00:00:00.080Hello, and welcome to the podcast of The Lotus Eaters, episode 1423 for Thursday, the 21st of May, even, not June yet, getting ahead of myself, for 2026.
00:00:12.480I'm your host, Luke, joined today by Harry and Firas.
00:02:10.640I think you made a decent enough case.
00:02:12.420Well, not to spoil anything for those who haven't watched it yet, but it helps that we were actually making arguments, which the other side struggled with for some reason.
00:02:21.940I will maintain neutrality here rather than...
00:02:26.640Okay, Switzerland, we'll let you do that.
00:02:29.460Honestly, it was a really fun debate and we actually had some great talking points on there all around. Great fun. Go check it out.
00:02:38.300So, with all that said, Firas, tell us all.
00:02:43.000Yes, so there was Thomas Massey's primary on Tuesday, and he lost.
00:02:50.600And there's a lot of arguments going on as to what happened.
00:02:54.140Was it the Trump factor? Was it about Israel?
00:02:57.040Was it because Massey didn't vote for Trump on a bunch of things?
00:03:01.420And I thought I'd start by giving the Israeli perspective.
00:03:05.600And this is the time of Israel saying the GOP primary, Massey's primary, is now a costly battle over Israel.
00:03:15.580So just to sort of settle that question from the outset, was it about Israel, was it not about Israel, the Israelis are saying that it was.
00:03:24.120And they're also saying, I suppose implicit in that title, is that they were very threatened by one man.
00:10:05.140whereas Massey does not take APAC money and so the objection from Fitzpatrick was ignored but
00:10:13.780the objective from Massey was not and of course we remember that there was a huge fight over the
00:10:21.240Epstein files where Massey played a critical role along with Rohana and Nancy Mace and a couple of
00:10:26.860others forcing the administration to release I suppose it was also the fact that it required for
00:10:32.800for Massey to push through with that, it required him to put himself in alliance with Democrats as
00:10:38.360well. Which obviously they didn't take too kindly to, but it's like, look, if that's what it takes
00:10:44.720to get something as seismic as the Epstein files out there. I mean, the thing is, you have to
00:10:49.720remember what we learned from the Epstein files, right? Because the things that we learned from
00:10:53.440the Epstein files were genuinely insane. We learned that Macron was coordinating with the
00:10:59.100Epstein network, Macron being a former Rothschild banker, was coordinating with the Epstein network
00:11:04.120and the World Economic Forum to basically implement a single agenda. We learned that
00:11:10.400Peter Thiel, who is fully engaged in basically collecting everybody's data and surveying it
00:11:16.640through Palantir, is leading another network interfacing with Epstein. We learned that the
00:11:24.320Indians, when they want to approach Trump, get told that what Modi has to do is go to Israel
00:11:30.400and dance with Benjamin Netanyahu, and that will put him in Trump's good books.
00:11:35.720We learned that random Yemenis, when they want to make a deal to end the Saudi war on Yemen,
00:11:44.140believe that they need to go through Epstein. The things that we learned from the Epstein files
00:11:49.340were genuinely insane. And Trump was saying that if you release the Epstein files, you are going
00:11:54.460to be hurting my friends. Which suggests that the problem is Trump's friends. Yeah. And the fact
00:12:01.940that they have power over... And the fact that they have any power. Especially when you take
00:12:06.340someone like Macron as well, just being hooked up to that entire system while spending all that time
00:12:11.020as French president, residing over immigration, the deterioration of France, just the betrayal
00:12:16.600of the french people it's like okay so you do it's not that you're you don't have loyalties
00:12:22.360it's just that they're the wrong ones and exactly it also smashed a little bit of the whole left
00:12:27.880right theater stuff when it came to somebody like steve bannon turning out to be collaborating
00:12:33.560seemingly with noam chomsky on how to do a media push to rehabilitate epstein's public image and
00:12:41.080now to attack the Pope and working with Epstein to meet with the Qataris after the bid to sort
00:12:49.820of eliminate the Muslim Brotherhood's headquarters in Qatar failed. And that had to go through Epstein.
00:12:56.760The reconciliation between anti-Islam America first and the literal Muslim Brotherhood
00:13:02.120went through Jeffrey Epstein. The peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians,
00:13:09.260The guy who organized much of the Oslo agreements was regularly in contact with Epstein and his children were left, I think, $10 million each or $10 million total by the Epstein estate.
00:13:23.260So what we learned from the Epstein files was genuinely cataclysmic.
00:13:27.700And we wouldn't know any of it if it weren't for the efforts of Thomas Massey.
00:19:53.420And you see this all the time with this kind of massive spending.
00:19:58.940And I thought that rather than just having me go on about this,
00:20:03.480I thought it might be highlighting this issue in its historic context.
00:20:08.780And here's Richard Nixon, who is very, very unfairly maligned in my view, and I will resume Nixon posting soon, but let's talk about Richard Nixon.
00:20:21.360He is, and I won't hear a word against him.
00:20:24.380It isn't a question whether I felt it.
00:20:26.660The fact is that American Jews support Israel, and I understood that.
00:20:31.460And the fact is that every Jewish prime minister that I have known has enlisted American Jews to bring as much pressure as possible in the political process on American presidents.
00:20:46.180Now, a president must not go along with it on occasion because some – let me explain something about what is called the Jewish lobby in this country.
00:20:55.800In the first place, Jews, understandably in the United States, because of what happened in World War II, because of the Holocaust, are going to put first priority on the survival of Israel.
00:21:12.380Now, as good Americans as they are, they believe that America's survival and security is directly related to Israel's.
00:21:24.680In other words, their belief is that being for Israel first means that that does not mean you're putting America second because they think it goes together.
00:21:35.820An American president, however, has to approach it in a different way, in my opinion.
00:21:43.740And he goes on to say that the Israel lobby should be treated in the same way as, I don't know, a Polish lobby or an Irish lobby or a Chinese lobby.
00:21:54.080or any other country, if that isn't the United States.
00:21:58.240If there were Chinese super PACs setting up
00:22:02.660and pouring $15 million into primaries for either party,
00:22:06.540you would say, well, that's the Chinese bought and paid for candidate.
00:22:10.720Yes, and we constantly hear about Chinese spies
00:22:13.580because you're not allowed to assume that your origins matter,
00:22:19.700that your actual ethnic affiliation matters.
00:24:30.000I said, no, the Congress of the United States is Israeli-occupied territory.
00:24:33.660What I meant by that is the most powerful lobby in Washington, which Congress can't stand up to, one of the most powerful, is certainly the pro-Israeli lobby.
00:24:43.920It has gotten its way in this town year in and year out.
00:24:47.440And I don't think the automatic votes of the Congress of the United States for $3 and $4 billion worth of aid to Israel are necessarily in the national interest of the United States.
00:24:56.700And that comment, which is to ridicule the subservience of the Congress of the United States, is perfectly valid.
00:25:02.620Do you believe there are members of the Congress of the United States who are voting the interest of Israel over the interest of the United States?
00:25:08.020No, I think they're voting the interest of a powerful lobby, which they can't stand up to in many cases, one of many.
00:25:13.920They cave into lobbies all over this city.
00:25:17.020I think the Congress of the United States, where it's got brave men on both sides, is an institutional coward.
00:25:22.760And that when a powerful lobby can influence or defeat them back at home and they can't get much support on the other side for a vote,
00:25:31.100Many of them who will even tell you privately, they will tell you privately,
00:25:34.860I can't stand up to that kind of heat.
00:25:53.340I wanted you to see that part because I think he killed the conversation.
00:25:56.500When we're talking about, say, the Iran war and say the Israel lobby is a problem with the Iran war, well, it's obviously not the corn lobby that is pushing for the Iran war.
00:27:08.480So this isn't a new issue, and it's clearly about Israel.
00:27:15.180And again, in case you're wondering, here's Ynet, which is the English version of Yadiot Aharonot, one of the biggest newspapers in Israel, making it clear that the defeat of Thomas Massey was a victory for Trump and AIPAC.
00:27:30.680and then you have AIPAC saying no no no it wasn't us it was just the voters
00:27:37.820then they say actually our community was proud to help pro-israel candidates win these races
00:27:45.240against people who are anti-israel and you have to okay so which one is it
00:27:50.300like pick one pick a lane and stick to it it's amazing you know we don't you know millions and
00:27:58.160millions of dollars into it but it wasn't anything to do with us nothing to do people just came to
00:28:02.740their own logical and rational conclusions which is why this is a multi-million dollar industry
00:28:07.400because advertising never affected anybody exactly exactly i mean come on and just to sort of settle
00:28:14.000this and be done with the nonsense john potter came out and just said it and that's the last
00:28:20.280clip that i will play i think it is a good thing if massey and the people like him and others believe
00:28:27.940that if you cross the line into anti-Semitism, Jews are going to use the power that we have
00:28:37.340openly to go for you. Because what other recourse is there? Are we just going to sit here and take
00:28:46.100it, beg for scraps, hope that nice people are nice to us? The Democratic Party is going
00:28:54.820explicitly anti-Semitic. We can see it happening. People are getting benefits, as Seth says,
00:29:00.560for being anti-Semites. That seems to be part of an appeal in primaries to the left and the party.
00:29:08.080We have to use what means there are at our disposal. And in my view, and I'm going to put
00:29:13.620that is Jewish money. There is an enormous amount of Jewish money in politics, by which I mean
00:29:19.060jewish donors wildly disproportionate not only charitably
00:29:25.600the thing is right it's like on the one hand you're very concerned about a perception
00:29:32.800of you that is currently taking hold in america and on the other hand you're saying and the way
00:29:39.060to fix this is not to have an open dialogue about it with the people who maybe feel aggrieved or
00:29:45.160slighted or lacking representation in their own government. It's to just outfund them forever
00:29:52.220so that they never get a look in. And that's supposed to help the optics. That's supposed to
00:29:59.780make it calm everything right down, I assume. Here's the thing. If you say Jewish money cost
00:30:09.280Massey the election, you're an anti-Semite. If Potter says it, he's bragging, and it's a good
00:30:19.220thing. So the truth and the perception of the truth don't depend on objective facts,
00:30:27.340they depend on who is saying it. When you say it, you're evil. When he says it, it's a good thing,
00:30:35.720and what else did you expect? And that's the standard that's being applied here.
00:30:41.840And that's the bottom line. You just have to be able to just walk through this. You just have to
00:30:48.980wade through the nonsense that's going to be thrown against you and say, this is what you're
00:30:53.480saying, mate. You're saying it out in the open. As most people would if they got charged with
00:31:00.300Islamophobia. They don't care just carrying on because it's the evidence before you was like,
00:31:05.600Exactly. So that's my segment. Sorry, I went a little bit over time.
00:50:52.340Oh, he's going to really lose it next year, he doesn't.
00:50:55.080The biggest rampage he ever did was a fantasy.
00:50:58.200Just wait until he gets his hand on the MacGuffin, he gets the MacGuffin, nothing happens.
00:51:03.260and then he dies amazing fantastic writing all because they hate you the chuds and half of the
00:51:10.280audience also hates the other half of the audience because one half was watching it because they
00:51:15.280unironically thought man this is excellently written biting cutting satire and the other end
00:51:22.640was watching it kind of waiting for homelander to actually go crazy and just start killing liberals
00:51:28.820because they were going to turn it into hype edits on Twitter and that's all that's all though so
00:51:34.580both of these parts of the audience diametrically despise one another and only one got what they
00:51:40.500wanted and are trying to desperately convince themselves that because it reaffirmed their
00:51:45.560political beliefs back at them that makes it's good it parroted what I wanted to hear therefore
00:51:51.300it good excellent and people are just trying to like explain the most obvious thing in the world
00:51:57.740So at the end of the show, well, in the middle of the last episode, this evil Trump supervillain, superpowered, godlike creature gets his powers taken away from him, tries to run away, and then just gets murdered.
00:52:10.460And as he's being murdered, he begs, he says, oh, I'll suck you off if you don't kill me.
00:52:18.020I'll debase myself in all manner of ways.
01:04:39.420If some Dutch academic wants to go to, you know, to New Delhi to study at one of their universities or something, no one's going to notice it.
01:04:51.280But if you were to move just a small, like 0.1% of India's overall population into the Netherlands, everyone would notice it overnight.
01:08:17.340Your ancestors left many things behind when they came here, but some things always stayed with them.
01:08:23.740The fragrance of their soil, memories of their festivals, the melodies of devotional songs, and the values passed down by their forefathers, Modi said during his address.
01:08:34.000Now, this immediately suggests, of course, that they actually have Indian values and Indian identities and not European values and European identities.
01:08:42.760I know that this is not a very big brain take.
01:08:45.900However, seeing as all of our leaders seem to be gullible enough to accept it, perhaps it is a more insightful comment than they're able to get.
01:08:56.620I'll just read some more passages going down where it says that generations change, countries change, surroundings change, but family values in the sense of belonging never changed.
01:09:07.260and from from a separate interview that i don't have the link for it said it's always a delight
01:09:11.780to interact with the indian diaspora so much love and enthusiasm to tell you the truth for a while
01:09:18.360i even forgot that i'm in the netherlands feels like um some festival is going on somewhere in
01:09:24.740india he said it's like yeah yeah i i guess it would feel like that how is this good for dutch
01:09:31.120people right where is the dutch uh can you do a stone toss meme now yeah and so then we move on
01:09:40.500to sweden you know poor poor sweden which is going through the exact same thing and has had to have
01:09:46.240um um you know a visit from modi as well and would you believe it uh it just so happens if
01:09:54.400you go to an article further down here he talks about the fact that uh the prime minister underline
01:10:00.160the importance of connectivity and the greed to advance talent attraction and active promotion
01:10:06.080of people-to-people exchanges. This word keeps coming back time and time again, including
01:10:11.920mobility of students and researchers study in Sweden and highlighting skilled labour
01:10:17.460work in Sweden. The Prime Minister Moreau...
01:10:25.340because who in sweden like and also you've got any country in the world to go to
01:10:32.440why would you choose india what what are you saying i'm saying that there are places that
01:10:39.880would be less stressful to maybe go and do your work experience well a lot of people want to go
01:10:44.880there to find themselves i suppose yeah i think i think the the funny thing is like if you said
01:10:52.620this 10 years ago I think everybody would have just said like oh yeah I'd love to go to India
01:10:56.360it's so spiritual and magical but in the past year especially it's his reputation online has
01:11:03.640just completely tanked yeah and strange as well there was another point I wanted to draw on here
01:11:10.260which is that whilst Modi has been going about having the meetings and you know the private
01:11:14.880ceremonies with all of these European leaders as well a lot of the entertainment and kind of like
01:11:21.240cultural connection that they're trying to do, the diplomacy of it, is to show him things like
01:11:27.400this. As Modi says here, this isn't Oslo, which you'd never guess by the picture, but this is in
01:11:33.820Oslo. It says, including rhythms of India, which reflects the cultural diversity of India. Now,
01:11:39.180I do also have points about this as well when he comes to Italy, but I'll just actually make the
01:11:45.260larger point here, which is that what's very strange is that if a European leader goes to
01:11:50.660India. India, Modi, his, you know, government, always use it as an excuse to show like the
01:11:58.400cultural majesty of India. That, you know, how beautiful India is and its culture to say to the
01:12:04.040Europeans, look how vitalistic we are. Look how in sync we are with our own heritage and our own
01:12:10.760sense of place. Which is a reasonable thing for a place to do that is proud of its own heritage.
01:12:14.860Absolutely. But when it comes to Europe, it's full of European leaders not showing him what is best about Dutch culture, what is best about Norwegian culture, what is best about Italian culture.
01:12:28.740It's them saying, oh, look, here's like a sort of mock-up of that thing that you guys do over there.
01:12:33.900because they have no confidence in their own culture.
01:17:35.560I was just going to say, but you are right
01:17:37.080that all of our leaders just keep protecting it.
01:17:40.560Right, and it comes back to what we were saying
01:17:42.940in your segment as well, Firas, about APAC.
01:17:45.400It's like, look, from their own sense of preservation and their own power, it's like, you get why they're doing it. I understand why Modi is doing this. What I don't understand are why our leaders are allowing it to happen.
01:17:58.960And the other problem that we have is that the longer it's allowed to go on and the more that the Indian diaspora is able to flourish and, as you say, Harry, create this soft power throughout the continent, not just in Europe, but in America, in Canada, in New Zealand and many other places as well, it's going to make it much harder to detangle ourselves from that power when we get to a point where it's like, actually, it's time for your community.
01:18:28.960communities for obviously foreign communities, which is why you're doing things like this,
01:18:33.280it's time for you to go home now, right? And then all of a sudden, because of all these trade deals
01:18:38.580you've done with India and you've linked your economy to them inextricably, it's going to
01:18:43.820really, really hurt. It's going to really hurt. Well, one of the other reasons for this, like you
01:18:49.140say, is my GDP, but a lot of these governments will face a lot of business pressure from enormous
01:18:56.200multinational corporations who are trying to get as much cheap labor into every nation that they
01:19:01.280operate in um as possible you know like in london britain there's the chamber of commerce which says
01:19:07.300like oh there are all of these different jobs which aren't going right now we're not filling
01:19:11.860these positions we have this many vacant positions so there's this deficit so we need to bring more
01:19:17.500people in so that we can fill that deficit rather than pay more rather than pay more ignore as well
01:19:22.140the fact that a lot of those positions will just be ghost positions put up online that don't
01:19:26.720actually go anywhere because they're just putting the job up so they have something to advertise
01:19:30.380which is just a completely different subject that'll be happening all over europe those
01:19:35.460businesses will be saying therefore because of this we need more people in so there is a huge
01:19:40.780business incentive and so if we're talking about italy frankly in classic italian fashion one of
01:19:48.860the ways that you stamp down on political pressure to continue doing this, you would have to bring
01:19:54.200the massive corporations under heel, whether that be through antitrust action or greater
01:20:01.840regulations on them. Obviously, you want to give them enough room to be able to conduct their
01:20:07.020business without them just shifting somewhere else in the globalized system. But you do need
01:20:12.160to really bring these people under heel because they do not care about your country. They care
01:20:17.420about their bottom line. Yeah. I've gotten some flack for saying this, but a system in which
01:20:21.640billionaires fall from windows is better than a system in which billionaires buy elections.
01:20:26.820Yeah. Just to conclude with this point here as well, and I swear, if there are Italians
01:20:33.400listening to this, just really take this in. Maloney and Modi welcomed the launch of the ICI
01:20:40.240Italy Calls India, a university enterprise talent bridge aimed at enhancing the talent of
01:20:46.860indian students enrolled in italian universities by offering concrete pathways for guidance matching
01:20:53.960and qualified integration into italian enterprises they also discussed the possibility of strengthening
01:21:00.940the cooperation to fight against irregular migration because why have irregular migration
01:21:06.500when you could have regular indian migration because nobody on a student visa ever overstayed
01:21:11.360right no and and also right we absolutely didn't just have some tamil guy come from india in the
01:21:18.160past three years and he's now a green member of the scottish parliament on the student visa still
01:21:24.060applying for a longer term visa as well i mean what we're describing here and what we're describing
01:21:28.780in a lot of these cases when it comes to the universities and the student visas it's just a
01:21:32.500gigantic pyramid scheme to keep these universities open and making money universities need to be
01:21:36.740broken yeah their backs need to be broken yeah and there's there's got to be an acceptance that
01:21:42.100there's going to be a massive recession but after that things will improve but nothing will improve
01:21:47.260before a massive recession that sort of stamps on big businesses and stamps on the universities
01:21:52.520in 2008 could have been that but they just decided to keep bailing all of the all of the
01:21:56.820all of the culprits out um and whilst all of this is going on as well you've just got Ursula von
01:22:04.280and giving just medals out to all of the wonderful Eurocrats and, oh gosh, aren't they all doing a
01:22:11.280wonderful job? Angela Merkel, you get an order of merit for all of the good that you've done for
01:22:17.460Europe. I mean, it really is. It's just the most sickening sight as all of them go on and just
01:22:22.300take these deals that are obviously bad for European peoples, especially when Modi is so
01:22:30.280overt with his intentions of what this is going to lead to and why he's doing it and who his
01:22:37.100loyalty is towards which actually he seems to be indians i you know imagine that how strange
01:22:44.240yeah who he knows will always be indian yeah yeah no matter how many generations he knows
01:22:49.680that they're always going to be indian but everybody in europe is pretending that russi
01:22:55.040but i am loyal to england and the english and of the europeans and so uh i just think i should
01:23:03.660bring your attention to it you know you are it is interesting how it works so you've just reminded
01:23:09.240me of how um ian smith you know at the end of rhodesia he wasn't african when he come back to
01:23:18.140came back to england because ultimately we are always we always carry where um our history with
01:23:25.920us and we can't and we can't escape it and that's what he's banking on yep uh i can't read that
01:23:31.020that's a random name but we know uh pseudelstone made an excellent point very valid question but
01:23:38.740yes it does call for a uh space marine intervention well mcleod also answering our
01:23:44.720query from earlier said, correction for earlier comment wasn't 10 times, but still a difference.
01:23:49.680Galrain fund raised $2.4 million, while Massey fund raised $5.5 million, according to FEC data.
01:23:56.420Oh, you're confused about this. The amount that the candidate raises is one thing.
01:24:02.420The amount that the PACs and the super PACs spend in support of a candidate is an entirely
01:24:07.360different thing and so even going by your numbers uh that would give around 17 million just counting
01:24:15.400the israeli money plus the 2 million 17 million to um massey's opponent and just 15 million to
01:24:24.100in total just assuming that there's no other division in the remaining 10 million so just by
01:24:30.740your numbers you're mistaken because you need to count the packs and the super packs which always
01:24:35.220outspend the candidates. That is how big money buys elections. And that rests on a case that was
01:24:40.840adjudicated under Obama, that pretty much allowed businesses to spend as much money as they wanted
01:24:46.620to buy elections. So no, you're wrong about this. Thanks, Obama. Video comments? To be fair, Obama
01:24:52.920opposed it. Obama opposed the Supreme Court ruling, but it was adjudicated under him.
01:24:57.500Interesting. Okay, let's go, Samson. So nets have gone down, and you can't use debit cards in all
01:25:04.280of europe that's an empty self-checkout behind me and large lines in the direction for cash so
01:25:11.080testless society might not have been that great of an idea anyway
01:25:15.760yeah it was interesting actually one one of the things i was pleasantly surprised about when i
01:25:22.180went when i visited japan a few years ago was how much emphasis ordinary people put on still using
01:25:28.140cash like they make an active decision to use cash and you wouldn't expect that i suppose from
01:25:33.000are places technologically forward as japan but fair play to them
01:25:36.680so there's this interesting old uh battle tech novel called ideal war very relevant to our times
01:25:45.160it's about a military officer basically being sent to some fringe military theater that's
01:25:49.860basically grinding on for like 20 years or something and the thing is everyone's saying
01:25:54.620everything's going according to plan we're winning every battle but why are we still there
01:25:58.520so he gets to the front line it turns out everyone is cooking the books everyone's lying
01:26:03.840about the data so they're counting like every insurgent kill as 20 dead and sam applies to
01:26:09.600everything else and keep that in mind whenever a left winger says the data says the crime is going
01:26:14.680down yeah cool any more samson i think we've got a few more this message is a little bit late but
01:26:25.160i felt that it's best to send it anyway the united rallies was a good sign of process
01:26:32.720against tyranny in the uk but the right wing is still divided settle aside your differences
01:26:39.440and disagreements and stand united for a common cause and remember you are not alone
01:26:45.260on behalf of all australians we stand with you guys against your fight against tyranny
01:26:55.160thank you for the good day to you too yeah and i do just see uh aussies as they're brits on the
01:27:02.940other side of the world absolutely that's what you are yeah so i appreciate it yeah and good
01:27:06.680luck to the aussie patriots in your own you know with your own problems you know i find
01:27:12.060incredibly funny at times but the mark carney pm of canada finds it like real is piss not america
01:27:18.960You know, the people, they pour like 70 to 90% of all their foods, processed foods some, you know, everything that's not bread, bread, juice, everything, everything that's processed.
01:27:33.400I mean, Canadians have like their own stuff.