The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1466

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Podcast of the Lotus Eaters. This is episode 1466. We are getting ever so

00:00:05.800 close now. It is Tuesday the 21st of July, year of our Lord, 2026. And I'm joined by Luca.

00:00:14.600 Hello. Afternoon.

00:00:15.880 And Stelios.

00:00:16.880 Hello everyone. Afternoon.

00:00:18.760 Yeah. Today we're going to be talking about Burnham's new cabinet, so we get to find out

00:00:22.660 who our masters are now. Hopefully they will be excellent. New Zealand. Something about

00:00:29.740 new zealand well there's a lot going on down there do we call new zealand down under as well

00:00:35.260 or do australia have exclusive rights to that title no i think downish there are many problems

00:00:41.740 down under yes yes yes and um um you're gonna have another pop at nolan because you haven't

00:00:47.700 forgiven him yet yes but this angle is gonna be very different today and i'm gonna talk about

00:00:53.300 other people i'm gonna talk about the the philosophy of disenchantment carl would love

00:00:59.760 this by the way yeah i would love to be on but you're gonna you're gonna name and shame yeah

00:01:04.260 we are gonna do this but also i'm gonna talk about how several intellectuals are essentially

00:01:10.340 virtue signaling and they're talking about things that they don't know in order to say that us

00:01:16.560 bad people who we should just get along with all sorts of woke subversion and how conservatism is

00:01:25.140 essentially losing because they're fine yeah well well actually i'll let's save it for the second

00:01:30.380 um yes so as you may be aware um andy burnham has appointed his cabinet yes yes and you might

00:01:41.700 be feeling sad about that but don't be because there's a new copy of islander that you can order

00:01:46.360 which is very good so so go and read that and cheer yourself up i'll tell you if we had some

00:01:50.400 of the writers for islander as cabinet members in britain yes it would be it'd be shorter footing

00:01:56.660 than we're on now i'd like that morgoth as home secretary that'd be excellent i'd like that it

00:02:02.380 would be yes um but no um well oh here we go so andy burnham's in and he he's not like keir starmer

00:02:11.160 who was wooden and legalistic.

00:02:14.300 He's prepared to do fun things,

00:02:16.100 like he's prepared to stand on a ladder

00:02:17.920 while giving an interview.

00:02:19.280 Oh, yeah.

00:02:19.760 Starmer would never have done that.

00:02:21.520 No, he wouldn't have done.

00:02:23.500 And there we go.

00:02:24.200 Let's play a little bit of this.

00:02:25.320 How old were you when you did this first job?

00:02:27.500 I was 17.

00:02:29.680 All right, anyway, enough of that.

00:02:30.640 I'll just play.

00:02:31.160 Anyway, so the point is, he's...

00:02:33.620 Why did they do this?

00:02:35.540 It was some avant-garde sort of performance piece 1.00

00:02:40.960 about is it you know whoever draws falls down is gay um whoever falls first shaking the ladder 0.89

00:02:48.680 furiously yeah i mean this is actually trying to do serious political work it's like have you ever 0.71

00:02:53.740 had a really bad takeaway near you no and then a new owner comes in and they splash new management

00:02:59.760 all over it and they send out you know flyers to everybody in the neighborhood it's under new

00:03:03.980 management that's the point is you've already written us off but it's different now but so

00:03:09.680 So this new manager does interviews while stood on the ladder.

00:03:13.120 Yes, quite possibly.

00:03:14.380 It maybe even cleans the kitchen from time to time.

00:03:17.340 So there's going to be lots of stuff like this where the message is,

00:03:20.880 look, I know that we were not so long ago heading to win four seats,

00:03:26.460 literally four seats in the next general election,

00:03:28.940 but we're under new management now.

00:03:30.320 So, you know, come and give us a try over at the Labour Party.

00:03:35.280 What would go wrong?

00:03:36.260 Well, it's very important that the people who believed in Burnham

00:03:39.540 become jaded as quickly as possible because fundamentally I don't want to see those people

00:03:45.340 any more than I want to see people who I think are on the more patriotic faction of British politics

00:03:50.320 funnel down more decades of disappointment and betrayal. Yes yes quite. Let's not forget the

00:03:57.120 sort of the desperate situation we're in I mean this sort of highlights it UK unemployment rate

00:04:01.920 remained at five percent but of course that doesn't mean that five percent of people aren't

00:04:09.100 working that means five percent of the people who they consider suitable for work after various

00:04:15.280 various carve outs so what it actually means is that 21 percent of people of working age

00:04:20.160 are economically inactive meaning they're not even looking for work i mean the amount of people

00:04:26.120 on disability alone is is is staggering so we got fewer people actually working the people who do

00:04:32.900 actually work paying ever more taxes the deficit is is about to blow out to oh whatever it is

00:04:39.460 some ridiculous i should know off the top of my head but it's going up again so i'd have to check

00:04:43.140 it the the the amount we're having to pay on our interest is going up for 110 billion to 130

00:04:48.520 something might might be 137 so we're not really question when they say brits i suspect they mean

00:04:55.040 people in the workforce or people in the country they're trying to make it a bit more inclusive

00:05:00.440 Yes, that's a fair point. 1.00

00:05:02.660 I mean, it would be interesting to get an ethnic breakdown

00:05:05.960 of how many native British people are in work,

00:05:08.860 and I suspect it's higher than 79%, I suspect. 1.00

00:05:13.220 Especially seeing as part of, I mean, I use this word very flimsily,

00:05:17.940 but Burnham's mandate was to come in and, of course,

00:05:21.440 restore trust in the Labour Party,

00:05:23.880 especially with those old working-class northern constituencies. 0.99

00:05:29.760 taking an absolute hatchet to the benefits for the scroungers 0.90

00:05:38.780 would actually be something that would endear him a long way

00:05:41.780 because the northerners, the working class, they're not scroungers.

00:05:45.180 These are some of the most hardworking people I'll ever meet

00:05:47.560 and they're people who have traditionally over the decades

00:05:50.680 found it far more noble to be in work than it is to be feeding off the state.

00:05:56.740 That's a fair point, actually.

00:05:57.660 And, of course, he is, as far as I'm aware,

00:06:00.300 the first openly northern MPM that we've had.

00:06:03.240 Openly northern?

00:06:04.140 Yes.

00:06:05.460 I think there's been some in the past that I've suspected have been northern.

00:06:08.680 Well, it was Harold Wilson.

00:06:09.860 I'm going to embarrass myself here.

00:06:11.500 But was he open about it?

00:06:13.720 I don't know.

00:06:14.260 I don't know.

00:06:15.680 Anyway, I thought we'd have a look at who's actually in the cabinet,

00:06:19.420 and the BBC have done a graphic.

00:06:21.600 So there we go.

00:06:22.940 So there's no Stern and Burnham himself with his guyliner.

00:06:26.780 There he is.

00:06:27.660 Mm-hmm.

00:06:28.740 Surprise appointment.

00:06:31.160 Actually, before I get into the detail,

00:06:33.860 I might as well give you the takeaway

00:06:35.000 so you can see where I'm going with all this.

00:06:38.020 He had a number of objectives to achieve with this reshuffle.

00:06:41.800 When I say reshuffle, he's kind of coming in

00:06:43.400 and appointing his own team.

00:06:45.820 Number one was destroy Starmer's network.

00:06:50.180 They have been...

00:06:51.280 Well, I can get behind that.

00:06:52.540 ...properly gutted.

00:06:53.540 So there's that.

00:06:54.280 um the second thing is to appoint burnham loyalists over the key bits of government

00:06:59.720 especially the bits that connect other bits that's that's what he that is what he's trying

00:07:04.660 to do if if if that is a if that is a node but other bits plug into yeah burnham loyalist goes

00:07:10.480 there all right um he's given every faction representation but effectively sidelined a

00:07:18.480 whole bunch of them and he's taken his rivals and he kept them busy in pretty oh yeah hang on

00:07:26.220 let me try it again prestigious uh but out of the way departments um and also there's a little bit

00:07:33.340 of reassuring the markets in there you're having a chuckle while i was going through that because

00:07:38.440 i'm looking at this west streeting photo who is who resigned from starmer's cabinet and then

00:07:44.420 he's on the new cabinet from what i see there yeah i just can't understand the expression there

00:07:51.320 it's the most aggressive photo of west reading but i don't know if you can see his upper lower

00:07:58.720 teeth there well don't forget it's just it's just his expressions are so funny that's the upper

00:08:04.800 lower teeth but you think so it could be it could be the lower row teeth couldn't it i can join it's

00:08:09.480 His expressions are so funny.

00:08:13.860 But there is an interesting aspect to the West Streeting thing as well,

00:08:17.820 which is the fact that, of course,

00:08:20.080 when it originally looked like they'd had the local council elections

00:08:25.180 and it was an absolute bloodbath for Labour and they were going,

00:08:27.520 oh God, we've got to change pilot, we've got to change pilot,

00:08:29.980 this is all going terribly.

00:08:31.460 Obviously, before they instituted the by-election in Makerfield

00:08:35.020 and went for the Burnham option,

00:08:37.480 Wes Streeting was a guy going around Parliament

00:08:39.980 to see if he'd have enough votes.

00:08:42.120 Yes, never quite got there, did he?

00:08:43.520 To house for power.

00:08:44.460 And so the fact that he's been giving a little conciliatory position.

00:08:48.280 Well, we come back to him.

00:08:49.440 The key three are these three up here, obviously.

00:08:55.560 Andy Burnham, Prime Minister, obviously.

00:08:58.260 Healy.

00:08:58.660 So if you remember him, he was the Defence Secretary.

00:09:02.980 And then he resigned.

00:09:03.580 Yes, but he did it at a really key moment.

00:09:06.560 So Burnham had won Makerfield and Starmer, he'd been knocked to the ground by that.

00:09:13.440 And Healy came running up and absolutely booted him in the nose and was like, don't you get up, you stay down.

00:09:19.340 And Starmer was like, all right, all right, I'm staying down.

00:09:21.560 It was a swift kick to the face at precisely the moment that it needed to arrive.

00:09:26.280 And it kind of really finished Starmer off and he had to go off and he had to go to Chequers, the prime minister's country home.

00:09:32.660 He had to go there and talk about it with his wife

00:09:35.560 and say, everybody hates me, don't they, darling?

00:09:38.080 And she was like, yeah, everybody hates you, you should resign.

00:09:41.260 So Healy, presumably this was all set up in advance, 0.87

00:09:45.720 was like, you know, if you were to absolutely shove the shiv in 0.99

00:09:49.340 from behind now, you'll get Chancellor. 0.98

00:09:50.980 Oh, it was barely subtle at the time.

00:09:52.600 Yes, yeah, something like that.

00:09:54.420 But he was a surprise announcer.

00:09:55.900 But actually, he could be worse.

00:09:58.060 So he's an old hand at this sort of doing politics business. 0.92

00:10:01.660 He's a brown knight.

00:10:04.720 Now, as I go through this list, I will talk about factions.

00:10:10.020 The reason you might think, okay, why do you care who's a brown knight? 0.65

00:10:13.460 Because Brown was a PM ages ago. 0.98

00:10:15.140 Why does that matter?

00:10:15.880 It's because at the time, it was very serious for everybody involved.

00:10:20.320 And networks of friendship and alliance and favours were formed at the time.

00:10:24.500 And so these factions do linger.

00:10:26.140 So it is worth talking about them. 0.97

00:10:27.100 But Healy is a brown knight. 0.74

00:10:28.920 And Burnham's rise is Tony Blair gave him his first leg up,

00:10:34.000 put him on the ministerial thing,

00:10:35.300 but it was Brown who promoted him rapidly.

00:10:38.260 So Burnham has not been strictly identified as a Brown Knight.

00:10:43.320 He's always positioned himself as a unity figure,

00:10:46.680 but he's well-liked by the Brown Knights,

00:10:50.340 and so he's in with the Brown Knights.

00:10:51.880 And so John Healy has come into there. 0.60

00:10:54.540 He does have some background as a Treasury Minister,

00:10:58.180 although he's a bit old, but he has served in the Treasury

00:11:01.060 in a more junior role, and he's run a big spending department,

00:11:04.400 so that's quite good.

00:11:06.140 Oh, and the funny thing is he resigned because apparently

00:11:09.300 the Chancellor wasn't giving him enough money,

00:11:11.160 and now he is the Chancellor, so he's now got to square the circle

00:11:14.660 of when little Wes down there asked for money.

00:11:19.960 So that's interesting.

00:11:21.820 Louise Haig is the other one that's very much worth talking about.

00:11:25.100 So she is a cabinet office.

00:11:29.820 Now, cabinet office by itself is potentially a reasonably, you know, it's an admin role.

00:11:36.660 It's a function role.

00:11:37.620 I mean, the cabinet office is basically, well, running the cabinet.

00:11:42.840 What's on the agenda?

00:11:44.720 What specialists are coming in?

00:11:46.980 What's the question that we're trying to answer in the agenda?

00:11:49.280 So it is, if you're careful about it, is actually quite important.

00:11:53.300 It's powerful.

00:11:53.960 Yeah, because this is what we present to the prime minister.

00:11:57.280 This is what we're talking about.

00:11:58.340 This is what we focus about.

00:12:00.160 But it can sometimes be, if you've got a prime minister

00:12:03.220 who really knows what's in his mind, like a Blair,

00:12:06.360 it can be a bit of a functionary role.

00:12:08.520 So what he's done is he's given her a couple of extra things.

00:12:11.980 So he's given her first secretary,

00:12:14.460 which basically bumps her up the ministerial pay band

00:12:18.820 so that she gets the 475,000 that full cabinet ministers get.

00:12:23.060 And she's also given a Duchy of Lancaster, which is another one of those things, which if you've got somebody and you want them to do something, but you want them to attend cabinet and you want them to have the cabinet level pay, you give them the Duchy of Lancaster.

00:12:36.500 And he's actually given her three things. So cabinet office, everything comes through there to the prime minister and then back out through there.

00:12:45.740 so it's a very powerful role plus first um first secretary and duchy of lancaster so effectively

00:12:52.960 she's deputy prime minister in all but name so he's hinging a lot of trust yes on this woman

00:12:58.400 yes i mean she she is a key figure uh for him because she she was like the woman who organized

00:13:03.480 his maker field and does does his political strategy for him so those two are thick as thieves

00:13:07.840 um that's not a very good picture of her there we go that's a better picture of her oh there we are 1.00

00:13:14.460 She is a convicted fraudster. 0.98

00:13:16.860 Oh, yeah. 1.00

00:13:17.680 There is that to mention.

00:13:19.140 Louise Haig.

00:13:20.520 Yes. 1.00

00:13:21.600 She's a convicted fraudster. 1.00

00:13:22.900 Yes. 0.97

00:13:23.940 What kind of fraud may I ask? 0.91

00:13:26.000 She used to work for Aviva and she kept on stealing their phones.

00:13:31.240 Has she been convicted in a court of law?

00:13:36.460 Did it go to court in the end?

00:13:37.800 I don't know. 0.63

00:13:38.200 I think it must have done, yeah, because she's a convicted fraud. 0.97

00:13:40.320 I know she's a convicted fraud.

00:13:41.380 The details of the case, I don't know.

00:13:43.260 Sounds a bit...

00:13:43.960 That's a really weird expression there.

00:13:45.200 No, she had to resign from government a couple of years back

00:13:48.000 because of that. 0.97

00:13:49.800 That's ridiculous. 0.96

00:13:50.980 If anything, she's overqualified. 0.99

00:13:52.820 Yes, quite. 0.91

00:13:53.700 Fraud's mandatory in government these days. 1.00

00:13:55.760 And she's also famous for her purple hair. 1.00

00:13:58.480 The thing is, though, right, the higher up the food chain she goes, 1.00

00:14:03.320 the more she dials back the hair.

00:14:05.520 And I think at the moment, as in there,

00:14:07.780 she's gone for this kind of deep reddish look.

00:14:10.600 so you you can tell how how senior she is by basically how bright her hair is and it just 0.99

00:14:17.000 becomes increasingly normal as she as she you know gets closer to supreme executive power um so

00:14:24.240 there's that so yes so there you go so he's got his shiv man in the in the in the probably the 0.82

00:14:32.120 most important role and his you know absolute thick as these buddy i mean if he was skeletal

00:14:37.000 That would be his Evelyn right there.

00:14:41.280 Right, Ed Miliband.

00:14:42.840 So he's soft left and a potential leadership rival.

00:14:47.620 Very cleverly, he's given him foreign secretary

00:14:49.760 because there's bugger all that you can do in it.

00:14:52.540 But it is prestigious, and the foreign office building is,

00:14:56.340 I mean, it's like a palace in there.

00:14:58.000 It's absolutely beautiful in there.

00:14:59.880 And in the British system, the foreign secretary is regarded

00:15:03.280 as being basically the number two job.

00:15:07.000 technically it sits at least at the level of chancellor if not higher it's very high because

00:15:12.820 you also establish connections with other world leaders senior officials so it raises your

00:15:19.320 prestige a lot so the reason i think it's prestigious is because that's a legacy from empire

00:15:23.260 because back in the days of empire genuinely the foreign secretary would have been the second most

00:15:28.820 powerful person after the prime minister because you're effectively deciding how the empire is run

00:15:33.240 um it was a huge role and no i agree with you it's just that it also happened it tends to happen in

00:15:40.300 countries that weren't empires yes yeah yes it's considered uh yeah i mean the um what do they call

00:15:47.860 it in the state department in the u.s um so it's prestigious but these days because we don't have

00:15:54.680 an empire or any influence or any money it doesn't matter because we put men like head milliband in

00:16:02.600 charge of these things well yes i mean yes partly that partly that over the over the over the centuries

00:16:07.600 but that effectively gives him a big job but also go over there and don't do anything maybe appoint

00:16:13.220 an ambassador once in a while lucca doesn't he deserve a second chance yes also he doesn't know

00:16:18.940 anything about international relations he's never done any of that so again he's effectively and

00:16:22.360 this is actually that's a theme that we will come back to as we go through this again and again and

00:16:26.500 again um if it's a potential rival he sticks them somewhere where they don't have any experience

00:16:32.960 so that they can be busy with that shabana mcmood we know um barrister home secretary yeah it's

00:16:39.580 interesting actually that mcmood has kept a position given how much um disquiet there was

00:16:45.900 from the back benches because as far as the back benches and like the true leftists of the labor

00:16:51.100 party was saying like her reforms are too extreme she's well it tells you he actually wants to try

00:16:57.980 and win the next election yeah because that's him if you if you were just trying to appease the left

00:17:04.000 you would get rid of her yeah if you're actually going to try and you know win you'd have her

00:17:08.240 uh west streeting again he's got no background in defense whatsoever but nevertheless it's a

00:17:14.960 prestigious role he doesn't know anything about it so again potential leadership rival stick him

00:17:20.000 in a complex brief

00:17:21.020 that he doesn't know about

00:17:22.000 and he's going to be busy

00:17:23.760 but it's not core

00:17:25.120 to the election strategy

00:17:26.860 so you can stick him over there.

00:17:28.620 Can anyone see him

00:17:29.720 as a potential leader material?

00:17:33.200 West Streeting can.

00:17:34.700 West Streeting sees himself but...

00:17:36.080 Yes.

00:17:37.080 I know.

00:17:37.980 And a number less than 81

00:17:40.060 of fellow MPs

00:17:41.720 also consider him leadership

00:17:43.160 so apparently he's got a block.

00:17:45.160 By the way,

00:17:45.880 I don't know how much time

00:17:46.720 I've got to get through these.

00:17:47.620 Do you guys want me to do

00:17:48.920 a slightly longer segment

00:17:49.940 or have you padded out your segments yet?

00:17:53.040 I mean, yeah, you can keep going and mine can be a segment.

00:17:56.540 Tell me when I need to,

00:17:57.980 I'll just plough on until you guys tell me to stop.

00:18:00.580 All right, sure.

00:18:01.460 Hopefully we won't be doing this entire podcast.

00:18:03.480 Don't stop until you get enough.

00:18:04.320 Yes. 0.99

00:18:05.240 Yvette Cooper, longstanding brownite,

00:18:08.520 very experienced in government, 0.60

00:18:10.860 but also I was surprised that she didn't try and run for leader 1.00

00:18:13.580 because she probably could do it 1.00

00:18:15.020 because she's got a big network, 0.90

00:18:17.680 very experienced, well-liked.

00:18:19.140 so again any potential rival she doesn't have a background in health so he's like okay your

00:18:24.760 potential rival here's a really complex job that you don't know anything about go and get and plus

00:18:29.600 you can't win as health secretary because you're basically running the nhs and the nhs is

00:18:34.320 unsalvageable which yeah yeah so you go and get lost in that rival number three whatever we're on

00:18:41.100 now um lucy powell um i think she's actually the elected labor deputy leader um but you know

00:18:53.200 she's been given um education set because she's also openly northern um and and so my people yes

00:19:00.800 and so she should be bunged away in that um pat mcfadden work and pension secretary i mean given

00:19:08.500 that it's britain today and given the link that i showed us earlier what was it that one about work

00:19:14.020 oh yes it's very questionable as to whether he should really be called the work and pension

00:19:18.020 secretary they should at least put pensions first and work in brackets of an asterisk after it

00:19:22.460 because there's not much of that going on in labour's britain um he's considered to be more

00:19:27.040 of the right of um the labour party um but he's considered competent so we stick him in you know

00:19:34.620 why not um angela rayner big bird the fridge rayner um housing secretary so she gets her job

00:19:44.000 back after being booted out for tax evasion after criticizing starmer breathlessly yes has her cv

00:19:51.580 changed in the meantime because last time you were showing us her cv wasn't particularly remarkable

00:19:58.680 the only thing i remember is is pregnant at 16

00:20:04.260 and maybe did some work for the council i'm not sure i i yeah i don't know i don't think

00:20:10.820 there's anything new on that um jonathan reynolds so um starmer scrapped the department for science

00:20:18.760 technology and innovation and he bundled it into business so he's now got a bigger brief

00:20:23.280 um he he's he's a key um burnham ally yeah and so that that's so he's in a delivery role as is

00:20:32.840 angela rayner so his loyalists go in the delivery roles of the things that he wants to fight the

00:20:38.400 next election on um the uber loyalists go in the connecting things and the allies get get pushed

00:20:45.660 out a lot of what it'll be with these things even if by some miracle a lot of these new appointees

00:20:52.020 actually do some good in their positions.

00:20:55.200 Oh, that's what he's going for, yeah.

00:20:56.840 Imagine that.

00:20:58.020 But the entire thing is just based on, well, look at these stats

00:21:01.660 and figures and statistics, right?

00:21:04.260 We've done a good job, vote for us the next time round,

00:21:07.880 not taking into account the levels of alienation,

00:21:12.200 the dissatisfaction, the purposelessness that people are feeling

00:21:16.380 in society, the constant barrage of hostility,

00:21:20.560 that young boys in particular are feeling

00:21:23.580 as they go through the education and throughout life.

00:21:26.040 And so all of these things are never going to be addressed.

00:21:29.560 Yes, but he's got a bigger brief

00:21:33.040 because he actually wants delivery on things like housing

00:21:36.480 and regeneration and all those kind of things.

00:21:38.940 But when he says he wants delivery,

00:21:40.340 he just means building more houses.

00:21:42.460 It's the same schtick as we've always had.

00:21:44.580 It's not addressing the demand problem for these houses.

00:21:47.180 Well, yes.

00:21:48.440 So I can only tell you what he's trying to do from his perspective.

00:21:52.620 I mean, obviously, I don't think any of this is going to work.

00:21:55.480 But that's what he's trying to do.

00:21:56.920 The soft left, the people most friendly to him,

00:22:00.180 you get the delivery rolls and please actually do something.

00:22:03.640 I'm going to boost up your departments and give you everything you need

00:22:06.060 so that you can try and win me the next election. 1.00

00:22:09.640 Bridget Philipson, Equalities Minister. 0.80

00:22:11.960 That is a silly job, so I won't waste time on it. 1.00

00:22:14.820 Total ideologue as well. 1.00

00:22:16.160 Yes, what we used to call Women Diversities and Equalities Minister 0.81

00:22:20.360 or whatever, but now it's just Equalities Minister.

00:22:22.360 It doesn't really have a department.

00:22:24.020 It's just coordinating strategy across Graven to make sure...

00:22:27.720 How to screw you over, Anon.

00:22:29.900 Yes, and hopefully to end inequality. 1.00

00:22:34.300 Women will be able to do as many push-ups as men 0.95

00:22:37.880 and men will be able to have as many babies as women 1.00

00:22:40.080 if this woman does her job correctly. 0.99

00:22:41.960 So brilliant. Well done.

00:22:44.220 important role uh lisa nandy culture secretaries um has some support in the party so fine um 0.96

00:22:56.600 she's going to play a role into his you know regeneration strategy um she's soft left you

00:23:03.840 know as ever soft left to getting the delivery roles in this um while the while the um um the 0.56

00:23:11.600 the blue labor are getting the you know the money and the um immigration stuff well this is a good

00:23:18.260 one um i think i think i might be pronouncing not bad yes um incidentally while we're on this one

00:23:30.780 i think i i'm i'm honestly getting tell me if you tell me if you agree stella's i'm getting

00:23:36.180 helena troy vibes from this woman definitely yes in fact let's let's see if we can go for a nice

00:23:42.160 close-up there we go energy secretary yes face that launched a thousand blackouts um so yes 0.66

00:23:52.180 um she's from iberia if you're wondering um yeah her background is iberia iberia yes iberia

00:24:02.460 or Liberia not Iberia no Liberia yes I was getting my Berias confused wasn't I yes um but

00:24:10.420 no they were having one of their frequent civil wars and so 40 years ago they they legged it and

00:24:15.480 came here so there you go one of the one of the engineers I mean she's actually an economist but

00:24:20.860 one of the one of the doctors and engineers has come over and is now taking a leading role making

00:24:24.800 sure that our energy bills go down I'm sure that the leg to get there had no you know privileges

00:24:30.980 and entitlements bound to it in such things

00:24:33.700 as what the Equalities Ministry will put out.

00:24:36.460 I mean, Labour people will tell you that she's got a...

00:24:38.620 I mean, she is a development economist,

00:24:41.660 and, you know, so she should have strong theoretical knowledge.

00:24:50.000 And she was a junior minister, I believe, in energy.

00:24:53.320 so um but she but she hasn't got big office um big job um experience so it's a high risk high

00:25:03.160 reward thing but um he obviously feels that um you know he can do the stuff um justice secretary

00:25:09.580 alex north is going in there um he is a unionist organizer he's not a lawyer or barrister or

00:25:19.060 anything like that but he's getting justice secretary you don't normally get justice

00:25:22.760 secretary unless you've got a legal background he has none but he has organized trade unionists

00:25:28.080 don't you think though that people who have zero background in law have to be represented in law

00:25:36.100 isn't it unfair if they aren't yes and why not why not burglars why not burglars why don't they

00:25:41.860 get representation they should as justice secretary as well yeah um so yes what you know

00:25:47.540 Oh, and Lord Chancellor, again, something you can tag on to give him a bit of a salary boost.

00:25:56.040 So, bravo.

00:25:58.620 So, basically, no one who is currently being given a position will have any incentive whatsoever

00:26:05.820 to call a general election anytime soon, because as far as they're concerned,

00:26:11.360 this might be the best-paying job that they get for quite a while if the election goes out.

00:26:16.860 Yes, we're in the $175,000 category.

00:26:22.120 You get $100,000 for being an MP, an extra $75,000 for being a cabinet-level minister.

00:26:27.140 And you can probably claim another $20,000 to $40,000 to $200,000 in expenses if you can.

00:26:33.960 But it just seems that the talent just isn't there.

00:26:37.920 And not only that, the entire premise of Labour even being in power

00:26:43.080 just fundamentally misdiagnoses the problems with the country.

00:26:48.540 And so even though Burnham might be more aware of some of Starmer's failings,

00:26:54.260 the direction of travel is still going to be basically identical.

00:26:58.800 And I do just wonder to what extent how Labour are going to play this going forward,

00:27:05.020 because Burnham was their best and last and really only shot.

00:27:11.400 Yes, well, I can see the strategy.

00:27:12.820 the strategy is get rid of the starmer right yeah but your key loyalists in the nodes put the soft

00:27:18.600 left in the delivery stuff so they can't complain and hope that they actually deliver on the stuff

00:27:24.240 so that he can win the next election that's that's broadly the strategy which is you know

00:27:27.720 anyway um i'm up to time so if you guys want me to carry on i will but you guys tell me when i

00:27:33.560 need to stop because there's loads of them yeah i'll uh i'll probably go towards my segment in

00:27:37.900 just a second all right fair enough um in which case i'll skim through this heidi alexander is

00:27:43.420 she was actually deputy mayor in london for transport so there's that angela eagle good

00:27:48.640 god she's still alive northern ireland um obvious uh secretary yeah obvious obvious uh chief secretary 0.60

00:27:55.600 of the treasury that's a very important role uh annalise midgley chief whip well she should have

00:28:02.800 a very quiet time of it because burnham said he wouldn't be using the whip yes he did say that but

00:28:07.460 He was lying because there was no way he's getting rid of the whip.

00:28:11.560 She's actually a new MP. 0.99

00:28:12.820 She only came in in 2024. 0.96

00:28:15.240 Right. 1.00

00:28:15.520 But she is a absolute labour machine operator. 1.00

00:28:19.880 So she might actually be good at it.

00:28:24.040 Leader of the House of Commons, Alan Campbell.

00:28:25.680 He's been around forever.

00:28:27.300 Leader of the Lords, that's fairly obvious.

00:28:29.980 The son of Lord Falconer, getting into governmental relations.

00:28:35.320 Oh, we've got a minister for AI now.

00:28:37.460 That's new.

00:28:38.540 We've never had one of those before.

00:28:40.640 It should be a robot or something.

00:28:42.640 It doesn't look like it's being AI generated, doesn't it?

00:28:46.020 I mean, government is only just coming to terms

00:28:48.840 with the fact that the internet was invented.

00:28:50.720 So I like the fact that they've got

00:28:52.240 an artificial intelligence guy.

00:28:54.840 Maybe that explains why they took technology

00:28:56.440 out of another brief.

00:28:58.200 What is his job to just asking AI

00:29:00.280 what other people are asking?

00:29:04.260 I'm running a government which is deeply unpopular.

00:29:07.080 how can i win the next election yeah please think deeply he's just typing yeah yes it could be that

00:29:13.920 um uh and then matthew pennycock um which a housing minister which is actually a normally

00:29:20.700 a minister of state role but he gets to attend cabinet he probably won't get the full salary so

00:29:25.580 he's probably only on 132 but that is an indication that burnham thinks that by building more houses

00:29:31.760 that's how he's going to win the election thus the importance we've seen through this on delivery

00:29:35.960 and housing and taking the minister of state and then sticking him in the cabinet and then i'll be

00:29:40.480 very quick so we can move on and not her again well please move on from this not this absolute

00:29:46.460 beauty uh we know we can't look at guilt yield shall we um yeah basically sterling down uh guilt

00:29:53.920 yields up uh if you want to know what that means um tough i'll do it in a broconomics or something

00:30:00.240 all right uh i'll just go through the uh rumble rams oh yes there as well so that's random name

00:30:06.960 says uh louise haye's uh hair color represents the blood labor have on their hands it's always

00:30:11.780 a warning that might happen to you if you don't mind your business i mean yeah they've come up

00:30:17.280 with stranger ways to tell us how they feel uh fortium uh barbis says uh brothers stelios lucrum

00:30:23.220 bow question mark uh maybe dan he means given that you're the one sat between us it's only a

00:30:29.000 couple of years until the election so let us get restore ready for everyone yeah we'll be working

00:30:35.180 on it that could be a master of disguise joke i'm not sure it's disguised as a but you're wearing

00:30:39.720 such a wonderful head of hair today yes um and sigil stone 17 says uh not a drop of testosterone

00:30:47.340 in that cabinet there's more masculinity to be to be found in the women uh yeah yeah more or less

00:30:54.240 um all right then ladies and gentlemen so we're going to talk about new zealand in this segment

00:31:01.880 now perhaps it won't surprise you as a enormous fan of the lord of the rings films and basically

00:31:07.880 the jaw-dropping cinematography that those films created by being filmed in new zealand i happen to

00:31:14.580 have a real soft spot for new zealand not only because of the cultural and historical ties that

00:31:19.340 we have as people. And, you know, the great British pioneers like Captain Cook, who went there

00:31:24.860 and established the settlements there as well. But just the New Zealand spirit over the time,

00:31:30.520 their contributions to empire and commonwealth and their own national identities, along with

00:31:37.180 the Australians, the Canadians and the other people who make up the Anglosphere. And that

00:31:43.160 is something that I think has really been failed in recent generations. I really wish that stronger

00:31:49.140 ties have been kept together, you know, whilst the royal family has been going around giving

00:31:54.540 land acknowledgements to all different sorts of people in Africa and, you know, to natives. I wish

00:32:00.800 that the genuine force for good that had been created throughout places like New Zealand and

00:32:06.480 Australia had been better maintained. And unfortunately, New Zealand is now approaching

00:32:12.080 its 11th hour, it seems that it's been left to fend for itself, largely based on a whole

00:32:18.780 slew of problems that we here in Britain are also facing, chiefly amongst them, of course,

00:32:23.960 demographic replacement. And so what is to be done at this very, very late hour? Well, this is

00:32:30.440 actually the theme that we explore in the sixth issue of Islander, ladies and gentlemen, and I

00:32:36.880 would encourage you to get a hold of it, because as I say, we explore the theme of what is to be

00:32:41.900 done. It's for £15 from the main website, and we've got lots of essays in there regarding Tolkien,

00:32:48.240 regarding economics with the American economist Michael Hudson, some wonderful stuff on law

00:32:54.300 from Henry Martin, Reactionary Reading Law, and some other wonderful essayists and contributors.

00:33:00.520 So if you want to listen to what some of the grand minds from our side of the political aisle

00:33:08.620 are thinking and how we're analysing the moment, this is the place to go and get it.

00:33:13.300 So, the first thing to say is that the recent census from 2023 is not great.

00:33:22.880 As things stand right now, 67% of the New Zealand population are white.

00:33:30.000 And of course, when that says white as well, that's not going to specifically mean Anglo.

00:33:35.760 It's not necessarily just going to mean British.

00:33:38.400 It means, in all case, those of European ancestry.

00:33:42.320 Now, this has dwindled very, very quickly.

00:33:46.200 It has fallen very, very rapidly indeed.

00:33:49.040 And as you can see here from this map that we have,

00:33:51.680 it's taken over the North Island much quicker than it has the South Island,

00:33:58.600 though the South Island too is going through the change.

00:34:02.760 So if I click on Auckland here, you can see that 29% of its population, for example, are now Asian. 0.97

00:34:10.960 And this is a creeping... 0.99

00:34:11.880 What do the Maori count as? 0.70

00:34:13.820 The Maori have their own group down here,

00:34:15.980 so you can see they're 4.4% of Auckland,

00:34:19.680 but if you go into the Gisborne region here,

00:34:22.380 they're actually about 35% of the population. 1.00

00:34:25.400 Because it wouldn't be too bad if it was Anglos and Maori. 1.00

00:34:27.520 You can sort of accept that. That makes sense. 1.00

00:34:28.920 Well, that was the settlement for basically 200 years,

00:34:33.660 you know, between the Maori and the British

00:34:37.640 at the Treaty of Watangi.

00:34:39.340 certain privileges and rights would be you know kept to the maori and that the two these two

00:34:45.920 specific peoples yes would have a negotiation moving forward for what new zealand was to look

00:34:53.140 like not the british and the indians who have recently arrived and the chinese and you know

00:34:59.460 so on and so forth etc etc no particularly between two distinct peoples about what where all of this

00:35:06.280 was going i'd love to know where this all came from it's like they had they held a g7 summit

00:35:11.280 in pakistan or india like 20 years ago and they all thought yeah that's what we need yeah um sorry

00:35:17.700 i was meant to uh scroll this here but you can see as well so if we go to this is the uh university

00:35:24.160 of auckland and if you have a look at the demography as well of the uh people who were in the

00:35:31.480 classes, right, the total staff and students, you can see that Asian is half of the total count

00:35:38.800 of the university. And bear in mind, this is Auckland University. This is for the capital.

00:35:45.180 And you can see as well that according to the key of Asian being categorised by these pink triangles,

00:35:52.180 they are disproportionately the highest number of students at the university. And this is

00:35:59.780 obviously something that we're very well you know accustomed to here as well all of our universities

00:36:04.940 have been gutted out basically because um of the uh population of the the rise of immigration

00:36:12.220 and also as well that once it's been put in place the mechanisms that bring in

00:36:18.660 continually incentivize more and more what they mean by asia because if auckland university

00:36:23.060 is really big on i don't know maths or something and they're all chinese i could kind of get my

00:36:27.460 head around that well it will be chinese and indians chiefly right um and so all of this just

00:36:34.360 points towards the fact that but these are the next generation this is where the youth are being

00:36:39.220 raised and we can already see now in the higher ends of um education that they are being the anglo

00:36:47.380 population are being tipped out of those curriculums and it also doesn't help the fact

00:36:52.900 that we can see here, Christopher Luxem, the Prime Minister of New Zealand. Just as an example

00:36:59.300 here, this was just posted yesterday. A pleasure to meet with Muslim World League Secretary General

00:37:05.260 Dr. Mohamed Al-Issa this evening. New Zealand is proud to be a country where peoples of all

00:37:11.260 faiths can live and worship freely and safely. Our Muslim communities are an important part of that

00:37:17.700 story. I don't have it here, but a text was pointing out that there were only about 2,000

00:37:23.340 Muslims in New Zealand back in 1985. So whatever important contributions they've been making,

00:37:33.000 they certainly couldn't be categorised as historic or long-lasting in any real sense.

00:37:40.260 So they didn't build New Zealand? They can't say that they have?

00:37:44.280 No, they didn't. And this is why you see things like Remigration New Zealand being launched, why you see all of a sudden this awareness coming about that actually this settlement that has lasted for over 200 years of New Zealand being an expansion, a satellite of European civilization, is on the precipice.

00:38:09.240 And unfortunately, from what I can determine, it doesn't seem like the people of New Zealand are taking this as seriously as they need to.

00:38:18.720 They don't seem to have that vision to the horizon.

00:38:21.580 And the great problem with all of this as well is that one of the things that I outlined in this video, I'll get away from my face within my face within my face, that's very discombobulating.

00:38:32.320 But one of the things that I pointed out in this as well is that Remigration New Zealand accused the Indian diaspora of New Zealand of being a subversive foreign ethnic bloc.

00:38:41.760 And the New Zealand Indian Central Association decided to refute those claims by lobbying the Kiwi government to raid the activists' homes and seize their equipment. 0.62

00:38:51.760 So you constantly get this thing now where it's obvious that it is the minorities who have the sympathetic ear of the New Zealand government.

00:39:01.620 which is actually made up of all sorts of parties from what I understand you have different parties

00:39:07.100 sorry people from different parties taking up different leadership roles within the government

00:39:11.840 but they're all a part of the same direction of travel and even those who claim to be

00:39:17.500 anti-establishment as you get with like New Zealand first well you can't be anti-establishment

00:39:24.500 if you are the foreign minister right it doesn't work like that because then all of a sudden you're

00:39:29.900 finding yourself being complicit in whatever free trade agreements are being drafted up with people

00:39:35.500 like with nations like india um and so the entire thing it basically there seems to be no clear way

00:39:43.840 within the current political system for an actual anti-establishment party to reverse

00:39:51.180 the demographic change that has been inflicted on it and the problem is as well because new

00:39:57.440 zealand is a nation of only about five million people that means that means that because people

00:40:03.580 have been coming in sure it's been in smaller it's been if i would say oh it's been 20 000 people

00:40:09.420 here it's been 30 000 here it's been 90 000 here you think oh good grief that sounds low that sounds

00:40:16.120 nice but when you are a population as a smaller zen i mean it gets felt quite profoundly it's 0.79

00:40:23.020 remarkable because in times gone past if you wanted to invade a country that was a big deal 1.00

00:40:27.540 but now india could do it this year by just sending another five million indians and then 0.91

00:40:33.580 they basically they own the country then it just becomes an indian colony and and five million is

00:40:38.160 nothing for india yeah they could do 15 or 50 million absolutely and not only is that a grave

00:40:44.040 insult to the people of new zealand who were never asked if they wanted to become an indian

00:40:50.240 satellite state through just sheer economic ties, because this is what it's all doing. 0.64

00:40:55.840 In the New Zealand government's attempt to diversify its economic ties and diversify

00:41:03.740 its economy, it's creating this free trade agreement with India.

00:41:07.600 But we know what Modi's like, because basically when you agreed a free trade agreement, as

00:41:12.960 you did between the United Kingdom and India, between the EU and India, between New Zealand

00:41:17.360 in India, it always comes with a big fat stapler just saying, oh, and by the way, we'll just

00:41:22.720 attach like 5,000 labor workers here or, you know, these university entryways or these visa

00:41:29.560 application routes. And Modi has explicitly said that he is using the despauler to basically take

00:41:35.320 over the world. Yeah. To modify it and make it on his own image. Absolutely. And this is not only

00:41:42.300 a grave insult, sorry, as I was saying to the Anglo population who are the heritage New Zealanders

00:41:48.500 along with the Maori and have maintained a particular settlement for their way of life. 0.78

00:41:53.480 But it's also a grave insult to what has been actually a very prudent and statesmanly

00:42:02.540 continuity of New Zealand politicians throughout the 20th century who fought very, very hard to

00:42:09.920 maintain a permanent European demography to New Zealand, who were constantly trying to

00:42:18.240 close those exploitative loopholes, who were trying to maintain the Anglo character of New

00:42:24.500 Zealand. And so to see New Zealand now, particularly the immigration ramped up, it

00:42:31.240 won't surprise you to hear, under Jacinda Ardern, just before the lockdown started and all of that

00:42:37.300 rot. Well, this basically ends up in a state where you end up being lectured to by people like this

00:42:45.400 chap. Now, I played this in the daily, but just to update you on it, it's not very long and I'll

00:42:49.800 just play what he has to say. There was one statistic that really interested me. Just in the

00:42:55.540 last 12 months, if you look at the number of babies that are being born in New Zealand, the most

00:43:00.220 common, the most prominent ethnicity is Asian. It's the first time this has happened. We've always

00:43:06.720 had European ethnicity as the biggest number of babies.

00:43:10.920 That was the dominant culture of New Zealand.

00:43:13.080 But something has shifted.

00:43:14.860 Not only do we have the diversity that's here already, but the future diversity of New

00:43:19.380 Zealand is now locked in.

00:43:20.940 All the babies are going to look different.

00:43:23.860 I wonder if that might provoke a little bit of fear in some.

00:43:27.520 It can.

00:43:28.440 And I think that's why it's important for us to talk about this openly and have a talk

00:43:32.940 about what does it mean to have a very diverse place?

00:43:36.080 well he's won well this is the point it's locked in we have won the comfort with which he talks

00:43:43.220 about this the authority with which he talks about this grand victory and the thing that i always just

00:43:48.520 hate about all of this is that i would have respected it so much more if this was done in

00:43:54.300 a traditional way and an indian army had just come and occupied new zealand but it's not

00:43:59.200 it's always done under the pretense of friendship under the pretense of just

00:44:03.680 greater ties and cultural exchanges and then when they're in a position to actually just reveal

00:44:09.580 their hand um there's this like oh aren't we great haven't we achieved something special

00:44:15.080 it's like well if you've if you've managed to conquer a nation just through the sheer gullibility

00:44:20.700 of that other nation's leaders and that's well the europeans disarmed their minds and so they

00:44:26.560 didn't they didn't need to fight no they could they could just literally just turn up and take

00:44:30.400 you know um and and so this is really really disgraceful and as well the way you say oh i

00:44:36.040 think that might inspire a little bit of fear it's like yeah well it traditionally for like

00:44:42.300 all of human history yeah it has done actually yeah so that's that's not unreasonable uh what

00:44:48.640 is unreasonable is to then use the state and tell the people who are being replaced how they should

00:44:56.120 feel about their own replacement. That's where it gets truly monstrous. And so then we get to the

00:45:04.020 fact that, as I say, as things currently stand now, so this is the tone of the dialogue in New

00:45:10.980 Zealand right now. And as I say, the whites are still 67% of the population. But as we can see

00:45:17.220 here, ethnic and faith leaders issue election ultimatum to parties over hate provocation.

00:45:24.220 And so despite being the minority, you can see that they already have something that the Anglo New Zealanders don't have, which is total unity, ethnic ideological unity, to form themselves as a voter bloc against the interests of the settled Anglo people, Kiwi people of New Zealand.

00:45:48.780 So Luca, in some respects, it's even worse because you don't need to have political rights

00:45:56.860 to be able to do this.

00:45:58.240 Because if a very big number of people, a very large number of people are present in

00:46:06.660 such a country, they function as essentially a sort of pressure group.

00:46:11.260 And they can essentially say, we are going to fund the politicians who are going to give

00:46:17.480 them or they could do themselves within parliament if they had political rights yeah absolutely just

00:46:23.680 to add to what you were saying no no thank you uh and you can see here as well as it goes on say

00:46:27.760 in this letter that comes from robert hunt the new zealand buddhist council uh vene karanian

00:46:35.900 the new zealand hindu council supreme sikh society of new zealand and federation of islamic

00:46:43.280 associations of New Zealand, all very traditional New Zealand cultural societies and matters of

00:46:51.700 important, to be sure. They say, when it comes to politicians suffering from protests in front

00:46:57.720 of their houses, Parliament moves at Dame Lisa Carrington and Sir Richard Hadley Speed to bring

00:47:04.380 in mitigating legislation. But when it comes to the hate-filled incitement to burn down mosques

00:47:09.920 and temples. The 18.4% of the ethnic voting population of New Zealand receives well-intentioned

00:47:17.880 lip service at best and absolute silence at worst from political parties. And one of the things that

00:47:23.820 I find so fascinating about that is just how they dip in the exact... Look, you can even see they've

00:47:29.460 emboldened it in the actual letter. 18.4% of the ethnic voting population, i.e. saying,

00:47:36.960 we are a faction you your votes now rely on us and we will uh browbeat you into doing what we want

00:47:47.320 and this is whilst we're a minority there is no consideration here for the anxieties of the

00:47:54.160 traditional kiwi people there is no you know sort of um there's no actual dialogue for all of what

00:48:01.780 the guy in the other clip was saying about dialogue oh we just need a dialogue you don't

00:48:05.460 want dialogue you want to berate people well until they submit but now i mean there there will be

00:48:10.680 deportations of new zealand it's just a question of whether it's the european and the maoris getting

00:48:14.840 kicked out or all this lot right uh and it says towards the end we do not want new zealand to

00:48:20.560 become a hate divided society where hate is normalized and violent threats to burn uh to

00:48:26.180 burn are tolerated as free speech we seek fit for purpose legislative settings and community focused

00:48:32.880 social cohesion and educated programs that protect every New Zealander regardless of their

00:48:38.540 faith, ethnicity or background. It's like that whole thing is like we don't want a hate divided

00:48:43.600 society. We had that. It was called New Zealand before a bunch of other people arrived with their

00:48:50.600 own particular interest and religious loyalties and ethnic loyalties as well. There was a clip

00:48:57.180 that I think has gone missing from it,

00:49:01.020 but where I talked about Modi turned up in New Zealand.

00:49:06.940 And once again, as you just see all over Europe,

00:49:09.360 it's just all the Indians there with their Indian flags

00:49:11.840 cheering and celebrating his name

00:49:13.640 as he stands there with the Prime Minister of New Zealand, 1.00

00:49:17.340 who is just this gormless fool 0.99

00:49:19.780 who can't see that he's been outplayed here in a long game. 0.97

00:49:23.960 So what if this free trade deal diversifies New Zealand's economy over the coming years? So what if it lowers certain tariffs on certain goods?

00:49:35.180 The other way that it goes is that once you've allowed these temporary workers into the country, there is already within New Zealand an entire social network of their own kin who are going to be determined with all of their might to keep those people and then fix them and keep them established as a part of New Zealand's population.

00:49:59.220 and on and on it will go until you're not even negotiating 0.63

00:50:03.340 as the nation of New Zealand against the nation of India. 0.90

00:50:08.400 All you're going to be is the vassal of India 0.99

00:50:11.840 and you'll just do, by dictate, whatever they tell you to do 0.83

00:50:15.580 without the formality of the actual paperwork.

00:50:18.640 I mean, until you did this segment, I didn't quite realise

00:50:21.220 probably the first Anglo nation to fall will be New Zealand

00:50:23.840 because it's got such a small population. 1.00

00:50:25.720 It's just the easiest one to do.

00:50:27.320 Yeah. 1.00

00:50:28.360 Yeah, it's the first Anglo nation down, New Zealand. 0.99

00:50:31.740 And then we get here as well. 0.86

00:50:33.420 Now, for the sake of time, I won't go into this in any great detail,

00:50:37.040 because frankly as well, I was a little bit confused by it.

00:50:41.440 So for one thing, so we have this trade deal,

00:50:46.680 and it's gone through its first hearing in the New Zealand Parliament.

00:50:51.000 And one of the things, of course, that I mentioned about it

00:50:53.640 is the fact that it will bring in temporary workers,

00:50:57.300 it will give uncapped places to students in New Zealand's universities.

00:51:05.380 Now, Peter's here, who's the leader of the New Zealand First Party.

00:51:11.020 He has basically, it seems from what I can determine,

00:51:14.680 to have gone around and done this little bit of theatre by saying,

00:51:18.220 oh, well, I've had assurances from others within government

00:51:22.780 that they're actually going to be tougher on Indians now.

00:51:28.540 And he's now using this to basically say,

00:51:31.040 shouldn't we apply this to all countries that we have free trade agreements with?

00:51:35.600 Which, yeah, fair.

00:51:37.260 But at the same time, the government have just come back to him and said,

00:51:41.020 well, the placements are uncapped because that's how we do all of our free trade deals.

00:51:46.340 We just uncap the university placements for them.

00:51:49.300 But this doesn't take into account that not all nations are the same and not all nations have over one billion people in them like India do.

00:51:58.500 And basically, this entire thing to me just seems entirely unserious.

00:52:03.480 And I can't see a serious political party out there that is really addressing these concerns.

00:52:09.500 Oh, here it is. This was a clip. So you can see just all the Indians turning up for Modi.

00:52:14.140 I won't play it for the sake of time. But he's basically accused of targeting the Indians and a lot of his people, his detractors are basically just the entire what I'm trying to say is that the entire thing is bread and circuses.

00:52:30.980 You can see that none of it is going to actually be meaningful.

00:52:34.720 None of it is going to stop the trajectory of travel

00:52:37.480 because as our good, honest Indian man

00:52:40.540 in one of the previous clips pointed out,

00:52:44.480 the youth are already locked in.

00:52:47.380 Yeah, they've already won.

00:52:48.080 It's already won.

00:52:49.060 So it doesn't matter. 0.94

00:52:50.280 You can fight about this particular free trade deal with India 0.98

00:52:54.220 and about, oh, is it letting in too many foreigners?

00:52:56.780 It doesn't matter because you've already allowed the trajectory to crystallize at the heart of New Zealand society.

00:53:05.660 And so to go on as well, the other worrying thing about all of this is the fact that if you scroll down and you see the list of concerns, the top issues of New Zealanders, only 6% of them are actually concerned about immigration.

00:53:20.640 Many of the other issues take precedent, and this is quite different from in Australia, where immigration is actually something that is very much on the Australian people's minds.

00:53:30.900 But the appeal has to be made to the New Zealanders that a lot of the things that are more of your concern, such as health care and hospitals, such as the economy, such as house pricing, such as unemployment, such as crime and law and order, all of these sorts of things,

00:53:49.360 are all affected by the question of immigration.

00:53:53.640 And so it seems to be down your list of concerns.

00:53:56.520 It is one that actually informs a good many others.

00:54:00.520 And ultimately, you're running out of time.

00:54:07.760 You're really running out of time.

00:54:09.580 And I don't want to see a great nation that we have a shared kindred spirit with,

00:54:16.240 not only in culture but in blood.

00:54:19.360 fall needlessly because of the treason of but one generation of politicians in New Zealand, right?

00:54:29.080 You have guarded yourself so well, so sensibly for so long, and it would be an absolute tragedy

00:54:35.020 to see all of this falling on itself now, especially when it's being done to you by 0.92

00:54:40.420 foreign actors such as Modi, who are entirely honest about their intentions for you. 0.87

00:54:46.020 And so this is a great deal to worry about. I can only hope in some far distant, unforeseeable future that after perhaps we've got our own house in order here in Britain and we actually have some power over immigration again, that we might be able to give better aid to Canada, to Australia, to New Zealand,

00:55:08.980 to those allies who have also found themselves betrayed by the same globalist, self-serving

00:55:15.040 people who have preyed on us as well. But until then, I would just say to the people of New Zealand,

00:55:22.120 you must communicate with one another. You must discuss this in your homes. You must bring this

00:55:26.720 question to your politicians. You must let it be known how important this is to you, because

00:55:33.040 frankly, they're giving away an inheritance that is too precious to give away.

00:55:38.980 and fundamentally one that they don't have the right to cast aside.

00:55:44.820 Are we going to read any of the comments?

00:55:47.340 I'll quickly flick through them.

00:55:50.240 That's Random Name says,

00:55:51.600 Here in Canada, was at uni during COVID?

00:55:53.940 Half the student body were Chinese or from the subcontinent.

00:55:57.420 You'd know one of them after you'd been in the bathroom. 1.00

00:56:00.400 Yeah, okay.

00:56:01.660 That's a random name.

00:56:02.760 He also says,

00:56:03.540 Reminder, diversity means anti-white.

00:56:05.460 Reminder, too. 0.82

00:56:06.600 Pride comes before the fall.

00:56:07.980 will get our countries back.

00:56:10.180 Well, we're certainly going to have a bloody good go of it.

00:56:12.840 Fallen Firebird says,

00:56:14.180 I say this totally solemnly, frankly, and slightly depressively.

00:56:19.280 There is going to be, well, I won't read that,

00:56:22.900 but I take your point, sir.

00:56:24.740 And Anger Rises for a dollar says,

00:56:27.300 I can't buy a home in my city 1.00

00:56:29.240 because the Indian diaspora have driven prices through the roof 1.00

00:56:32.700 with their nepotistic job recruitment practices. 1.00

00:56:36.060 There's the other factor is corporate complicity in the invasion.

00:56:40.000 Yeah, very true.

00:56:42.420 All right.

00:56:47.400 Right, we're going to talk about how bad philosophy destroys the cinema

00:56:52.400 by destroying culture first.

00:56:54.660 Many people are talking about the critical theory school,

00:56:59.820 the Frankfurt school, and to a very large extent,

00:57:02.740 this school has had a very negative effect,

00:57:04.960 but it's not the only one. So once you really get into the history of philosophy, you sort of see

00:57:11.260 several key moments where civilization completely goes downhill and the worldview that people have

00:57:18.040 right now is changing in very negative ways. So we are going to talk about this. We're going to

00:57:26.360 talk about the current intellectual orthodoxy, which is reductive materialism. And then we're

00:57:31.800 going to talk about the cinema. We are going to talk about some of the commentary surrounding

00:57:36.060 the Odyssey, but this is not a segment predominantly about the Odyssey. We did one

00:57:41.140 yesterday, which was Monday. So if you want, check it out. It was about how Nolan's Odyssey

00:57:48.780 is an absolute disaster. Alice Smith, who I really like, writes, modern Hollywood can't portray

00:57:56.980 heroic men because they don't know any they don't want any and can't even imagine what one might

00:58:04.580 look like that's quite a good point actually because if you go back to say 80s and 70s

00:58:08.700 they would have known people who would served in the second world war and they would have plenty

00:58:13.240 of role models so that's quite an interesting point and you could say that they could get

00:58:19.060 role models from culture, from literature, from past cinema. Instead, they hate the past.

00:58:29.120 They are looking the past in the eyes of a rabid leftist ideologue. The past was imperfect,

00:58:38.200 therefore it's completely irredeemable and not worth caring about. This is the spirit in which

00:58:45.700 several people are treating the past. And I regret to say they're not just the leftists,

00:58:52.320 several centrists and others, small C conservatives, they do tend to be this way.

00:58:58.720 Some of them won't say this, especially the small C conservatives, but they're incredibly

00:59:03.120 uncultured and they don't understand radical egalitarian propaganda when they're being fed

00:59:10.700 radical egalitarian propaganda because they end up defending something like Nolan's Odyssey saying,

00:59:17.360 hey, the diversity wasn't so bad, so it's okay, I'll support it.

00:59:27.020 Let me say one thing about it, because it has to do with how people view the world. And the way

00:59:32.500 people view the world right now impacts also how they view the past and also how they view the

00:59:39.080 future. So you don't get attracted to philosophy if you live on cloud nine. If your life is heavenly,

00:59:45.560 you don't wake up one day and say, hey, I want to go and read a philosophy book.

00:59:49.760 It's usually hardship in life that leads you to try to develop a more sophisticated view of what

00:59:57.660 is happening, because primarily you want to make sense of what is happening around you.

01:00:02.940 In a party where you are in a state of bliss,

01:00:06.880 you don't need to understand what's happening around you,

01:00:09.660 or at least you don't feel the need to do so.

01:00:12.200 So what happens is that when people start feeling this need

01:00:16.540 to start developing a sophisticated worldview,

01:00:19.420 they don't know where to look.

01:00:20.480 Most of them don't know where to look.

01:00:22.100 So they are going to come to terms

01:00:26.040 and they are going to seek examples

01:00:28.700 from the current dominant intellectual orthodoxy.

01:00:32.680 And I have some articles.

01:00:34.240 We don't have to read much from them.

01:00:37.000 We'll just focus on the titles, the questions they raise,

01:00:39.780 and also some of the statements that are made in them.

01:00:43.240 And you will see something that is sadly really familiar.

01:00:46.020 And I will say it has nothing to do with the Frankfurt School,

01:00:49.360 which, again, is a problem.

01:00:51.240 It has a lot to do with something deeper.

01:00:54.060 Right, so here we have this BBC article

01:00:56.220 from the 4th of April of 2017.

01:00:59.820 Is consciousness just an illusion?

01:01:02.860 They're trying to say essentially

01:01:04.100 that the cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett

01:01:07.740 believes our brains are machines

01:01:09.500 made of billions of tiny robots

01:01:11.620 and urine brain cells, blah, blah, blah.

01:01:13.620 Is the human mind really that special?

01:01:16.880 So there are several things to say here.

01:01:19.400 First of all, it's the attack on the idea

01:01:22.500 that humanity has a sort of special role to play in the universe, like the custodians of the earth.

01:01:31.220 Just one thing to say there. Also, the idea that brains are machines

01:01:35.260 is what reductive materialism is about. Yeah, it's terrible. Horrible language.

01:01:42.780 It also leads to the view that the human entity, the human being, 100% is a machine,

01:01:52.500 and you can entirely understand a human being just like a machine. And within such a universe,

01:01:59.620 there is really no place for our rich mental life, but also for value, for moral responsibility,

01:02:07.960 for free will, for morality. Let me just give you some more statements of this religion,

01:02:14.580 again by Daniel Dennett. He says, what we think of as our consciousness is actually our brains

01:02:20.820 pulling a number of tricks to conjure up the world as we experience it, but in reality it's

01:02:25.800 all smoke, mirrors, and rapidly firing neurons. If our brains are robots, our neurons are smaller

01:02:32.580 robots, which in turn are made of smaller robots, so even if we lose the concept of consciousness

01:02:38.100 along the way, we're still pretty incredible machines. So essentially there are people saying

01:02:43.740 consciousness is an illusion. The question they have to ask is, who is deluded then? Who gets

01:02:50.160 tricked. Let's move here. Who do you think you are? Why your sense of self is an illusion? Most

01:02:58.220 of us are convinced that we're coherent individuals who are continuous in time. There is just one

01:03:03.680 problem with this sense of self. It can't exist. So it's not just consciousness and the brain and

01:03:09.780 the mind. It's also the self. The self doesn't exist. Does this kind of philosophy sound familiar?

01:03:16.940 Do you encounter examples of it around you?

01:03:20.900 So here it says, this is from Philosophy Now.

01:03:25.220 Necessary illusion.

01:03:26.740 Roger Colwell on Nature's Little Lies.

01:03:29.220 It ends up saying essentially that morality is an illusion.

01:03:33.820 I can't exactly find where it is, but this is the argument of, yeah.

01:03:40.180 So here, for instance, it says,

01:03:42.420 Indeed, the very notion of morality according to the new Darwinism of Edward O. Wilson and others

01:03:48.580 is itself such an illusion. This is a picture of the world which has no room for value. Because

01:03:56.340 it has no room for value, it has no room for morality, has no room for agency, it has no room

01:04:04.460 for moral responsibility, essentially treats people like passive recipients of welfare.

01:04:11.300 And David Hume is, to a very large extent, responsible for this in spirit, but he was

01:04:19.540 really great at finding problems and really atrocious in finding solutions.

01:04:25.240 Right, you can say I'm a bit biased and say this, but let's save this for another time.

01:04:29.040 But one of the problems he said is that there is the problem of you can't derive a not from an is. 0.99

01:04:35.880 And he's absolutely correct about this because he says, if fundamentally all you have,

01:04:42.220 if you try to derive morality in terms of an argument and the morality and moral sentence

01:04:48.300 is going to feature in the conclusion of an argument, you need to have something moral

01:04:52.940 in the premises. If all you have is matter in motion, you don't have this. So you can't have

01:05:01.400 this morality. That's why lots of intellectuals right now are in denial about this. They can't

01:05:09.160 say right outside, say, we don't believe in morality. We don't believe that we have social

01:05:15.100 responsibility, agency, ethical responsibility, all that. They want to have their cake and they

01:05:20.980 182. They want to sound respectable on one hand to the scientists, let's say, and they want to say,

01:05:27.760 hey, we are scientific. All of you, all the rest of you are bozos who are just getting deluded and

01:05:33.880 you're just imbeciles. But they also can't have any room for what they claim to promote. And lots 1.00

01:05:41.600 of them are virtue signaling, especially in politics. They want to constantly say how

01:05:46.460 progressive they are and how good they are and how bad the right-wingers are. Let's continue

01:05:54.760 and show how this essentially is leading to a very bad portrayal of the epics. The epics are

01:06:05.940 one of the sources that we have, one of the sources that people who really want to start

01:06:11.800 thinking about the world have to start thinking start aspiring to something greater they are one

01:06:18.640 of the last vestiges last you know bastions of where we can of let's say a space where we can

01:06:28.400 be attracted to something greater we can aspire to something greater and let me just say you can't

01:06:34.640 explain the popularity of the fantasy genre without understanding this, because for instance,

01:06:43.140 especially high fantasy like Lord of the Rings is precisely that. It is

01:06:48.300 continuing the tradition of the ancient epics. And let's not forget that many people who are

01:06:56.900 criticizing the Lord of the Rings, they're criticizing it for its moral clarity. You do

01:07:02.720 remember Luca the the article we spoke of I am familiar yes yes yeah no they um well the thing

01:07:11.500 is as well it's they obviously do have an idea of their own morality as well because what they

01:07:16.940 constantly do is just basically find a way to construe some old character that meant this

01:07:24.340 particular thing into being something that now means and represents this particular thing that

01:07:30.060 is expedient for whatever political causes they may have. One of the strangest things about all

01:07:35.720 of this is that I don't think the true diversity of moral opinions has ever been more on display

01:07:43.840 for mankind, because we find ourselves now constantly rubbing shoulders with people from

01:07:50.760 all over the world, and we see how much our moral systems compare to theirs. And so I don't know,

01:07:59.600 But I agree with you as well. This entire rationalistic, this reductionism, this scientific reductionism, it's like, oh, well, your brain is just a machine. It's not just a machine. And also as well, if it were just a machine, what is so special about the human mind in comparison to all others? And this is something that is constantly spoken about in Shakespeare. If someone is insulted as an animal, you're basically insulting them as being beneath the chain of being.

01:08:29.160 All differences in this worldview are differences of complexity and degree, not differences in...

01:08:35.700 And humans are more complex than the beast.

01:08:37.920 Exactly. Hierarchies become hierarchies of complexity.

01:08:42.200 Yeah.

01:08:42.680 And for instance, something like the great chain of being is completely lost here.

01:08:49.360 And let us see how this affected Nolan's adaptation, Christopher Nolan's adaptation of the Odyssey movie.

01:08:55.940 Now, the Odyssey epic depicts a world that is completely governed by the gods.

01:09:05.580 There is nothing disenchanted about it.

01:09:08.880 But Christopher Nolan made a disenchanted adaptation of the Odyssey.

01:09:15.220 And one of the slogans that he used for his billboards was defy the gods.

01:09:21.240 So let me just give you a very brief example

01:09:23.640 why I think that Nolan's movie depicted an ultra disenchanted world.

01:09:29.100 The goddess Athena was reduced to a persistently guilty consciousness,

01:09:33.840 as Carl puts it, a function of Odysseus's PTSD,

01:09:37.820 plaguing Odysseus for winning the Trojan War in her name,

01:09:41.380 a war she and Hera partly cause in the Greek lore to punish Trojan royalty.

01:09:47.620 So everyone defending this movie, not just the leftists,

01:09:53.520 we know about the leftists, the others,

01:09:55.900 they don't know what they're talking about.

01:09:59.960 Zeus was reduced to a buzzing sound,

01:10:02.800 indistinguishable from many such sounds during the movie.

01:10:05.960 The sound was awful.

01:10:07.460 Dan, do you agree on this?

01:10:10.400 So I could hear it in the cinema.

01:10:13.140 I didn't pay for a ticket, by the way.

01:10:15.260 but um when people try and watch this movie at home you're gonna have to be like that with a

01:10:21.360 volume yeah to to hear anything so zeus was reduced to a buzzing sound indistinguishable

01:10:28.400 from many such sounds during the movie and a name everyone invoked the spirit of the law of

01:10:34.160 zeus was absent we don't understand why the hero's homecoming is just as it is in the epic

01:10:40.760 I don't understand why anything happened in that movie.

01:10:43.600 Yeah.

01:10:44.620 Why was there a mutiny?

01:10:48.280 Just none of it made any sense.

01:10:50.160 It was just thing, thing, thing, thing,

01:10:52.140 and none of it was thing, consequence, reaction.

01:10:55.880 It was just none of that.

01:10:56.740 To any extent that there was a narrative,

01:10:59.620 there was a disenchanted narrative

01:11:01.680 that stripped away all the value of the epic,

01:11:05.000 depicted in the epic.

01:11:07.260 So Poseidon was reduced to basically rough seas

01:11:10.180 and the name of a god whose savage son Odysseus blinded. 0.94

01:11:14.180 The sorceress goddess Circe was reduced to a terrified witch woman

01:11:18.000 who was scared of getting raped by marauding soldiers.

01:11:21.320 Calypso, an if goddess who held Odysseus captive,

01:11:24.360 was presented as a woman who had a moment of epiphany

01:11:27.420 and let Odysseus go when she felt that stoning the man

01:11:31.200 she fell in love with for seven years,

01:11:33.500 stoning, I mean, with drugs, not actual rocks,

01:11:37.920 and making him forget who he was,

01:11:39.660 led her to live with and make love to the shadow of who she initially fell in love with.

01:11:46.560 What an utter cheese slop thing.

01:11:49.560 Right.

01:11:49.880 So this is what was entirely disenchanted about the movie.

01:11:53.740 And I will say that any proper reading of the epic, any minor reading of the epic,

01:12:01.340 would make people spot these things.

01:12:04.960 But we do have here people like, who's here?

01:12:08.440 Sam Leith says, who cares if Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is nothing like the book?

01:12:14.840 There's a very simple answer to this.

01:12:16.840 Why do you care about one of the founding literary works of the Western canon?

01:12:21.800 Yes. So apparently, Luca, people don't think that this is a question that answers itself.

01:12:27.800 But if you have to give an answer to Sam Leith and the people who read him and the editors there

01:12:34.600 at The Spectator, is that, well, what's the alternative? What did we get? What were the

01:12:43.560 messages of what we got? And also, this movie will be watched by more people than, sadly,

01:12:50.440 will read the epic. And the next generation that isn't going to read as much as the previous ones,

01:12:56.760 already this generation doesn't read much, will have an idea about the Odyssey and about

01:13:03.320 western civilization of which the odyssey is a key part formed by that movie so um maybe sam

01:13:11.640 leith doesn't think that this is important because maybe he doesn't care about western

01:13:16.160 civilization maybe he does i don't know who he is but i think i get my answer to yeah to this

01:13:21.920 particular question see if you agree with me i think the difference is is that if you read the

01:13:26.260 odyssey and you've probably found it because you've read it multiple times every time you read

01:13:30.940 you can go one layer deeper yes like okay okay that's happening because of that and that's and

01:13:35.140 and it all fits and you can just keep going deeper and deeper and deeper into the story

01:13:38.520 the difference with the film is you get all of it on the first pass there's no reason to go back

01:13:43.600 and watch it because it's all an inch deep the entire thing it's just it's just spectacle but

01:13:47.840 there's nothing drawing you in under it and also um i will say this uh we i want to talk now a bit

01:13:55.640 about Steven Pinker, who is one of the sages of the dominant intellectual orthodoxy, which is

01:14:02.420 reductive materialism. And let me also put one of his stances here. Steven Pinker in free will,

01:14:11.220 there's no such thing as free will in the sense of a ghost in the machine. Our behavior is the

01:14:15.940 product of physical processes in the brain, rather than some blah, blah, blah. He essentially is one

01:14:23.240 of those people who are saying that there is no free will. There's no free will. There's no

01:14:28.300 personal, and I'm talking about not Pinker here. I'm talking about this reductive materialism.

01:14:33.660 There's no self. There's no brain. There's no consciousness. There is no morality. There's no

01:14:38.100 value. There is no free will. There's no ethical responsibility. There's just matter in motion,

01:14:44.660 machine-like matter in motion. So here, Steven Pinker says something about the Iliad and the

01:14:50.200 Odyssey, which I find completely surprising. And yes, I will criticize him a lot about this,

01:14:56.000 because I expected better of him, because he's supposed to be one of the, he's considered to be

01:15:01.000 one of the biggest intellectuals of our time. And I think that this is a really, it's not a mistake

01:15:07.600 that I can look past. So he says there, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, a book that he has

01:15:13.020 wrote, he has wrote, written, I presented the Iliad as an example of the brutality the ancients took

01:15:19.480 for granted. Correct. This has not been fully appreciated in the revisionism in the New Odyssey 0.98

01:15:26.160 film, or most of the commentary, and opens quotes. We should not act as if there is any higher value

01:15:33.920 in honoring the ancient past, instead saving our reverence for how far we have come in the last

01:15:40.960 centuries. The best lesson that Homer can provide is gratitude that we no longer live in this world.

01:15:47.580 We're still living in denial about the Greeks, and he's posting positively an article by Richard

01:15:54.640 Hanania, who is completely clueless about the epic. So let me say one thing here, what he says.

01:16:01.620 We should not act as if there's any higher value in honoring the ancient past.

01:16:07.480 No one said this. No one said that the Odyssey has value because it's old,

01:16:16.300 and especially what is egregious here by an intellectual,

01:16:21.640 he says, instead, saving your reverence

01:16:24.640 for how far we have come in the last few centuries.

01:16:28.160 You can't actually, you can't be familiar with the Odyssey

01:16:32.960 and think, say, to counter-signal critics of the movie,

01:16:39.800 say, don't get fixated about the correct representation

01:16:42.760 of the Odyssey and Odysseus.

01:16:45.260 instead get fixated on how and happy on how the better angels of our nature have made the last

01:16:52.300 two centuries incredibly blissful. You can't do that by separating Odysseus from the spirit of

01:17:00.740 civilization and the goods of civilization. The brutality of war was what Odysseus ended.

01:17:12.340 That's the meaning of the Trojan horse.

01:17:14.680 But people like Richard Hanania and Steven Pinker can't see this because they don't see the epic on its own terms.

01:17:23.060 They haven't familiarized themselves with it, or they have read it, but they have read it through a completely disenchanted look, such as the look about the Odyssey that was presented to us in Nolan's movie.

01:17:37.880 there if they strip the element of gods there completely from the movie and they strip the

01:17:45.440 element of justice there you just see someone who is less guilty than others and comes and overpowers

01:17:51.500 some bad people at his home but uh yeah they all of that flew under them so let's see here what

01:17:59.620 richard hanania says here uh by the way i'm not gonna pay to read his sub stack but he says here

01:18:06.060 conservatives sometimes criticize modern adaptations of old stories for including

01:18:10.840 changes to make them consistent with today's political sensibilities.

01:18:15.260 They never are, though. They never are consistent with today's political sensibilities. They're

01:18:20.920 always consistent with a particular smaller fraction of people's political sensibilities.

01:18:27.860 And the rest of the moderate people who just get thrown into the quote of modern audience

01:18:33.500 just get dragged along with it and told, oh, this is what people believe now. This is what

01:18:40.080 a modern audience is. And this is what you think. It's always done as a form of moral propaganda.

01:18:48.100 And here Hanania continues in the post that Steven Pinker shared and approved of. He says, 0.83

01:18:57.940 to me, put yourself in the shoes of Nolan, creating a movie about the Odyssey in 2026.

01:19:04.900 To me, it seems like there are two options. Tell the story accurately, in which case the audience

01:19:09.740 will hate the protagonist and not be able to relate to him at all, or tell the story with

01:19:14.700 a modern twist in order to make it palatable. Chris, for Nolan, made choice number two.

01:19:20.300 I just, first of all, these aren't the only two options. And second, I don't see how the first

01:19:25.160 one is seriously contemplated by anyone who is who is um mightily familiar with the epic also

01:19:34.700 he definitely doesn't answer why people want to want to make versions of the odyssey time and time

01:19:42.280 again do they want it because they're romanticizing a trickster that's the thing this wasn't just a

01:19:49.700 trickster but please look well i was just going to say in which case the the audience will hate

01:19:54.120 Odysseus, it's like, well, will they? At the end of the day, fine, Odysseus is a man of the Bronze

01:20:00.500 Age, and some of the things that he did might not sit well with people these days. But at the same

01:20:07.020 time, we live in a culture, especially after the explosion of Game of Thrones, where moral

01:20:13.860 complexity was seen as the great thing of storytelling, to have someone who was actually

01:20:21.400 great to have someone who has is either a villain with a really troubled backstory you know in the

01:20:27.820 shady past or whatever it may be like moral complexity is one of the in fact it's one of

01:20:32.840 the things people have been for a long time kind of wanting to okay can we just get back to like

01:20:37.840 the old good versus evil thing there as well so the idea to me that it's like well they'd hate

01:20:44.720 Odysseus it's like I don't think they would and even if they do I still think it would be a

01:20:49.840 worthwhile endeavour, getting the audience to grapple with the portrayal of people's lives

01:20:57.540 in times far before their own, so they can see what other older moral systems used to be in

01:21:04.780 place. Because in that, when you do it that way as well, you automatically have either a better

01:21:11.900 or worse appreciation for where you now sit in your own moment, because you have an actual

01:21:17.840 honest portrayal of the fact that life back then was different you're not just saying well the

01:21:23.740 film the northman did that quite well actually right and that was highly regarded yeah yeah

01:21:27.400 right that's a great example um yes and let me just say this because it adds to your point

01:21:34.300 the movie was let's say um the people who advised nolan about the epic were illiterate right right

01:21:42.880 So we can make criticisms of past systems of morality, and there are plenty of criticisms

01:21:50.420 to make of the morality of the time, especially when it was wrapped in a polytheistic content

01:21:58.220 and context.

01:21:59.920 But to just look at the Odyssey and say, hey, the Achaeans did some bad things, like Agamemnon

01:22:08.740 sacrificed his daughter.

01:22:09.940 So the Achaeans are a death cult, and you don't care at all about subverting one of their epics, is to essentially have a really troubled relation with the past, which is a relation with the past that lots of people in modern times have.

01:22:25.820 It's like saying, for instance, well, Cicero's second wife was less than 18 when they got married, so Rome has nothing to teach us.

01:22:36.220 Obviously, Rome has a lot of things to teach us

01:22:40.680 and it has contributed to civilization.

01:22:43.380 And to subvert, for instance, Roman epics

01:22:46.320 just because of this thing

01:22:50.420 and just defend the subversion of Roman epics

01:22:54.820 is as hideous as defending the subversion

01:22:57.280 of ancient Greek epics.

01:23:00.140 And yeah, this flies under the radar of several people

01:23:03.340 Because it isn't just an issue of obey the gods, thinkers and atheists, so I don't care about people who are religious.

01:23:13.180 There are themes there that are universal and themes there in morality that even atheists abide by.

01:23:20.560 If you look at the Odyssey.

01:23:22.140 And I want to talk a bit about Jonathan Peugeot's, some of his comments.

01:23:26.020 I want to play some of his comments.

01:23:28.040 Samson, do we have some extra time?

01:23:30.820 We aren't going to have brokonomics afterwards.

01:23:33.340 okay so i want to i want to criticize some of the things that he says because he

01:23:39.720 he says that he initially was very skeptical of the movie he didn't like the woke portray

01:23:45.960 the woke mantle and stuff but then he watched this and he says essentially that this is a

01:23:51.320 masterpiece and it is trickery upon trickery and that nolan is using the veneer of post-modernism

01:23:57.680 to actually play some themes that Hollywood has turned its back to.

01:24:08.280 It's all 10D chess from Nolan.

01:24:10.440 Yeah, yeah, it's exactly.

01:24:11.420 As he says, it's double inversion.

01:24:13.580 So I'm going to show less than I wanted to show,

01:24:18.280 but let me just show you this.

01:24:20.080 Absolutely brilliant.

01:24:21.620 You see, you have to remember what this story is about.

01:24:24.600 The Odyssey is the story about the character of Odysseus,

01:24:30.940 the character of Ulysses, is a trickster.

01:24:33.280 And he's a trickster all through his story.

01:24:35.820 He's a trickster until the end. 0.71

01:24:37.680 He pretends to be a beggar in his own house 1.00

01:24:39.980 in order to trick the suitors to be able to kill all of them. 0.99

01:24:43.680 He tricks all these people through his story. 0.95

01:24:46.760 And of course, in this version of the Odyssey,

01:24:48.500 they add the part from the Aeneid, which is not in the Odyssey,

01:24:51.700 which is that the entire thing starts with him tricking the Trojans

01:24:56.100 with the Trojan horse in order to take over the city of Troy.

01:25:00.840 And so, at some point, you realize, oh, wait a minute.

01:25:06.180 This movie is a Trojan horse.

01:25:08.580 This movie is like a reverse Trojan horse

01:25:11.620 where he has put on a kind of veneer of postmodernism,

01:25:15.800 but inside is the story of the return of the king,

01:25:19.520 the return of the father,

01:25:20.820 You know, the remembering of your home, the returning home, and then the passing of authority to the son, you know, the ennobling of the son who will replace the father in an act of filiation rather than an act of revolution, which is... 0.95

01:25:37.800 So, there are several things to say here, but one thing is that you could have all these themes with a black lesbian Odysseus.

01:25:50.820 or black, trans, lesbian Odysseus who would identify as a king or a kang.

01:25:56.860 And the return of Odysseus there, it would show the return of the king. 0.63

01:26:03.800 So the veneer of postmodernism wasn't just the veneer of postmodernism

01:26:07.940 because the movie was a disenchanted movie.

01:26:11.900 All these themes were present because it was the Odyssey.

01:26:15.300 There were several additions there.

01:26:17.300 But these additions were there just to achieve what wasn't there in the epic, just to deconstruct the epic.

01:26:26.640 And let me just say, and I'm surprised he didn't spot it because this is what he's doing essentially.

01:26:32.420 He's doing meta commentary about movies and about, you know, myths, tales and stuff.

01:26:37.900 Because in the Odyssey, Odysseus is loved by the gods, except Poseidon after a particular moment, which symbolizes the sin of pride, right? Odysseus is loved by the gods in the Odyssey. And there are several things that the movie missed and alterated from the epic that show precisely why Odysseus is loved by the gods.

01:27:02.640 and the movie tried to have a leveling down function.

01:27:08.520 They tried to elevate his crew, downgrade Odysseus,

01:27:12.660 downgrade Odysseus to make him seem also

01:27:15.880 not as guilty as Polyphemus,

01:27:19.600 but also a bit guilty for not burying his men,

01:27:22.180 which just isn't there in the epic.

01:27:24.240 So it was all a postmodern,

01:27:27.320 entirely disenchanted postmodern attempt

01:27:30.460 to completely deflate morality, to completely deflate heroism, to completely present Odysseus

01:27:38.540 as a trickster. And I'm sorry, but I'm not having it from people who are supposed to know about

01:27:43.620 the Odyssey and talk about the epic. To present Odysseus just as a trickster is to fall entirely

01:27:51.260 victim to this disenchanting propaganda that perhaps flies under the radar. Because what

01:27:58.440 Odysseus represents is realism. We aren't in a utopian setting. And he says, when you get caught

01:28:08.260 in the crossfire, what you have to do is to restore order in chaos and get home. It's not

01:28:15.360 to wage war for war's sake, for glory's sake, to give in to the worst angels of our nature,

01:28:23.180 as Steven Pinker would put it, it's the exact opposite. It's, let's end this, end this with

01:28:29.920 ingenuity rather than just stupidly attacking other people and going, hey, I want to be heroic, 0.99

01:28:36.660 let me just charge and slay as many people as possible. It's use your ingenuity to restore 0.98

01:28:45.400 order in chaotic situations that you find yourself in and restore a just order. So it was,

01:28:51.740 This is how we know about leftists, but also because of this culture, because of bad philosophy, because of the deflationary spirit of philosophy, which constantly tries to say everything good is a lie.

01:29:08.980 Because of this, many more people, more people than the rabid leftists, leftist ideologues, have trouble connecting with the really prestigious and I'd say great European tradition and Western tradition and the Western canon.

01:29:32.880 And if we are to say that we shouldn't be ashamed of it, we should find out more about it.

01:29:39.120 And here is one of the things that I'm really happy to be here at the Lotus Eaters and to be able to do this is if you're really interested in it and to learn more about ancient Greek virtue ethics, we do have a course about ancient Greek virtue ethics from Hesiod and Homer to Plotinus.

01:29:57.880 and we're working on more projects and on future projects

01:30:01.320 because we do care about our tradition.

01:30:07.960 Great.

01:30:10.040 What do you want to do?

01:30:11.160 Do we have video comments or...?

01:30:13.360 Do we have any video comments, Simpson?

01:30:16.600 Sorry?

01:30:19.220 Okay.

01:30:19.780 Okay, well, we will wrap it up then.

01:30:22.420 So thank you very much for coming

01:30:24.100 and we'll see you tomorrow.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - July 21, 2026

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1466

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