Chapo Trap House - 1013 - Your Podcast feat. Jonathan Shainin (2/23/26)

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

Jonathan Shainin returns to Chapo after ten years to talk about what the hell is going on in the United Kingdom. We talk about Keir Starmer’s and Labour collapse, his wildly unpopular policies and austerity regime, the rise of the Green Party, and Jeremy Corbyn’s bizarre Our Party. We then talk about Shainin’s new magazine Equator and their pieces on the end of liberal Zionism and the Long 90s. Check out Equator: https://www.equator.org/ Few tickets left for our April 3rd live show at the Palace Theater in LA: https://www.ticketmaster.com/event/0900643BE404F182

Greetings, friends. It's Monday, February 23rd, and this is your chop. Oh, we're coming to you once again during another snow day. Hope you're happy for making us work. But on today's episode, Felix and I are joined by our old pal Jonathan Channan, the London-based journalist, who was, I believe, a year one chopper guest, right? Is that possible? Was it year one? It seems like a long time. No, yeah, no. I remember, yeah. For people that don't know, for newer listeners, you can thank or possibly blame Jonathan for the existence of this podcast because 12 years ago

when I was would just like go on my phone at my job in St. Paul. John was the first person who wasn't like an MMA shithead to follow me because he apparently you I'll never forget this. You thought I was like a writer in New York that you knew who was just like using some other guys' pictures so he could like make fun of Rosie Green. Ray without endangering his job. But no, John is the entire reason I, like, went to New York and, uh, pursued an illustrious career first making $15,000 a year and then, uh, inventing podcasts in 2016.

I do remember you telling me, I remember DMing you late one night and being like, hey, like, what's your deal? I was maybe like, where, where do you live in Brooklyn? Yeah, yeah. You were like, no, I'm in college. and then I think you were like I was thinking of doing like

I mean maybe you were shitting me like doing like a waste management internship No I was I was like the only real job I had lined up the only possibility No I think you should move to New York I'm glad to have this on the record Yeah no we've looked it up Jonathan You're on episode 18 of the show

On June 27th 2016 That's very good And according to Chris this was also the debut of beloved chopo comedy character, the Portuguese butler, DeCretio. Well, so DeCretio was, I think, part of the early Felix lore. Felix, what was your Twitter name then?

At Sworthy villain. Swarthy villain. Yeah, it got suspended in like 2016, and I remember what actually happened now. I was sick. I had like the flu or something, and I was just like, I was sending threatening messages

to the YouTuber O'Nezzi. beyond. And of course, you know, they were just death threats. That's what you did back in 2016. And of course, when I got suspended, I was like, this is bullshit. What did I even do? How times have changed.

Well, Jonathan. Now you can do anything. But, yeah, it's been, God, 10 years. But Jonathan, you were back now with a new magazine of politics and culture called Equator. And I would like to talk to you

today about some of the stuff that you have featured in this magazine. But I'd like to begin with, obviously, the UK. What's going on across the pond? And I've got two big stories just to kick things off today of what came across my newsfeed this morning, starting with the arrest of Peter Mendelsohn. Looks like the Bobbies have nicked him, and he is headed to Old Bailey. And then the number two biggest stories from the UK today is the BAFTAs last night, where a guy with Tourette's shouted the N-word

at Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan when they were presenting an award at the Baptist and I mean, look, when I saw that story this morning, it was like having a waking anxiety dream. I feel bad for everyone involved in this story, but like, that's got to be like one of the worst fears possible, right? Like, do you think that someone like before the award show was like, hey, this is one of the things you yell,

maybe you should just watch it on TV and he got yelled at? now he's just like, I didn't want to say I told you so. I feel like this is one of those social media. I mean, it's a news story, obviously, but one of these news stories where I've just like assiduously avoided finding out what happened all day. The whole thing, the whole, like I just, you see it and you're like, I would be better off not knowing. This is kind of my approach to award shows more generally.

Yeah. I feel like I've seen a lot of pretty good meta discourse that's a bit like, do not get drawn in. Do not. You know, I see people saying like, the Yanks want to have an argument about this. Do not call for it. We don't. This would never happen at the Oscars.

I'll tell you that much. I mean, I don't want to get this wrong. My understanding is that the person in question is maybe the writer of a movie about Tourette's that was nominated for a act. I would not want to see the first draft for that script. Yeah. Oh, I see, no, he's the star. Okay, he's the star. Yeah. Yeah, it does, it does seem like, I know, kind of like, for some reason it puts me in mind of like, it's like an episode that seems like designed to generate like Twitter culture.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. A bit like when you like go and you post that like my husband was on the subway and someone came in and just pissed all over the place. Yep. That's another big discourse to that. That's been big today, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's big stuff. And then as soon as I saw that woman's husband, I yelled the N-word at him. No, I just like, obviously, you know, it's certainly raised a lot of awareness about the condition Tourette's syndrome. But, you know, like, the discourse is like, oh, like, doesn't matter if you have Tourette's. He's still a racist. I mean, he apologized to Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan, obviously. I feel like in 10 years ago, this would have been like a sort of like pre-woke or like proto-antewoke fantasy of like the kind of guy who's a

You're like, listen, if you had to say the N word in your office to stop a ticking bomb, would you do it? You know? It is very fortuitous that it ran concurrently with the stuff about the person pissing on the subway. Because it, I mean, both are like, you would not think that you could jam both together. But I've seen dozens of posts that are like, oh, so people want to excuse the guy who said the N-word, but not people who piss on the subway, which I don't know. Like, I have not seen anyone say that they love both guys, which is what I'm doing. But, you like, well, you need one of those like two-by-two grids.

It's funny, I spent today thinking about how I would describe Peter Mandelson to like an American audience and who was like the Peter Mandelson. I mean, maybe this is like totally useless. I think my way of trying to like relate British politics to people in America is to be like, oh, okay, well, like, you know, Scotland is like the Canada of England. You know, like looking for these kind of really bad analogies. And the best I could come up with is that Peter Mandelson is like gay Rahm Emanuel. I think that's pretty good. That's pretty good. I have been kind of fascinated by this whole thing because I was, I had very low expectations for the entire.

Starmar administration But I I was still shocked When he made him Ambassador to the United States I mean I guess the reason for it is obvious He would see Trump and go

Remember that thing that we can't talk about But I just thought it was like common knowledge And a discussed thing that he was You know a very close associate of Epstein But many Brits revealed to me that It just was not reported on Yeah, It's a classic of the genre of like if you were like a shitter, shitter, if you were like a Twitter shit poster or or vaguely acquainted with Twitter full stop, you would have seen the photograph of Epstein and Mandelson, you know, what, like shopping together for a belt or something?

Like 20,000 times, you know, but presumably like Keir Starmer has like never actually looked at Twitter. It's very, it's mysterious because one of the things that's like, maybe this is just like what happened. in these kind of political situations. For like a long time, Peter Mandelson's whole thing, right, was like, oh, he's like the master of the dark arts. He's like a spin doctor. He's like really tight with all these shady rich dudes.

He's like on a Russian oligarchs yacht. He's hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein, you know. But like this was somehow part of the appeal or part of the like, it was like a thing that you just, journalists seem to not really be super, interested in or it was like, oh, we just, everyone knows that about him, so it's not news? It's sort of like, oh, you need a bastard to control all these other bastards out there.

But he's our bastard. I think the analogy of Mandelson being sort of like gay Emmanuel is a good one. But with Mandelson, there is like, there was always like a hedonistic or like libertine quality to him, even before the Epstein stuff was commonly discussed in the UK where he's almost like, I would compare him to someone like Ted Stevens almost. Or maybe even someone

who left office during the ab scam scandal. Like he is kind of a throwback in that way. Yeah, and people would always be like oh, Peter, you know, he just he has a weakness for really rich people. Oh no. Like that's like a funny character

character type like, oh, he's got a sweet tooth, you know, or like, oh, he's just, you know, he can't stop vaping. Yeah, I think it's very strange. And he, I mean, I had a, I had a, before I left the Guardian, I was at like an event in London for like a think tank. And one of my Guardian colleagues was there. This was like, I don't know, a couple months before the election. And I was talking with some other Guardian colleagues and we were like, what is the deal with this guy? Like, is he, is he, it was a great deal of ambiguity before Starmer won the election in 2020. 24 about like is Peter

Mandelson involved or not you know and there would be these kind of coy suggestions that like oh a Starmer's getting advice from all of the people like to say the big beasts of new labor and in the biblical sense yeah it's like one of these

I don't know it's like one of these like it's like when when someone's described as like a giant of the Senate you know oh yeah yeah it's like that Joe Rogan thing where he calls comedians he likes like assassins and murderers Yeah, that's like a big piece. So, and one of our, like, reporter colleagues was there, and we called this guy over.

And I was like, hey, man, what's going on? Like, what is the deal with Peter Mandelson? It's like, is he an advisor to Keir Starmor or is he not an advisor to Keir Starmor? And the, like, incredible thing that the reporter said was like, and this is a guy who's, like, at Westminster every day, was like, well, nobody knows. We think that Peter, and he, you know, he's very, he's very. He's very manipulative. We think he's trying to make it seem like he's more of an advisor than he really is. And I was like, well, have you thought of finding out?

Is that, is that, if you could make some phone calls, you know some people, you know, like, you could probably get to the bottom of this with a little bit of effort. And the reporter was like, I don't, I don't. Someone would have to commission me to do that. I'm not sure anyone's interested. So, but I think this is something that has persisted, even after all the scandal stuff. I mean, I was trying to piece together today to, to like refresh my memory or to like, you know, be able to kind of walk you through it, the order in which all this stuff happened.

And I think that even when he was appointed to be the ambassador, there was like this, like, calculated ambiguity of like, you know, it's come out now that he's very close with this guy, Morgan McSweeney, who was the kind of mastermind architect of the whole kind of Starmer project strope scam. But even when he's appointed ambassador, there was a sense of like, oh, they've, Starmer has like reached into the past to like pull this guy out of retirement. For one last job. I'm putting a theme together. He sized up that Trump, you know, he needs someone who can like go face to face with Trump. And there's like, you know, it's come out like in the past couple of weeks, of course, that like all of these people now

who like columnist kind of types, you know, were like, oh, what a master stroke. You know, brilliant. This is incredible. You know, he's, he's, like, there's something you can really dazzle, like, political journalists by being like, we got like, the biggest cheat, you know, like, dirty fixer. We got him to come back. And he's, he's back for one last job now. And we're like sending him to deal with Trump. And people will be like, oh, masterful, masterful. That is, I, I feel like that that is a very distinctive feature of UK politics is the idea of the press being in the tank for someone. it is more of an openly understood and sometimes openly stated thing, at least in professional circles.

It seemed to be very well understood that the press was like in the tank for Starmer, to some extent in 2024. Whereas here it definitely happens, but you just, you cannot suggest it at the time or you're insane. Even though in 2020 through 2022, the press was obviously completely in the fucking tank for Biden. in the exact same way. To add on that, Felix, I think another future of the UK media is that it's like,

it's more widely accepted and understood that the press, not just to be in the tank for someone, but to be implacably hostile to someone else, i.e. Jeremy Corby. Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, like, that's understood. Whereas in America, the same thing happens. But the, like, the sort of, I don't know, the standards of American journalism are like,

it's sort of, it's Kant and, you know, it's Kant and bromides, like, demand that you have to maintain this veneer of, like, you know, both sides. objectivity. Yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about this for obvious reasons, I guess. And I think my like, I think one thing about it, like, I think in in Britain, and it's funny to say this stuff because it's like, obviously there are all these counter examples from America, right? Like, American journalism is not like the best place in the world right now. But I think in Britain, the, the sort of smallness of everything in terms of like, you know, like in America, you have like, you know, you got 50 states. They've all got. governors, they've all got state houses, you've got all of these representatives from all over the country, you have senators from every state. In Washington, you have Congress and the Senate, but you also have the White House and you have, you know, this sprawling federal bureaucracy. And kind of all of this in England is like one-tenth the size or one-one-hundredth the size.

And there's this like little cohort of like the kind of people who like in like the early days of blogging like Paul Krugman and Glenn Greenwald would call like the villagers you know. I'm like dating myself here. That's a deep hole. Yeah, yeah. You'd be reading, you'd be reading Atrios and, you know. Shout out Atrios.

He's one of the still real ones. I think he lives in England, actually. I feel like he's a professor somewhere. Really? Yeah. If you're listening, you know, old fan. Yeah, he wasn't Philly, I think. But, you know, like, I think you have this sense of like kind of like state,

it's like state capture or a kind of rent seeking. where like you have this really small world in Westminster of these like political parties and and the government itself is really small and there is a I mean I saw someone once said that like you know American politics is like Hollywood and like British politics is like theater and I think that's like not a bad analogy

there's a sense in which yeah because also too in America like you look at these people like who is the Republican Speaker of the House now like Mike Johnson Mike Johnson guy yeah but like nobody knows Mike Johnson Johnson, where did he come from? You know, like, it's like vanishingly small odds that, like, Jake Sherman from Punch Bowl News went to high school with Mike Johnson. Could you imagine?

Right. Like, it would be like an incredible coincidence. What you're saying is like all these people went to the same fucking school. They went to the same schools. They went to the same colleges. And then you're like, the people you know are now, you have to cover them. There is more of these, everything is more governed by these kind of unspoken social cues and codes. Yeah.

And, well, and I think that even if you didn't, even if you don't have that background, you come into this sort of structure. And it's like a really interesting thing, too. It's a bit like, you know, I don't know, in New York. I mean, maybe there's a bit of this in America where like, oh, like the New York Times, Washington Bureau will have kind of its own center of gravity. But all of the reporters who cover government don't sit in like the newsroom. They all sit in parliament.

And so, and you never like these people don't like, you know, you don't see them that often or I don't know. They come in like once or twice a week. But there's like a real sense, I think that like, their job is to sort of explain Parliament to the rest of us. It's almost like they work for the state or they work for Parliament and they're like the ambassador

to the telegraph or the Guardian or the Financial Times or the New Statesman or whatever. And I think the sense there then becomes that like whatever is the sort of the people who promise access or who have access to this world

it's like a really highly valued commodity because the newspapers needed or the news, you know, TV news needs it or whatever. So you have this kind of like rentier economy in which, um, like a real high premium is put on like a kind of reporting that's like, oh, like, like, start like that number 10 has revealed that like, Starmer is going to do a big relaunch next week and it's going to be awesome. I know, I know, I know they're, they're, they're ready to bounce back. And, and people are like, oh, great. Okay. Yeah. Amazing. That's fantastic. He's bouncing back. Okay, good.

I know I've showed this quote on the show earlier, but whenever I think of the difference between American and UK journalists, I always think of a quote from Alexander Coburn, who said that the difference is that in America, journalists all essentially like themselves and see them as participating in a noble endeavor due to movies like all the president's men, whereas every journalist in the UK hates themselves. And if you can find one who's sober after 3 p.m., like you'd be like, you know, a genius. Well, I think I used, I would have said, like, what you would have said, I think, in the past, and this is like an interesting thing vis-a-vis, like, Corbin, Boris Johnson-Starmor, I, you know, I think you would have said in the past, or you would still say that, like, okay, the best asset or the best quality of British journalism by comparison to American journalism is that it doesn't take itself too seriously. And if you hang out with British journalists and, you know, one does, you know, the, like, the self-seriousness of, like, the Pulitzer chasing American journalist is, you know, is like a figure of fun. I think one of the things that happened in the like period of like Brexit and then Trump and then Corbin and then Boris Johnson

was this like sense of like British journalism suddenly had this like or a lot of British journalists suddenly had this kind of like mantle of like we are the defenders of sensible politics. We are like waiting for the grownups to come back into the room. You know and so you have Brexit

and you have then Boris Johnson who takes over for Theresa May. and then Boris Johnson gives way to Liz Truss, you know, who I learned when doing a little research earlier is the only prime minister who has lower approval ratings than Kier Starrmer in history. She was at minus 70 at some point. We'll come back to that in a minute. So when Starrmer comes back, you know, like, you know, Will said, you know, these politicians were kind of in the tank for him. I think that part of what you have there is like maybe not even a particular fondness for this guy, you know, and maybe the, maybe it's like maybe it's less emotional or less ideological than people supporting Biden or journalists kind of in the tank for Biden in America. But I think there's just a sense of like, oh, the grownups are back. And the people who, the people who deal with us are back. The people who are our friends, are our colleagues are like the reasonable folks like us are coming back into power and it's going to be great. Well, along those lines, I mean, I guess I wanted to ask you,

like, can you tell us about how even before all this like Epstein stuff and the arrest of Prince Andrew and now Peter Mandelson, a guy who is incredibly close to the Stramer administration? Like, could you just get out for us? Like how the Labor Party has just completely collapsed in its support? Like, like, how did this happen and why? Yeah. So they, okay, so in 2024, I mean, I think like one of the things here, and I guess this is true of any kind of election conversation, right, is like, you know, does, does one side win or does

the other side lose? you know, so coming into the election in 2024, the Tories are incredibly unpopular. Rishi Sunak calls an election, I think, very unexpectedly. I'm not quite sure what the logic there is. There's like a lot of like, you know, Benny Hill style Pratt falls where like all of his aides are caught or like a bunch of his aides are caught gambling on the on the odds that like there's going to be an early election. And this is like a kind of election defining scandal at the time. So Starmer wins the election. and he wins the election really because like the Tory vote has kind of collapsed and I think he wins with like 33% of the vote I mean it's complicated it's hard to read this across to America

because it's like a multi-party system and this will become I think significant when we get into Starmer's abysmal approval ratings one of the thing is that the Starmer strategists make a big deal of and this is like the Morgan McSweeney you know big brain victory approach

well look at oh yeah Morgan McSweeney Am I read about this guy? He's an Irish guy who lived on a kibbutz in Israel. Am I wrong about that? I think this is true. This is all part of his biography. I don't know if he's Irish.

I think he's born in Ireland, but I think either his parents lived in the UK or he moved at some point to the UK. He definitely did go live on a kibbutz at some point. I mean, Morgan McSweeney is like an amazing story in his own right. Is he Jewish? No, no, he's Irish. I mean,

I assume the name like McSweeney. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know he's like, but he, I mean, there's like a thing. that's hard to describe, and I was thinking today, like, how am I going to explain this, right? Like, in the Labor Party, there's sort of like two, there's two sort of right-wing factions in the Labor Party. And the one that everyone will know about is the sort of Blairite faction that's kind of modernizing and, like, you know, we're going to be like really capitalistic and we're

going to do away with all the old union shit. And then there's like something that is usually referred to here as the Labor Right, which is the kind of like old tradition of being like, like, you know, I suppose it's like a sort of like right-leaning social democracy. It's very union-oriented, but it's also very much about like, you know, these people are very proud that like Ernest Bevin was one of the founders of NATO and he gave Britain its own nuclear bomb and all this kind of stuff. And it's like really like rah-rah, like we're going to go like the factory where they make the nuclear submarines that the United States actually controls. And we're going to like campaign on like good jobs for good jobs for British workers, you know,

building like drones that fly over Gaza. We're going to tour the room where they keep the doomsday button that can destroy all of the UK. The room is in Fairfax, Virginia, by the way. Yeah, exactly. But you saw too in like, you know, in 2017, 2019, right? Like the big thing with Corbyn was like, you're going to push the button? What happens? Are you going to do it?

You know, are you a patriot? That was like the only answer ever given by a politician that wasn't fundamentally insane was when Corbyn said, of course I wouldn't. Are you fucking crazy? I'm not going to end all human civilization because London doesn't exist. So I think McSweeney kind of comes from that sort of tradition. And he, I mean, we can get into this in a bit because it gets into this. I don't know, you guys maybe have not followed this whole thing, right? Like since McSweeney got kicked out over the Epstein-Mandelson stuff, now like there's been this torrent of stuff coming out about how McSweeney basically like,

you know, comes to in the core. In the Corbin era, McSweeney gets involved with this kind of think tank, stroke, kind of pressure group called Labor Together, and basically puts together a plan to kind of take back the labor party from Corbin. And eventually, a few years into this plan, alights upon Kier-Starmer as like, this is the guy. And he's going to come in, and McSweeney has done, like, loads and loads of polling of all of the labor members. and he's tried to figure out precisely. These people, I mean, like, one of the things about, like, both the Blairite tradition and the kind of labor right tradition, and I don't know what the U.S. Democrat kind of equivalent of this would be, is this idea that, like, okay, members of the labor party are, like, naive left-wing idiots. And we, and we have to do is we have to protect them from themselves.

And we have to, like, make it very clear to them that, like, the stuff that you want, you can't have, right? Sounds like a party to me. Yeah, yeah. You have nuclear submarines, and you can have like a good job at the nuclear submarine plant, but like you can't have, you know, any of this peace-knick hippie bullshit. Forget about it. So McSweeney basically puts together this plan and he has, the big thing that's happened in the past couple weeks that's interesting here, and I don't know if it's made it over there, is like McSweeney takes in all these donations

basically from like hedge fund guys on this prospectus of like give me all this money and I will like take back the labor party from all of these like lunatic leftists and then he fails to disclose any of these donations until like it's way too late so he basically is like taking in all this money

like you know not huge amounts like 800,000 pounds or something like that but he like very deliberately keeps it a secret and this is against the law but election law being what it is he gets like a sort of wrap on the knuckles. And like no one pays much attention to this. In November of 2023,

this guy, Paul Holden, who's written this book about Starmer called The Fraud, maybe I'm going too deep into this stuff, shares these documents with reporters for the Sunday Times, which is, you know, a Murdoch paper and not usually great, but, you know, has some strong investigative stuff. And they basically put out this story that says that like, oh, hang on, wait,

Morgan McSweeney, who's now running Kier-Starmor's campaign, basically has been caught lying for like taking in $800,000 in like secret donations, 800,000 pounds rather in secret donations. And then it turns out that after this story comes out in the Sunday Times, all these people around McSweeney hire a PR firm basically to like quote unquote investigate the journalists who are publishing this material, which like effectively amounts to like running a, a little smear campaign. So like these PR firms starts calling up all these other journalists. And they're like, oh, did you know like this story that's in the press about like Morgan taking all these like secret donations? Like this was planted by the Russians. You know, this is like a Russian hack. All these guys are part of a pro-Russian disinformation network.

And as the Mandelson, Epstein, I mean, Prince Andrews, less relevant to Stormer stuff has been happening. There have been this series of stories in the press, which is now like incredibly outraged. because it's been discovered that this young MP called Josh Simons, who was Morgan McSweeney's successor, and then was parachuted into like a safe northern seat for labor, he basically like ran this sort of smear campaign against all their, all their colleagues. So he's like asking this PR firm basically to call up other journalists

and to be like, hey, have you heard about this guy who's like a Sunday Times journalist? I think he's like secretly a Russian plant. Sorry, I've gone down a deep rabbit hole here, I realize. Well, where does that leave Labor and the Tories? Like the traditional parties of Great Britain. Because like, I mean, like we have the sort of the rather meteoric and rise of the reform party. And now just as an outside observer, it seems to me Labor's argument is that, like, you have to vote for labor because we're the only way that you can vote strategically to prevent Nigel Farage and his like, you know, barking fascists, you know, from taking over this country's government.

But like, how does that score with, like, the Green Party, which seems like they're probably more popular than Labor is right now. Yeah. It would have been Labor's old voters who have been told to fuck off by Morgan McSweeney and company. Yeah, so I'll go back, sorry, Will, and answer your question from a little while ago, sorry, which is like, after Starmer comes into office, they basically like commence shooting themselves in the foot as soon as possible. they like take away the winter fuel allowance from old people. They... It was like the first thing they did. It was one of the first things they did.

And it's kind of, I think, like, an interesting thing here. And again, this maybe like goes with a sort of like U.S. Democrat kind of analogy, right? Like an incredibly important, less scandalous, but like nonetheless miserable aspect of stormerism is this belief, this kind of cargo cultish belief that like you have to reassure the public. by which they mean political journalists that like you're serious. You're going to keep like an ironclad hold on the budget. You're going to be very austere. You're going to be like,

you know, you're not going to fuck with the bond markets. You have to show a willingness to reduce the surplus population. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So they're not getting visited by the ghost of Christmas past. Then you are not serious. Yeah, so they take away the winter fuel allowance.

And then I think like at about the same time, all the stories start coming out about how they're getting lots of like all these donors are giving them like free clothes and free Taylor Swift tickets. And like this stuff basically just like sticks with them and won't go away. There's a guy here who's like a pollster like focus group kind of type who has this like great chart that's like, these are all the policies that labor, these are all the policies that people know about. And these are whether people like them or hate them. And all of the labor policies that people know about the most are the ones that people hate the most. And the policies that people know about

the least are the ones that like, you know, like, oh, well, it turns out they've frozen prescription charges, but like only 20% of people know about that, whereas like 85% of people know about the Peter Mandelson scandal and the winter flu allow allowance cuts. I mean, like, that sounds exactly like the fucking Democrats in this country. And when I hear from defenders, they always talk about it. Like, it's so unfair how nobody talks about, you know, the good things Biden did. And everyone just remembers the genocide and all the bad stuff. And it's like, well, like, whose fucking fault is that?

Yeah. So they, so they, pretty much like pretty quickly their support began to crater. I mean, I would have to look at the numbers to be like, when did it really start to fall apart? And I think a couple of things happened. Like, like the Tories are obviously saddled with a pretty bad reputation from the past 14 years. I think you could say, you know, going back to the conversation about the 2024 election that like, you know, Labor won principally because so many people were like, let's just get the Tories out. It doesn't matter. And. And. as labor has like chased so like the the Morgan McSweeney theory was like there are the this is an amazing phrase that you guys will not believe right there are these people who who used to vote labor who are like working class like people in like ex coal mining communities and uh you know they're very patriotic the imagination is they're very socially conservative and these are the people who left the labor party because they hated the like a terrorist loving Hamasnik Jeremy Corbyn, and they went to vote for Boris Johnson. And Morgan McSweeney called these people hero voters.

Hero voters. Hero voters. So it was like, we have to win back the hero voters. It's never been really explained to me where this term has come from. Are they heroic for turning their backs on homastic Jeremy Corbin? Are they heroic the virtue of their sort of coal mining salt to the earth? Is it like, are they, did they fight in World War II? Is that the impression here? They bought in World War II and they're still working at a coal mine to this day. And that's the good British spirit of... Do they mean it in like the old internet parlance, like, and hero?

Like, they voted for Boris Johnson and then killed themselves? Do they represent, like, voters we just can't win back? Well, so the idea was like, we're going to get these people back. And I think what actually happened, I mean, I'd have to look at, again, you'd have to look at the numbers. But I think what really happened is that a lot of these people just went to vote for reform. And so as the right-wing vote split, all these people, you know, labor was able to get in in all of these places. And I think in office, so Starmer has done like two,

there's like two main points of like Starmerism, right? One has been like these like unforced errors like we're taking old people's winter fuel allowance away. Well at the same time, we're being like photographed enjoying our free Taylor Swift concert. And then the second thing has been like shitting on the left wherever possible. Um, so like anything to do. do with Gaza. You know, you may be aware that there was a sort of direct action protest group in this country called Palestine Action. That was in the habit of going into kind of weapons factories and smashing them up. This group was prescribed as a terrorist organization, which meant that if you said, you know, hilarious and wonderful images for the British state of like a 90-year-old

Anglican priest being arrested by the fucking Bobby's for simply holding up a cardboard placard that says, I support Palestine action and to genocide. Yeah. So like this kind of stuff. So like, so Starmer has done this kind of magical thing, basically, of like the people who are kind of fed up with government now vote reform and the people who are fed up specifically with this kind of like right wing kind of, you know, we're going to crack down on immigration. We're going to deport more people than ever before. These people are now all voting for the Greens. And there is a big what in this country they call a bi-election. This is really great, actually. So there's a labor MP in like the outskirts of Manchester who had to resign from office because his like WhatsApp chats were leaked

with like a group of his like co-workers and his like local constituency office saying things like, oh, you're like, this woman keeps calling me up about her bins. I hope she fucking dies. Okay. I take it back. I support this guy now.

Yeah, yeah. Well, there's another guy. who punched a constituent on the street. That also caused by election. Yeah, yeah, these guys are great. The Labor Party would have better standing if they would just physically assault their voters. I think the Democrats need to start doing that in this country,

quite frankly. Yeah, yeah. Biden tried. His advisors didn't let him. So this guy steps down. And again, the big thing here has been like, there's a guy, the mayor of Manchester, is a labor mayor called Andy Burnham,

who has, like, positioned himself. I mean, again, I don't know who a good American analogy of this would be. Maybe he's like John Ossoff or something. That's preposterous. He's kind of inhabited this idea of like, I'm still like the authentic labor guy. You know, I'm going to like make the buses free in Manchester. I'm going to stand up for people in the north, whatever, whatever. And he wants to topple Starmer.

And so when, and in a way, this is like the thing that maybe could like save the labor party possibly from its kind of calamitous poll ratings. And this goes back to the thing we were talking about with British politics previously. So this guy has to stand down, this MP who tells his constituents to fuck off and die. And Burnham wants to go and run for Parliament because then once you're in Parliament, you can challenge Starmor and say, I want to be the new labor leader. And because there's no sort of primary system here, Starmer's people are just like, no fucking way. Are you kidding me? We're not going to let you in.

And they all go to the press and they like, you know, this like, it's a classic thing to me of this. kind of like labor tradition is like this is like a total corrupt stitch up but like they're making it seem as if it's the most reasonable thing ever like why why would it's like it's like it's if like Biden had like Bernie assassinated and then well you know what else you're gonna do we're we're gonna let him challenge us in an election you know we had to we had to like have him run over by his truck and put him in the hospital Biden Biden would never do that Obama did actually do that um yeah so uh anyway so so there's a by election happening this week. in an area of outer Manchester called Corton and Denton.

And the Greens, I think, probably look like they're going to win. The polling basically shows that it's kind of like 30% to reform, 30% to labor, 30% to the Greens, roughly. And what labor is afraid of now, and Will I think you're talking about this, is basically like the only thing they have going for them, and this is again, you know, like a good analogy with Biden, is like, you have to vote for us to stop Farage. we're the only chance to stop Farage. But once you lose that, and people are like not afraid of Trump or people are like,

well, I'm not going to vote for you just because you're saying I have to. Then you're screwed. There was an election in Wales in a place whose name I can't pronounce properly called like Hair Philly. It's got six L's in a row. Yeah, it's a C-A-E-R. And this was a situation where the, I'm really burying myself in it, the local Welsh nationalist party, which I think is called Pled Cymory. Is anyone running on the premise of giving Wales a vowel or two?

They, I mean, maybe in the, maybe in, in, in, they, they basically establish themselves in Wales now is like they're the anti-reform vote, you know. And this is like, well, Wales is like the, you know, the traditional heartland of the labor movement, whatever. It's like Pittsburgh or whatever, West Virginia. and labor will not win there now. You know, it's going to come down to reform against the sort of Welsh nationalists. And so the Starmer and the Starmer people are freaking out right now

because if they lose to reform, also too, I mean, this is a great thing that you guys will love. The reform candidate in this by-election is a kind of right-wing former academic called Matthew Goodwin who became famous because in 2017,

when he was still like somewhat respected, well, I don't know if he was respected, but he was like an academic still. He hadn't yet become a kind of like right wing political entrepreneur. But he said that if Jeremy Corbyn didn't get like destroyed in the 2017 election, he would eat a copy of one of his books on television. Do you remember this?

Yeah, yeah, no, I do. This guy like eating some pages from his book on. Classic Werner Herzog move. Exactly, exactly. So this guy is the Farage as the reform candidate. The book eater. The book eater. And yeah, so that's on Thursday.

People should watch out for that. There's been one vaguely serious poll, which shows that the Greens are in the lead and reform are second and labor or third. I don't know whether that will hold up or not, you know, three days from now, that would be a risky thing for me to predict. But I think if the, if labor finished third, that's like seriously bad news. And Starmor, I mean, basically what happened, I was going to say after the Epstein-Mandelson stuff, Starmer was basically saved by like, you know, that, like, you know, when Mr. Burns goes to see the doctor and they're like, all your drawings came to the door at the same time. So basically it's like everyone is trying to bring down Starmer over all this stuff. And they're getting stuck in the door like the three stooges.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And basically no one, everyone sort of has a reason for either letting someone else try and do it or waiting a little bit longer. And I think the conventional wisdom is basically that, like, there's a set of local elections that, will happen in May that are kind of effectively like a like a, a, a UK equivalent of a kind of midterm. And labor is going to get absolutely trashed. And then I think dealing is like, well, at that point, then everyone will run to kind of take over for Starmer. Jonathan, like, we've been talking about analogous figures in UK and U.S. politics.

And, you know, in terms of we've got Biden, historically unpopular president, just like Kira Starrner, who has led to Donald Trump and his snake pit of fascists, who are now also themselves historically unpopular. We're stuck with this two-party system. So everybody hates everything. But in terms of possible offerings or alternatives, roads not taken. In the UK, there's Jeremy Corbyn. In America, there's Bernie Sanders.

So I guess I need to ask, what happened to Jeremy Corbyn's your party? And like Bernie Sanders, is this another example of our beloved own? becoming washed. I think, you know, I said earlier that when I woke up this morning and I saw the like BAFTA Tourette's discourse on Twitter, I was like, I endeavor to know as little as possible about this before the end of the day. This is sort of how I think I feel about your party and I think how a lot of people feel about it. I think that like when it comes to like politics as like a sort of parissocial thing where like you want to be invested in like some of the drama,

right, you want to know about like some, who's on Zoron's team or like whatever, like, who's AOC falling out with or whatnot? What's going on in the squad? I think there's like a degree to which when the drama gets to be so intricate that like you would need to literally spend like

six hours a day following it to know who's doing what to who. So Corbin is by all accounts, I think, kind of persuaded. You know, so Corbin, Starmor kicks out Corbyn and makes like a big show of this. And in fact, like last week or two weeks ago, when the Tories in parliament were like... What exactly was he kicked out of the Labor Party for?

So he was kicked out of the Labor Party ostensibly for his reaction to a report by like an equality commission about the treatment of anti-Semitism cases in the Labor Party under his leadership. and there's like an enormous volume of ink has been spilled on all of the negotiations about this. The Starmer people maintained at the time that, well, they had no choice but to kick Corbin out because he refused to accept the verdict of this commission. At the same time, the Starmer people were like briefing to the press. Well, like, of course, we had to kick him out because that's how we show everyone that we've changed. This is like one of their cargo cult obsessions, right? Like, in order to win over the hero voters, you've got to kick Jeremy Corbin out.

Because if you allow Jeremy Corbyn, yeah, like the hero voters want to see Jeremy Corbyn humiliated. That's part of their heroism. So you have to kick him out because if he's still hanging around, then you can't plausibly like say like, you know, well, we booted that guy. And when Kemi Badenock or someone said to him in parliament, like, you know, how did you appoint this Peter Mandelson? You know, he was like, well, you know, I fired Jeremy Corbyn.

I kicked him out of the party. No one. Starmer gets like, I think unlike. Biden actually gets like super thin-skinned when people confront him about this stuff. And he like immediately like lapses into like your worst ever boss kind of vibes of like how dare you say this? You know, I did it. I did this the right way. So, so Corbyn gets kicked out and and then runs as an independent against labor in 2024. And all the labor party people are like, oh, we're going to crush him. But, but he wins. So he's still in parliament and he forms this kind of loose grouping. with these other MPs who ran as independence largely as like a Gaza protest vote. Just real quick, Peter Mendelsohn did go to Jeremy Corbyn's writing to canvas for the labor candidate. Yeah, yeah, he did. He did. He was there. Yeah, yeah. How did that not work? Yeah, yeah. Islington North. Yeah, yeah, I used, that's where I used to live.

It, so, so he, but like also, too, this, like, in the run up to this, all of these political journalists are like, oh, he'll never win, you know, it's not, you know, these people just like to vote for. the Labor Party. They don't actually like Jeremy Corbyn. So Corbyn, like, forms this loose grouping with these other, I think, kind of like largely Muslim men who have won seats basically on like a Gaza protest vote. And they call themselves the Gaza Independence. And there's a sense, I think that, or maybe they're called the Gaza Independence. And there's a sense I think that, like, people want to start a new party. And my impression from talking to people who were involved, in this or who know Corbyn or worked with him, is that like, he's not

super up for it. He's like, oh, you know, I don't know. Do I want to go through this again, is my sense? I mean, this is not journalism on my part, but kind of hearsay and my impression. But eventually gets kind of bounced into doing this by a young labor,

now ex-labor MP called Zarah Sultana. And she basically is about to get kicked out of the labor party over some other Gaza thing. Starmor's like kicking out lots of MPs all the time for various things. Like voting. I mean, it's an amazing Starmar thing, right? So like, there's a vote. The Tories brought in this very unpopular policy, which nonetheless is still very generous by American standards, that if you have more than two children, your child benefits get like cut off. So if you want to have like four kids, that's fine. But like, you're not getting any benefits for those extra kids if you're on

benefits. And everyone in the whole world of like policy, whatever politics is like, this is like the cruelest single policy that the British government has. The easiest way to fix child poverty in this country would be to lift this two child benefit cap. And Starmor not only refuses to do it, but when there's a kind of ceremonial protest vote to try to get him to do it, he kicks out all the MPs, mostly from the parties left, who vote in favor of lifting the cap. And then a year later, he lifts the cap anyway and then goes boasting around about how like, I'm the one who finally lifted the two child benefit cap. You know, know, and you're like, well, hang on, you kick these people out. So Zara Sultana gets kicked out of labor,

and basically, I think, does some kind of deal with Corbin and the people around Corbin that's like, we're going to start this new party together. But Corbin, I think, is very reluctant or doesn't, I don't know, they haven't like done the choreography. And so Zarathultana, like, goes on Twitter one day and is like, hey, everyone, I've just been kicked out of the labor party. We're starting a new party, Jeremy and I together. And immediately, Corbin or the people around Corbin are like, whoa, what the fuck? We didn't agree to this. Why are you talking about this to the press? We're still, like haven't finished this out, finished like working out the details here. And this basically like sort of sets the tone for like the next six months, uh, where like, depending on who you

believe, either the Corbin people are like control freaks and they were trying to like own the process and they won't let Zara Sultanah have a say in things. Or if you believe the Zara Sultan al-Sat, well, that's the Zara-Sultana side. The Corbin side is that Sultana is like constantly doing things like announcing a membership portal, but like not telling the Corbin people that she's going to do this and all these people are coming and signing up. I'm not joking. It's like you can't, you can't even keep track of it anymore.

It's like very, and I think there's a funny, like, sort of, to me, my own personal feeling is like, oh, this is like, I'm just like a bit of a softy, I guess. You know, like, I think I have to admit that, like, I want to, like, root for the Greens

to, like, beat the Labor Party. I think that's very satisfying. I don't, I'm not sure I have it in me to like, this is, I mean, this is like the equivalent of like some sort of, like, endless, like, New York City. DSA sectarian. Yeah.

That was like that that was kind of my thing was that I was paying attention to the surprising surprising strength of the Green Party in some by-elections. And a lot of people I knew over there were incredibly excited about it. But I was very, I mean, it doesn't matter what I do one way or the other. But I was, I felt a lot of trepidation around. the Green Party just because of Polanski. Polanski was a huge, the leader of the Green Party in the UK was a pretty, he was pretty into the Corbyn anti-Semitism stuff in 2018.

And of course he said that he, he misjudged it. He made a mistake. But, you know, that's fine if you're just a guy, but you're leading a fucking party. And at the very, you know, at best, it calls your judgment into question. And I hope I'm wrong about that. but I really wanted your party just a fucking horrible name. I know, I know.

That's what I was going to say. But like I really, I really wanted it to be successful or for them to at least figure something out with the Greens. But, you know, I also, I have the same problem you do where I can't even look at it anymore

because I have so much personal affection for Jeremy Corbyn. But when you compare it to anyone we've ever fucking had in America, he is such a wonderful guy. but watching this, it is the only fucking political party in the world that is run exactly

like a restaurant that Gordon Ramsey visits and throws up his hands and says I can't do anything. This is the Amy's baking company of parties right down to the age mismatched owners. I was going to say that it's like trying to like start a podcast with your friends

and you like fall out with one another. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Like there's a sort of sense of like no one's a podcast with 20, hosts. Yeah. And I feel like I have I have real sympathy for this because it's like, well, yeah, no one's in charge. You have to kind of like, you have to have an election to figure out who's in charge. But like, how are you going to get from like not existing to having this election? I mean, it's been, I do. I think with Corbyn, you know, I think at the end of the day, what was decisive for Corbyn's success or failure was was probably not. down to his kind of managerial skills. But I do think the sense that has come through in the your party thing, and I think here

he's like unlike Bernie, I think, in this way, is that he seems a little bit uneasy with taking charge and making decisions and being like the boss of something. And I'm like, okay, I'm very sympathetic to that. I wouldn't want to do that stuff. But I think that that has kind of, and I was just going to say, I feel like it's like, in Felix, you're probably seeing this too. I feel like I have friends or, you know, whatever, mutuals, I guess we now call them, on Twitter who are still like really into the your party stuff and they're like posting about like, oh, vote for this, you should vote for the grassroots left slate or you should vote for the Corbyn slate, which is called the many. But I kind of can't keep up with it.

And I think what's ended up happening in the sad thing from from this sort of Corbyn perspective is that if this thing had started maybe like two years ago, a year ago, I think you wouldn't have seen necessarily this exodus to the Greens. But basically the Greens and Polansky, you know, who's kind of embraced this kind of eco-populist mode, have just kind of taken all the energy. And I think for like most people who are looking for like a way to like not vote for armor or to be sort of freed from like the shit show of labor, that's like more than enough.

You know, and I think the greens, I mean, I would say I think of the greens that like there is a sense of, you know, I think like increasingly in, you know, whatever politics anywhere in the rich world, there's basically like people who are trying to come up with some reason to defend the status quo and people who are like, no, we need to kind of challenge and confront whatever sort of establishment is is trying to keep things from changing. And I think the Greens have just kind of taken up that mantle now, you know. Yeah. And Polanski has been pretty good, I think, on being like, you know, not being cowed by the

allegations that are being put against him in the press and the kind of, you know, I mean, he's probably learned a bit from the Corbyn experience in that way. Yeah. And he already went through it in the 1960s. It's cool that they learned. I thought, yeah, I thought he was living in France. Yeah. But no, no, I mean, like, yeah, I obviously have...

I'm worried about his connections to Woody Allen, to be honest. Mr. Palanski, will you denounce Woody Allen? Will you push the button to blow up Woody Allen? Sorry, I've gone too far there. But, um... Forget a take the Irish town. For all my, uh, reticence about Polanski himself, I mean, it does, from an outside perspective, it does seem like, the Greens have people,

whose judgment I worry about less. And at the very least, they seem to, at least that leadership can agree on what they're going to post on a given day, which is not the case for your party. I just, yeah, it's just too fucking sad to watch.

Most of the people I know are already, they're pot committed to the Green Party or they are just watching in horror at your party. I also think that you, I mean, one of the funny things to me or one of the ironies of the your party situation is like the extent to which it seems to be in a kind of Freudian way like recapitulating all of the worst labor stuff right like there's a sense in which like it's like to be involved in your party or you know and I think in a way right like it's like if if your concern is like a long term you know socialist party of the working class or whatever you know I think you're that's that is what your party aspires to be in the Greens I don't think have that ambition. But, like, it's just like you're so caught up in like this sort of residual drama of the labor party of like labor ways of kind of factional like, we're going to the press to complain that like our like inner party rivals have have done such and such dirty tricks. You know, it just has that.

It has it has this sort of reek of laborism about it. Yeah, I think like Corbin, I mean, one of the things about Corbin that I think is interesting. And again, it's a bit of a contrast with Sanders, you know, is that. like Corbin, like, I think when you read stuff about him or you talk to people who know him, you know, there's like a deep emotional attachment to the labor party, you know, and I think he was like absolutely, you know, horrified to get kicked out by Starmer. And I think this sort of sense of like what he wants is to be like a left wing labor MP or what he wanted was to be like a left wing labor MP. Yeah. I think the comparison to just, you know, going going on Twitter or left book if it was 10 years. ago and reading about some indecipherable fucking DSA problem or some factual dispute between the 75-year-olds who made up the first wave of membership arguing with 25-year-olds over non-binding resolution over Hugo Chavez being a dictator. It imparts the same feeling.

Nothing ever made me feel worse about giving money to the DSA than when I saw all their disputes litigated online. And, you know, there is a lot I admire about PSL, but maybe their single best organizational policy is that members cannot litigate these disputes in front of everyone online. That is one of their rules. And I think it is fucking brilliant. Your party, if they can be credited with anything, it is taking that stuff out of insular left-wing online spaces and bringing it to the press.

to imagine a world where the Danny Fatante scandal was litigated in the national papers. This is London. Jonathan, I do want to talk about Equator magazine. And I want to think about, you know, first of all, maybe just tell us about a little bit about what Equator is and why you started. And then I'm going to talk a little bit about the really exhaustive reporting that you guys did on how the BBC has handled Gaza over the last few years. Well, yeah, so this is a magazine that launched, we launched in at the end of October last year. I think the seeds of it go back to kind of like early 2024. You guys may have been aware of an episode. One of my kind of equator colleagues is the Indian novelist and literary critic Pankaj Mishra, who's a who's an old friend of mine and a write. I've worked with, you know, at various publications over the years. And he had had been asked to give one of these LRB winter lectures.

So the London Review of Books does this winter lecture series. And these winter lectures were supposed to be hosted at this big London Arts Center called the Barbican. You've probably seen it in TV programs or whatever. It's like this like, I think pretty cool, like brutalist miniature city. But it's got like, you know, a cinema and theaters and things like that. and when the Barbican agreed to host all these lectures, and then when the LRB published the titles of the lectures in the magazine, and the Barbican saw that Pankaj's lecture was called DeShua after Gaza,

the Barbican flipped out and canceled the whole thing. So this is like around the time that we were starting to kind of think about this magazine, and it kind of sort of organically a bunch of, of writers and editors kind of coalesced to kind of work on this project. So there's myself, there's Pankaj, another old Guardian columnist called Nisarine Malik, who's a Sudanese writer who lives in Kenya, a guy called Gavin Jacobson, who was an editor at the New Statesman, two writers in New York called Nicar Azami and Susie Hansen, who were both kind of like people who, Susie was a foreign correspondent and lived in Turkey for a really long time. And,

the Pakistani novelist, Mosin Hamid. It was just kind of like a bunch of friends, basically. And I think there was a sense of like, okay, you know, sort of sparked by the way that Gaza was being misrepresented in the mainstream press. I think really while Biden was still in office in some ways, I mean, I think this started to change once Trump won the election. You know, but like that feeling of 2024 of just like, okay, are we going crazy here? Like, we can, I can see this stuff on my phone every day. Well, I mean, like, I think one of your authors sums it up that, like, it's probably one of the, like, look, I mean, it's impossible to rank.

What's the most evil thing this happened during your lifetime? But I think, like, what separates Gaza from other, you know, mass slaughters or mass murders in the past is that, like, if you are a citizen of a Western country, certainly the United States or the UK, both major political parties completely support what's happening. So I think that would mark, and then the entire media behind it backing them up. So I think that would like, that adds a like a certain distinct character to this level of this kind of mass murder. Yeah. And I think, I mean, absolutely.

And I think the other thing that I think is interesting and we spent a lot of time talking about this in the early days is like, think about the kind of like global outrage that went with the Iraq war in 2003 and like the sense around the world that like, oh my God, what are the Americans doing? This is completely crazy. But I think the difference between, you know, 2003 and 2023, 24 is that like, now you can see everyone freaking out in real time, right? And there was a sense, I think, that not only is the, is the U.S. government and the UK government and all these other European governments basically helping out in what, you know, at that point is rapidly starting to look like a genocide. There's a sense that like all over the world, people are really angry about this and shocked and horrified. But they're, you know, There's no sense in which, like, well, what are they reading? What's there? It kind of calls into being a global community, I think, of people who are united in a new way by, like, watching this kind of horror altogether. So I think that the sort of instinct there was like, this is, I guess a moment, too, where, like,

the feeling was like, look, all of us had spent a lot of time working in establishment, legacy, media organizations. You know, I had been at the Guardian for 10 years. You know, I worked at the New Yorker. I worked at the New Yorker Review of Books, whatever. Like, you know, these were like, we'd, we'd been in these places. And I think, like, we had, I guess, like, a sense of, like, disenchantment, right? Just like a feeling of like, okay, this, this, is, is this ever going to get better?

You know, like, we've put a lot of time and effort into trying to, I don't know, I don't, I don't, it's like, it's like, it's hard to talk about. because I think you sound a bit naive, right? But you're like, okay, I've invested in the system. Yeah, these are institutions that are trusted in other regards or do good work in other fields. But, like, I think there's a sense that, like, the Palestine exception has really broken all of these liberal institutions, you know, and then, which leads us into the BBC. The BBC, yeah. Like, this can no longer be maintained, like, either to the public or to many of the people working there.

And I guess, like, the example of the BBC is very instructive because, like, this is one of the crown jewels of the British state. You know, like, of, like, you know, like the, probably the top example of, like, how good a state broadcaster could be. However, the way they've handled what's happened in Gaza and the way they maintain and, like, sort of a artificially abridged set of, I don't know, artificially abridged parameters of debate as it relates to Israel and Palestine. Like, like I said, the piece by Daniel Trilling is called Inside the BBC's Gaza Fiasco.

and it's exhaustively documented and reported, but, like, Jonathan, like, how does that manifest itself in the BBC? I mean, we've all seen examples of, like, news presenters. Like, if they have a guest on who uses the word genocide, they're immediately cajoled into being like, well, well, now, we're just going to remind our viewers that, like, you know, Israel disputes that and, like, you know, that's a controversial world that's very much in contention. But, like, what are some of, like, the institutional ways in which, like,

the BBC has, I don't know, continued to uphold this Palestine exception well past the breaking point. Well, I think, I mean, it's interesting that you talk about this sort of liberal institutions kind of like unable to bear the weight of this. I think one of the things that has happened is that like, and the BBC is like far and away the best example of this, I think, is that like this moment of, call it like ideological crisis over something like Gaza has coincided with like a long term decline in their sort of strength and independence and authority, right?

Like the BBC, I mean, one of the things that I think this Daniel Trilling piece gets at is that the BBC has been kind of like targeted and undermined by successive British governments, you know, really starting with Thatcher, but including the Blair government. And more and more is kind of looking over its shoulder to be like, well, what does the state want us to say and what does the state want not want us to see? There's a sense in which, like, it's a lot, the BBC finds it a lot easier to report the news when, you know, Britain's enemies are involved.

And I think one of the things that, you know, I think is good about this. A good example, hence they'd be like they will describe actions taken by the Russian army in Ukraine as slaughters or massacres or war crimes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think, I think, I mean, you know, my own experience at the Guardian, and I think is similar to the BBC. is that, you know, one of the things that Daniel, I think, did very well in this piece is like, the BBC did lots of serious reporting on Gaza, but I think the serious reporting that was done on Gaza

was overshadowed by this kind of tippy toes, like, okay, let's not be too straightforward here. We need to be worrying about like what we're saying and how we're saying it. I mean, Daniel gets a lot of, has kind of inside sources who talk to him about like the extent to which that there was like ironclad insistence that you had to always say it was the Hamas run health ministry that was providing these numbers, right? And this was kind of an up and down dictot through the BBC.

Well, they don't do it as a dictop, right? But there's a sort of sense of like, and any time that there was a big documentary that was looking at, you know, conditions in Gaza. So, you know, they did this documentary called How to Survive a War Zone. And then there were allegations

or people came out alleging this documentary had a script that was narrated or read by a child and it turned out the child's father was like some technocrat deputy agriculture minister in Gaza so he was described in the media as that you know this is the son of some Hamas terrorist you know I think this guy is like literally like you know like an agriculture PhD I have no idea

I don't think he has anything to do with like the fighting part of Hamas so then the BBC is just like spirals into a whole panic And then they've got another documentary about doctors being attacked by the Israeli army. And they're like, oh, forget it. We can't do this. So they're like immediately cancel this after like holding it in limbo for many, many points. And then it airs on another channel and it's, you know, full of praise and winning awards and things like that. So I think the sense to me, what I was saying is like after October 7, when the scale of what Israel was intending and starting to do in Gaza became apparent, I think there was.

a sort of weird lack of urgency as if this was just like, Daniel, I think, captures this really well. It's just kind of like, well, this is just business as usual. You know, they're like mowing the lawn, as Netanyahu or the Israeli generals say. In a way that I think, again, when it comes to kind of Russian action in Ukraine,

you wouldn't get that, right? It was like much more with the invasion of Ukraine in the UK media and the US media too, I think, right? Like this sense of like, holy shit, this is crazy. What's going on? Oh my God. You know, so I think that's, yeah, that's kind of the outlook there.

Well, I mean, it does seem to be like a repeated pattern. And like, I guess like the question is like, where does this leave the BBC? Right? Because like, I mean, it's just like the maintenance of this exception, what it requires from the people who have to maintain it. And whose utility in maintaining it is based on their credibility as serious objective broadcasters has, like I said, essentially like it's beginning to eat itself. Because like you can't have one without the other. And like, so what like, it's hard to imagine like where the. BBC goes from here or like or any other like are the New York Times for that matter.

I mean like I guess they've always been like this but like it's become a few, Felix has talked about on the show before like effective propaganda like that, you know, to use examples like the BBC or the New York Times, it works because most of what they report on or present is true. So it's like when they put their thumb on the scale for something that like they really want you to look the other way on or they want to cover up, it glides past because of the credible work that they've done in the past elsewhere. And I guess what I'm saying is like for the New York Times or the BBC, what has happened in Gaza or like what Israel has done to Palestine

and like the way that they have tried to like manage their liberal audiences, like political instincts, which is that shit like this is wrong. And that like if you want to think of yourself as the good guy, you don't necessarily, like you can't be rooting for the army that's just slaughtering unarmed civilians. Oh, like on, yes. Well, I think, too, the thing that you see in any kind of news organization is like when there's a feeling of uncertainty or like, you know, the BBC basically kind of invites its critics on the right to kind of have a big say in how it's doing things, right? Like there's a sense in which I think, and I think the piece kind of gets at some of this stuff. there's a sense in which

criticism from the left is not taken very seriously or is not seen as the sort of thing that we need to respond to. Criticism from the right is, you know, capable of stirring up real panic. And sometimes the critics from the right, you know, a light on something like, oh, well, you had this documentary

and it was narrated by a kid whose dad is a Gaza government official and we're going to blow that way out of proportion. But there's a sense of like, okay, they've got us there. And so then inside the bunker of the kind of like flustered liberal establishment news organization, this sort of sense of panic sets in and there's an anxiety and there's a, you know, you start like screwing things up because you don't know. You lose sight of like what made you trustworthy to begin with, I think.

There's another piece at Equato that I wanted to touch on by Ben Moser, which he writes a piece basically about, along similar lines, the death of liberal Zionism and how this kind of contradictory stance can really no longer be maintained. And, you know, it's titled, Is it time for us to stop talking about ourselves? Can you lay out for us? You get a little specific about what Moser identifies as the problems of liberal Zionism and how October 7th led to its death or like the impossibility of maintaining its contradictions much longer. Yeah, well, I think, so this is a, This is a piece by, as you said, by Benjamin Moser, who is, I think, best known as Susan Sontag's biographer. He grew up in Houston in the 1990s. I mean, I think one of the things that came to be a theme

of all these early equator pieces, and I think still, you know, we're not that old now, is this sort of sense of like marking the end of this era that's like the long 1990s, right? like, you know, the end of the end of history period. And I think one of the things that Ben is writing about in this piece is the idea that for a certain kind of liberal American Jewish community, the idea of kind of Oslo era, I mean, he doesn't really get into this, right, but like a sort of, you know, peace process, liberal Zionism, was kind of of a piece with an era

of like American exceptionalist like the whole world is going our way the Berlin Wall has fallen we are history's good guys right and I think one of the things that Ben

does a really good job of articulating is the extent to which the war in Gaza is like an American-Israeli co-production right and and the sort of sense that without the image of a sort of imaginary Israel that is going to, you know, make its way to kind of peaceful Jewish and democratic existence, you can't sustain this discourse basically.

You know, and I think that the, it was kind of like sense of like, okay, this was this, this, this, It's about your sort of centrist uncle, you know, who was like, above all, saw himself as a liberal. And yet is calling on, you know, Columbia University to like, you know, arrest these kids for protesting. Well, yeah, I think that's interesting. I think, like, when I think about centrist, it's like, the people who get the most mad at the left for, like, let's say, sitting out the last presidential election over an issue like Gaza. and the genocide that our government was sponsoring and abetting. I think, like, because they see themselves as liberals, I think they have a really hard time identifying with the idea

that there are people more liberal or more to the left that they are. So they have to think of it in terms of betrayal, where it's just like, you betrayed the Democratic Party. And it's just like, well, if you ask me, like, they betrayed their own conscience, you know, or like, or the idea that, like, that anyone, that they enforce the parameters of like the furthest left you can be. And if you go further left than that, you are just a right winger to them because you're, quote,

supporting Donald Trump. You helped him get elected. And I think like, you know, especially of like an older generation, like they all think of themselves as like, oh, we were, we were anti-war, you know, we were hippies. And then as they got into adulthood and like, you know, life and home ownership or whatever, they've never really examined that. And like, I think they are innately hostile. to the idea that there are further left horizons or political commitments than the ones that

they've adopted or sort of fossilized into. Yeah, I think, I mean, you see that in the conversation we're having about Starmer and the Labor Party as well. I think with, this Ben Moser piece to me is a piece about the, as he puts it, the marriage between a kind of American exceptionalism of the post-89 world and the kind of ethos of liberal Zionism. And the ethos of liberal Zionism in this case being the sort of willful preference for a kind of imaginary Israel over kind of actually existing Zionism in practice or actually existing Israel in practice. And I think part of what Ben is talking about, and I think what you see

in this kind of post-October 7, you know, right, like people being like, we need to shut down the universities, we need to back Donald Trump as he's, you know, fighting anti-Semitism at Harvard and Columbia and whatever is, I think, people abandoning the pretense to a kind of liberal universalism for a kind of like tribal, like, well, you know,

our enemies can go fuck themselves kind of vibe. That's a really interesting, I think, really astute way to put it. I've always, and it's a framework I've always been kind of fascinated by. The long death of the 90s. I was in grade school. I was, you know, I was in grade school,

in the 90s, but the main thing I do remember about it was the sort of not just idealism, but the true sense among a lot of adults and especially liberals that the main problems of the world had been figured out, and

that we can move on to things like, you know, getting America, all of America's fat children into shape and eradicating disease and, you know, inventing prestige Kivet. And it is

everyone who at least had conscious thought whose internal monologue contained language does have these very fond cultural memories of the 90s. But yeah, I think this is, this is

the 90s lived for, you know, like 30 fucking years inside the minds of especially sort of center left, center, right liberals because those were, those were the people, even during Trump 1, who loved, they were always putting out books that were like, here's ways that the world is actually great and better than ever.

They were really holding on to that. And there's been, people have talked a lot about how the, you know, the Trump two foreign policy is, it is a sort of formal end to a style of a post-war style of American empire, where soft power is dead. It is the age of regional powers and just more overt extortionism. everything is run like a mafia. It always was, but it's more on the surface. A similar thing happened with liberals, where this type of liberal, really, because I think Raken File liberals, just your average guy who's a liberal, has responded in a very

surprising way, at least in America, with Palestine. But it was, it also represented them becoming more thuggish and transactional. but in service of this thing that they previously thought, they previously saw it's just another problem that could be solved. But when the default wasn't just praising Israel, when the default public posture wasn't just that, and they actually felt threatened, the last of their utopianism died.

You know, I think also, too, there was a sense that, like, you know, I think your point about, like, the rank and file liberal, right? Like, rank and file American liberals, whatever their other flaws, I don't think see like, they don't see like Israel's war on Gaza as like, you know, a heroic outpost defending us from the Muslim wards and, and, you know, keeping our Western civilization intact. And I think until recently there was a sense, well, like, yeah, but we need to still kind of go along with that, right? Like, like, the Democratic Party is like, yeah, okay, we don't, we don't actually

think Israel is a, is a, is a fortress defending the West against, you know, at the gates of Vienna. but like the there was still a sense that that was the in order to win elections you had to say that that you couldn't touch these sort of red lines um i mean i think that the 90s thing has been big part of what we've tried to do so far there's another essay that is less inflammatory than these ones um by this really great Nigerian professor called romane adrissa that's called state Mania, which is a memoir of growing up in Africa in the 1990s, and he describes this sort of amazing moment where like the sort of Soviet influence on the continent of Africa suddenly vanishes overnight. And, you know, a situation in which, like, in a heartbeat, students who

wanted to go study abroad in Europe or in Moscow or whatever are now like all like queuing up to go to America. And like, suddenly this idea of America. And like, suddenly this idea of America as the new promised land is like everywhere in the air in the 1990s. And I think returning to that moment and seeing the contingency of it is an important element of what we're trying to do to be like, look, this was just like a thing that happened. It was a kind of accidental moment in history. Or it wasn't accidental. It was the culmination of various things.

But like there was no sense in which this was like the permanent final stage of like human culture was like 1997 America. It was nice. It's also like the least replicatable conditions possible. Like I always, I think that is such a funny aspect of new labor and

the Democratic Leadership Council. This idea that like everything's all fucked up now because we departed from the way we did things in the 90s. And it's just like if there is any other decade where the conditions are harder to achieve, I have not seen it. Well, this is the, I think this is the sort of like equator manifesto, so to speak, is this idea that like, look, how much of the journalism that we consume or how, you know,

set aside Gaza specifically, how much of the world that is presented to us by other newspapers, magazines, TV programs, or whatever is still inhabiting this kind of 1990s ethos, right? is still whatever the good work that's being done, whatever the excellent reporting that's happening from all around the world, to what extent is like the intellectual architecture of all these venerable publications, which like as well was saying before, like,

you know, they do very good work. There's very good work in all of these places. But it's kind of stuck in this idea of like we've just defeated the Soviets. You know, history belongs to us. And I think you can see, you know,

Gaza, Trump, China, like, things are starting to unravel for this kind of whole worldview right now. The 90s are over because Donald Trump was elected president of the United States of America, not once, but twice. And like, there's no coming back from that for America. We're never, again, going to be thought about as, like, a serious or good country to the extent that we ever were.

And I mean that, forget how other people across the worldview, We don't care about that. But how we view ourselves, right? Like, yeah, well, I think. If you like Trump, you like him because he's a reflection of what an angry, miserable fuck you are and how much you hate everyone else and the rest of the world and your neighbors especially. But like, but there's no more going back to the idea that we're the adults in charge

or that we have a moral duty or responsibility or right to govern the rest of the fucking world. Because look who our fucking president is. That's who we elected. That's who we are. Well, and I think the second election is really significant. Yeah, obviously. More so than the first one.

Well, only because I think there was a dream of restoration, right? Like, much like Starmor here, right? Biden brought sanity back to America and, you know, the world was going to respect us again, and we were going to be, you know, responsible stewards of the liberal international order. That's why I think Gaza is so significant for this, right? because it's like that is that is Biden's genocide you know that's i mean trump is like perfectly happy to let not nahu do whatever he wants but this is on biden's watch i know like he it it started under him and he could have stopped it and he did it and they lost an election because of it yeah i've

seen that this is there's some reporting that's come out yesterday or two days ago that like some kind of internal post-mortem i won't i won't i won't i won't subscribe to axios to find out what that article actually says um I keep trying to open it in incognito mode. But like, look, it's, we already know exactly. There's like, oh, they, like the DNC did a post-mortem on Kamala post-2020 election. And then for some reason, they decided to keep its findings top secret. And the fact that it's taken this long to leak to the press is, is impressive.

But we all know why it was held to. We all know why it was secret. Because what it reveals is exactly what everyone has been saying. They chose to lose an election for Israel rather than. win one by, you know, by listening to their voters. Well, and I think that they, again, you know, it's a bit like, I suppose, the fable of like the scorpion and the frog. I think the kind of people who staffed the upper echelons of Biden's State Department, National Security Council, the, for these people, it's axiomatic

that, like, U.S. foreign policy is about. supporting Israel. Israel is our friend. Israel is our closest ally, right? Like, there's no, like, grand conspiracy here. I think that, like, you, if you come from that foreign policy establishment, this is how America has always done things, right? And I think in a way, it takes us back to the 1990s, right? Like, you are, you are a product of this kind of Bush-2-Clinton kind of worldview, sorry, Bush-2, I mean Bush 1, you know, you know, in the same way that, like, oh, well, there's certain rules about, like, how we have to talk about Taiwan, you know, because, like, this is just how American foreign policy is conducted. You know, I mean, you'd like to think that, like, these people had some conscience. And, you know, my colleague on Equator, Susie Hanson did a great piece for New York Magazine, basically, about how all of these, like, inside the State Department, all of these reports were coming in of Israeli war crimes and human rights violations that should have triggered, you know, a stop on shipping weapons. And they were just,

summarily ignored. But you would think that some conscience would kick in. But I think this is just like these guys are on autopilot. There's a sense that this is what America does. I know.

Whether it's that inertia, their own lack of conscience, or their, you know, surplus of actual genuine conviction for Zionism and the project it represents, what they've done is now handed over

American foreign policy, perfectly represented by Guber, extraordinaire Mike Huckabee, who when, interviewed by Tucker Carlson over the weekend said, the Bible gave Israel the land between not the Mediterranean and the Jordan River,

but between the Nile and the Euphrates, which would encompass Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt. And then he's our diplomat. He's our ambassador to Israel who just said that Israel is entitled biblically to virtually the entire Middle East. It was such a bad risk reward because, you know, Tucker isn't on TV anymore.

So if you did that interview and you're Huckabee and you want to stymie Tucker because, you know, he's, he's, he's mean to Israel. You think he's, uh, anti-Semitic. He's ruining the whole thing. Uh, no one's going to fucking see it. They're not going to log into X to watch the Tucker show. But if you fuck up, imagine doing such a bad interview that several foreign ministries condemn it. And it's not even on TV. Yeah. It's not even, it's on X, the everything app.

Look, if we've done this show for like 10 fucking years, you do some bad episodes sometimes. We've never, no foreign ministry has ever been like, this is such a bad episode that we're calling our ambassador. His answer is about, his answer is about why he met with Jonathan Pollard are also hilarious. Yeah. I thought when, Will, when you talked about.

He was like, look, he was just there. I said, what's up? You know, whatever. I thought we were going to talk about Pete Hegsseth and are the weights fake? I want Felix's verdict on this. I know. So I have always been very impressed with

Hegsteth has done a lot of photo ops where he's working out with the troops and he's doing burpees and push-ups and shit. And regardless of what you think about the guy, and he is a terrible guy, just even on his personal conduct, he should be in the Tower of London. but I have never seen anyone who is as big of a drunk as him.

A, not bloat like him. And B, do as many early morning workouts as he does. I don't know if he's still drunk, if he metabolizes alcohol in a different way. Yeah, but like guys who work on cocaine, guys who work out on cocaine just like sweat a lot. And he's sweating a normal amount. And I am really, I look, it looked a little too. smooth for me and it did make me think he's bullshitting a little. But I would not be totally shocked if he actually did it.

You have to give it to him. I believe it. What the fuck else is he doing other than working out? It's certainly not running the Pentagon or fucking. Yeah, no. Planning any wars were going about to fight. My dad had this saying. He said, if all you ever want to do is make a lot of money,

that's, you can do that. You just won't, you know, you won't get anything else. And I said, good advice. And I did it. I'm just kidding. But, no, it's the same way, if all you want to do is get drunk, work out, and ignore your kids, you can do that. And the best way to do that is be Secretary of Defense. Secretary of War.

Secretary of War. Excuse me. Excuse me. I'm sorry. Well, Jonathan, we've taken a little. taking a long time today. We should wrap it up here today. But like as long as you're talking about the 90s, an era in which people thought, you know, there are still some problems out there, but the big ones, they've pretty much been solved and things are getting better. I would

like now to read from the document, this is what Kier Starmer has done so far in terms of some of the problems that are being solved by our car tier. This is our new website. We're really proud of it. Please go to what cure has done.co. In light of our Instagram account being pulled bromotarily, it's, we're replacing it with

this is what cure has done. dot co.uk. So here is just some highlights. Shout out to our, shout out to our generation alpha employee, Spencer. He was born in 2014. He found this for us, by the way. All right. This is just a few things that that Keer has done so far.

let's see here given communities more power over their local bus service delivered planning reform to build the homes we need announced homes for heroes a program to ensure all UK Armed Forces veterans as well as domestic abuse survivors

and care leavers have a roof over their heads in the same house that sounds like that disaster launched a curriculum and assessment review to help improve schools that's just like nothing yeah yeah no listen to this

launched skills England to transform opportunities and drive growth what the fuck is that he's transforming opportunities and driving growth this is scrapped wait hold a second

scrapped a single headline offstead grades in schools in landmark school reform oh my god that you used to use it your schools used to get like a letter grade they don't do that anymore now uh

i i like launched land Mark Pensions Review. Okay, here's a good one under Environment. Launched a new flood resilience task force to turbocharge flood preparedness and to support delivery of flood defenses. Oh, a task force? There's a lot of task forces. This guy is working all day. Yeah, there's a lot of task forces and plans and reviews.

I'm surprised that they don't have the big joke forever here was like that they wanted to bring, they wanted to, labor governments always used to say that they wanted to bring on speedy boarding for heroes. If you had served in the army, you could like, you could go to the front of the line when you're getting on like an airplane. Unveiled, oh, this is a good one. Unveiled new measures to support small businesses impacted by late payments. See, I think they should have just kept it at unveiled new measures to support small businesses. Do you remember when you would order order food on like Grubble? or something during COVID, and it would give you a little message that says, thank you for supporting restaurants.

That's like those, that's Keer Starmer. That is his tenure. Just supported restaurants. Support it supported shoe repair stores. Yeah, he brought in a, you committee. Senate of a review committee over speed bumps. Growth and skills levy. A growth and skills levy.

Kick started the rollout of free breakfast clubs for all primary school children through an early adopters scheme. Okay, well, you know, I can't make fun of that one. That's a good one. No, there's plenty of this stuff, but this is the stuff, as I said before, that nobody knows about. All they know about is like appointed the most famous Pido's best friend to be the ambassador to Washington. I mean, it is true. But like, when your government, when your government is that closely connected to Jeffrey Epstein's best friend who, you know, let's just say allegedly is a notorious pedophobic. like so many other people of the British government. That kind of does outweigh the Homes for Heroes program to ensure that domestic abuse survivors and veterans will have a house, we'll have a roof over their heads.

I don't like bandwagon fans of anything. I'm just going to say that. Introduce the new fiscal lock law to deliver economic stability and protect family finances. Don't like locks? I guess, Jonathan, my final question here for you is like, We began it with Mandelson getting arrested. This is on the heels of Prince Andrew getting arrested.

Those are two extremely high up and powerful people in British government and society. What do you think accounts for the discrepancy in the UK being able to arrest some of these people? And like, let's be honest, both of them have been arrested for sharing UK state trade secrets with Jeffrey Epstein, which is sort of like getting Al Capone on tax evasion. But like, what do you think accounts for the discrepancy in the way the Epstein files have led to? some level of accountability in European countries versus here in the United States. Yeah, it's a very good question. I mean, I think I'm tempted to say that if, well, there are two things, right? One is that like, unlike Donald Trump, you know, Kirstarmer himself has no connection to Epstein.

So there's no incentive. He's just doing it for the love of the game. He's doing it just for the love of the game. I think that, I think that, well, you guys tell me, like, if Trump could arrest some people and it would like plausibly make this go away. Well, no, because then they would tell. to justify against him. Anyone he could theoretically arrest would turn state's evidence against him.

Yeah, so that's it. That's the, that's the thing, I think. You know, it's like they're just there, but it is interesting, right? Because it's as you were saying, Will, it's like the, the alleged misconduct in public office is like 20 years ago having told Epstein, you know, oh, here's what Gordon Brown is up to. Rather than like, you know, sex trafficking. Well, that's what Gordon Brown was also up to. But, let's leave. Allegedly. Allegedly. No, not Gordon.

He's very sweet. You know, there's a really good, uh, yeah, he's like a lovely bear, Gordon Brown. I like that they're basically getting prosecuted for like telling Jeffrey Epstein that Kier Starmer was going to like set up a plan to review the pensions and small businesses. Like they just sent him what has Kier done.com.uk. We're leaking. We're leaking the speedy boarding for heroes plan. So that's that FD can get ahead of it.

MI5 issued a denoticed all British publications that they cannot talk about the homes for heroes or speedy boarding process. All right. Jonathan Shannon, I want to thank you so much for joining us today. The new magazine is Equator.

We will have links in the show description. And before we sign off for today, I'd like to turn things over to Chris, to give you guys a rundown and preview of our upcoming 10th anniversary show and a few other exciting announcements. Hello. Yes. Our 10th anniversary show, April 3rd at the Palace Theater in Los Angeles, still a few tickets on sale, but I think fewer than 150 right now. So get them while you

can because we have an exciting lineup announcement. We are pleased to invite friends of the show, Episode 1, Seeking Darrangements, and Brace Belden to be. accompanying us at this wonderful event that we are throwing. They will be doing individual segments throughout the night with us. Will and Felix are planning some wonderful stuff to serve as kind of the backbone of the entire show. But it's definitely going to be a big hootnanny. Are you guys excited to perform with these guys? It's the first time we perform with seeking derangements on stage.

I'm very excited. I'll be clapping for carers. Sorry, I've got the UK brain right now. Yes, yes. Clapping for carers like Seeking the Arrangements, episode one, and Grace Belden, who sucked me off all my clap for carers. I'm sorry, I was in the bathroom.

That's how excited I am to perform with all these amazing gentlemen and ladies. It'll be a night to remember, and not just because we'll be reenacting the Bezlin Theater tragedy. And we might even add another exciting guest or two to that. So if you guys are already clearly excited about this show, tickets are selling fast. You've got one month about to get your final

ticks for that. Sell out the palace theater. Get those last 150 tickets. And then also I have a bit of a nerdy admin announcement, but I'm very excited about this. Over the last few weeks, I have been adding every free episode of Chapo Trap House, all of the public RSS feed-only episodes from before about episode 500 when I started adding them all to the Greatwood feed. Now, every single episode, of the show is on the gray wolf feed, the Patreon feed. I know that the public RSS feed cuts off after about 500 episodes and it makes it a little difficult to listen to early episodes of the show if you want to go back to those.

Now they are all, if you're a subscriber to the show, they are all there in your feed. You can go all the way back to episode one and listen to the show in order if you want to do if you were particularly sick in the head. But yes, now every single episode that we've ever put out of the show, I think that adds up to something over 1,300 individual pieces of content is right there in the Patreon Grey Wolf Feed for subscribers. Five bucks a month. Your one-stop shop.

Every single episode. Everything chop-o. Yes. So go back and enjoy some classic episodes. Like episode 18 with Jonathan, the upset governor. If you wanted to hear that, that's right in your great movie. Yes. All right, everybody.

that does it for us today. Till next time, bye-bye.