TRIGGERnometry - November 06, 2026


The Midterms Breakdown + Russell Brand Found Guilty - Off the Fence

＂The Radical Right Is More Reasonable Than the Moderate Left＂ – Steven Crowder

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 6 minutes

Words per minute

171.73

Word count

11,493

Sentence count

196


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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00:00:30.000 Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's Off the Fence with me, Constantine Kissin,
00:00:35.140 my Trigonometry co-host, Francis Foster, Winston Marshall of The Winston Marshall Show,
00:00:39.920 and of course, Tom Slater from Spike. Gentlemen, welcome back. What a week of news it's been.
00:00:45.020 We've only got two massive stories, but they're so massive, that's why we're only doing two,
00:00:49.860 and that is, of course, the midterms and the very recent conviction of Russell Brand.
00:00:56.080 And let us start, I think, with the midterms.
00:00:59.940 And let me just give a summary of what's happened, then we can get stuck into the discussion.
00:01:04.900 The Democrats won both houses of Congress, the House and the Senate.
00:01:09.140 They flipped in the Senate seven Republican seats, including Texas, Kansas, Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Maine, without losing any of their own, giving them a 54 to 44 majority, with Alaska and Mississippi still counting.
00:01:26.000 Kansas elected its first Democratic senator since 1932, almost 100 years.
00:01:32.340 And Texas elected a Democrat statewide for the first time since 1994.
00:01:36.820 In the House, Dems have won at least 251 seats, flipping around 40 and building their biggest majority since 2008.
00:01:46.780 And about two dozen races are still to call.
00:01:49.840 Now, Trump's approval rating with those who voted was 38%,
00:01:54.100 which is the lowest of any president at a midterm.
00:01:57.160 The economy was voters' top issue,
00:02:00.160 but also 9 in 10 voters called government corruption a major factor,
00:02:05.420 and most said the Iran war was a mistake as well.
00:02:08.900 These are counts as of this morning, as I mentioned,
00:02:11.180 if you see it's still being counted.
00:02:13.640 and the recriminations within the republicans have already begun there's obviously questions
00:02:21.660 about what this will mean going forward for the last two years of trump's presidency and a lot
00:02:27.820 more to discuss so francis oh i should say one final thing is actually while this is a british
00:02:36.060 show me francis and tom are in the u.s right now so we're actually on the ground and have been
00:02:41.760 talking to people uh francis what have you made of it we've obviously hosted a few conversations
00:02:46.780 about it with people spoken to people off camera uh read a lot about it what's what's been your
00:02:52.640 takeaway well my take has basically been the trump voters voted for in particular one or two let's
00:03:02.800 say three things number one was closing the border which trump did and they're very happy with the
00:03:08.460 way that the border was closed number two it's the economy stupid the great the very famous line
00:03:15.100 and trump voters feel that the economy hasn't been tackled properly the cost of living keeps
00:03:22.480 spiraling inflation keeps going up the gap between rich and poor is ever widening and this is not
00:03:29.540 what they voted for when it came to a trump presidency they thought a trump presidency
00:03:34.360 would actually be tackling these issues more effectively.
00:03:37.840 And also they feel incredibly, incredibly frustrated with the war in Iran.
00:03:42.940 The phrase that everybody uses, no more forever wars.
00:03:46.860 And they feel that the rising prices that they feel both at the gas station
00:03:51.180 and at the supermarket, they feel that the war in Iran is largely to blame for that.
00:03:59.000 So at the moment, when you talk to ordinary Americans,
00:04:02.080 particularly those who voted for Trump, who were not normally Trump voters or Republican voters,
00:04:08.000 there is a sense of frustration and there is a sense that this presidency hasn't been what they actually voted for.
00:04:18.320 And you can see right now what's actually happened.
00:04:22.060 I think the story of so far, I think there's two major stories so far of the midterms.
00:04:28.400 Number one is the flipping of Texas, which is just a huge, huge, huge story.
00:04:35.220 And number two, the rise of John Ossoff, the Georgian senator.
00:04:41.220 Because you and I, KK, we watched his speech.
00:04:45.500 We watched him deliver.
00:04:46.700 We watched what he was talking about.
00:04:49.080 And I have to say, it was a barnstorming speech.
00:04:51.920 It's a great orator.
00:04:53.140 He looks like somebody who could actually really galvanize the center and center right, possibly, if this trend continues to vote Democrat.
00:05:05.060 So it's really interesting to see what the next two years are going to be.
00:05:09.600 Well, just on that, before the guys jump in, the Calci odds for the next Democratic nominee, he absolutely shot up in that, as you can see.
00:05:19.920 So he is now at 26%. He was actually, I believe, a little bit higher than that at one point. And on the Republican side, you know, I talked about the recriminations. One of the things that is happening is one of the Republicans who's actually been willing to talk publicly about corruption, the need to make sure that there's no stock trading by politicians, etc., is Ron DeSantis, who's gone from basically zero to, yes, he's behind JDB.
00:05:49.920 Vance and Marco Rubio, but he is absolutely shot up as a result because, as I mentioned in my
00:05:55.540 introduction, even if you talk to right-wing voters and even right-wing commentators, the
00:06:02.060 corruption within the Trump administration, the fact that Susie Wilde's daughters are making
00:06:08.140 millions allegedly from lobbying and all sorts of other things that people will bring up,
00:06:15.140 That was a big issue, including for Trump's own voters as well.
00:06:20.700 And so the fact that Ron DeSantis is doing so well is an indicator of the fact that the entire administration is now losing support with their own base.
00:06:31.980 I think that's right. And also, it's so clear why this happened.
00:06:35.740 I mean, we can look at the exit polls, the question of I'm going to try not to knock over my own laptop here.
00:06:41.420 we we've all seen those exit polls we see that the cost of living was the primary concern we
00:06:46.500 see how many people are concerned about corruption and also the sense that the iran war certainly
00:06:50.780 underpins the price at the pump people have realized the sort of grand folly of this and
00:06:56.420 that it's now having huge domestic political consequences for trump but there's also a
00:07:00.420 broader sense in which he has forgotten who put him in the white house in the first place
00:07:05.000 those kind of forgotten men and women of flyover country of the rust belt who took a chance at him
00:07:09.860 in 2016 and the fact that what made his movement so potent originally was it fused their kind of
00:07:15.820 economic concerns de-industrialization the fact that their um the bread and butter issues weren't
00:07:21.400 being attended to even by uh the parties that would like to think of themselves as looking
00:07:25.740 after the working class i.e the democrats but also there was this immigration dimension the
00:07:30.460 fact that their concerns about the influx of people at the southern border and elsewhere
00:07:34.760 was just being totally dismissed and also the cultural question the fact that they were being
00:07:39.220 condescended to that there was this new liberal left elite who had some pretty kooky views and
00:07:46.060 didn't have much time for the more traditional values of people across America. That would all
00:07:50.900 sort of start to break down. You had Trump going into this election, having effectively ceded the
00:07:55.900 economic ground to the Democrats, not that they've got any answers to what is ailing Americans, but
00:08:00.400 broadly speaking, opposing the Iran war and being able to highlight just how difficult things are
00:08:07.360 getting out there, that ground was given to them. And then in the meantime, you've not only got the
00:08:11.220 corruption, which is clearly filtered through, but also just the absurdity of, you know, Trump
00:08:17.300 continuing to cycle through swatches about, you know, what the curtains are going to look like in
00:08:20.620 the presidential ballroom. Meanwhile, people are really struggling out there. And a sense that
00:08:25.420 even though this is by no means a vindication of the Democrats in their curious ideologies,
00:08:33.140 all the open borders greenism all the nonsense they've been marinating themselves in over the
00:08:38.540 past few years it's so obvious to me that the yeah the failures of the trump administration
00:08:43.880 basically handed states which historically have been deep read to the democrats in a way that
00:08:48.380 could so easily have been avoided if he had just focused on that domestic agenda rather than getting
00:08:52.520 himself into all of these entanglements i don't think we would be here and what's fascinating is
00:08:56.760 It's infuriated sections of all of the key aspects that you would need to piece that coalition together.
00:09:05.860 The MAGA base has broken down over the issue of Iran as well as some other issues as well.
00:09:11.080 The kind of floating voter is now being repelled because of the cost of living concerns.
00:09:16.620 And even the pre-Trump Republican base, deep red states, places like Kansas, what have you,
00:09:23.420 which I think the last time they had a Democrat,
00:09:25.020 Wizard of Oz was still in the cinemas,
00:09:27.440 shows you just how lethal all of those mistakes and blunders
00:09:32.300 the Iran war to the fore have been for him.
00:09:36.800 I would say that your guys' analysis is considerably more nuanced
00:09:40.040 than what we're hearing, not just from podcast Istan,
00:09:45.320 who I had a quick look and it seems to be a lot of chat
00:09:48.500 about the Zionists in Iran.
00:09:50.920 and i also listened this morning to the bbc for their analysis i couldn't quite believe it but
00:09:56.620 they they framed it as completely catastrophic as sort of historically catastrophic and which is
00:10:04.240 neither uh true which i'll i'll explain why and certainly not impartial as the bbc is supposed to
00:10:11.920 be at one point the commentator i forget her name said wouldn't be amazing if he gets impeached as
00:10:16.440 a consequence. But before I get to what happens next, I think it's interesting. I've been trying
00:10:20.920 to work out exactly why what happened, what happened, what happened, happened. The vice
00:10:25.920 president, have you guys seen his tweet? He talks about, he blames four things. He says it's,
00:10:33.480 he wants to listen to the people, to his voters, and they want an end to the war,
00:10:39.080 a focus on cost of living and inflation, to put America first and change the relationship with
00:10:45.680 Israel. Now, that actually, he's got, he claims the sort of the best pollsters on the job,
00:10:54.240 but that actually contradicts the best exit poll I found. So NBC News have done an exit poll of
00:11:01.740 79,000 voters. And this is very interesting. And there's a couple of things I want to highlight
00:11:08.100 here. Now, this only polls people who actually voted. So those who abstained would not be
00:11:14.720 included in this. But for a start, those who voted Republican last time and voted Democrat this time,
00:11:23.100 I switched their vote. It's very, very small. We're talking about 6% of the Democrat voters
00:11:33.200 this time who were Republican last time. And likewise, 7% of them who normally think of
00:11:41.540 themselves as a Republican voted Democrat this time. So people who actually changed the vote,
00:11:46.420 there's not a huge amount. It's pretty small. And it's not nothing, but it's pretty small.
00:11:53.300 What I think is maybe a lot of people abstaining because they can't bring themselves to vote for
00:11:57.340 the Democrats. And the other big thing which I'd like to bring up is, Dino, can you bring up the
00:12:04.040 asset i had okay so this is from that exact poll that i am referring to now you'll see
00:12:12.600 it lists which of these is the most important issue facing the economy uh based on republican
00:12:19.560 voters and democrat voters in this election and you'll see that the most important thing is the
00:12:24.600 economy at 39 and that's pretty much split 52 50 46 between the parties so pretty even split and
00:12:34.040 What is not there is foreign policy, which is 4%.
00:12:38.600 Now, of course, you'll be thinking, well, foreign policy, the Iran war affects the price
00:12:42.720 of gasoline.
00:12:43.720 And in the same polling shows that people actually really care about the price of gasoline.
00:12:47.320 But I think that goes in the face of a lot of the common tree that we're hearing, which
00:12:51.620 is sort of blaming Israel and Iran.
00:12:54.960 It's more specific.
00:12:55.960 It's about the economy.
00:12:58.840 And there's also right at the bottom, the second big issue is the state of democracy,
00:13:02.400 Konstantin referred to. And I think within that comes the idea of corruption. And what's interesting
00:13:12.800 about the corruption thing, obviously there you can see the Democrats care a lot about corruption.
00:13:18.000 And you already mentioned what some of those issues will be, but it will include the Trump
00:13:24.320 coin and what does he call it? He calls it World Liberty Financial. I think it will include
00:13:32.240 the qatari jet that he got the pardons the clemency the family business deals i also think
00:13:39.200 though for republicans who think that way who voted republican they'll think of corruption
00:13:44.080 about they'll they'll remember equality leering center in in minneapolis and for them corruption
00:13:50.400 means something different and it will it'll be that they see the democrats as corruption but it's
00:13:55.600 nevertheless an important issue for voters so for me this i found this to be a very interesting exit
00:14:01.520 poll and trying to understand what people really wanted and I before I sort of go further I wonder
00:14:10.480 if anyone had any opinions of what I've just said before I sort of launch into other details
00:14:16.240 well you mentioned it there I mean the interesting thing is how do you divorce
00:14:21.040 foreign policy from the economy and this is part of the big debate here in America especially on
00:14:26.640 the right because there are people who say well look look at the polling that winston's just
00:14:32.000 presented foreign policy is not a big issue for voters and in fact they would argue the reason
00:14:37.520 that prices have gone up as much as they did is trump's tariffs policy which was
00:14:44.000 why it was actually quietly but widely unpopular on the right with his own supporters and many
00:14:49.920 people in the commentariat and the the problem with that argument is prices for everything have
00:14:57.440 gone up across the world so if it was about trump's tariffs policy that wouldn't be driving the the
00:15:03.600 rising prices of everything in the uk in france and germany all over europe etc the other thing
00:15:10.640 probably worth mentioning is is how little credit trump has got for his immigration policies and in
00:15:18.880 fact one of the key demographics that he massively slid back with was his panics and a lot of people
00:15:26.640 attribute that to the fact that while closing the border was kind of popular with everybody
00:15:32.880 the ice raids the way that they were done uh some of the visuals some of the mistakes that were made
00:15:40.000 they they really were something that uh angered the hispanic community in particular but actually
00:15:46.400 angered many people across the board and so people who were very very supportive of the idea of
00:15:52.320 closing borders uh nonetheless found themselves in opposition to immigration policy overall
00:15:58.480 uh because of what they perceived as being the excesses of it and um not to sidetrack the
00:16:03.200 conversation entirely but it's um i think there's some relevance here for the debates that we have
00:16:08.720 uh in the uk and elsewhere about uh you know there's this very popular i certainly on on the
00:16:15.200 fringes of the right very popular idea you know what we need is mass deportations i think one of
00:16:20.560 the big takeaways from all of this is actually that when when the public even some of whom are
00:16:27.680 prepared to accept or even support the idea of you know we've got a big problem with illegal
00:16:32.880 immigration we've got to deal with it when they are confronted with the visual imagery and the
00:16:38.720 narrative stories of what happens to people who are deported and how they're deported and seeing
00:16:45.360 all of that happen actually that's when the rubber meets the road and you see that it's
00:16:50.000 one thing to say that you care about this issue and it's a totally different thing
00:16:55.680 to actually carry out and and have a sustained policy on that that people will continue to
00:17:00.880 support um so that there's a mix of things but i think uh in my view the idea that you can divorce
00:17:08.720 domestic economics from foreign policy in this instance it's just very hard to say now i agree
00:17:14.640 with you winston jd vance did a very long tweet which was essentially uh we've got four problems
00:17:20.800 uh in america the first is israel the second is israel the third is israel and the fourth also
00:17:26.080 happens to be israel and it's now very clear there's been this big question over jd vance
00:17:33.120 and his association with tucker carlson tucker carlson has been very very active in undermining
00:17:40.400 uh trump both before the election when he he for you know there's no evidence to support this but
00:17:46.800 he claimed that trump was about to nuke iran because bb wants him to um and now here only
00:17:52.960 yesterday he he did a tweet uh with the words the great portrayal showing all the times that
00:17:58.800 Trump promised something and then didn't do it. I think it's becoming very, very clear to a lot
00:18:04.160 of people that the reason J.D. Vance refused to distance himself from Tucker Carlson is that
00:18:10.360 Tucker Carlson is the mouthpiece of J.D. Vance. He says all the things that J.D. Vance doesn't
00:18:17.440 want to be pinned as saying. And he is clearly the wing of the Republican Party that is persuaded
00:18:27.460 that, you know, the big problem America faces is its relationship with Israel.
00:18:32.080 There are other people who are making different sorts of arguments,
00:18:34.900 and that is now the source of the infighting within the party.
00:18:40.120 I also think one of the issues that we haven't discussed
00:18:43.460 is the issue of AI and data centers.
00:18:47.260 When Konstantin and I were in Austin when we were filming some interviews,
00:18:52.740 we were watching YouTube, and because we weren't signed in
00:18:55.700 to a YouTube channel, we were essentially getting bombarded with political ads. And it was so
00:19:02.480 interesting because the Democrat side, James Tallarico, that was one of the things that he
00:19:10.140 referenced. He was talking about data centers. He was talking about the impact that it was going to
00:19:16.160 have on communities. If you talk to people, the average person on the street, and you talk to
00:19:22.620 about AI, there is a real fear. There is a fear that the data centers, the impact it's going to
00:19:31.080 have on the water, on electricity prices. But there's also a real fear as to what this technology
00:19:39.140 is going to do to the job market. And we can already see the impact it's actually having
00:19:44.360 on the job market, particularly entry-level white-collar jobs. So there's a real, real
00:19:50.900 angst around this. And in fact, just going back to John Ossoff, when John Ossoff delivered that
00:19:57.700 barnstorming speech, when they announced his victory, he referenced AI and he referenced
00:20:07.000 the data centers. This is a massive issue. And one of the things I think that we're not talking
00:20:16.000 about is trump's association with the data centers and maybe his base will were also thinking and the
00:20:25.300 people who decided to swing over were thinking well this is the presidency of the tech oligarch
00:20:32.760 the tech overlord and he's not as interested in the little guy as he purports to be and the kind
00:20:40.400 if you take something like the race in texas as well the way in which there was this attempt to
00:20:45.700 kind of shift it back onto much more comfortable ground for the republicans so talarico being
00:20:49.300 branded talafrico because of the fact that as with all democrats it's there's no end of absurd quotes
00:20:55.180 that he's issued over the years you know there are six genders god is non-binary the american flag
00:21:00.720 is a complicated symbol all of this was thrown at him and it just looked like changing the subject
00:21:05.420 because those more fundamental issues of the economy where everything is going feel like
00:21:10.460 they're getting away from the republicans and to i suppose shift the conversation slightly i think
00:21:17.020 one if we're talking about the democrats the democratic side of this and the new figures that
00:21:21.380 have emerged through this obviously on top of john ossoff and james talarico have already mentioned
00:21:25.880 abdul al-sayed in michigan is clearly worth a mention him triumphing in the census race there
00:21:32.040 is a really significant development not least because i think you can most gently describe it
00:21:37.620 he's got a very clear history of islamist apologism um it's quite clear that various
00:21:42.820 members of his family from egypt were involved in the muslim brotherhood including his own mother
00:21:47.780 at least that's according to his half-sister he claims to be estranged from her but nevertheless
00:21:51.380 that's there after the ayatollah hermene was uh assassinated earlier this year there was this
00:21:58.100 leaked internal call that elsaid was having with his campaign staff saying he was going to keep
00:22:02.900 entirely quiet about it because there are a lot of people in dearborn who will be sad today dearborn
00:22:08.260 of course being america's first and only as i understand it arab majority city and it was the
00:22:13.900 city couple of people on trigonometry were sad about it as well exactly and uh a rare point of
00:22:22.540 uh unity between francis and dearborn michigan there and uh those are the voters who put him
00:22:28.000 over the top in the primary it's very close primary and uh those places dearborn also ham
00:22:32.460 tramek places like that were the difference for him earlier this year there was an attack on a
00:22:37.600 synagogue in michigan by a lebanese national and his response was to say that hurt people
00:22:43.160 hurt people so there is this sense in which maybe tallarico is a little bit a reminder of the
00:22:48.440 slightly more cartoonish woke them and identity politics of the democrats previously in the form
00:22:54.580 of el side i think we see the new bays that the democratic party is in where kind of cultural
00:22:59.660 politics is concerned which is that they have sort of maintained a lot of the woke stuff that's just
00:23:04.160 a given but bolted onto it now is this sort of islamo-leftist jihadi chic almost that seems to
00:23:13.200 at the very least um forms takes the form of making excuses for or turning a blind eye to
00:23:20.260 islamist extremism and that's something which is uh we're more accustomed to it in europe i think is
00:23:27.460 uh a grim and brave new world for america to be entering into yeah i think there's a sort of
00:23:33.300 irony here which is that trump has brought my net migration or south border crossings down to zero
00:23:41.860 um he has the fentanyl crisis is like massively down which is completely linked to that to that
00:23:47.620 problem and he's deported between 10 and 15 percent of biden's illegals of which i think
00:23:54.580 there's 10 to 15 million now that actually is pretty low if you think about how many
00:23:58.660 biden brought into the country but it's still a lot of people that he's managed to deport and
00:24:06.580 yet at this election they have you have this uh abdul el-sayed the son of egyptian students
00:24:15.700 and he's linked to the muslim brotherhood he seems like an islamist he doesn't seem like a
00:24:19.940 a particularly nice chat there's a viral video of him this week with a scottish sky news journal i
00:24:24.900 don't know if you saw this and he's he's holding the shoulders of the journalist or almost i mean
00:24:29.540 you just don't you don't touch journalists i've never seen that before where someone
00:24:33.940 touches anyway all this to say that trump actually seems to be doing pretty well
00:24:40.100 on some measures on on uh sorting out the immigration issue and yet the result has been
00:24:45.700 nine more Somalis like Ilhan Omar elected to the Senate or Congress. And you kind of like
00:24:54.820 have a mismatch there, which as Constantine, I think is right, is lessons to be learned about
00:24:59.140 what that means in Britain and the sort of the politics of immigration. There's one detail
00:25:04.900 I will bring up though, Constantine, which is that actually of Republican voters,
00:25:09.780 they largely in this same NBC exit poll agree with the the idea that US made the right decision
00:25:19.740 in taking military action against Iran so again that doesn't include people who didn't vote and
00:25:26.780 so are not including this but voters there's still people still some of MAGA do think it
00:25:32.200 was the right decision to make so that all to say is to me is that I'll make one more point
00:25:39.500 here actually is that inflation is actually it's absolutely the case that food and gas prices are
00:25:45.780 up but inflation is at uh a better position as far as if i've got my facts right here then it
00:25:54.120 was certainly under biden um or at least the rate inflation is is not nearly as bad as it was under
00:25:59.660 biden um so actually might be worth getting uh uh your ai uh guys who are they called venice ai
00:26:07.280 um to check where the current inflation rate is and how that compares to biden but um we can but
00:26:13.500 you've got to remember that inflation is a cumulative thing right so if you've had a
00:26:19.660 terrible period of inflation under the previous presidency and then on top of that you continue
00:26:25.040 to have inflation under the current presidency people don't go oh you know my prices went up by
00:26:30.360 just for the sake of argument 20 on the joe biden and now they've only gone up by another 10 under
00:26:36.400 president trump that still feels like well it doesn't feel like your prices have still gone up
00:26:42.100 by 30 percent right no it's much less than that but yeah and of course it is these are numbers
00:26:47.340 i'm using for the sake of ease of calculation uh go ahead if i could just finish the point which is
00:26:52.860 that although i absolutely it's clear that the cost of living is the issue and i and i agree that
00:26:58.620 people write to feel like that's the problem it's clearly a problem it's a massive problem
00:27:03.040 at the same time there are wins here that it i feel like it might have been that trump did a bad
00:27:10.880 job of selling what he was doing to the american public and selling what and so that's a i would
00:27:17.680 see that as a failure of trump in the in the things he has achieved he has not done a good
00:27:22.960 job at all of selling it to the american public but i still think that these failures are legitimate
00:27:27.820 that's that's the point i wanted to make that's very interesting and the one thing i would add
00:27:32.740 on your point about the iran war there is no doubt that a portion of the american right in particular
00:27:38.500 and there'll be some people on the left by the way as well who feel the the the the slogan is
00:27:45.020 iran can't have a nuclear weapon and which i think we probably all agree with but at the same time
00:27:52.160 there is the feeling that while the decision to go to war is you know theoretically the correct one
00:27:59.080 actually the way it was prosecuted was terrible this is something we just had uh we recorded an
00:28:05.180 interview with sam harris yesterday uh and i sort of said to him sam isn't it ironic that trump whom
00:28:10.880 you hate has been undone by a policy which you actually support um and that that's kind of what
00:28:16.500 happened there but trump's uh but sam's rather point was it's the right war it just wasn't done
00:28:22.840 right and um there is a lot of that there's also by the way uh you know i think coming back to the
00:28:30.680 conversation about you know bb netanyahu who's tricked america or has tricked trump into this
00:28:36.760 it's interesting because to me what i see in that uh attempt to say that is a complete
00:28:43.240 lack of understanding of a how the world works because it works exactly the other way around
00:28:48.520 bb does whatever trump tells him to effectively but more than that it's a way i think it's a way
00:28:55.000 for the maga die hard to cope with the reality that trump did something that they didn't support
00:29:03.000 and they have to find a way to explain why that happened and they can't admit that actually it
00:29:08.600 was trump's uh impetuous and perhaps impulsive nature which at this point at the age that he's
00:29:15.560 at you have to wonder why that is now he's always been an impulsive person but but we know that
00:29:22.280 impulsivity uh you know can increase with you know in some people as they get older uh and uh i think
00:29:31.160 that is a kind of cope that is also going on people don't want to recognize that trump went
00:29:36.360 into venezuela it was not a thing that he'd prepared for for 10 years with strategic planning
00:29:42.520 and the thing with the iran war and we know this from everybody we've spoken to within the
00:29:46.680 administration it was an impulsive decision based on the idea that we're on a roll here and a lot
00:29:53.640 of people who will say i support dealing with iran will nonetheless say the way that trump did it was
00:30:01.240 wrong and bad the preparation wasn't enough the investment wasn't enough how come we didn't have
00:30:06.360 enough interceptors how come this how come our bases weren't hardened against the inevitable
00:30:11.800 retaliation? How come we didn't anticipate or didn't at least prepare for the closure of the
00:30:17.260 strait homers, et cetera? So yes, there are a lot of people in America who think Iran needed to be
00:30:23.420 dealt with and its nuclear threat is a problem. That doesn't necessarily mean that they support
00:30:28.980 the way that Trump did it. And to your point about immigration, just finally, I mean,
00:30:35.180 it is fascinating to me because those undeniably closing the border is a massive,
00:30:41.400 massive win and everybody who really cared about that issue which was a lot of americans will know
00:30:47.080 that that's what happened and for that to be an issue only four percent of the public care about
00:30:51.480 it's almost like oh you know you've solved that problem what have you done for me lately and i
00:30:56.920 think there was a lot of that going on and look you know to a lot of people to a lot of people
00:31:03.640 the the the immigration thing is important but partly theoretical it's a thing that happens on
00:31:12.760 tv screens and to which they object but their local error may not be directly being affected
00:31:18.440 they nonetheless think it's wrong but when you wake up every morning and you're thinking about
00:31:23.880 how to feed your kids that week and how to make sure that you can afford to go to the to actually
00:31:31.320 go physically to where you need to go etc those are things that are on people's minds and they're
00:31:36.540 pressing on a daily basis in the way that even something as frustrating and angering as masses
00:31:43.380 of illegal immigrants coming into your country it's still more immediate and more visceral than
00:31:50.500 that especially once you fixed the immigration problem it's it's a weird irony yeah and on the
00:31:57.280 I'll just correct. Can I correct one detail on immigration? So I said 10 to 15% of illegal
00:32:02.060 supporters, actually 5 to 10% is actually lower. Sorry. Yeah, not at all. Because of everything
00:32:06.780 going on in the news and the concerns both Francis and I have about the direction of economic travel,
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00:32:53.080 is pure-gold.co.otf. So on the Iran war, it was always obvious that this was going to be hung
00:33:01.100 around Trump's neck. The question was, was it going to be a medal or an albatross? And that's
00:33:05.560 proven to be an albatross. And we'll have arguments for decades to come as to whether or not it could
00:33:09.620 have been prosecuted differently. That will rage on. But the fact of the matter is, it's got him
00:33:15.320 up to this point. And I think we've spoken a lot about the kind of MAGA base, the really active
00:33:20.180 people the really engaged people the people who are going to be following uh jd vance's tweets
00:33:26.140 and tucker carlson's post-match analysis with a fine tooth comb we've also got to think about the
00:33:30.740 voters broadly speaking and this is the thing about trump he has always been an incredibly
00:33:34.080 polarizing figure there were a lot of people who voted for him oftentimes with their hands holding
00:33:40.340 their nose and what were the arguments they would always make they'd be like yeah he's a bit crazy
00:33:44.680 sometimes or he says things i don't agree with but isn't the economy doing and he hasn't got us
00:33:49.120 into any new wars and he's getting on top of immigration that would often be what you would
00:33:53.920 hear it's worth remembering that a lot of voters who backed him will have voted for democrats
00:33:59.440 previously will have been independents or will have been a more kind of classical style republican
00:34:04.420 who wouldn't have liked a lot of what he was doing but nevertheless on those three issues
00:34:09.180 you would hear people say on balance it's been good problem with the iran war is it knocks out
00:34:13.360 the economic argument and then it knocks out the no new wars argument so what are you left with
00:34:17.560 so all of these things are interconnected it's pretty clear the public have made those connections
00:34:21.980 as well and i i feel like going forward the one thing that um the republicans would really screw
00:34:28.200 up by doing is focusing too much on what is the argument what is the narrative forming amongst the
00:34:35.880 most kind of active aspects of their base when if they're going to get back towards um having a
00:34:42.940 viable presidential run in two years time if they're going to get back towards actually taking
00:34:47.640 political power again then they're going to have to look at actually what just americans writ large
00:34:52.360 are thinking and they're not obsessing over israel to be perfectly frank they can see how foreign
00:34:57.280 policy is impacted upon domestic policy obviously but some of the arguments that are being waged on
00:35:04.980 the kind of online right at the moment i think are pretty divorced from where most people are
00:35:08.820 Should we move on to talking about the future here? Because this is another dimension of this
00:35:15.720 we actually haven't addressed, but it's very important. Because if you are one of those
00:35:20.320 voters who voted against the Republicans, let's say, on the basis that the cost of living is too
00:35:27.240 high, et cetera, et cetera, the fact of the matter is, I don't think we see any evidence that the
00:35:34.900 Democrats have policies that are actually going to address this. And so that vote of frustration
00:35:40.640 is perfectly understandable. Whether it delivers any results is an interesting thing, is one thing
00:35:46.960 I would put on the table for our discussion. The other thing is one of the big challenges,
00:35:55.280 and I remember talking about this with Coleman Hughes on his podcast, is if the Democrats get
00:36:01.720 both the house and the senate if you remember in the past they've been able to impeach trump but
00:36:06.760 they were never able to remove him because it takes a vote in the senate to actually uh to
00:36:12.720 actually do that well now they control both houses and the question is is trump going to
00:36:20.240 spend the next two years in all sorts of investigations impeachment hearings etc not least
00:36:25.800 because even his supporters many of them now readily admit that he has given a lot of ammunition
00:36:32.680 to people who want to prosecute him members of his family members of his administration
00:36:38.020 on the basis of corruption and all sorts of other nefarious activity and the reality is i suspect
00:36:44.520 is once the democrats start digging there is going to be no no shortage of information that
00:36:51.600 supports the idea that trump or his people have committed all sorts of offenses while in office
00:36:57.840 and so that you you will potentially have simultaneously democrats controlling both
00:37:03.920 houses of congress without necessarily addressing the concerns that people voted on the basis of
00:37:09.680 and also spending a lot of time uh trying to basically get trump out of office or paralyze
00:37:15.680 his presidency and so you may have not only a lame duck presidency but a sort of lame duck
00:37:20.560 has been chased, hunted down endlessly by hunters, whose only focus is the lame duck and not the
00:37:27.040 economy and not the reality of people's lives. Well, what's going to happen at the federal level
00:37:36.960 is because he still has his veto, and this isn't addressing your impeachment, this is just
00:37:42.720 just addressing general legislation the democrats are going to keep putting forward proposals which
00:37:51.420 they know are going to get vetoed by trump but for them it's just their way of signaling what
00:37:55.760 they're about so come the next presidential they can be like this is my this is my legislative
00:37:59.540 record but at the state level you've already there's a funny thing that happened was that the
00:38:06.560 ai uh companies uh value just a massive plummet because at the state level they're going to start
00:38:13.520 working against the ai companies now i know francis said people you know average person
00:38:19.680 on the street really cares about data centers but this same poll this nbc poll it suggests it's
00:38:25.680 really largely a democrat it's largely a uh a talking an issue for the those on the left less
00:38:33.280 so those on the right although so may i throw may i throw some facts in on this because i actually
00:38:38.000 while we were talking look this up so i looked this up with venice ai and i said is up because
00:38:43.120 my understanding was opposition to data centers is actually a bilateral issue and the answer is
00:38:48.640 mostly yes uh majorities of both parties oppose new data centers in their area though democrats
00:38:54.960 oppose them more strongly a gallop poll in march found that 71 of americans opposed air data centers
00:39:02.400 in the local area, including 75% of Democrats,
00:39:06.260 74% of Independents, and 63% of Republicans.
00:39:10.540 The intensity gap, yes, 56% of Democrats strongly oppose them,
00:39:16.880 39% of Republicans.
00:39:19.140 So there is a discrepancy, but the fact of the matter is
00:39:22.360 a significant chunk of Americans do not want data centers
00:39:26.540 in particular in their backyard.
00:39:28.220 Sorry, Winston, carry on.
00:39:29.040 no no that yeah i i think that's uh that that kind of aligns with the nbc uh data um i would
00:39:37.540 also just make the case i said this at the beginning of why i thought the bbc were wrong
00:39:42.980 to say this is historic catastrophe for trump and the republicans is that in 1994
00:39:51.740 Clinton lost 54 seats in the House and eight seats in the Senate, which is more on both
00:39:58.780 counts than Trump has lost here, and then went on to win the presidential in 1996.
00:40:06.380 There's been other scenarios where you can have big change. Actually, the voters can be more
00:40:14.460 capricious than one realizes. One assumes it's kind of tribal. I think people are prepared to
00:40:20.300 move around with their vote and it doesn't mean that they can't come back so long as they diagnose
00:40:25.260 what went wrong a bit better i think and there's just one other detail that i think i found
00:40:30.700 interesting with regards to why the votes might have gone what they go on and the wall street
00:40:36.780 journal did a review of how much people have moved around the country in the last two years
00:40:43.340 and you have had a lot of people moving from the north to the south and so that might partially
00:40:51.260 explain some of the change and for example hispanics in the south have is increased from 22
00:40:57.980 up from 13 in that period and if the hispanics are not happy about what they've seen about the
00:41:04.860 deportations they i think he's lost them there and and so it's interesting how the demographics uh
00:41:11.820 movement sorry but you're right uh we should talk about what this means for next
00:41:17.900 and on that question it's interesting that if you look at the coalition that they put together
00:41:22.140 last time around uh so we've spoken a bit about latinos latino men in particular moving away from
00:41:27.180 the republicans in a big way but it's also like suburbanites it's also young men there was one
00:41:32.140 fox news poll which looked at men under 30. so in 2024 trump were at one the republicans had
00:41:38.860 won amongst them by plus 15 points by 2026 the democrats had won amongst them by plus 33 so
00:41:45.020 that's a swing of 48 in the space of two years i think that's a really fascinating insight into
00:41:51.260 just how quickly this is all unraveled because it's not to say that the republic has done for
00:41:55.820 generations now it's not to say that this is a hole that they can never climb themselves out of
00:42:00.220 i think what it's clear is that the trump project has unraveled uh the extent to which trump was a
00:42:06.220 vehicle for the discontent not just as a sort of forgotten working class although in large part
00:42:10.940 that was clear but also various other constituencies who felt that america was on the wrong
00:42:15.820 track that it had been trapped in sort of globalist ideology woke pieties and needed just a complete
00:42:21.900 shake-up i think now that has drawn to a close um and that whatever even though obviously he was not
00:42:27.820 going to despite his protestations he was not going to run for the presidency again um there's
00:42:32.140 a sense that there needs to be a rethink there needs to be a recalibration um and there needs to
00:42:36.540 be more kind of a different offer or a different form that is put forward in order to bring those
00:42:41.820 people back together whilst i agree that the the 2024 coalition of the tech bros who by the way
00:42:50.540 probably apart from peter teal uh uh probably still like what trump is up to because of of his
00:42:57.260 uh acts in ai but the maha group the swing voters the people worry about woke the that coalition
00:43:06.680 probably does seem to have uh broken down but the idea that the sort of trump this is over over for
00:43:11.840 trump well he can still make decisions when it comes to foreign policy and that's probably what
00:43:16.280 the next two years are going to be about it's he he's gonna he can still act in that domain
00:43:20.740 and i think in a way he doesn't have i mean not sure what he had to lose but
00:43:27.540 he he what is he bound by now he he doesn't does he do you think he cares about who wins the next
00:43:33.220 presidential election i would hope so but he might not he might be like well i don't really
00:43:37.220 care what happens next i'm just going to do what i think's best for my legacy and and for me and so
00:43:42.100 you might just see him maybe sort of free now he doesn't have to worry about any midterms he doesn't
00:43:47.300 have to worry about the next election he might feel liberated in a weird sort of way i mean is
00:43:52.340 that a crazy thing to suggest no no you know when you went like oh i don't care what you sort of
00:43:58.260 what anyone thinks and i was just about my legacy i'm like yeah that's probably how he's always been
00:44:03.380 in one sense but one of the things that i think that we nobody really addresses when it comes to
00:44:11.380 politics or certainly not as much as we should is we can talk about policies we can talk about
00:44:17.620 stats we can talk about data but it's kind of like a band you need a great front man and who
00:44:23.020 is that front man going to be because a great front man can unite a political party think about
00:44:28.380 for instance tony blair united labor drove them on and they became the political force of a
00:44:34.040 generation and he was a singular political talent the same with trump by the way disagree agree
00:44:41.280 it doesn't matter he was a political force of nature and one of the things that the republicans
00:44:48.920 are going to have to tackle now is who is going to lead them post trump because that is going to be
00:44:56.260 a very very difficult it's going to be incredibly difficult to follow somebody who has that sheer
00:45:04.020 force of personality and i'm looking over at the democrats and look it's one speech and a week is
00:45:09.840 a long time in politics but i was impressed with ossoff i really was a lot of the times you look
00:45:17.080 at the democrats they seem to be kind of like al-said who seems just to be deeply unpleasant
00:45:22.340 all the democratic socialists of america are frankly a bunch of fruitcakes but this guy
00:45:28.580 actually seemed to be one of the few people at the moment who's capable of grabbing the center
00:45:36.080 and look a week is a long time other people are going to emerge but it's about for me the people
00:45:43.860 the person at the front the person who can unify a party it's looking like the democrats might have
00:45:50.040 that possibly who is going to be that for the republicans well with with the democrats they
00:45:56.380 also have james tallarico who uh interestingly went on rogan actually came across very well a
00:46:02.520 lot of people felt uh went on dire as ceo so he did podcasts where there's not necessarily uh
00:46:08.580 natural alignment between their audience and him but he went in there and tried to persuade uh
00:46:14.520 there are other people within the democrats so i i think uh you know falling in love with john
00:46:20.520 ossoff off the back of one speech uh and and and look prediction markets i agree with you francis
00:46:26.740 calci certainly seems to show that john ossoff is is the front runner by a long way but i i think
00:46:32.980 we've got to keep in mind this there's two years to go and during those two years a lot can change
00:46:39.540 what's interesting on the republican side of this is as i mentioned ron desantis if you actually
00:46:45.100 travel around the united states one of the things you see is the difference between desantis and
00:46:52.220 perhaps other people within the Republican Party is Florida is actually incredibly well run
00:46:57.460 and so it's less about what he says and the bombastic nature of his presentation which is
00:47:04.860 not I don't think doesn't come naturally to him it's just an incredibly well run state and that
00:47:11.680 perhaps can can stand him in good stead although you know he told the I saw a clip of DeSantis
00:47:17.520 talking about the last time when he ran against Trump in the primaries.
00:47:23.240 And he said, I had this voter come up to me,
00:47:25.540 I think he said in Iowa, somewhere like Ohio, maybe, at the primaries.
00:47:30.820 And he said to me, I think you're going to be the greatest president
00:47:35.300 since Ronald Reagan.
00:47:36.300 You are able to be that figure for our nation.
00:47:41.300 And if Trump wasn't on the ballot, I'd vote for you.
00:47:44.160 and so anyone who's who's run against a figure like trump so far has faced that reality which is
00:47:53.500 he just inspires a love and adulation from a certain section of america that can't be beaten
00:48:00.940 with anything including being someone who's run the state incredibly well uh but it's very clear
00:48:07.140 from his response to this election the fact that obviously his his term as governor of florida is
00:48:13.560 over that he is going to be one of the people challenging uh for the presidency two years from
00:48:20.040 now and then of course you have jd vance and uh marco ruby and the interesting thing to me this
00:48:26.200 is kind of going into the weeds but i've always thought this was interesting uh it was very clear
00:48:30.520 from the outset that jd vance was against the iran war and i don't think it's remotely an accident
00:48:36.520 that trump made him america's chief negotiator in the resolving that conflict because to me
00:48:43.000 that is kind of a way of saying well you don't want to be involved in this but you will be tied
00:48:46.920 to this and so jd vance has to simultaneously continue to signal to the portion of his
00:48:52.760 electorate that he thinks is uh there and growing which is uh you know the the more isolationist
00:48:59.000 wing of american politics but at the same time he may well have find that the albatross of this
00:49:06.600 conflict, however it's settled, is actually hanging not only around Trump's neck, but also
00:49:12.300 around his own. And Marco Rubio, then he's got his own issues. It'll be fascinating to see how
00:49:18.100 all of this plays out over the next couple of years. Gentlemen, shall we move on to the other
00:49:24.140 story of this week, which was a bombshell announcement in the UK that Russell Brand
00:49:30.860 has been found guilty of both rape and sexual assault? Tom, take it away.
00:49:36.600 Yes, so he was found guilty at Suffolk Crown Court. One count of rape, three counts of sexual assault. Some of these cases going back many decades. And it really draws to a close what has been a saga that's been going on over the past three years in terms of what the public have known about.
00:49:52.060 But in terms of anyone who might have been in and around Russell Brand, in and around the comedy industry, in and around the entertainment industry in Britain, a lot of these allegations, or at least the very bad smell around Brand, was a pretty open secret.
00:50:07.240 so in about 2023 there was this big investigation by both the times newspaper and the dispatches
00:50:13.900 documentary it's worth pointing out that these um now guilty verdicts do not relate to any of
00:50:21.040 the stories that were in that specifically this is actually people who have come forward since
00:50:25.240 2023 um who have lodged these um complaints and ultimately culminated in this conviction
00:50:32.040 but that was certainly something that set the ball rolling led more people to come forward led
00:50:36.500 more people to reckon that they might actually get justice at this point I think everyone will
00:50:42.660 have noticed that there has been a striking reaction online which I think broadly speaking
00:50:48.200 falls into two camps one of which is people asking as they asked after Jimmy Savile asked
00:50:54.440 that as they asked after various prolific sex offenders are exposed in the entertainment
00:50:59.460 industry as to why this person was essentially allowed to operate for so long Russell Brand of
00:51:04.500 course before his sort of glow up on the crank right was the darling of the guardian newspaper
00:51:09.580 he guest edited the new statesman in 2013 he made huge waves in the 2015 election where he first
00:51:15.640 said he didn't want people to vote then he back said milliband etc etc so there's been that
00:51:19.520 aspect to the backlash and then there's also been this response from dare i say it the sort of newer
00:51:25.840 fans of russell brand since he became kind of maga adjacent since he became uh more on the sort of
00:51:32.180 conspiratorial cranky fringe of politics always been quite cranky to be fair but more on the
00:51:36.980 right shall we say who are just like flatly refusing to believe that these uh convictions
00:51:41.540 are sound often i dare say about wanting to get into the details too much without looking properly
00:51:46.200 at the uh evidence which i think was pretty clear and no wonder the jury reached the verdicts that
00:51:51.580 they did but um yeah a huge huge story he's awaiting sentencing that'll happen next week
00:51:58.300 he's been remanded in custody um and we uh wait to see what happens next but as is ever the case
00:52:04.440 particularly when you're dealing with someone as culturally significant as russell brand it's also
00:52:08.900 instantly become a factor in the cultural with people falling into broadly speaking one of those
00:52:14.000 two tribes one of the interesting things with uh with brand is people always go well how did he
00:52:22.820 get away with it and why do people continue to work with him in show business all aspects of
00:52:28.520 show business most people don't make that much money they don't generate that much money they
00:52:34.300 don't generate that much money for their agencies it's essentially just a pyramid with the people
00:52:39.780 at the very top probably the one percent zero point five generating the vast majority of the
00:52:44.460 revenue if you look at podcasting it's pretty much the same it's all it's pretty much all aspects of
00:52:50.160 show business and media and what brand was exceptionally talented at was generating revenue
00:52:57.360 was jay was galvanizing a fan base he was somebody who was incredibly talented he was very very
00:53:05.000 charming he was very he was somebody who people felt that they liked they knew and he got chance
00:53:14.420 after chance after chance, because he was good at what he did. He was very good at bringing
00:53:21.080 listeners, for instance, to Radio 2, the BBC Radio 2. And when you have the BBC, which always has to
00:53:27.720 justify, essentially, because it is a publicly funded service, it has to justify, you know,
00:53:35.300 the service that it puts on and the fact that it spends public money. They are always going to be
00:53:41.840 looking for that talent that can do that unfortunately for the BBC and for lots of
00:53:50.080 outlets now there are going to be very serious questions put to them as to actually how much
00:53:56.180 they knew about this particular individual how much they knew of his behavior what actually
00:54:03.300 happened on their premises and also how do we move on from this and you're looking at the BBC
00:54:10.260 right now and you're thinking to and they're probably thinking to themselves and other people
00:54:15.720 are thinking as well how many scandals can this organization withstand well to your point about
00:54:23.900 you know how much they knew the fact of the matter is that the fact that russell brand was a sexual
00:54:30.240 predator was extremely well known in on the british comedy circuit and we know i think from
00:54:37.500 some of the evidence and core that his activities were known to the people around him. And of course
00:54:44.280 they would have been because of the way that he behaved. And so the fact of the matter is that
00:54:51.340 there are lots and lots of people for the reasons that Francis articulated who turned the blind eye
00:54:56.580 and maybe we will discover even facilitated his behavior. And Tom, to your point about
00:55:02.340 you know the the split between the narratives here it's been quite amazing because i tweeted
00:55:08.840 yesterday what i just said which is it was extremely well known and people who don't
00:55:13.340 understand british libel laws in america go why didn't you say something before well it's because
00:55:18.560 in britain if you make an accusation of serious of a serious nature against somebody they will
00:55:25.400 sue you for libel which by the way russell brand did and silenced people including one of his
00:55:31.200 victims to the point where to this day she's legally not allowed to say anything to anybody
00:55:36.880 about her claims if you make an accusation against somebody you then if they sue you then have to go
00:55:44.100 to court and prove in court that the allegation that you made is correct now if you're someone
00:55:50.400 who knows this because a friend of yours um you know i i have a friend for example who was a victim
00:55:57.840 of his and that's how I know but it's something very widely known like on my Facebook I have
00:56:04.020 still have a lot of comedians that I'm friends well friends on Facebook they're not huge fans
00:56:09.920 of my evolution since we knew each other but nonetheless and you know I see lots of women
00:56:16.360 going like of course we all knew and in fact female comedians in the UK have a WhatsApp group
00:56:22.480 in which they share things of this nature
00:56:24.360 to warn fellow female comedians
00:56:26.600 of potential risks and potential predators.
00:56:29.480 So this was something that was an open secret.
00:56:33.200 And that put a lot of people in a big dilemma as they saw.
00:56:39.340 It was never a dilemma for us.
00:56:40.500 Russell Brand invited me on his show many times.
00:56:43.100 I never wanted to have anything to do with him
00:56:45.620 because it was clear to me
00:56:47.200 that all of this would inevitably happen.
00:56:49.320 And also it was just the wrong thing to do
00:56:50.820 to associate myself with somebody about whom I knew this kind of thing.
00:56:56.140 But a lot of people were not in that position
00:56:58.240 where they knew somebody who'd been affected or whatever.
00:57:01.120 And then the other thing on top of this is you had COVID,
00:57:05.340 which just totally broke everybody's brain,
00:57:07.280 made everybody extra conspiratorial, extra suspicious.
00:57:11.180 And one thing I will say is I do think there is some truth
00:57:15.720 to the argument that people have made,
00:57:18.660 which is if Brandt had remained on the right side of the political tracks,
00:57:23.100 if he continued to do, you know, those beautiful pictures
00:57:26.700 that have come out in the last day of him, you know,
00:57:29.240 having his arm round Owen Jones, doing, you know,
00:57:32.700 conversations with Ed Miliband, you know,
00:57:34.900 being this sort of communist adjacent lovey,
00:57:39.040 if that had continued, there's a possibility
00:57:40.960 that he actually would have been allowed to get away with this for longer.
00:57:43.820 I do think it's true that him being in such a focus when it comes to these allegations is partly about the fact that he changed his political allegiances and became troublesome to the establishment.
00:57:57.940 But the fact that that is true does not mean that he was not guilty of the things of which he's now been found guilty.
00:58:04.940 And people need to be able to delineate those two things.
00:58:07.840 well i'm going to take a position that's i guess in this context controversial and likely gonna
00:58:16.700 be unpopular and i invite you guys to push back against me if you think i'm misguided but looking
00:58:23.140 at this case i am actually a bit um i i have a sense that the there's a problem with the british
00:58:33.260 judicial system and the british justice system and i i'll make my case i have never met russell
00:58:38.740 brand i am not saying he is he by the way still refutes the allegations that he says it was
00:58:45.800 always consensual all the evidence in the case was testimony there was not video evidence there
00:58:52.260 was not forensic evidence i dna and so it seems to me it comes down to largely a he said she said
00:58:59.560 with a again you can correct me if i'm wrong here but the jury were asked have they read
00:59:07.080 the times expose in late this late summer 23 or watch the channel 4 expose and they hadn't but
00:59:14.420 they would still have known about brand and i don't know how you could have missed this story
00:59:18.340 and so you've got a situation that this guy with allegations from 20 odd years ago which are
00:59:28.620 testimony and even the testimony it's like i think one of the the victims said she had initially said
00:59:37.260 didn't think there was much of a story when she was approached by either times or channel 4 when
00:59:41.100 you say now i'm not saying that trump uh that brand is uh innocent i don't know the courts
00:59:48.540 obviously found him guilty as you'll know that his uh lawyer on the way out said to the times
00:59:55.660 journalists you it and the reason i think if i'm trying to understand why he said that is because
01:00:01.740 that they the channel four or the times they put that out in the public before putting it to the
01:00:08.620 police with once it's in the police you can't put it out you can't do it because you have contempt
01:00:14.540 of court right so you can't then do the thing so they did it before and then it went to the police
01:00:19.900 so that's just in the wrong order and what frustrates me and this is why i'm actually
01:00:26.860 frustrated is because we have had in our country since the second world war the most horrific
01:00:33.740 series of uh um group charge sexual exploitation uh known uh euphemistically as the grooming gang
01:00:44.460 scandal and there are plenty of examples where young girls who went with forensic evidence
01:00:51.980 there was one girl in in 2013 i think it was no earlier 2008 she went to the police gave
01:00:59.100 her underwear in which had the dna of the victim they arrested two men and then the cps
01:01:06.300 decided not to press charges who was head of the cps at that time it who was the chief
01:01:12.300 Chief Public Prosecutor, it was Keir Starmer. So we're in a country where, as shown with
01:01:19.560 Russell Brand, if the establishment want to put people away for these sort of crimes,
01:01:24.580 they have shown that they can. But when the narrative is wrong, when the victim is
01:01:30.640 inconvenient for the establishment narrative, they haven't done. And so for me, it's another
01:01:36.480 sense again i'm not saying that brand is innocent i'm saying that here we have the establishment
01:01:43.440 showing that if they want to act they will but the frustration is those on the other side when
01:01:51.760 it happens the other side not only are these victims is there no justice for these victims
01:01:57.040 but we elect to be prime minister the person who throws it out so for me there's a sense that like
01:02:03.200 Like, it's a sense of something's not quite right.
01:02:09.080 And I just add that Hugh Edwards at the BBC, who had indecent images of children on his phone,
01:02:15.500 he got a suspended sentence.
01:02:20.320 Brand, there's a way this goes, this happens, where he's going to spend the rest of his adult life behind bars.
01:02:27.780 That's actually a scenario.
01:02:29.320 Now, it might be the case that this is justice working.
01:02:33.200 maybe he was you know the the man they found to be guilty for for good reason and and this is
01:02:39.520 justice being served i'm saying i don't i don't know but this is not as clear-cut a case but why
01:02:45.360 are you saying you don't know i don't understand why are you saying you don't know when he's just
01:02:49.920 been found guilty because if you look at the look i've read some of the transcripts it's like
01:02:55.920 horrifying i'm saying i'm not in any way excusing it but if you look at what evidence it was
01:03:00.800 it was it was not forensic or video so it's it's women saying things fine do you think jimmy savile
01:03:08.240 was a pedophile i i do i do think that never found guilty never found guilty there's no evidence
01:03:18.240 no forensic evidence and it is also worth saying that if we were talking about with with the
01:03:25.200 example of the grooming gangs as well and you're right to bring it up winston because the uh
01:03:29.040 the lack of concern about the industrial-scale rape
01:03:32.440 of the most vulnerable girls in society,
01:03:35.800 the complete memory-holing of that, ignoring that,
01:03:39.420 it makes it so hard to stomach
01:03:41.520 when you suddenly have the Believe the Victim crowd
01:03:43.160 pop up in relation to this case.
01:03:44.500 You're absolutely right about that.
01:03:45.720 Difficulty is that if we were going to go down this line
01:03:48.780 of we are going to question the soundness of a conviction
01:03:51.560 unless there's video or DNA evidence or what have you,
01:03:55.780 then that would imply that it would be illegitimate
01:03:58.440 or unsound to say pursue historic grooming gang cases as well and there's many cases like this
01:04:02.900 which do not really come down to the fact that there are clear-cut witnesses really do not come
01:04:07.240 down to the fact that there's cctv that can be accessed that doesn't mean that someone can't be
01:04:10.580 convicted of course and also if we're looking at this case in particular woman five as she's
01:04:14.960 referred to in a lot of the reporting who um the complaint of rape against brand is the one that
01:04:21.080 he's been found guilty of there is in terms of the witness testimony there is quite a lot of it
01:04:25.680 I think there were eight individuals who said that she told them about this encounter immediately after it had happened.
01:04:31.620 Back in 2009, there was also a nurse at a sexual health clinic who says that she came in because she was concerned that she had contracted some sort of venereal disease from Bram
01:04:41.860 because, unbeknownst to her, he had taken the condom off as well during the rape that he's now been found guilty of,
01:04:47.760 and that she had told her what had happened at the time as well.
01:04:50.740 so in terms of even though this is uh testimony um this is still evidence under our system of
01:04:56.160 course and there i suppose there's a there is a fair bit more of it than some people not saying
01:05:00.700 you went sort of been letting on you know even though the uh as you said there's nothing as
01:05:05.700 definitive as cccv or dna or what have you but if we are to hold by the standard that we're
01:05:10.880 questioning those convictions unless we have the smoking gun as it were then even going after
01:05:15.460 historic grooming gang cases would therefore be questionable and illegitimate i suppose
01:05:19.080 I just want to reiterate I am not doubting that he was a philanderer I am not doubting that he
01:05:25.380 was a dastard he even said he was I it look it doesn't sound it doesn't sound good but I'm saying
01:05:32.360 that there's some things that happened in this case that for jurisprudence sake are like a bit
01:05:40.160 weird and i'm also saying that there's a i'm frustrated to i'm if this is justice been served
01:05:48.880 great but i'm frustrated when we have such horrific failures in our just justice system
01:05:54.000 to see that when they bloody want to they can actually they can actually serve justice and
01:06:00.940 that that's my that's my um take i i uh seeing the what i did see the transcripts it's it's not
01:06:07.840 pretty stuff i'm not just to reiterate i'm not i don't feel like i'm in a position i'm certainly
01:06:12.600 not in a position i'm certainly not rather uh defending i'm sort of making a different point
01:06:17.800 all right well on that happy note uh that is it for off the fence this week and we will see you
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