the centrist
00:03:31.200
candidate won nearly 54 percent of the ballots cost. A clear win of a hard right candidate, George Simeon,
00:03:38.080
who is a fan of Donald Trump. Simeon opposes providing military aid to Ukraine and is critical of the EU.
00:03:45.520
Looked on track to win the election after he swept the first round on May 4.
00:03:50.320
As I said, he got around 41 percent. However, Dan gained ground after trouncing Simeon in a televised
00:03:57.120
debate. So they engaged in a debate that seemed to be going in favor of Niko Jordan. Let me say some
00:04:08.160
things about it. So yesterday, Nick Jordan got around 54 percent and George Simeon got around 46 percent.
00:04:16.160
So who is Niko Jordan? So he's a maths prodigy. In 2015, he founded the Save Bucharest Union.
00:04:26.320
Next year, it turned into the USR, which is called the Save Romania Union. And about a year afterwards,
00:04:39.120
in 2017, he left and he has been independent ever since. He left allegedly due to the internal factions
00:04:46.400
of conservatives and progressives within the USR. Now, let's note that within the EU parliament,
00:04:54.080
the USR is adjacent to what we'd call the liberal center, to the Macron side of things.
00:05:01.120
Absolutely. There's nothing independent about him. So in 2020, he won the mayorship of Bucharest. He was
00:05:10.880
reelected in 2024. And he basically stands for, I'd say, a pro-EU agenda, a liberal centrist agenda,
00:05:20.480
if you would like. He is in favor of the EU. He's against Eurosceptic narratives. He is pro-NATO. He says
00:05:28.240
that there has to be a partnership with the US and NATO within the context of an EU membership.
00:05:35.200
And he's also in favor of boosting the military spending of Romania and arguably capitalizing
00:05:41.440
upon its internal, its domestic defense industry. Right. So...
00:05:46.560
So all in all, so far, he's a perfect Davos man. Perfect Davos man. Yes. Yeah. Super.
00:05:52.880
Good summary. Yeah. Perfect Davos man looking for a good career and a retirement somewhere
00:05:57.920
after he's done what he's told. So I will reserve judgment for this, but it looks like it looks like
00:06:03.280
he's definitely advancing the... He's definitely advancing the narrative of the EU at the moment,
00:06:10.320
especially when it comes to Ukraine. Now, I will say, and the reason why I am a bit
00:06:16.240
reluctant to say either way is because I don't know that much about Romanian politics.
00:06:20.880
I'd like to know much more to give you an informed opinion. So I have to be honest on this. But also,
00:06:26.480
I think there is a tendency of Americanizing non-American politics. And I think that at the
00:06:32.960
moment there is, especially on X, the reign and the domination of the MAGA infospace. And there is
00:06:39.760
a tendency of trying to apply MAGA categories on the non-US area of things, which should be taken with
00:06:48.320
a pinch of salt. If you look at both the previous tweets, this one and the previous tweet, so George
00:06:54.160
Simeon is not only pro-Trump, he's pro-Putin, but anti-Von der Leyen. Yes. So, you know, at the end of
00:07:02.000
the day, this is all about just painting them in the pictures of what the elites are now
00:07:07.200
doing across the whole of the global, in particular, Western politics. It's that you're
00:07:12.480
either pro-EU, pro-dying in Ukraine and not supporting Trump. And if you do support Trump,
00:07:18.480
then you're bound to be supporting Putin as well. There's like, there's no non sequitur on that.
00:07:22.720
You're either one or the other. No nuances. I'd say that this is the more, you'd say,
00:07:29.040
U.S. perspective. And these elections definitely represented a clash of perspectives. One is the
00:07:36.080
pro-U.S. that tries to talk about the EU as being a uniquely globalist organization, which,
00:07:45.120
unfortunately, at very large is. But on the other hand, I think that there are definitely globalist
00:07:51.680
elements within the U.S. and they still remain. Including within the MAGA movement itself,
00:07:57.760
including within the Trump camp. And got rid of everyone, unfortunately.
00:08:03.200
So let's talk about George Simeon. George Simeon was the pro-sovereignty of Romania candidate,
00:08:10.080
the pro-MAGA candidate. And he did have a large support by the MAGA camp. Here we have Mike Benz
00:08:17.680
saying, George Simeon, the pro-Trump candidate in Romania, won the first round election 41-21
00:08:24.000
against the NATO-EU blob candidate two weeks ago, and somehow lost or ran off today.
00:08:30.160
It's the same thing that happened with Marine Le Pen, basically, where she would do extremely well
00:08:37.520
in the first round. And in the second round, the entire political spectrum would unite to try to
00:08:43.360
defeat her. In Hungary, to try to defeat Viktor Orban, they managed to get literal Nazis and literal
00:08:49.280
communists into the same, I think it was a nine-party bloc trying to oppose, to oppose Orban.
00:08:55.520
So you see the same story being repeated, but yes.
00:08:58.240
And the same strategy. If you look at what happens in Turkey, the capital is more left-wing, more EU
00:09:05.680
supportive, and they're more students, and all of them vote for this kind of wet weakling of a man
00:09:13.760
who is the opposite to the president. You've got the same in Hungary, where they try and get the
00:09:20.880
capital. Here you've got the same, the same in Paris, the same in London. That's their first strategy.
00:09:27.040
Let's get somebody in there, that's one of us, and then we can utilise him to promote their name,
00:09:32.320
their face, their character, and the funding to take on anyone that might come from the sticks,
00:09:37.840
the suburbs, where the proles live. And then we can control the proles from our own elitist centres.
00:09:45.200
Right. So here we also have people linking Simeon to the pro-Trump camp. Here we hear
00:09:53.040
Romania is at a crossroads, and so is the US influence in Eastern Europe. George Simeon stands
00:09:58.640
for sovereignty for a strategic alliance with Trump's America, not Biden, Macron, and Brussels.
00:10:04.000
A vote for Nico Jordan is a vote for the globalist elite. Romania first, America first. Now, I don't
00:10:09.920
know to what extent it's particularly good for non-US campaigns to attach their name to Trump,
00:10:18.080
not necessarily because Trump is mistaken or about lots of things. Lots of things he gets right. But I
00:10:26.160
think that to a very large extent, it works to a segment of the population, but to the greater
00:10:32.160
segment of the population, the general public, I think it definitely seems a bit servile to US
00:10:37.280
interests at the expense of others. It's alienating. Yeah. And you could arguably say that in Canada,
00:10:44.480
this didn't work. And it hurt Pierre Pauliever, who was seen as, in a way, the closer to Trump
00:10:50.400
country. And Australia. And Australia. Yeah. So Marine Le Pen here also endorsed George Simeon.
00:10:59.200
She definitely feels, I'd say, targeted by the EU establishment. And she has every right to,
00:11:08.320
every justification. Here he appeared, George Simeon appeared on, on Stephen Bannon,
00:11:15.840
here with Jack Posobiec. So definitely, he seemed to be the pro-MAGA favorite. Yeah. And from an EU
00:11:22.800
perspective, because we hear the MAGA perspective, from an EU perspective, there is definitely lots of
00:11:29.360
worry about candidates who are necessary, who are, who make their pro-MAGA, let's say, nature as their
00:11:37.440
flagship. Yes. It's because they are saying, well, what if suddenly the MAGA establishment
00:11:44.480
thinks that it has to make concessions to Russia and give lots of European, let's say, and gives,
00:11:53.200
give lots of parts of Europe to Europe, to Russia, in order to secure a sort of aid of Russia against
00:12:00.960
China. This is one of the things that the European establishment is thinking, when it comes to
00:12:07.440
think about it this way. For the Europeans, the worst possible outcome is a Russian-American
00:12:14.720
agreement. Because given the extent of European military weakness and economic weakness, between them,
00:12:21.280
they can dominate the continent with no challengers. And so the EU establishment needs to
00:12:29.440
rally and ensure that these challengers fail in order to keep up their own space of autonomy.
00:12:37.200
And the other argument that builds on that is that if you're going to allow these two big
00:12:42.880
powers on the side of you to actually have an influence, the worst thing you do then is allow
00:12:47.760
your nation states within your group to also have patriotic, conservative-based nationalist parties
00:12:55.120
who believe in their country over a set of individuals that are running it from the centre
00:13:00.400
in the European Commission. And so that EU elite, which has been built up over 40, 50 years, which
00:13:07.840
includes the large corporations that are benefiting from the commissions, from the NGOs and charities that
00:13:13.440
are benefiting from their largesse, all of them will see weakness because they too might say,
00:13:19.200
okay, we're not actually going to get our funding anymore and our lives and our luxuries will go.
00:13:24.240
Here we have George Simeon talking about mass migration.
00:13:27.440
We will oppose illegal migration. We will stop the anti-american change in Europe.
00:13:36.400
We will go beyond illegal immigration and under uh anti-american protests.
00:13:54.260
Donald Trump! Donald Trump! Donald Trump! Donald Trump!
00:14:02.480
Donald Trump is not just a person, he's a symbol of freedom that will cover all the free world.
00:14:12.160
I don't know, how does this sound from the perspective of someone from, let's say, in Romania?
00:14:22.580
Well, it's interesting. I was in a small coffee shop just outside of Winchester by chance with my daughter yesterday.
00:14:28.240
And we're having an ice cream and we ended up with a conversation with a chap who was from Romania.
00:14:33.700
Bogdan, if you're listening, now that I've told you to watch, very interesting man, all about freedom.
00:14:40.180
He felt that his nation, after Ceaușescu, had become more dominated by a new form of communism.
00:14:48.320
And that new form of communism, in his view, was the European Union.
00:14:52.700
So there are those who see alternatives to the European Union, whether it's coming from Trump, whether it's coming from Simeon,
00:15:00.620
to actually say that we want a different way of thinking in our country, not the way of the elites.
00:15:06.560
Because, of course, straight after Ceaușescu, in we came with the European Union, in we came with the MI6 and the US,
00:15:19.940
We positioned the politicians and we positioned the business people to be in charge of the influential areas
00:15:26.600
before stripping out the parts that they wanted.
00:15:29.800
So you've kept an elite, you've built on an elite.
00:15:32.780
And some of those that decided to get rid of Ceaușescu, ardent communists realised where the wind was blowing
00:15:37.880
and they kept their jobs, they kept their influence, they were suddenly promoted into big companies, NGOs and moved to the EU.
00:15:46.180
That's what we're up against, the same people, and their families and friends who continued after that.
00:15:56.040
I think that this rhetoric was designed to address the Romanian diaspora, but I don't think it worked well within Romania.
00:16:05.080
Because if you see the issue with immigration to Romania, they have a very small migration population.
00:16:12.120
It's 3.6, and most of it is of European origin.
00:16:16.580
And this rhetoric targeted Romanians from the diaspora, but it worked only to Romanians that were outside of Romania,
00:16:26.860
who were in more Western nations, and not to the extent that they particularly expected.
00:16:33.180
Whereas in other cases, the Roman diaspora chose to help Nicosia or Dan.
00:16:44.000
So let me just give you a really fun thing, which was, I think, very unfair to George Simeone.
00:16:49.580
At some point he announced, I'm the new president of Romania, and he used the flag of Chad, which I thought that it was a bit weird.
00:17:03.000
But I checked out and I saw that the flags are really close, and it's just the shade of blue that is a bit different.
00:17:10.580
And so he just made a mistake, but then people made fun of him, and they said, you know, make Chad great again.
00:17:17.200
That was a fun moment, but I think it was a bit unfair to him.
00:17:20.640
So he made this, initially he said that he won the election.
00:17:24.220
Then he said that he is, that the votes have been counted and that Nick Jordan won,
00:17:29.600
and that he isn't going to challenge the results.
00:17:32.340
And let us go to Georgescu now, because what happened was that there were presidential elections in Romania at the end of November 2024,
00:17:46.460
He didn't become president, he won the first round with around 23%.
00:17:50.840
And then what happened was that the EU annulled the results, and they basically said that there is a campaign of misinformation surrounded by Georgescu.
00:18:04.240
There have been more than 800 TikTok accounts that are boosting his image and his message, cultivating support for Georgescu.
00:18:15.560
And also they accused him of being pro-fascist, being essentially someone who is supporting anti-constitutional and anti-democratic forces within Romania,
00:18:29.560
and forces that are pro-corruption as opposed to anti-corruption, which is the big flagship of Nicko Jordan.
00:18:37.160
Didn't it turn out that the campaign was actually organized by the opposition to him,
00:18:42.860
and that they themselves had sponsored some kind of campaign.
00:18:48.360
Then the Romanian courts annulled it, annulled the election on that basis,
00:18:52.800
and it turned out that the Russians were not involved in any way.
00:18:55.860
So they sort of manufactured a story themselves, very similar to the Russia collusion story in the United States,
00:19:03.360
and then used that to annul the elections with full EU endorsement and support.
00:19:08.560
And you had also the founder of Telegram saying that the French intelligence had told him to make sure
00:19:21.100
that right-wing voices in Romania were suppressed, except that he only spoke about it after the election.
00:19:27.160
Now, I'm not in his position, and I don't understand the pressures he's under,
00:19:30.460
and he's been arrested for owning Telegram, essentially, in the past.
00:19:34.360
But there is a concerted effort to play around with elections and to make sure that the right person wins.
00:19:42.100
I think that I take everything with a pinch of salt.
00:19:46.780
We're in the digital age, and I think that basically we cannot have election campaigns without digital foreign interference.
00:19:55.500
There will be propaganda campaigns in every election.
00:19:59.400
The flip side of it is that you then end up in the position where, for any electoral result,
00:20:06.100
you can allege some foreign intervention online.
00:20:10.760
It will be partially true, and it can be used as an excuse to annul any election.
00:20:17.080
These are the dangers, and that's what points to the potentially,
00:20:22.180
to the unnecessary exercise of authoritarian might by the EU,
00:20:28.820
because I think that the way they acted on Georgescu's case essentially was completely unnecessary.
00:20:38.000
Because Georgescu fought a campaign that was based upon a very specific agenda
00:20:44.400
that on the second round was almost bound to lose.
00:20:48.360
The way that they reacted, that the EU reacted, and especially here we have Thierry Breton,
00:20:54.340
I'm definitely certain, Stephen, that this isn't your favorite person from the EU.
00:21:01.500
He'd have us all arrested and put behind some sort of fencing walls
00:21:05.580
and only allowed out when we've been re-educated to accept the European Union,
00:21:12.740
And the point is that he is the smug face of the EU.
00:21:18.100
He was out on a panel, and he was so happy that they did this,
00:21:22.720
and they were saying, well, we can cancel elections.
00:21:29.660
And they're also using their own state agents to manipulate the social media framework.
00:21:37.700
If it was Russia or China, the Americans are doing it.
00:21:40.440
We're doing it. The European Union countries are doing it.
00:21:43.220
And then they turn around and say, oh, it's misinformation.
00:21:49.140
So everybody is now smart enough to understand.
00:21:51.820
The lines are being drawn because people are understanding the misinformation
00:22:04.220
People like Thierry Breton, who are making money, living nice lives,
00:22:07.500
wants us keep it that way and keep the poor out in their own walls.
00:22:12.420
The rest, which is a bigger number of people, are saying we're fed up.
00:22:15.340
It's just the middle ground who have yet to understand that they're the people
00:22:21.300
They're beginning to understand it slowly in different countries.
00:22:24.140
They're going, oh, well, we better stick with what we know first, the safety hands.
00:22:28.280
And as it gets closer and closer, then they're going to move over to the other parties.
00:22:34.500
And I think basically that this face of the EU is what is boosting the anti-EU sentiment.
00:22:44.380
So I think ultimately speaking that this has been a very telling case, case study.
00:22:52.920
And it represents a clash of perspectives that we're going to see more of in the near future.
00:23:07.360
He says, I usually do other stuff while listening to the podcast.
00:23:14.160
So every time any of you say Simeon, I get startled.
00:23:23.360
Moving on to the next segment, again, wanting to remind you of the importance of the Trivium course
00:23:29.700
and wanting to encourage you to go to the webinar and then see if this course is right for you.
00:23:39.500
And you will see that somebody like Barack Obama could have used a course like that in his own arguments.
00:23:44.520
But before we get there, the point I want to make in this segment is that the state is inherently and always going to be dogmatic.
00:23:55.220
And it's always going to try to teach some kind of values.
00:23:59.640
The idea of separation of values and politics is completely delusional.
00:24:04.060
You see the example that I want to use here is with results to the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biophobia.
00:24:20.780
Apparently, they have enough money to splurge on that.
00:24:23.160
You see UN women insisting that there is no difference between men and women.
00:24:29.020
I frankly don't understand the logic here, but here you are.
00:24:32.900
You see Dr. Tedros, I think he's the former Ethiopian Prime Minister or Minister of Health, and he's now with the WHO.
00:24:43.380
The World Health Organization tells you that there is no difference between men and women.
00:24:55.520
Previous years, NATO would have a big celebration for this kind of thing.
00:24:59.360
Now, with Trump in office, they seem to have toned it down.
00:25:02.900
But they would always be insisting on the extent of their support for pride, for transgenderism, etc.
00:25:12.780
UK and Mozambique, because Mozambique doesn't have bigger problems, I'm sure.
00:25:18.000
And therefore, the most important thing is the commitment to equality and inclusion.
00:25:24.440
Across different states, the Canadians know to homophobia, transphobia and biphobia.
00:25:35.740
So you can't really enjoy your time with a sport.
00:25:42.840
You must always think about this kind of thing.
00:25:46.580
EU in South Africa, the International Organization of Migration.
00:25:51.080
I mean, do you think that if people are genuinely fleeing from war, they would have bigger problems than this?
00:26:01.140
And of course, the European Central Bank, because it's not like European banks are close to bankruptcy.
00:26:06.640
It's not that the EU needs a bailout from the American Federal Reserve every time there's a crisis.
00:26:12.440
They have enough time on their hands to show their support for the LGBT plus community.
00:26:27.980
Well, I'm sure they will adjust it for next year.
00:26:37.920
We need to put forward, we need to push phobophobia and all these phobias should be banned or something.
00:26:44.520
And then you have Miss Ursula von der Leyen, be proud, proud of whom you love, proud of who you are, proud of who you are becoming.
00:26:57.140
So, if somebody were to say to Miss von der Leyen that someone should be proud of being German or British or English or Romanian,
00:27:08.700
I think she would have a little bit of a panic attack.
00:27:12.600
And she would absolutely refuse to acknowledge that it's legitimate to be proud of your nation.
00:27:18.760
However, of your, what I would argue, your sexual deviance, that you should be absolutely proud of.
00:27:28.660
What's happened here is clearly that every institution globally is parroting the same narrative.
00:27:39.520
You could go and see what the World Economic Forum is saying.
00:27:44.720
And the reason that I bring this up and the reason that I think this is important is because we've gone from tolerance to intolerance.
00:27:54.260
And I want to show you an example of what I mean by that here.
00:27:57.760
This is the evolution of Barack Obama on the question of homosexual marriage.
00:28:04.120
So, let's sort of go through it for a second here.
00:28:09.760
I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.
00:28:14.540
But I also detest the sort of bashing and vilifying of gays and lesbians because I think it's unduly divisive.
00:28:30.320
Most gays and lesbians are simply seeking basic recognition of their rights.
00:28:39.760
This is being presented as an argument for equality and against discrimination.
00:28:48.920
We've got to make sure that everybody is equal under the law.
00:28:52.700
And the civil unions that I proposed would be equivalent in terms of making sure that all the rights that are conferred by the state are equal for same-sex couples as well as for heterosexual couples.
00:29:07.360
Now, with respect to marriage, it's my belief that it's up to the individual denominations to make a decision as to whether they want to recognize marriage or not.
00:29:17.440
So, now you can decide how you want to recognize it.
00:29:22.980
And you are left with a degree of freedom as to whether or not you accept it.
00:29:28.360
So, it's equality, but your own personal freedom.
00:29:37.060
So, with respect to gay marriage, I do not support gay marriage, but I support a very strong version of civil unions where I think the state has to recognize the same rights and responsibilities for gay people, same-sex couples as they do for anybody else.
00:29:56.500
Because the state is not a religious institution.
00:30:04.360
To deny that there is religion in the state is belied by the fact that every organ of the state is now parroting the same message.
00:30:14.820
They're all adamant that you must celebrate homosexuality, you must celebrate transgenderism, you must celebrate et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, or the various identities that they've developed over the years.
00:30:28.320
This was happening at a time when the whole trans debate wasn't even happening.
00:30:32.340
And what followed from the recognition of the so-called right of homosexuals to marry was the imposition of this new dogma on everybody else.
00:30:45.780
And I'm not going to show you the whole clip here, but then Obama goes on to say that he's going to use executive power to make sure that all hospitals throughout the United States,
00:30:57.820
a huge chunk of which are Catholic hospitals, must treat homosexuals and normal people, I'm going to say, equally, because anything else wouldn't be acceptable.
00:31:10.940
And he's threatened to deny federal funding to any hospital that receives Medicare or Medicaid.
00:31:17.500
But isn't an argument here now, he's talking about, you know, religion.
00:31:24.820
Isn't it saying that I am now the head of the church of the state, and therefore I'm going to deny the state what our morals are?
00:31:32.260
Yep, I'm going to jump in here because one of the comments is brilliant.
00:31:35.220
We're not allowed to discuss what religion the state has adopted.
00:31:39.180
But we must, because the state is an arbiter of moral values.
00:31:44.400
All questions of politics, all questions of law, have a moral foundation.
00:31:49.980
And to deny that and to pretend, as Obama did here, that the state is always secular.
00:31:58.140
The hierarchy of the secular state is different from the hierarchy of the church.
00:32:02.020
I think, basically, there cannot be any kind of valueless and value-free governance.
00:32:11.040
This is just, people don't know, people who say this don't know what they're talking about.
00:32:15.540
But one thing that is, from a realistic perspective, really important, has to do with the tyranny of minority.
00:32:21.820
Because in many cases, in many countries, I'd say the majority of countries where we have democracy, we have parties that make a sort of forecasting, sort of calculation of what kind, of how many votes they expect from particular groups of population.
00:32:41.260
And if we have a group that can have, let's say, 3-4% of the population, maybe a bit less, it can be a very important player in tilting elections.
00:32:53.620
That is why we have center-left and center-right parties and centrist parties being pro-LGBTQ plus agenda.
00:33:04.620
Because they want to count on their votes at the end of the day.
00:33:08.560
And because we're voting for agendas of parties, not specific policies, they're putting in this from the back end?
00:33:19.000
Well, all political parties are trying to find different groups of people.
00:33:22.280
But if you look at the LGBT community, one of the things that they also have is higher levels of income, higher levels of influence in media and TV and music.
00:33:32.860
And so those modern-day powers, which have much more control over the young and the younger voters, that's also incredibly influential.
00:33:45.580
Well, we're going to talk about disinformation in a second because this is relevant to the discussion here.
00:33:50.840
I mean, Obama went from saying that he's neutral on this to saying that legalizing homosexual marriage is a huge victory for America because everybody must be equal.
00:34:02.040
But as Thomas Jefferson understood, there is, and he was basing this on Aristotle, I understand, there is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal people.
00:34:15.280
Yeah, that's in Nicomachean Ethics' book 5 on justice, where he's talking about fairness.
00:34:21.280
He says, treating equal claims equally is fairness plus treating unequal claims unequally.
00:34:29.580
If you treat everyone equally, you're unfair for Aristotle, and he's correct.
00:34:35.660
Because the issue that can't be avoided here is that this has become a new state dogma.
00:34:46.660
And that this, the state, using its power, is trying to impose this dogma on anybody who dares to disagree.
00:34:59.860
Imagine working for a big corporation and saying that you disagree with homosexual marriage publicly.
00:35:11.000
I was lucky because I was only made redundant as opposed to being directly sacked.
00:35:18.580
And I think we need to understand their perspective more.
00:35:21.060
So part of Christian charity is to try to understand the perspective of the enemy as best as you can.
00:35:31.200
And as this is the court philosopher of the World Economic Forum,
00:35:36.640
I think we need to take a minute to listen to what he has to say about...
00:35:43.700
Darwin is the kind of prophet of sexual liberation.
00:35:49.060
If I think about the liberation of gay people, of LGBTQ people,
00:35:53.520
then if you dig underneath, you eventually find Darwin.
00:35:56.880
For centuries upon centuries, gay people were persecuted and oppressed because of this mythological idea about sex,
00:36:07.980
that sex was created by God for the purpose of procreation.
00:36:15.500
And if you use sex for anything else, you're sinning against the purpose of the thing, so you must be punished.
00:36:27.240
She's nodding as if she knows what she's talking about.
00:36:40.260
She would understand philosophy if someone wrote it down in front of her in a word.
00:36:43.760
And see how he summarizes his own point of view.
00:36:54.180
Does this apply, say, to cannibalism, which exists in nature?
00:37:07.440
The idea that there is no purpose to our lives and to our nature...
00:37:12.940
Or that nature has no purpose is revolutionary in the worst way possible,
00:37:19.540
in that it is purely destructive and deprives us of having any kind of ordered thinking.
00:37:25.760
Now, you would assume that someone like Harari would therefore conclude that there are no values to be worried about.
00:37:34.100
But in reality, the man is a big political player in Israel.
00:37:39.280
He's opposing Benjamin Netanyahu over the judicial reforms that Netanyahu is trying to impose
00:37:45.540
that would limit the ability of the Israeli judiciary to intervene in democratic decisions.
00:37:52.580
So Harari is of the view that a certain expert class must use its superior knowledge and intelligence to govern.
00:38:01.660
And that the hoi polloi, us people, who vote on things, shouldn't have a say.
00:38:08.340
And he views any challenge to that as an attack on democratic norms.
00:38:14.700
So it's not that the man concludes that his own values should be treated in the same way
00:38:19.020
as having no purpose and no relevance and what have you.
00:38:22.580
He is fully dogmatic, but about his own dogma, and doesn't realize that he's dogmatic.
00:38:30.380
Which brings us to a point that Chesterton made, and I know you're familiar with it,
00:38:35.400
that there are only two kinds of people in the world, those who are dogmatic and know it,
00:38:42.100
And the continuation is that the latter, the ones who are dogmatic but do not know it,
00:38:50.620
Because if you know your dogma, you know where it's bounded, and you know that it's dogma.
00:38:55.320
Whereas these guys have no idea that they're being dogmatic,
00:38:57.940
and that they're trying to impose things that haven't been...
00:39:02.420
You know, if they are that nefarious, we have a problem.
00:39:07.180
I just think Yuval Noah Harari knows exactly what he's talking about,
00:39:10.280
and he's just being utterly dishonest about it.
00:39:15.820
How do you have a purpose of a plant, or an animal that tries to eat you
00:39:23.640
That has a purpose to devour you, and to destroy you.
00:39:35.320
Literally, I could talk about it for 10 hours plus.
00:39:39.060
And if you take the statement, nothing is a natural...
00:39:49.400
One implication is that there is basically no morality.
00:39:58.660
Everything that exists in nature, nothing in nature has a purpose.
00:40:05.840
Well, this is a very subversive way of viewing things.
00:40:13.340
You can distinguish between an ideologue and a theorist
00:40:21.140
And the idea that we should part with common sense is the mark of the ideologue.
00:40:28.380
And when they begin saying things like, well, there's nothing that has a purpose.
00:40:35.860
Thought has a purpose, which is to portray the truth.
00:40:49.000
So, you know, what you're thinking about is totally unnatural.
00:40:55.280
And the only thing that's, for me, that makes him look like a brain
00:40:58.020
is he's trying to show more of it because he hasn't got anything on his head.
00:41:04.240
If nothing that exists is unnatural, therefore, all the things he criticizes are natural.
00:41:12.940
He just says, most people are so completely false about it.
00:41:21.060
We need essentially a strong state to tell them...
00:41:25.180
Darwin wouldn't have even been considering homophobia, biphobia, transphobia,
00:41:30.600
any of these issues when he was looking at the way that the world that considered,
00:41:34.500
unless he was looking at animals not being able to have sex between, you know,
00:41:39.560
But other than that, he had no concept of what this Yuval has tried to create.
00:41:44.220
He's just trying to be smart for being smart's sake.
00:41:48.360
And I think with all of these things, we should always look at the consequences.
00:41:53.260
If you believe this, then here are some of the consequences.
00:41:57.620
One of the consequences is that now you can just buy a baby.
00:42:01.960
You can design and manufacture a baby and go and buy one.
00:42:05.240
And we no longer have to pretend that, okay, we're a happy couple
00:42:09.780
and a gay couple is equal to a straight couple.
00:42:16.140
Single men can just go and purchase babies and take them from their mothers.
00:42:28.080
Single man can go out and buy a baby and then he can raise him
00:42:31.460
and do whatever he likes inside and we just do not know what sort of perversions
00:42:40.720
It's really impossible not to assume the worst about these men.
00:42:47.600
A 60-something guy buys a baby in South America.
00:42:50.400
I mean, you find an impoverished woman, you get her to carry a baby for you
00:42:54.440
and then you take the boy and you are behind closed doors with him
00:43:08.120
He doesn't know he's going to be dead whilst the child is growing up.
00:43:13.240
He doesn't have any understanding of the pain that you would go through
00:43:16.360
if something hurts, you know, like a blood parent would do.
00:43:19.640
You know, I'm not saying that people don't because they don't adopt people
00:43:24.700
Look at the way that this is just the buying of children.
00:43:38.300
According to the philosophy of Harari, all we are is just matter, emotion.
00:43:51.220
There is no basis to say that this is wrong from the standpoint of Yuval Harari.
00:44:09.740
So we need to look at these philosophies and go beyond the sentimentalism of,
00:44:15.680
oh, but equality, oh, but poor so-and-so, oh, but whatever.
00:44:18.920
There is real evil that's being perpetuated against innocent children.
00:44:24.860
And if everything is natural and nothing is unnatural, there's no reason to object.
00:44:32.180
But also it shows the ridiculous extent they are prepared to go in order to whitewash their political allies.
00:44:42.420
It's one thing to say, guys, there is such a thing as morality, and maybe you're a bit harsher on group A, B, and C.
00:44:49.820
But they straightforwardly go for the nuclear option, which implies there is no morality.
00:44:53.740
No, they didn't go straightforwardly for the nuclear option.
00:44:55.900
You have to remember, Obama was arguing that it should be about equality and justice and fairness and including everybody.
00:45:06.540
The Economist was writing articles about how legalizing gay marriage was a good thing because then they'd just be normal, suburban, middle-class parents and nothing would change.
00:45:18.000
So the argument, the revolutionary argument came after they won.
00:45:22.160
They revealed their agenda after they captured the state, after they became in a position to use the state's dogma and the state's ability to impose dogma on others.
00:45:33.380
You hear endless stories about teachers being sacked for saying, okay, I don't believe that this child could be trans.
00:45:40.280
I don't believe that homosexuality is a good thing, etc.
00:45:44.060
If you as a teacher say this, you immediately get sacked for it.
00:46:03.300
Obama personally was arguing that homosexuality was innate.
00:46:07.240
And that because it was innate, it came from nature.
00:46:10.940
And if it came from nature, as Harari was saying, then there's nothing wrong with it.
00:46:18.340
Because in reality, there isn't anything genetic that determines homosexuality.
00:46:24.120
There are various genes that interplay with homosexuality.
00:46:28.120
But there is no way to predict someone being homosexual based on their genes.
00:46:36.160
So, even starting from nature, this argument falls pretty much flat on its face.
00:46:47.120
And we've ended up in a situation where just you can randomly purchase children from any poor country
00:46:56.180
because a young woman needs a bit of extra income.
00:47:05.820
So, the idea that everything boils down to genes is completely foreign to me.
00:47:11.680
I don't think that everything boils down to genes.
00:47:13.500
But even if it did, I think there is such a thing as saying that if there were absolutely
00:47:19.540
no disposition whatsoever in any human being, it would never have arisen in the first place.
00:47:26.120
So, there are people who say, well, it's not biology.
00:47:30.900
Well, society wouldn't try to enforce it in the first place or wouldn't involve it
00:47:38.480
Because society occurs within biological grounds, let's say.
00:47:45.760
My argument would be that we are naturally prone to doing some evil because of original sin
00:47:52.140
and that sexual perversions, including cheating on your partner,
00:47:58.760
including doing things that you shouldn't do, form part of our menu of sins that we choose from.
00:48:07.300
Does it mean that human nature has a disposition towards homosexuality?
00:48:10.380
It would imply that human nature is naturally flawed.
00:48:16.220
If we were all capable of being saints, we wouldn't be a fallen species.
00:48:22.100
We're capable of being saints, but we must struggle with evil to be saints.
00:48:27.020
It would imply that the correct way to view humanity is through the mix of original sin and divine grace
00:48:35.360
that we are all born with and that we are all called upon to struggle to let the grace shine and to bury the sin.
00:48:48.780
And then, you know, they tried to teach this stuff in schools as it was normal.
00:48:53.380
But then when you look at the promiscuity rates in the homosexual community,
00:48:59.540
you find that they're extremely high and that older homosexual people are much more likely to be promiscuous
00:49:07.080
than older people in general, and I'll leave your imagination to sort of think through what that means.
00:49:15.040
You end up with dogs infected with monkeypox, which is something that I really don't want to discuss
00:49:31.240
And you end up in a situation where this dogma is being forced on children as though it was neutral.
00:49:40.220
However, I want to read another Chesterton quote here.
00:49:44.680
Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education.
00:49:51.240
A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.
00:50:00.160
The true task of culture today is not a task of expansion, but of selection and rejection.
00:50:08.280
The educationist must find a creed and teach it.
00:50:19.140
The Catholic Church and the schools that I went to are so different to the way that I was educated
00:50:34.900
We have an archbishop who went over to Rome to vote.
00:50:39.120
Archbishop of Canterbury, who I kind of met his team about immigration.
00:50:44.640
And they're all openly, happily bringing as many people in as possible.
00:50:49.540
So they're in that kind of group of individuals that just simply no longer care about the education.
00:50:58.800
They have enough schools here and here, enough teachers.
00:51:00.820
You could protect those teachers who want to follow true rules.
00:51:05.540
They fail to do so in schools across the UK all the time.
00:51:08.960
Being nominally Catholic or even being a good Catholic or trying to be a good Catholic
00:51:15.160
doesn't protect you about being wrong all the time or against falling behind the currents.
00:51:22.660
And yes, there are certainly elements in the Catholic establishment that are chasing this
00:51:30.340
But the bedrock is fundamentally opposed to it.
00:51:33.580
I think basically, I have taught at university for six years.
00:51:52.100
And the term dogmatic was initially the opposition to the term skeptic.
00:52:01.100
So being dogmatic originally meant you think you possess knowledge.
00:52:07.380
Being a skeptic meant originally you suspended judgment.
00:52:11.920
The skeptic, nowadays, you'd say the dominant intellectual orthodoxy in Western countries is
00:52:20.460
It tries to say that being a skeptic essentially means being very dogmatic about things that
00:52:27.300
bring human nature down to the level of matter.
00:52:30.160
It's not at all suspending judgment because they make constant judgments all the time.
00:52:40.120
So one thing, I think that it's a good thing to try to instill both a kind of dogmatic element
00:52:47.880
in education, but also a kind of critical element.
00:52:50.860
Because without the critical element, you make students essentially into people who are going
00:53:02.520
But you shouldn't confuse what is dogma and what isn't dogma.
00:53:06.460
Well, it depends again, because we will have discussions about whether something is true or false.
00:53:13.500
But I think that it's important to cultivate to students both a dogmatic disposition, but also a skeptical one.
00:53:21.100
I was just going to say, but putting a bit of levity in, I do like dogmatics.
00:53:35.020
A corporation needs 50% male board members and 50% female board members, and everybody celebrates.
00:53:41.400
A child needs a mother and a father, and everybody gets angry.
00:53:45.100
And this is the result of this complete loss of reality that we live in.
00:53:49.440
And the last thing that I want to conclude with is an argument from first principles in defense of what marriage really is.
00:54:02.000
Mr. Keyes, on the Channel 7 debate last Thursday night, you said, and I'm quoting you,
00:54:06.680
where procreation is, in principle, impossible, marriage is irrelevant.
00:54:12.380
You went on to say it was irrelevant and not needed.
00:54:15.540
What about marriage between people who are well beyond their childbearing age?
00:54:22.800
The word in principle means relating to the definition of, not relating to particular circumstances.
00:54:29.600
So if an apple has a worm in it, the worm is not part of the definition of the apple.
00:54:33.840
It doesn't change what the apple is in principle.
00:54:41.100
To act as if concepts are laughable means that you want to be irrational.
00:54:50.260
Human beings reason by means of concepts and definition.
00:54:56.260
And if you don't know how to operate with respect for those definitions, you can't make the law.
00:55:00.760
An individual who is impotent or another who is infertile does not change the definition
00:55:05.540
of marriage in principle because between a man and a woman in principle, procreation is always possible.
00:55:12.920
And it is that possibility which gave rise to the institution of marriage in the first place as a matter of law...
00:55:18.360
To 80-year-olds, it's still possible in principle.
00:55:22.240
But when it is impossible, as between two males or two females, you're talking about something
00:55:27.280
that's not just incidentally impossible, it's impossible in principle.
00:55:30.860
And that means that if you say that that's a marriage, you are saying marriage can be understood
00:55:38.280
You have changed its definition in such a way as, in fact, to destroy the necessity for the institution.
00:55:46.980
And if you want to learn to argue like this, please go for the trivium course.
00:55:52.320
There is such a thing as natural and unnatural.
00:55:59.500
When you pretend that the state doesn't have a dogma or that you can have a state without morality,
00:56:04.800
what you end up with is men buying children and much, much worse.
00:56:13.500
It's turned out that there is no possibility of a truly secular, amoral state.
00:56:20.320
And therefore, the question is, which one is the right morality?
00:56:24.320
The one that allows the buying and selling of children or the one that forbids it?
00:56:28.960
And that's what I want to end this segment with.
00:56:39.480
I wonder if Barak's stance on rainbow marriage changed once he finally consummated his marriage to Big Mike.
00:56:58.420
These people always end up giving back their credence and justification to PDF files.
00:57:23.660
So I think everybody needs to understand following that and looking at that last video,
00:57:28.220
how important it is a classical education can give you, particularly one of grammar and logic.
00:57:36.140
And although I'm not suggesting that we're committing rhetoric, I think we're doing the logic part of this course.
00:57:41.360
But you can see very well the importance of it.
00:57:43.740
And that's why this course is going to be invaluable to people.
00:57:51.460
I don't know if you can do Sanson, the next part, which is the introductory part.
00:57:57.320
I think just for yourself, for those who are not understanding the old classical ideas of Aristotle
00:58:03.580
and all of those points that will be raised by improving your logic today,
00:58:11.860
You just get a chance to get a flavour of what it actually is.
00:58:15.800
So I'm going to move on today and I'm going to get rid of this and move on to my part,
00:58:22.100
which is this, the ex-army chief issues a World War III warning
00:58:27.880
and brands the new access of power as more dangerous than Nazis.
00:58:33.340
This is all part for me in the context of what I see now is a very growing
00:58:38.240
and concerningly growing rhetoric across the West
00:58:41.860
where we're beginning to manufacture consent for World War III.
00:58:46.600
And what I'm going to show in this kind of segment is the way that they're preparing
00:58:54.760
Now, I think what you'll see as we go through this, ladies,
00:58:56.760
and part of the reasons why we were late today is because I had a whole load of links
00:59:00.000
and it's my apologies to the team that just didn't work.
00:59:03.660
So after the show, I will actually recreate all those links that you can see
00:59:10.680
But there'll be lots more than what we're going to talk about here
00:59:13.340
because I think it's important to see how all the categories I talk about
00:59:21.780
in order to try and persuade the public, not just this year,
00:59:25.640
but over the next coming decades to prepare ourselves
00:59:28.540
for what I think will be a war of all wars, to be honest,
00:59:34.420
So I begin here in the UK as part of preparing the public
00:59:49.880
who talks about, he's a former military chief, Sandhurst,
00:59:55.880
and he talked about the need that Russia, China and Iran
00:59:59.800
were the new Axis power and a third world war could break out
01:00:06.800
Think about the time scale of that by the time of 2030
01:00:14.420
are a greater threat than the Nazis were in 1935
01:00:18.760
because they're more independent and more aligned
01:00:27.000
The date of this was in May, I believe, of 2021, July.
01:00:33.800
In April of 21, the House Speaker of the United States
01:00:56.200
talking about the new Axis powers of Russia, China and Iran.
01:01:01.720
So clearly, our military and intelligence services
01:01:21.500
not just here, many, many mainstream newspapers.
01:01:27.120
is that argument is now being consistently used
01:01:40.680
and I'm looking, trying to find in terms of that,
01:01:51.220
I think this actually is more of a little bit later on
01:02:19.860
Now, we've heard this since before the war in Ukraine,
01:02:43.960
One where we have 175 million people in Russia,
01:02:56.460
The amount that we spend in military aid in NATO
01:03:03.680
We're warning the public that this is necessary.
01:03:30.100
I don't know whether you say AUKUS or AUKUS pact.
01:03:53.280
You must be the part of the team that's essential.
01:04:10.440
So you've got NATO talking about a China problem
01:04:36.900
I thought NATO was about the North Atlantic Treaty,
01:04:40.920
Now they're saying we need to go across the Asia-Pacific.
01:04:43.780
So you're drawing a new line with that of China.
01:05:20.880
Stage three of all part of this control package.