TRASHFUTURE - Conversations with Frenemies

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

Anne Applebaum might have written the worst book ever. Certainly the most aggrieved centrist book ever. And for this week’s free episode, you’ll get to hear our take on it. Join the slightly modified cast of Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum) and have your brain gently prodded. Don't worry, it’s all logical! If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture We support the London Renters Union, which helps people defeat their slumlords and avoid eviction. If you want to support them as well, you can here: https://londonrentersunion.org/donate Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/the-bail-project If you want one of our *fine* new shirts, designed by Matt Lubchansky, then e-mail trashfuturepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. £15 for patrons, £20 for non-patrons, plus shipping. *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/

I miss the days when like we would do podcasts and you were like eating Burger King while we were doing it. Sorry to interrupt all this like burger flavored burger riffing, but I didn't just get a call about my pussy flavored pussy. Oh, what happened? Oh, nothing new, nothing exciting. They still felt the need to like update me to be like, yeah, no, we still got. You heard about this coronavirus and I had to be like, yeah, actually.

Sounds bad. Can't give you, sorry, no pussy. Do you get like a Domino's Pizza Tracker for your new pussy? It's like, it's still in the prep stage. Policy control. Oh, boy, it's on bake. Hello and welcome to TF, that podcast you're listening to right now at the moment. It's me, Riley.

I'm here with Milo. Hello, it's with me, boy. And we also have Hussain and Alice. You heard about this COVID? Drinking coffee, flavored coffee, the way COVID fae fae, the way that real men were supposed to have it. What happened to podcast flavored podcasts? Yeah, that's that's exactly. And we're about to, and I have read book flavored book just showing up at the

Apple podcast. And just going like, oh, can I just get a podcast, please? Yeah, that's what P-boosted judges podcast is. P-boosted judges new podcast is simply called podcast. It's genre, podcast, tags, podcast. He does every podcast. Like he investigates a crime that was somehow committed by a chimp. If he's investigating any historical crimes, they'll have been committed by him and his friends.

So, allegedly, what are we? No, I'm, fuck that. Hey, I assume. So we are, we are talking today about what can only be described as a book flavored book. That's right. Nice. Conceptually straight out of 2015, but somehow published this year. When you have a thirst for knowledge, but you just want to read a dang.

I don't want one of these books that has a point or a title. I just want some some pages with letters on it. I have to like drop the veil a little bit in here and say that I worked on the notes for this with Riley. And one of the things I posted this on Twitter, if you saw, maybe, I said afterwards to the others that reading the notes for this felt like eating a pound and a half of damp sand. Yeah, that's right. And it is weirdly the current prep stage that Alice's new pussy is on. Yeah, I don't know why my surgeon has to do that, but you go off, I guess they got to have the sand.

So we are talking about a twilight of democracy, the seductive lord of authoritarianism, a book by Ann Applebaum, where she was like we wrote that title. Yeah, it's so good. It might as well be like brain chance, the battle of the mind intelligence of the mind gods. Yeah, exactly. So we are we've read this book and it is, as Alice said, it's like reading. It's like eating a pound and a half of wet sand. It's also like reading a thousand and a half of wet sand.

It's like it is. It is a lot like wet sand. So before we go into too much more detail, I just want to like have a little bit of a moment to talk about like who is Ann Applebaum like as a theorist and what is this book for? So Applebaum is best understood generally, like, yeah, as a neoconservative, but also as like a liberal institutionalist. And what that means for her, right, is our whole political theory is designed around the importance of institutions and then looking at what those institutions do at face value and then taking them at face value

and believing that every outcome in the world around you derives from those institutions. So these can be institutions like the university in particular, the Senate or even a concept like meritocracy. And the surface level belief here is that politics is a technical problem and institutions exist to coordinate resources and efforts for optimal outcomes between players that can't necessarily easily make those coordinations. So you invade Iraq to improve its institutions. You create the conditions that lead to a TGI Fridays appearing outside of Fallujah.

And what's this book for? This book is ostensibly an account of the political collapse of the center by the various chancellors and hamburgers, hamburgers and used car salesmen. We've all come to know and love and how the process of elite fracture has affected and personally. But what it actually is, is an account of her time in the political woods no longer useful to the right wing of capital, which has now become revolutionary as opposed to conservative and is designed to appeal to the democratic or labor parties under new management, which are now the home of the old institutionalist center, right, the Bush era, neocons, the Rachel Reeves, all these people.

And so really, this book has to be seen as an audition by Ann Applebaum, where she can once again find relevance that leads her to host good parties again, right? Because the great balance of political forces has changed. And what was the new labor or the Bush era Republicans is now the Democrats because the Tories and the Republicans now are sort of qualitatively different. Doesn't mean they're worse. Just means they're different and they don't need people like Ann because they don't communicate in that style. So with with that in mind and that this book is like an audition tape to for her to like get back in

the good graces of the Democrats who now represent her worldview, let's get into it. Nationalism is kind of thing. And essentially, like we have come to the perfect synecdoche for this, which is that like the book on international liberalism tastes like drywall. There's nothing there. And it is essentially her attempt to explain in 2020 why there has been this growth, this political fracturing, this moment of rupture with the past, where all of a sudden it seems like there are the force of nationalism.

2020 over here, the hell world, am I right? Damn, I think I saw that on Tiger King. No, but the point is right that this different kinds of this book have been written since 2015, and this is one of the worst ones. Oh, no. Yeah. So to hear Applebaum tell it of her own book, and we'll go into a little more details of this as we get on, it is about the before we get into this as well. Like this isn't just some random pamphlet.

This has been feted in the observer and the yeah, because I'm used to write for the spectator and most like this kind of like leading luminary of the, I guess, internationalist liberal kind of vibe. Riley, it's just occurred to me. You might be the only person on earth who's read this entire book. I don't even think Ann Alphabet was read the whole thing. I think bits of it, she was just doing the like auto-correct suggest next word thing. Oh, yeah. Some of this could definitely have been written by an AI.

Yeah. So like basically, yeah, she is from an old political tendency that is wondering where its time in the sun went and in the great thing about this is that this reflection is undertaken without a modicum of self-reflection at all throughout this text and it is just another lovely fun little romp through the sort of death nails of what might be called centrism. Dude's rock. So it's like reading a book in 1935 written by an Austro-Hungarian prince. It's like, I don't people respect the ancient dynasties anymore.

So I think that's all I want in the spectator this week. Yeah, they've started getting those guys back out. Oh, really? It's actually good to have a huge jewel. There's a Habsburg that doesn't stop writing in the spectator now and says that people who make fun of his jaw are like, yeah, Edward Habsburg. Oh, the better to chew you with. It's like, oh, you know, he actually says, oh, haha, I'm a Habsburg.

I've heard all the chin jokes. You can look them up on Twitter. I've got some Fritzel jokes you haven't heard, bitch. So to hear Applebaum tell it, this book is about the growth of what she calls a nationalist international, whether by far right parties like Hungary. That's such a fucking Wong phrase. Yeah. Yeah, she's a Wong.

Whether by far right parties like Hungary's Fidesz, Poland's Law and Justice, the Front National in France, or the transformation of nominally center right parties such as the Tories or GOP, through the splintering of her own central right social sphere into never Trumpers, into never Trumpers and moderates, her and her friends, and the headbangers who have all the actual power, but none of the cultural respect. So winners and whiny losers. Yeah, precisely. This is a book about winners and losers, and it's a book about the written by the losers

saying actually they're the real losers because they didn't play the game good. And so what this book actually is from what I can see, Applebaum has written a book about why social media, professional jealousy, and the sensible right learning how to be insane from the left mean that and Applebaum's parties are no longer as star studded as they used to be. Damn, you hate to see it. It's fucking ruined the volavon's table. In my opinion, that's the main problem. Absolutely. Ironically, this is something that she shares with Trump.

Like Trump associates everything with the quality of pain and Applebaum's party. I went there, not hot. Both of these people were like built their entire personality around their parties in the 80s. And it's just that Trumps were like, good. I went to a party at Gorka's house. Derek Jeter was there. And Applebaum's house. No one there. Some Polish guy. Don't know him. Never heard of him. Never. It doesn't have a building. Okay. Yeah. So here for I think our purposes, this is like the killer paragraph of why this book

can be safely ignored by any serious person because any centrist account of sort of things must sort of at some point make its explanation for why things like inequality or the relations of production aren't the problem. And then whatever, you know, why my party is not being good as the problem. Yeah. Well, no, it's the, they have to, they have to dismiss the right wing and the left wing answers. Right. So they have to dismiss like it's the immigration. They have to dismiss it's the economy. And I always, I love finding the paragraph where they do that. And here's the paragraph where Ann does that in the book. And that's, we're going to go through the rest of it in chronological order, but this God help us.

This is going to be the thing that sets the table. So I'm spreading out a little lit, nice white linen tablecloth laying the silverware in front of you and no one's sitting down because it's a terrible book about a terrible party. Is there a wine pairing for this paragraph? Oh yeah, this one goes with a sotern for sure. No, it doesn't. This one goes with paint stripper. Today is not 1937. Thanks, Ann. Okay, thanks. Yeah. Nevertheless, a parallel transformation is taking place in our time, both among the thinkers, writers, journalists and political activists in Poland, a country where I've lived for three decades. She used that as an example, as well as the rest of the societies we have come to call the West.

Everywhere, this transformation is taking place without the excuse of an economic crisis of the kind Europe and North America suffered in the 1920s and 30s. Oh, I know what you're about to say. What about the recession of 2008 to 2009? Yeah, what about that? Is it finished in 2009? Yes. Yes. And the consequences of it ceased to be felt then. That's what she says. Oh, no, man. You can't be this stupid this early on in the episode. The recession of 2008-2009 was deep, but at least until the coronavirus pandemic, growth had returned. At least until the water bussed into the last of the flooded compartments on

the Titanic. You know, the stern really had stabilized. For fucking who? This is like, this is like, it's too early in the episode. I can't shout this much this early in the episode, but this is actually like to draw an analogy. This is like, imagine like the fucking the economy or like the people of like Britain. Right. Oh, fucking one guy who's being shot by a firing squad. And 2008 to 2009 is him just being riddled with machine gun bullets. And then in 2009, they're like, but you've stopped being shot now. So I think we can all agree that it's going to be fine. There's no need for medical attention. Look, your hand is still fine. Exactly. We'll start on to someone else. Yeah. So we've dealt with the economic

explanation and that's like all of that's all that economics gets in the book. There you go. There's the limit. It all went fine. The refugee crisis of 2015-16 was a shock, but it has abated. Cool. Yeah, because no more pushback is coming. Yeah. Also the and also, yeah, because it was abated because the EU strung a bunch of like barbed wire across the southern Mediterranean and has been painting a southern flank red with blood. So by 2018, refugees from North Africa and the Middle East had mostly stopped coming to Europe thanks to deals done with Turkey and the EU and its mainstream politicians. Yeah. Commissioned deals of the EU. Yeah. Yeah. So thanks to deals done by Turkey with the EU

and its mainstream politicians. So it's like, look, we did the reasonable argument and we created the charnel house along southern half Europe. What deals exactly did they do and how did this lead to Turkey occupying parts of northern... Don't ask. Yeah. Oh, Alice, I'll tell you, she does not. This is as much as this gets treated. It's like, well, it couldn't be refugees because the EU has now is really good at repulsing them by being really dangerous and it couldn't be the economy because top line growth is returned. It must be something else. Yeah. And growth always has to measure how things are good or not. That it couldn't have ever uncoupled. The line can only reflect how good things are for actual

real people. If that line ever stopped, my analysis would be fucked. Luckily, that hasn't happened. Famously, if someone has terminal cancer and then you say, but statistically, 80% of cancers aren't terminal, they're then fine. Yeah, exactly. That's how that works. So let's talk about this. Who is Ann Applebaum? She was an American woman and she now works as a staff writer at the Atlantic and she spent her life between the US, UK and Poland. Hussein, I want you to grip onto something. Grip onto something. Yes, grip onto something. Oh, I was making noise. What we're doing is we're getting the door handles. You get on a car that no one uses and we're installing all of those above the microphone.

Okay. All right. I'm holding onto my very solid oak table. So, ready for it. From 2011 to 2016, she created and ran the transitions forum at the Legatum Institute. Oh, hell yeah. It's the transitions forum where I can't get my fucking pussy yet. Hussein, what's the Legatum Institute? Oh God, how do we describe them? Um, Legatum Institute is, uh, well, I guess like the best, they sound very cool. Can I say that up front? It sounds like a Metal Gear Solid. From 2011 to 2016, she worked as Judge Dredd. From what I remember of them, they were kind of like a sort of like spruced up Henry Jackson society, right? They were like a neoconservative think tank.

Awesome. They were like kind of, they got into a bit of, they got into a bit of controversy because they were doing, oh, okay. Like I kind of remember it, but I feel like it had something to do with like their work of China or Russia. But yeah, something like this. Yeah. But yeah, so she created and ran the transitions forum at the Legatum Institute. You know what this is? This is like the early learning center version of the Bilderberg group. Like it's, it's, it's the perfect riposte of the idea that there is a secret one world government because all of the people who try to make one end up doing like sort of like long seminars about how the West was good that nobody goes to. Oh, here are two of the projects that she ran.

The future of Syria and the future of Iran, two different projects. Cool. That sounds great. So I just like, I just kind of remembered some of it. So they were also, they're also like one of the very few remaining think tanks. So it's very kind of like oddly libertarian free markets across the world, very kind of pro intervention as well, like pro like military intervention. The most libertarian thing. Yeah. So in many ways, yeah, again, like they just kind of, they just remind me of like what the Henry Jackson society was back in like the mid 2000s, but even like the VHS have sort of kind of like pulled back a little bit because they sort of realized that like the tides of history

aren't really in their favor, but the Legatum Institute is very, yeah, still very much like on the wall path in the very literal sense. Yeah. So she's a gentleman Legatum. So she left. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we got him. So the Legatum Institute. Yeah. She left when they start, they basically went super brexity because like she's a liberal internationalist, like she likes institutions and things of that nature, like the type of IR theory and she kind of embodies it. And so it's like intervention and things of that nature. She left when they started flying drones over the Northern Irish border to somehow make the case for a no deal Brexit. What? Awesome.

And not like, like, not like Predator drones, just like, you know, little quadcopters to like film it and be like, look, there's easy to have no border. Friendly neighborhood drones. Yeah. Anyway, and that she liked. Why didn't the liberals love drones so much that they just used them for things that you could use other things for? Just doing the like fucking Mary Poppins thing of the animals help you clean the room, but there's a bunch of quadcopters just tying a sheet. Some drone, some drone who like swore he'd never bomb a Yemeni hospital ever again, just like in retirement, taking some jobs, surveying the Irish countryside. Like, ah, this can't fill the hole in my soul. Why is this father McMurphy man down there throwing

rocks at me? Yeah. So this should give you the case in point of the book, right? Which is that the right wing no longer needs its high minded intellectuals who will write blog posts about a missile gap with Venezuela. Oh, no, that that kind of Harvard Kennedy School, LSE, I said, like liberal internationalist is no longer necessary to the project of preserving capital. Oh, no, has a different way. Yeah. And so like, it's just she's become obsolete. It's not like society has gone down a dark path. It's just the people like capital no longer needs her help to take it down and help of her friends to take it down a dark path. You can just bomb stuff because you want to now. Yeah, now since Trigapod now people just Google Venezuela on their own. So

before and also we have to ask who is Radek Sikorsky, who is that every day. We do every morning. I wake up and I ask that they invent the helicopter. It's an alphabet husband. It's an alphabet husband. He was like a wealthy, wealthy Polish guy, like a long anti communist pedigree was educated at Pembroke College, Oxford, or he's a member of the Bullington Club before rising friends with David Cameron. Sorry, did this guy come off of a PKP like propaganda poster? Oh, anti communist polls. They're all like in this insane English nonce club. Yeah. Well, don't forget like to join that at some point. You have to like burn a 50 pound note in front of a homeless person to like show how much you detest them. And so but he then so

that when it gets to the Bullington Club stuff later and like, oh, well, that was all a joke back then. It's real now. Yeah, you're only being as a bit. Yeah, cool. Yeah. So where he was rose pretty high in Polish center right politics becoming Minister of Defense for a couple of years for the party civic platform. This is from his Wikipedia. It's also very funny. From 2000 to 2005, Sikorsky was a resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and Executive Director of the New Atlantic Initiative. He organized inter international conferences and I'm setting two names here of the international conferences he organized, including Ronald Reagan, a legacy for Europe. Okay. Oh, and Axis of Evil Belarus, the missing link

intelligence to the mind gods. Belarus is some like weird primate. We may never understand Belarus. Yeah, but it is evil and we should invade it. Exactly. We need to get our hands on those potatoes before it's too late. I'm a very serious person and I spent at least a little bit of my life in a club where you burn money in front of the homeless and wreck up restaurants because you can afford to pay for it. And then come and take them. We will not let you have them. I do not care if we are missing link in the secret access of evil. We will defend Belarus. Alexander Lukashenko, but he was then like graduated into this blob of like doing seminars

about how like Belarus is part of the Axis of Evil or the future of Iran. And now we now have like president deals and his like lanky son-in-law roaming the world doing deals that immediately fall apart instead of that. And I much prefer this. I much prefer Jared Kushner organizing the definitive Middle Eastern peace deal of getting Serbia and Kosovo to move their embassies to Jerusalem. And then as soon as the Prime Minister of Serbia sees what he's just signed, you can see him on camera just put his head in his hands. That's the thing that I like. Yeah, just a complete morons fucking. This has always been complete morons fucking up all the time. It's just the morons now. The morons now don't bother with like seminars,

which is it saves everyone's time. I love the idea of the Serbian president being like, this is too spicy of an international political move for me. Literally, all they did was a classic Trump move where they got Rucic in the room and then they said, okay, just sign this and presumably told him it was like, oh no, something cool. He did. And then he was in the room as Trump announced that he had just committed to moving the Serbian embassy to Jerusalem. And you can see him look to his aid, look to the paper, leaf through the paper and then just put his head in his hands. It's beautiful. Why does this say that I am gay? So look, so the point is, right, like it's that the goals have basically always been the same. It's just now the goals are undertaken by like

funny amateur crimp like that. Now the goals are undertaken by like the villains from home alone. And it used to be undertaken by grad school people. None of these people have ever in their lives been one and a half steps ahead of like fed relations from the Department of the Interior. So let's talk about the first party. On December 31st, 1999, we threw a party. Nice. We held it at Chobolin, a small manor house in Northwest Poland that my husband, Radek Sikorski and his parents had purchased a decade earlier when it was a mildewed uninhabitable ruin, of course, unredivated since the previous occupants fled the Red Army in 1945. Using the previous occupants who will also their others. Yes.

When the previous one fled the war and when? The previous occupants fled the Red Army in 1945 for some reason. Why'd you do that? I don't know. Probably for a jog. Yeah. Like a forest gun situation. You just go for a run and you know, you just keep jogging. Probably just really hated the color red. Too gaudy. Yeah. You know, I'm sure real estate was, you know, booming back then. But you could have lumped the majority of us roughly in the general category of what polls call the right. Conservatives, anti-communists. But at that moment in history, you might have called us liberals, free market liberals, classical liberals, even thatcherites. Oh, the famous left-wing thatcherites.

Like liberal. Like the market in capital. Capital liberalism, neoliberalism, things of that nature. Mr. Chappell. To me, that's preposterous. Classical liberal things of that nature. Yeah. At one point, I went upstairs learning. Borenzi Elton had resigned, wrote a brief column for a British newspaper. Awesome party. Then went back downstairs and had another glass of wine. At about three in the morning, one of our wacky or Polish guests pulled a small pistol out of her handbag and shot blanks into the air out of sheer exuberance. Because that's the thing. Everyone was really exuberant that this had happened. Every single person. Yeah. Went Boris Yeltsin resigned. That was actually really good.

And nothing bad happened as a result of that. Yeah. And yeah. Yeah. It's absolutely. And it was, it was, it also, it ushered in a new era. But the party lasted all night. Which was a good era. Great era. Yeah. Nothing bad happened. I've not, I'm not going to Google it because I know that nothing bad, I've not even asked Jeeves did. That's how certain I am that Russia went from strength to fucking strength after the resignation of Boris Yeltsin. It's been a fantastic time for the free markets, right? It really has. In whatever. It's been a great 20 years for Surgut and Yeftigaz. And that's what really matters. Also, right? Like, if you think about this, she starts her clock at 1999 and then like the wheels start coming off of the whole,

or sort of liberal project in like 2008. At my first party, we seem to have struck an iceberg, but we were all pretty fine with that. Yeah. So the party lasted all night, continuing into brunch in quotes for some reason, the following afternoon. It was like Burkine. Continuing into brunch. Continuing into brunch in international waters. And was infused with the optimism I remember from that time. We'd rebuilt our ruined house. Our friends were rebuilding the country. We agreed about democracy, about the road to prosperity and about the way things were going. Again, the way things were going for like eight years. Yeah.

You're writing a book for like a lost era of prosperity that didn't last even a decade. Yeah. And most of it was presided over by George fucking Bush. Oh, she loved that. Nearly two decades later, I would now cross the street to avoid some of the people who were at my New Year's Eve party. Yeah, I've had all just like that. Because of what happened at brunch. After seeing that guy eat a cheese pizza at brunch, I have to say, I couldn't look him in the eye again. The estrangements are political, not personal, and they run through not only what used to be the

Polish right, but also the old Hungarian right, Spanish right, French right, Italian right, and the British right and American right, too. Well, that's good writing is when you list things. And the more things you list, the better writing is. It's good writing. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, the three O's right there. Ladies and gentlemen, we got them. So basically, right, like she says that all of her friends from all of the sort of,

not the nationalist international, but like the liberal international, whatever you want to call it, the Bush people, the Cambrian people. The various freaks and neoconservatives. Yeah, exactly. Like the never, what we can call the never Trump moderate right, whatever you want to call it, they were all friends together back then. The Chipping Norton, Little St. James axis. And now many of them are no longer friends. Oh, no.

Yeah. And so the real liberalism wasn't the friends they made along the way. No, it turns out it wasn't. Who would have thought that liberal technocrats don't make the best, like, you know, long-term friends? Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's because her theory as to why this happens is manifold.

And after several pages of achingly quoting Alexander, Hamilton and Cicero and shit, she introduces us to her first two theoretical concepts. The first one is the authoritarian sensibility, which is a concept she takes from psychologist Karen Stenner, which basically defines authoritarian people as having quote, an aversion to complexity and debate. Having aversion to debate, the worst possible thing. So if you are not tolerating my like extremely annoying grad school bullshit

is the authoritarian sensibility. No, not listening to maybe we just not listening to like, well, maybe we should, I don't know, fucking like sponsor. Fellas, why don't we invade Belarus? I have a long essay here about how complex it's going to be. And you have to take that seriously or you're an authoritarian sensibility. There's nothing normal about liking debate. Stop trying to pretend that like debate is this thing.

Everyone love debate fucking sucks. Also, all of these people are completely averse to complexity and debate when it doesn't suit them. Right. How much debate do you remember in the lead up to the Iraq war? Right. How much complexity was there there? Or also like how much when when her hero that her heroes are Thatcher and Reagan,

how much how much complexity to great days great together with how much complexity and nuance did Thatcher deal with organized labor applying complexity and new one to a coal minus skull. Yeah. Like I think Ronald Ronald Reagan actually he applied. He looked at several different schools of thought when he ultimately settled on a non-strangling for American foreign policy in Central America. It's very complex. You understand the Soviet Union using this laser in space.

Yeah, essentially. But no, because Ann Applebaum is unable to think outside of her own incredibly thick skull because she's a real fucking dunce. She basically says, yeah, I'm pretty sure this is just no one wants to debate me about whether or not we should invade Belarus because it's on the axis of evil. I'm always saying Ann Applebaum from Baltimore, yeah. The other concept, so that's the concept, the authoritarian sensibility. It's everywhere.

People hate debate because they're like morally inferior. Cool. The second issue is who are the players in this? And this is a concept she takes from a French essayist called Julien Benda. Fascism is water carriers who he refers to as the clerks, C-L-E-R-C-S. Oh, it's spelled in French too, didn't it? Yeah. Yeah.

And so here is a short quote that sums up sort of a lot of this. All right. If it happens, the fall of liberal democracy in our own time will not look as it did in the 1920s or 30s. Thanks, Ann. I don't know. Ah, the fall of liberal democracy, see. It will require a new elite, a new generation of the clerks, the essayist who morphed into political entrepreneurs and propagandists

who goled whole civilizations into acts of violence. Again, John Yu, would he be a clerk, Alice, you think? Nah, he was just doing debate and complexity. Yeah, he was doing complexity and debate when he signed all the memos that allowed the US to start torturing people. In the time Ann Applebaum thought was good. No, he's not a clerk. It only happens to people who weren't American.

Yeah, also, he could have brunch, right? Yeah. And he also was associated with Yale. Oh, so that's good. Or Harvard. He was associated with Harvard. The people who made the locks, those guys. Yeah.

I'd love to go to the Chubb School of Law. I mean, that's where the current generation went and it's basically the same. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I got my chubby degree. So the clerks include the ideologues of the right as well as the left. Jeremiah Crobney is getting a look in. There is actually a section.

I'm not sure whether you're going to bring this up. But there is actually a section where she does kind of like equate the authoritarian sensibility to like momentum, right? Or something like that. Oh, yeah. We're totally going to talk about it. I have a bit about the grad students. Yes.

She says the authoritarian predisposition is understood as simple mindedness. People are often attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity. The complexity. I'm sorry. I'm still not over the complexity of using large words to talk about why we should invade fucking Belarus. Yeah. I don't know.

It's complex. Yeah, I guess so. Again, like, yeah. John Yu solving the complex question of should you torture someone if they'll give you the code to if a bomb is going to go off or whatever with the simple answer of yes, you should torture them. Yeah. So not bothered by complexity there.

Not to like go back to like real Norse's kind of leftism, but like famously George W. Bush, a very complex president. Yeah. If you want to look at like what kind of freaks are like rehabilitating his image, it's all of the people mentioned like approvingly in this book. So she says a sudden onslaught of diversity, diversity of opinions, experiences or what have you, therefore makes the authoritarian predisposition person angry. What factors in the modern world might provoke people to react against complexity?

People keep telling me that I'm a dumb piece of shit and I'm wasting their time. What could what could provoke this? What? Let's see. What could be wrong with them? So she says an authoritarian sensibility is unquestionably present in a generation of far left campus agitators. I won't.

Hold on. Unquestionably. No, you can't question it. Oh, sorry. Yeah. If you question it, that's you're a cleric. If you. Right.

But like authoritarianism is when you're averse to complexity and debates. Yes. Yes. Correct. That's right. But unquestionably present in. Yeah. It's like a think about this is a very stupid version of the part of the paradox of tolerance

because they don't like debate. They don't like debate. You don't have to debate them. Cole Poppers. I was having a little, I was having a little think while I was having a piss and it occurred to me that essentially, as I understand it, the argument that she's making here is that both the left and the right are very stupid because they, they like authoritarian ideas which subscribe to like a single ideology where she's very smart because she's able to

believe in a number of contradictory ideologies at the same time. That's right. That is the move of a brain genius. She has a, she has like a big medieval labyrinth where her brain should be. Awesome. The Minotaur of Sentry. This is a book written by one of those brain woe jacks where like there's a, there's a windmill up there.

She says, Hold up. Morm lives in our mind. Check this out, check this out. Authoritarian sensibilities unquestionably present in a generation of far left campus agitators who seek to dictate how professors can teach and what students can say. So basically, if you think about this, she does, she says that like Poland, it's very bad, like Poland is, and again, Poland has gone in a very bad direction.

It's become ludicrously anti-Semitic. Quite a bit of which has been directed at Ann Applebaum. Well, it's, let's say it's anti-Semitism has become much more respectable in Poland. Quite a bit of it has actually been directed at Ann Applebaum personally because like she's like a prominent like figure in that country. Did she enjoy debating them about that? And the, and but like also anti-LGBTQ sentiment also is massively like on the ride. Again, much more respectable outside that like seven year window.

How much does she care about that? She talks about this a little bit where, for example, in the LGBTQ thing, she says like, yeah, the clerks in the government now, they hate diversity so much that the government can, you can get like anti, like an LGBT free zone sticker from like the law and justice party. But she also, I stick it on my ass. So when the guy is fucking me, he knows I'm not gay. So at the same time, right, she says that also it's authoritarian for like students to you know, I don't know, like try to boycott a transphobic speaker.

So it's like she seems to want like a free market in anti-LGBT stickers. I don't really understand what her point is. Yeah, either like what you just think that the process for deciding how to be anti-LGBT should be more consistent. Be nice to me, nice to me. I do understand what she's saying, which is that? Yes, that's right. I was going to make like a general point, which is like from what I kind of,

when I was skimming the book, like I feel that this is the general kind of sentiment. Like runs through it, which is that she kind of falls into this, not necessarily a trap, but like she falls into this thing that lots of this type of conservative writer falls into, which is that they can sort of correctly diagnose particular problems, but they can't bring themselves to like entertain any other solution except for like, you should be nice to me and you should kind of kind of like come to my party and like bring me a gift of some sort. Yeah, that's exactly right. So like she identifies a lot of problems throughout her book, whether that's kind of like

economic inequality or social inequality or like, you know, again, as you said, anti-Semitism, rising homophobia, the kind of dangers of like right populism and stuff, but she cannot like bring herself to actually kind of bring about or like to kind of even assert what she thinks solution should be. So like even at the end of the book, her conclusion is that, well, we can't really do much to like change society or institutions. So you should just kind of like hold on to your close friends really tight and show them love and invite them to your parties. Oh, she's phased banks.

Was this written by Carloven Nouseguard? Yeah, I think that's right. It is essentially, it is all of the critical depth of phased banks, but like if you forced phased banks like to do the Clockwork Orange Ludovico technique in front of grad school, it's far better to be in the Norway full of people that love you than the whole house party full of sharks and raised food. What is what is like, what is the country house in like rural Poland, except for like a TikTok house or by any other name? I mean, essentially it is as much political depth as a fucking TikTok house.

She also said, well, carry on. She also says the new authoritarian right actually owes more to Lenin than any conservative entity. Okay, so Steve, Steve Bannon called himself a Leninist when he meant an accelerationist. And like, none of these people who love complexity and debate ever consider that he might have been deploying irony or lying. I mean, like in as much as like much of the new authoritarian right seeks to seize every form of every lever of state power, every form of cultural production, and has a kind of conservative revolutionary mentality, they'd be like...

Yeah, but that's just fascism. We have a political tendency to explain revolutionary nationalism wedded to like conservative sentimentality and its fascism. It's not Leninism. Yeah, well, no, she can't say that. She has to say actually, basically that's what I said earlier, right? Her thesis is that the right used to be sensible, then it learned how to be crazy from Lenin. Just none of this makes any fucking sense at all. You see what I mean by the wet sand? Yeah. Is she suggesting that the Nazis got their ideas from Lenin? Is that like the natural conclusion that you have to draw from this because they came slightly later?

I think her argument, and again, it's one of those things where it's like she kind of like trips over herself because she can't bring herself to actually like go to the logical endpoint of the problems that she diagnoses, which is like she uses terms like being like taking more from Bolshevism, because what she's trying to say is that, oh, these people want to like change institutions. And she's someone who like not only kind of reveres institutions, but sort of owes her entire career and like her entire credibility to those institutions, sort of like, you know, elevating her status, right? So like she can't actually comprehend anything outside of that, which I think you mentioned before, like she can't comprehend

anything outside of this like box. So then the conclusions that she draws up are literally just like, oh, people are being mean online. And then people take that meanness offline and it's all happening on like campuses, which again, like they revict university campuses as well, right? Because again, this was where they were their first introduction to institutional prestige is kind of so like they're kind of watching not necessarily the world crumble around them, but the world they imagined existed because they owe so much of their life and their social life to that. Yeah, it's also like collapse, right? Yeah, it's also kind of a Cold War last harassing of like, looking through my big tool set of shit that I have and like, it's the old anti

communism hammer, you know, it's so it's so hollow, isn't it? Because you can imagine if she was writing this book, like in Moscow in the 1960s, she would just be an aparachic who loved all of the institutions of Soviet state that had given her all her nice zeal and like, you know, all the things that she has, right? So she just be writing like, Oh, there are some young people who have written very unpleasant pamphlets about me recently, of which I strongly disapprove. So basically, right? She says, so here's how she describes the new authoritarian right owing more to Lenin than others. Unlike Marxism, the illiberal one party state is not a philosophy, just a humdinger of a sentence right there, huh? Beautiful. Yeah, awesome. It is a mechanism for

holding power. Unlike other states, which are, it works because it clearly defines who gets to be the elite, the political elite, the cultural elite and the financial elite, unlike other states, which don't. She said it works. So that I'm taking them as a positive review. Thanks. In the monarchies of pre-revolutionary France in Russia, the right to rule was granted by the aristocracy. In modern Western democracies, the right to rule is granted at least in theory by different forms of competition, at least in theory. Yeah, by competition, such as like competition for the richest parents. Yeah, competition, campaigning and voting, meritocratic tests that determine access to higher education, civil service and free markets.

Meritocratic tests, she's literally just said that fucking elections don't produce good outcomes. Like that's been like the whole point of her book so far is her talking about like populist right wing governments that she doesn't approve of. So like, in what way are elections meritocratic by her own fucking watches? Well, they've been corrupted by this authoritarian tendency. Yeah, from Lenin. From Lenin. Yeah, it's Lenin's fault. The right learned how to be crazy from the left and then started lying for the first time ever. Oh my fucking god, do you think we could draw a cartoon of Lenin in a Trump 2020 hat and put and get the Democratic Party to share it as like a gotcha? Well, hey, you know what, fan art, let's do it again. You've got to do the like

fake Cyrillic. So it says doidal jatzma. You have to make him like jacked as well. So basically, but basically right, she says like, look, Lenin's disdain for the idea of a neutral state, a political civil servants and any notion of an objective media was an important part of his one party system too. He wrote that freedom of the press is a deception. Yep. Okay, he mocked freedom of assembly as a hollow phrase. Yep. As for parliamentary democracy itself, that was no more than a machine for the suppression of the working class. Yep. Yep. Because here's like she is not able, she's not just like the conservative tech companies that we talked about a couple of bonus episodes ago weren't able to look at like the actual weaknesses of Facebook

and Google. They were only able to look at the like cartoon versions of them they built in their mind. So because like all everything about this in Apple bombs mind was evil, she says, well, freedom of assembly is a hollow phrase, meaning Lenin thinks that no one should be free to assemble or whatever. Lenin thinks that no one should be free to assemble. There couldn't be multiple interpretations to that phrase. He couldn't say or freedom of the press, right? He couldn't say that like we couldn't actually be we mean be that freedom of the press in somewhere like Britain today is actually a deception because most journalists basically just kind of will just write the same story anyway. No, he meet she he must have men or the left must mean that freedom

of the press is bad and things like democracy rather than being interrogated and deepened and broadened and pushed to other other areas are bad because I can't understand a criticism of a thing I like except in the terms that I understand it because I am a fucking dunce. Yeah, it's just a bit. She says a little baby. She was a little baby, but I like democracy and Lenin wasn't mean about it. It makes me feel sad when Lenin's mean things about freedom of assembly and pretty lots of my friends work on newspapers and I don't see why Lenin doesn't like them. So the far left mockery of the competitive institutions of bourgeois democracy and capitalism, its cynicism about the possibility of any objectivity in the media civil service to

judiciary has long had a right wing version. Excuse me. Do you mean has been objectively proven many, many, many times? Give me the drop. Ladies and gentlemen, we got him. Oh, I was expecting BE one that time for some reason. As part of the Patreon, like on a bonus episode only, I will replace one drop at random with E, E, E, E, E, E, E. So she says that all of those critics, because it's mockery, but it's criticism. Criticism implies the possibility for improvement. Well, but we know that that's not possible because this interests are right. Like look, history ended in 1989 and there have been some historical events since then, but they have

been mistakes, which should be great. History was supposed to, when Francis Fukuyama said history was over, it was fucking over. And everything, all the history that's happened since then, we're going to have to undo that. You better stop doing history now because otherwise it's going to be much more of it to undo, buddy, because we've got to go back to 1989 when everything was perfect. That's basically like the plot to Tenet, I think, based on my one, based on my like one viewing of it the other day. Yeah. So she says this, check it out, that all those criticisms of the left, they all have a right wing version too. And Hitler's Germany is usually the example given. Both sides of the same coin. I mean, to be fair, at least, at least she correctly

identifies a right-wing couple. It's the most factually correct thing she said so far. Look, the Nazis are pretty right-wing. So the modern day clerks in soft dictatorships, like Hungary or whatever, understand their role, which is to defend the leaders, however dishonest their statements, however great their corruption, however disastrous their impacts on ordinary people and institutions. Previous, their predecessors also did that a lot. What? No, I was pretty sure that Peter Mandelson has never steered me wrong. No, Peter Mandelson is a lovely man. Colin Powell also, he once brought that nice cake to the UN. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And you know, when Tim Geithner left his job overseeing the

bailout to run literally a payday loan industry advocacy group, that was just him taking a good job. Sorry, James Bull here. Those are actually good. Right? So yeah, again, I don't want to keep doing like hitting the hypocrisy button, right? But just the extent to which she's incapable of self-reflection is mind-boggling. And again, this came out in 2020. This came out this year. Like, I don't understand if this was written in 2015 when like these things were still cracks were starting to show and she was like trying to grapple with them. But she's had five years of like it being very obvious even to centrist that this is happening. Yeah. No, it's the children who are wrong. Yeah. They can be so they say they however dishonest

their statements, however great their corruption or however disastrous their impact on ordinary people and institutions, the clerks can become very wealthy receiving lucrative contracts or seats on company boards. Never happened before this. And it's never happened to fucking an Applebaum. Like who just is like a sinecured idiot who just like writes stuff that means literally nothing. But I'm sure it makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Actually, let's look at her bibliography really quick. Her other books have included... Hang on. Sorry, just tighten this up. It's because I'm now waiting for... Sudoku gymnastic. You wish. The logic of brain thought.

Red Famine, Stalin's War on Ukraine, Gulag History, Iron Curtain, The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956. Why am I dissenting a theme developing here? Gulag Voices in Anthology. Gulag Voices is my new rap group. Yeah. So those are a few others of her top right. How'd all of this far right fascism get in my anti-communism? Oh, what a doozy. You know, Stefan... Oh, good morning, Anne. Will you be rattling about the communists again? You know, Stefan Bandera's grandson is on Twitter talking about how leftists have too much white

privilege? Oh, I did see that. It's hilarious. You know, sometimes the post left is right about like one or two things. Stefan Bandera's grandson. So... Any relation to Antonia Bandera? No, Milo. I wish I could live in your head. I believe there is not. Yeah. No. So, they... No, zero. 23 and me, 0%. 0% Bandera's. So she says they can become very wealthy receiving these lucrative contracts and however badly they perform, they will never lose their jobs. Huh. Unlike Anne Appelbaum.

Matt, do you have a Donald Rumsfeld? Do you remember when he went to the troops who were getting blown up and were like, yeah, listen, sometimes you just get blown up. I don't know, I just like kept his job. I guess that's one of the known unknowns. She says you can call this sort of thing by many names, nepotism, state capture, corruption, but if you choose, you can describe it in positive terms. It represents, for them, the end of hateful notions of meritocracy, political competition in the free market. But those things that were never real. Yeah, I see that you're doing an authoritarian sensibility, Alice.

By saying they were never real, you're saying also conceptually, they would never have been desirable. I simply keep clapping my hands to make the free market come back again. These people are just so annoyed that they've been outplayed at their own games. Like all the people who used to laugh at Donald Trump at cocktail parties because he would be like making himself a hot dog out of foie gras or something. And now, he's just in charge of everything and he's like ruining their day and they're like, but the thing is, the smarter ones of them, even the smarter ones who refuse to pivot to be like Trump guys, they knew, they always knew that meritocracy or the free market was bullshit. You really have to be deeply,

stupid, like within that own milieu to still be believing this. There is a cynical answer to this, right? I think she does, though. I think she does genuinely believe that the free market is real and that like objectivity of the press is real and meritocracy is real. And we were just going to keep doing that until everything was good and the party was never going to stop. Remember how Margaret Thatcher's idiot son got himself lost in the Dakar rally, had to be airlifted home, only to be given a £12 million handshake part in signing the Al Yamama contract, which continues to spread death, destruction and misery today?

But in fairness, the reason why that happened to him was that he'd never looked at a map before in his life and he didn't actually know what a map was. Which considering is performing pretty well. Yeah, and then that actually helped with the Al Yamama project. Remember how Barack Obama signed a $60 million Netflix deal after leaving office? Oh, is he going to be on How I Met Your Mother? Because she says, right? Oh, if you like your mother, give her. She says, a rigged and uncompetitive system sounds bad if you want to live in a society

run by the talented. But it sounds great if you want to write a fucking book like this. Yeah, but if it's your primary interest, what's wrong with it? Yeah, she keeps going, oh, they're trying to profit off of their government seats and they're not doing good with all this stuff. Oh, no, no one's ever done that. Yeah, it's just, it's this thing is this has always been the rules of the game and she's basically complaining because someone told her the Tooth Fairy wasn't real. Wait, what? I'm sorry to many of the trash future listeners who are under the age of seven.

You need to write, right? Riley said something that he didn't mean. And the Uncle Milo's here to tell you the Tooth Fairy very much is real. And those pounds that she leaves you under your pillow is very important that you keep donating those to the Patreon. That's right. All right, now you have a good evening sport. So like, for example, in Poland, her big illustrative story is about like two brothers, not the ones who were one of them died in a small end disaster. What's with Poles and identical twin brothers?

It's a whole thing there. But basically, where one of them went to university and did well and became like a leading light of a center-right paper and the other one asked for his brother for a job was denied, ran a bunch of small-time scams and then was offered the directorship of the Polish like state TV program by the law justice party. Yeah, because he was jacked. That's why and basically like, you know, and basically just like ran it like info wars and has, you know, that has caused a lot of problems in Poland. But like the problem is she never turns around and said like it's caused like political assassinations and stuff. It's real bad, but she never turns around and

says, wait, while we, well, me and my friends were basically running stuff while like the competent center-right was running stuff. Why did we build? Why did we sort of arrange things so that like a gentle breeze and then like a two-time scammer and some YouTube clips could come in and cause chaos in our society? Why did it have to be so fragile? Hoombs could have predicted that the law and justice party would provide so little law and justice. Can you think of a fucking political party that has more of a name that says, we're the evil guys? Yeah. Well, the thing is right. This is if for someone who is so obsessed with like meritocracy and the idea that, oh, the only reason that people succeed in destroying

our societies is they don't play by the rules or whatever. They love that they can win without having to be good at abstractly good at whatever task they're doing. But wait, how the fuck are you so meritorious if you built, if you and your friends ran a society that was so fucking fragile? So there's another couple of conversations in discussion with a Hungarian former friend of hers. She says, the other irony is how Diana Schmidt, far more than Orban, perfectly embodies the ethos of the Bolsheviks she genuinely hates. Her cynicism is profound. Soros' support for Syrian refugees cannot be put back on anything. Cynicism was invented by Bolsheviks in 1917.

It must come from a deep desire to destroy Hungary. Obama's comments about a statue were not sincere. They must have reflected a financial relationship with Soros, blah, blah, blah. All of this recalls Lenin's contempt for the institutions of bourgeois democracy. You know, what's really funny is how much anti-Bolshevism and anti-communism was grounded in anti-Semitism. And so now all of this just coming back round again, and Anne Applebaum has found herself being like, wait a second, all these people who are like blaming Trotsky for like coming up with this secret evil plan to undermine the West. Some of them might be anti-Semites now. It's like the fact that like the anti-communism just like took every ally it could find,

it protected a lot of anti-Semites knowingly or unknowingly. Stefan Bandera. Yeah, there it is. A lot of those guys came over to the US. A lot of them went to Canada. It's like no relation of Antonio Bandera. We can't stress that enough. There's a reason why I always have been in contact. Why I mentioned Stefan Bandera is that like for some reason, all of the Ukrainian nationalists and Nazi collaborators decided, let's go, fuck America. Let's go to Canada, which is why

that Canada has a gigantic Victims of Communism memorial that they built that is like... To a group of... We also have a memorial to an SS battalion. Yeah. Oh yeah, we talked about this. I mean, well, thank God that there are no Nazis in the Ukraine now. That's all I'll say. Thank God we dodged that bullet. So it's, I think it's not to say that like I far, I do not want to like imply it at all like that, in terms of the anti-Semitism stuff that she did it to herself, that would be gross.

But like the fact is, if you're, if that anti, at doctrinaire, anti-communism, you're going to have a lot of fascists in there and a lot of fascists are anti-Semites. Yeah. So the UK, even in countries never occupied by the Red Army and never ruled by Latin American populace... Except for Jeremy Corbyn, am I right? That's right.

Democracy in free markets can produce unsatisfying outcomes, especially when badly regulated or when nobody tries to regulate. Unsatisfying when you starve to death, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. I know when it's badly regulated. Or when people are entering the contest from very different starting points. I hate when people are into the contest from very different starting points.

Again, shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up, man. Stupid, stupid, stupid awful writing. So the losers of these competitions were always sooner or later going to challenge the value of the competition itself. How is Trump a loser? He's very wealthy. He never had to do any work.

Doesn't make sense. More to the point. The principles of competition, even when they encourage talent and create upper-probability, don't answer deeper questions about national or personal identity. Anyway, time to not follow this thread anymore. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's like, well, damn.

It seems like, sir, does it seem like inequality is a problem? Too good a thing, it's not the problem. Yeah. She says, I worked at the spectator eventually as deputy editor from 92 to 96 in an era when the magazine was run by Dominic Lawson. A brilliant editor is still one of the best I've ever had. Our summer parties and afternoon long lunches attracted an eccentric range of grand guests from Alec Guinness to Inclyde James to Aubrin Waugh, Evelyn's son.

To many charming Argentinians with strange accents. But in that era, the tone of every conversation, every editorial meeting was arched. Every professional conversation was amusing. There was no moment when the joke ended or the irony ceased. Even the strangest articles had fabulously witty headline. Oh, fuck. I'm bracing myself for this bit.

Lawson came up with one I remember best for what was no doubt meant to be a deadly serious article about Poland, Gdanskig on thin ice. It's not good. It's not even funny. That's what got him. I love jokes. I love bits. I do them for a fucking living.

I spend most of my time trying to drag this podcast, kicking and screaming down fucking holes of stupid fucking voices that don't even make sense. And even the worst bit I have ever done on this fucking podcast is better than Gdanskig on thin ice, which isn't even a pun. Now this goes dance and dance. Well, dance. So I guess like danishing on thin ice because it's like Gdansk. Because it's dance.

Because danish dance. Exactly. That's what that's what Danish people say when they greet each other in Australia. Good dance, mate. Yeah. So good pun. So this was an unusual historical moment, one in which Enoch Powell, a controversial anti-immigration Tory politician of a previous generation.

Controversial anti-immigration politician, Enoch Powell. You might as well just go with like famed classical scholar, Enoch Powell. Like just describe him in most viral terms. Notably like you can invite him to your offices or your garden parties, but you're not responsible for like fascism ever. Well, you're a famously mustachioed man, Enoch Powell. You're not because he's simultaneously an occasional lunch guest, a revered authority but also a figure of fun.

Ladies and gentlemen, we got him. Get yourself an anti-immigration politician who can do all three. Yeah. But like all that means is they were comfortable enough with all of these ideas. He behaved himself in polite company. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

It's just that he behaves himself in polite company. It doesn't matter what he does. Also, what was the spectator? Was there a certain section the spectator might have been advocating for in the 1990s? Yeah, it's probably fine. It's fine. Section 3029. Don't count above the numbers above like...

Oh, section 28. That's the section. Who even remembers all the sections? Yeah. So again, it's like, we really don't like Poland for like, you know, it's LGBT suppression or whatever, which is good. You shouldn't like places that do that. Yeah, but we don't like it because they're rude about it.

Yeah, but to then say, oh, but we're going to do it. I mean, she says, oh, that's what aboutary, which is again, a concept invented by, it's invented by lazy people. Identifying my hypocrisy has lost you this debate. And so you are banished from the mind-oxygen. Yeah, when you, when you, when you say that I have acquired all my jobs through nepotism, that is, that is a philosophical fallacy called the nepotism fallacy. A classic gambit called known as the bishop's pleasure.

Yeah. Michael, Michael Gorka. During a philosophical fallacy, that's what they love these days. So he said, there were Tory, there were Tory journalists and Tory MPs who would compete with one another around the dinner table to see you could do the best enic imitation. Yeah, I fucking bet. So they basically, yeah, in their careers. But equally, right? Like, okay, they weren't necessarily, even says revered authority,

but they weren't reverent of him all the time. They didn't say, hi, I'm waking up this morning and I respect Enic Powell and I agree with him. So I'm going to do all of his policies. No, that's only how a grad school moron would think. All she's saying is that she has never understood this world she reveres so much. Enoc Powell's sauntering into the spectator garden party in like 1997 with a butternut squash on his head saying, does this make me look like Brynden O'Neill? So it would be profoundly inaccurate to say that the circle of people who gravitated

around the spectator was actually nostalgic for Britain's imperial past because nobody in the 90s wished to actually have India back and nobody does now. And that's all that being nostalgic about Britain's imperial policy means. She says that she says that what they're actually nostalgic for, they are restorative nostalgics. Feel like pure shit. Just want India back. Yeah.

They say they say they say Hong Kong, by the way. They believe that it was still possible for England to make the rules, whether the rules of trade economics or foreign policy, if only their leaders would take the bull by the horns, and if only they would just do it. And again, like that's, that's, that's a, that's a, that's a, also. Now we're, now we're vibing. So right. And also, like that's, that's a, that's not entirely wrong.

Number one, like, yeah, that is what that kind of nostalgia is all about. Like she's diagnosed that problem correctly, but like, Only 90s kids will remember. But hasn't really sort of gotten any of the other problems around it. And secondly, you know, we did just unilaterally invade Iraq. Like it's not as though with the international law was able to stop us based international order. Yeah. No. Also, actually,

technically multilaterally invaded it. And also true. Also, all of these people would have wished to have India back if it, you know, didn't have like nuclear weapons or like 60 years of independence, you know, their ex-wife India. So let's, let's, let's, let's talk about the US because we're going a little long. Oh, there's no fascism there. We can skip this one. Yeah. Yeah. That is not to say that immigration and economic pain are irrelevant to the current crisis.

Clearly, they are genuine sources of anger, distress, discomfort and division. So again, also that's her way of saying, if you're mad about your neighbors who aren't white and if you're about to die from preventable illness, that's the same kind of mad. Yeah. You have like negative mood from that. It's bad vibes. But as a complete explanation for political change, an explanation for the emergence of whole new classes of political actors, they are insufficient. This next sentence you're about to read is like, if you don't read the book,

read this one sentence because it's as in-depth and analysis as you get, and it represents perfectly the like failure of neoliberalism to get to grips with it. If you only read one Ann Applebaum sentence, read this one, which is all of them. Here it is. I want, I want, I want the drop after this one. I want the big, the big fun one. Something else is going on right now. Something that is affecting very different democracies with very different economies and very different demographics all over the world. That was to give it time for change. Thank you Ann. This, this book is basically like just the lyrics to we didn't start the fire.

Yes. Like it just, it just, it draws so few actual conclusions. It's just a list of stuff that's happened in her going, yeah, that's not good. That's why people don't come to my party anymore. Yeah, we didn't sell the fascism. Also, right? Like all of these things that underpin American fascism from like predatory capitalism to white supremacy, that frontier mentality, the militia movement, none of it's new, none of the expressions of fascism she's worried about are new.

And it's not even like they're newly popular. Like these were all like- Nobody voted for Reagan because they were racist. Yeah, Newt Gingrich's contract with America happened during her fabled end of history. Was it Newt Gingrich? What the fuck it was? Who was it? It was Newt Gingrich. Yes. Yeah, it was Newt Gingrich. Yeah, yeah. But that happened during her like Halcyon days of the 90s when history was over. That was all happening. It's just that they're newly widely respectable, right?

And that just means that she's no longer important. There's been an elite fracture and there's been an elite fracture that has been like the effect of, that has been the effect of many, many big causes. And she's done, she's looked at that elite fracture as the cause of many, many big effects, essentially. I mean, again, that's like another free line throughout the book, right? Which is that as you kind of read it, what the thing that keeps coming up is that she's sort of mad that like the people that she thought were on her side or at least had her

vision of the world were kind of just like careerists and opportunists, right? Which is like what they were designed to do. Like again, that's like when you go through the institutions and when you believe in like, you know, meritocracy via the institutions, that is what you do. You end up kind of, you know, you, you are willing to kind of change your positions in order to climb up the ladder. And it sort of feels like even though she's not, she doesn't go against that. Her thing isn't like, her thing isn't that she's mad at the people at her party because

they've changed their views or like they've kind of like changed their vision of the world. It was because they sort of like outmaneuvered her. Yes. You know what this book is like? It's like watching Anne Applebaum lose a game of musical chairs. Right. That's the best way of putting it. That's absolutely the best way of putting it. Yeah. So, yeah, a lot. So, so basically, right?

She keeps discounting the explanations of the left and right for why things are the way they are. So here's where she gives her, her like, because like the authoritarian person, like personality or whatever, and the clerks, like those people were all around. What changed recently that has caused all of this unraveling to occur? She says, alongside the revival of nostalgia, the disappointment with meritocracy and the appeal of conspiracy theories, the answer may lie in, say it with me now, everybody, social media. I literally said when we were doing the notes for this that Anne Applebaum has a

less deep understanding of economics and a less material analysis than season five of Bones. Show in which in the background, there is what the characters refer to as the economic mess that causes people to lose their jobs. That does not appear here. This is the book from the show Bones. This is the book from the show Bones. Yeah. So, a part of the answer may lie in the contentious cantankerous nature of modern discourse itself.

So, yeah, social media. Has anyone just like said Anne Appleby's? That's going to be Alice's new Twitter name. Yes. Yeah. Hi. Fuck me. And then she saw pig poop balls once and was like, this is giving me some thoughts about democracy.

I'm back again to the only centrist policy. It should be illegal to at me. Yeah. Yeah. Because well, the reason that's the only centrist policy is because centrism is really all about just a sort of imagined, it's the divine right of SAT scores. Right? Like, I have these degrees.

I have these qualifications. I'm going, you can trust me to run the world apolitically to make it fast. I am Matt Ford and I'm now going to be in the cast of Spitting Image, a show which they've brought back for some reason. I have some for you. It looks like a spitting image puppet of his fucking self. I have some thoughts on like her social media thing, just like again, as like a general through line throughout this book,

which is yeah, it's all rooted in me deciding to rewatch Borgon season three on Netflix. Borgon is a bad show and season three is like the worst of all the seasons, but it's also like the most relevant for our times. Because the whole plot of season three is that the Danish, the former Danish Prime Minister, the kind of the woman who's like at the protagonist of the show, she gets voted out at the end of season two. And season three, she starts off as kind of like a international speaker who gives these speeches that aren't really about anything other than like,

we don't really get on very much. And then she decides that like after her former party like reject her on the basis that like, you know, your old news, you've already been Prime Minister. Why the fuck are you here? Go on holiday. Good news. She decides to set up her own party called the New Democrats. And there's like a scene, there's a scene in one of the beginning of these episodes where

she's kind of talking about how her party is really popular because they received 10,000 likes on Facebook. And it's a line that I've just been thinking about a lot just in terms of, because like the whole season as she's kind of producing this kind of new centrist party, again, is one where like she doesn't actually have any answers to the problems that like arguably she has created. You know, one of the big problems is like, you know, the kind of ongoing refugee crisis that has like been one of the kind of big things that characterize her premiership.

She has no answers for like that other than like, we should just be nice to each other. Terms like capitalism and socialism are outdated. We need new terms for these things. And all of that just reminded me of like everything in the Ann Applebaum book. Again, one of those things where you can sort of diagnose a problem, but you can't bring yourself to like actually engage in the solution. And one thing that Ann Applebaum says about regarding social media is she says something along the lines of like,

Twitter is a great place to be ironic and satirical. And it makes sense that because of the fact that you're ironic and satirical, that you'll end up getting candidates who are ironic and satirical as well. But wait, also, weren't all of her friends doing ironic and satirical impressions of Enoch Powell all the time at the Spectator? How's that different? The only difference, and this is kind of where I think the centrist kind of the real like centrist head fuck is, is that like,

while they were all doing this in private at the Spectator Garden Party, where presumably they got to say the N-word and stuff. And control who came in. Right. They now have to like confront- Actually have an N-word talking stick at the Spectator Garden Party. They now have to like confront this thing, this like, this machine, which like allows anyone to not just kind of like, say stuff at them,

but they have no control over, but who are also like, markedly funnier than any of the friends that they ever had at like, their dinner parties. Right? Oh, not funnier than good dancing on thin ice. How is that? What kind of fucking illegal Russian nuclear lab has that come out? Do you want to, do you want to start a side podcast with Riley called the Borken Island Loot Fesk?

Oh fuck, yeah, let's do it. That's very funny. Yeah, we will do that. Borken Island rotting fish. Do you want to hear some materialism from someone who appears to be suffering the effects of smoke inhalation? Yes, absolutely. So this is, this is the, if you're trying to do a materialist analysis of the internet

and understanding how the internet relates to the world, again, this is the kind of materialist analysis you would do if you've just been like suffered a workplace injury or perhaps like gotten CTE. You're taking part in an ad for workplace safety. A forklift truck is just backed into the back of your head. The rapid shift in advertising money to internet companies has within a decade severely damaged the ability of both newspapers and broadcasters to collect and present information. The most common business model based on advertising to the general public

meant that they were forced to serve a general public interest and forced to maintain at least a theoretical commitment to objectivity. Please enjoy this drop that I have of Sylvia Berlusconi's campaign song. Yeah. They could be biased, bland and boring, but they filtered egregious conspiracy theories out of the debate. So they could be biased, but they filtered egregious conspiracy theories out of the debate. Is this woman ever read a fucking newspaper?

I mean, just not remember like when the Daily Mail like came out for the Nazis. Like, does she not remember this? Or worse than that, the time the sun came out for Blair. Yeah, yeah. Or what about- Oh, we are not sure it's worse than that. Or what about the time right where, I don't know, what about the conspiracy theory that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that was put in all of these papers?

Oh, sorry, the tooth fairy thing is real, but I'm afraid that's not real. Ladies and gentlemen, we got them. Right. Remember, like all of those newspapers, there was a massive lockstep conspiracy theory. It was just an elite conspiracy theory. And so, like, and again, this is someone who is not recognized. It's a chimp that doesn't recognize itself in the mirror. You know, it does not understand that her only problem seems to be-

Would take the shreds. Her only problem seems to be that she's no longer on the inside. Oh, no. Yeah. Above all, the old newspapers and broadcasters created the possibility of a single national conversation in many advanced democracies. Yeah. It created the possibility of a single national conversation because no one else had any kind of voice.

Isn't that- Isn't that some place to see, which is the authoritarian mindset? Oh, she should just get a fucking podcast. Like, literally, you and your friends can have a conversation and no one can interrupt you. And all they can do is just, like, angrily post about it online, but you don't care because they don't get to interrupt you. For instance, people keep telling me to use fewer drops to which I can only say. You're a big guy.

For you. For you. It doesn't even make any sense, but I can't- You can't stop me from using it. It's two clicks. So you need- You're a big guy. For you.

So you need a single national conversation between the people who've graduated through the meritorious institutions and then they have a debate amongst themselves and then everyone else just sort of, I don't know, sits there and with their thumb in their ass and looks up in the sky, just walks around with their mouth completely open, just hoping that some, like, protein flies into it. It's good for breathing.

We're mostly subsist on plankton here at the Centrist Institute. In many advanced localities, there's now no common debate, let alone a common narrative. In an information sphere without authorities and no trusted sources, there's no easy way to distinguish between conspiracy theories and true stories. You'd go, okay. Just what the fuck?

We've reached a point in the episode where I have stopped finding it funny and I've begun to just grow weary of Annapolis. And eating the paste, eating the wet sand. Yeah, you've been eating sand. Like, how do you write this? And like, this is like, if you asked me to write a parody of what a dumb Centrist book would be like,

like, how do you actually write this and then email it to a fucking publisher without reading it back and being like, no, this is the dumbest shit I've ever read. Everything else you've ever written has been published with no questions asked. How, for example, do you write the opinion that mass advertising means that fact-checking has to be rigorous

and not then just sign yourself back into preschool and start again? Yeah, get the blocks out. She says, okay, here's a paragraph. I'm going to sort of start wrapping up soon. An apple bomb, just like love stretch arms strong. Here's a paragraph that was ghostwritten, I think, by Steven Pinker or someone from an Intelligence X.0 series.

Modern democratic institutions were built for an era of very different information technology and provide very little comfort for those who are angered by the dissidents. Back in the day, we didn't have computers, but now we have too much computer. Yeah. I was wearing an onion on my belt,

which was the start at the time. Voting, campaigning, the formation of coalitions, all this seems retrograde in the world. It's very difficult to be fascist if you don't have computer. Incidentally, can I tell you a funny garden path yannick dote about the time I hung out with Erik Powell? My lo-av-is-and-im over here.

All this seems retrograde in a world where other things can happen so quickly. And here's the bit that I actually find delightful. You can press a button on your phone and buy a pair of shoes, but it can take months to form a government coalition in Sweden. No, it was ghostwritten by Raphael Beck. It's Raphael Beck.

Yeah. All of these people are like Adam Curtis with a brain parasite. But then a shoe's happened. You can push a button. You can push a button and buy a pair of shoes. But then in Stockholm, something else was transpired. You can download a movie with the flick of a wrist.

You wouldn't download a shoe. Don't think you can. How do you download a movie with the flick of the wrist? You download the movie and then you flick the wrist, baby. That's what happens. But it takes years to debate a problem in the Canadian parliament. No.

You can be drinking refined wines. What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Like, oh, man, we should be able to like... You can get a fake taxi in seconds, but a real taxi. Hey, well, maybe if Mr. Trudeau wasn't so busy over there buying shoes on his telephone, we could resolve this issue about the maple syrup. Where else is he going to get the polish?

I think the point she's trying. I think the point... He needs a lot. The hands too. Jackson Trudeau. I think the point she's trying to make is that because things happen fast on the internet, but happen slowly in the halls of government,

people who are used to the internet become fascist while waiting. Fascism while you wait. Hate to see that. Like, it's very tight. Every time your order takes a while at McDonald's, you don't know the kind of risk you're under. People famously become fascist because it takes too long for them to order their policy.

Yeah. I mean, at the most generous interpretation, the most generous, it is that someone like a fascist will offer you a fast solution to a complex problem. Because so many other things in your life are simple, being by technology, you also want simple solutions. There is no... I'm trying to be as charitable as possible with this paragraph. And you cannot just get out from under the crushing cloud of moron fog.

Perfect. Can we skip to her second party? No, there's one more, and then we can skip to the second party. The issue is not really one of false stories, incorrect facts, or even election campaigns. People click on the news they want to hear. If you click on a perfectly legitimate anti-immigration YouTube site, for example.

Did she say YouTube site? Yeah, it's pretty much. Yeah, on the YouTube site. I was on the Facebook the other day. I was essentially on a perfectly legitimate anti-immigration Facebook. Just a fucking dummy. I happened upon a thinker called Stefan Mullen. He's very smart.

You should check him out. These can lead quickly. These can lead quickly to white nationalist sites in violence. Oh, no, probably because they were white nationalist sites that you were originally on. Why did all this white nationalism get in my white nationalism? I actually have a note little here. Often, as many as zero clicks.

She does the same thing about America. I don't even really want to read some of that. There's pages and pages of this shit. Yeah. The big thing is where Trump was asked about Putin, and Trump said, he's a killer. There are a lot of killers. You think we're so innocent?

It's like, yeah. But she's like, no, no, no. You've got to, instead of that, you've got to have Reagan shining sissy on the hill, which was not racist, and nobody voted for Reagan because they were racist. Yeah. What she says, right, is that instead of seeing ourselves

at the heart of a great international alliance for good, we're indifferent to the fate of other nations, including some that share our values, right? And then after that, she talks about how it used to be fun in the 1990s, when you'd go to a party in DC, and you'd see James Atlas, David Frum, Bill Crystal, John Podoritz, Roderick Emberlin, Dinesh Sousa. Is that James Atlas from Atlas Struct?

This party, by the way, contains my favorite paragraph from the book, which I described as the centrist version of the end of the perks of being a wallflower, which let me allow me to read before we wrap up. Go ahead. Laura Ingram, who had been a clerk to Supreme Court Justice- He's never given a, you know, never, not a fascist, and never has been until recently,

when she was turned fascist because Twitter made her used to things happening fast. Her arm just did that. Who had been a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and was then an attorney at a Tony law firm? In the penultimate paragraph, Atlas finds himself near midnight, careering through the streets of downtown Washington, with David Brock in Ingram's military green land rover,

at 60 miles an hour, looking for an open bar, while the music of Buckwheat Zydeco blasted over the stereo. In that moment, I swear we were infinite. I fucking love that. Just, just yet, oh man. This is, oh, for these lost times, right? Used to hang out with Dinesh D'Souza, looking for an open bar in DZ,

and listening to Buckwheat Zydeco. Oh, for these lost Halsey and salad days. I had never heard of Buckwheat Zydeco until that moment, and in all honesty, I never have to listen to them to know exactly what their music is like. Do we think we can get Buckwheat Zydeco's the outro this time? Yeah, I'm sure they can do that.

Do you know this book, like, sort of just, I just realized that this book also reminds me of something that happened this week, at the week of recording, which is, do you remember when Lawrence Fox did his tweet about how one of his friends blocked him on Twitter because he kept, like, posting a name, like, shit? It was only, like, 15 hours ago, Hussain.

I think even we remember it. I mean, look, I'm not like, you know- Like, you not in fact remember it, because fascism is making my brain move too fast. Exactly. Like, you know, these days, you know, you might have ordered a taxi and forgotten about that stuff that happened, but also, like, want to, like, deport loads of people.

But he put, so he, like, he posts out, like, the DMs of, like, this person who's, like, quite reasonable to him about, like, you know, about why this kind of, like, this broken friendship happened. And I realized that, like, what Anne Applebaum has basically done is, like, she's trying to put her old friends on blast, but she's doing it in a book which, by all kind of means,

is just, like, a big post anyway. Hmm. What are old books, but a big post? That's what I keep saying. I keep saying. Sorry, I choked on my own spit, then. Yeah. So, yeah, there is a whole bunch of her being, like, how come people aren't so stoked on America's mission of global democracy spreading or whatever? Hmm. Which they like to do.

Why don't people come to the launch of my book about how the Halodomor was the worst thing that's ever happened, and that's why we can't do my old social democracy? I don't even think that, like, she's actually that mad about people kind of not believing in that vision. It's more the fact that, like— And I think I said— They won't get into her Land Rover.

Well, yeah, it's also just that people who she thought kind of bought into the vision, but were actually just, like, people who were playing the long game, because, again, this is something that, like, they have been built to do, have kind of occupied positions of power that she just hasn't been able to. So now, you know, because she's kind of, like,

put her chips on the table and because she kind of missed this kind of tide because she was too enchanted with, like, the 90s parties and, like, all the stuff that happened there. She's just, like, this really is a book about, like, lamenting, but it's also a book about how, like, she basically got left behind. Yeah, and Applebaum loses a game of musical chairs. Yeah, she is no—

She is now surplus to the requirements of the right— The music is buckwheat zydeco. Yeah, she is now— She's surplus to the— Is the requirements of the right? It's that simple. They no longer need grad school dummies, and so no one's going to go hang out with you,

because all of these people are, like, careerist, backstabbing, backbiting psychopaths. It's that Dinesh Jisooza was just that little bit slipperier than you, basically. That's it. I feel like Brendan O'Neill could talk about the buckwheat zydeco's of Islington North. So let's wrap up on the last party.

In August 2019, we threw a party. This time, the party was in summer, and so there was sunbathing in the grass and swimming in the pond instead of snow and sleigh rides. Fuck off. Swimming in the pond. How big of a pond is this? Some of the guests were familiar.

One friend who came from New York in 1999 returned this time with his husband and son. A Polish couple came without children who themselves grown up in Mary. It was August, which was fitting, as we'd thrown the party in honor of Pinochet. Nobody's popping off with a makarov here, though, which is much less fun.

Yeah, the group that came— Yeah, a bad party. It's her party's worse. A group that came from Warsaw included a few fellow refugees from what could be called the right. Oh, they were murdered by Frontex, okay. Remember earlier legitimate anti-immigration sites

in Europe dealt with this refugee problem? The real people who are fleeing persecution is me from the fact that— Yeah, I'm politically homeless. I'm like actual homeless people who are not. The real problem of homelessness is the politically homeless. Exactly.

Yeah. And Applebaum going out to homeless person and going, like, you're actually lucky. I'm politically homeless. Yeah, yeah. And Applebaum going up to a homeless person and be like, did my husband burn a 50-pound note in front of you in order to, like, ironically get into an ironic club

with his ironic friends? There were, of course, others too, including neighbors from the village, some mayors of some nearby towns, and a small group of friends from abroad. At one point, I noticed the local forest ranger engaged with a heated discussion with former Swedish Foreign Minister, Carl Bilt.

Okay. Otherwise— Cool. No, they have ruined Fortnite through the new skins. I will not listen to your view. Like, why would you want to go to a party and bicker with, like, a sort of senior— A local forest ranger.

Yeah, why would you want to go to a party and bicker with Carl Bilt? That sounds like it sucks. I tell you, what is a bigger problem than forest fires? They make the titties smaller in the video games. Might as well have a fucking Gamergate conversation with him. Who cares? Jesus. Another point, I saw a well-known lawyer

who was the grandson of a notorious Polish nationalist of the 30s. Cool. They love telling on themselves. A notorious what of the where of the when? A grossed-in conversation with a London-based friend who was born in Ghana. Not racist. Just don't like him outside a garden party, simple as. Yeah.

That's just it, right? Like, yeah, I got this grandson of a notorious Polish nationalist talking to a guy who's not European. He's actually very— This is interesting. Yeah. He was talking to Jerk van der Klerk, actually. Wearing all of his grandfather's medals.

And so, basically, who's saying earlier, you said like, she doesn't have any kind of ideas. She basically just says, oh man, this is bad, but it might be a turning point. Maybe my children and their friends, all of our friends and all of us, really, who want to go on living in a world where we can say what we think with confidence, where rational debate is possible.

This is also like another fucking liberal tendency as well. Like, it's the same type of tendency, which is sort of like, you know, that kind of valorized Gen Z, because they're basically kind of pushing their problems onto them. It's basically like this thing of like, well, you know, we have no more ideas. The world isn't kind of the way that we wanted it to be. So, we're just going to like hang out, and you guys can solve the problems,

and we'll just like keep hyping you up on TikTok. Yeah. It's the end of the book as we know it. Almost, almost. Also, it's where rational debate is possible. Again, it is possible. You just don't like it. Just one last mouthful of sand.

Yeah. Where knowledge and expertise are respected. Like, again, just sorry no one wants to go to your seminar on why we should invade Belarus. And where borders can be crossed with... The legitimate anti-immigration YouTube sites. The borders into Belarus by the NATO coalition, which I formed. Okay.

Where borders can be crossed with ease. Yeah. For you and your rich friends, gestures to the field of corpses along the Southern Mediterranean. It's not a field as wet. Well, that actually happened because of a breakdown of debate, and people were being very mean online. Yeah.

If people hadn't posted the pig poop balls in response to Ann Applebaum and her friends, those people would not have needed to drown in the Mediterranean. It all started when that pig took that ship. It did. That was when it went wrong. That is the grand axis of history. We may be doomed like glittering multi-ethnic Habsburg, Vienna,

or creative decorative Weimar Berlin. No, no, no, no. Dion, you're not weaseling out of it with a Weimar thing that easily. No. Read me back to the Austro-Hungarian thing again. We may be doomed like glittering multi-ethnic Habsburg, Vienna. So in 1848, when they marched on the Palace of Ferdinand I of Austria, he asked von Metternich what was going on,

and he said they're doing a revolution, and Ferdinand said in this extremely fucked Viennese German, your Dürfensteindes, are they allowed to do that? I love that. To be swept away into a row is just full of black water. Let's look up a portrait of Ferdinand the first. Brendan O'Neill face on like... Let's make that be the episode art.

Yes, please. Yeah. To be swept away into a relevance, it is possible that we are already living through the twilight of democracy that a civilization may be already heading for anarchy or tyranny as the ancient philosophers and America's founders once feared the end. That's the only correct part of the whole book is where she's like, maybe it's fucked, yes.

But also it's like, maybe it's fucked, but more importantly, cancel culture on campus. Check out my weird shaped head. Yeah, we shouldn't do anything about it. Yeah, the problem is an actual fascism. The problem is some people on campuses who, even a lot of people on the left are like, yeah, those people can be tiresome sometimes.

Well, also this fixation also represents the only thing that they think they can change, right? And this kind of goes with the whole like an apple bomb obsession of debate is one where it's like, well, if we can't force institutions to be as prestigious as we felt that they were when we were in our 20s or when we were teenagers, then we can force other people to have that experience. So if we can't improve wider society in any way, we're going to just reform, we're going to change campus culture by which that means everything's going to be a debating society.

But also, it means they look at like just the coterie of like used car salesmen that have taken over right wing politics. And the answer, I guess, has been to say, can't we tell everyone how great it was in the time where all the stuff happened that caused them to follow the used car salesman? I loved it when stuff happened. It is just perks of being a wallflower, but for the biggest nerds. History is just one thing after another.

Dorks. Just for this is, this is like, id Paul for land your dorks. That's what this is. Yes. Come to my party. You have to come to my party. Jeremy Bentham said, you have to come to my party. And now some players are not invited.

I'll quit Zydeco. All right. I caught Mark, my friend Karl Marx, having a fascinating conversation with a huge pile of linen coats, which really shows how we can form bonds across divides. But hey, we've gone forever. So I'm going to say to all of my co-hosts, once again, thank you to all of our listeners, once again, thank you to Ann Applebaum. Stop writing books.

Please, please stop writing books. We will pay you to stop writing. We will not pay you. We will not. We will not pay you to stop writing books. But please stop writing books, because we will not make fun of any more of your books if you stop writing books. And we are going to see you on the Patreon five bucks a month on Thursday.

I think there's another Britonology, actually. Yeah, that probably is. We've recorded lots of them now. They'll be coming out. You'll be getting those. Yeah, another Britonology this week. So do look forward to that. And otherwise...

Also, we might be getting kicked out of our office. So we need your Patreon money more than ever. Let's not say too much more about that. It's a secret. It is a secret. Anyway, it's not because... The work left are kicking us out of our office. It's council culture.

Yeah, they're kicking us out of our office on this campus. Just because of this anti-LGBT sticker. We do not have... We do not have one of those. And we should reference to something we said earlier in the episode. Not even ironically. Anyway, all right, I think that's about it. I'll see you all on Thursday.

Bye. Bye.