TRASHFUTURE - Deus Schmaltz feat. Eleanor Janega

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

Eleanor Janega stops by to talk about her new project on the history of The Crusades with American Prestige, and how these largely failed military campaigns against basically everyone East of the Italian peninsula transformed into the iconography of Islamophobia at home. But first, we look at more flailing from the Labour Government, a plan to sentence criminals to bins, and reflect on Scott Adams’ ass. Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows *TF LIVE ALERT* We’ll be performing at the Big Fat Festival hosted by Big Belly Comedy on Saturday, 21st June! You can get tickets for that here! You can also get tickets for our show at the Edinburgh Fringe festival here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

I think it's very amusing that Scott Adams, the Dilbert Scott Adams, got the same ass that Joe Biden does. Like their asses are experiencing quantum entanglement. And because of the audience that Scott Adams has spent, what, like a decade cultivating, after he was like, alright, I'm not gonna try to invent a new food group called the Dilburrito, which he actually did. It's a thing that he did. Yeah. It's kind of the spiritual companion to Garfield Eats. Yeah, yeah, yeah! An entire Sunday Funnies based diet.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm having a dill burrito with a side of the Garfield pizza. Yeah. Enjoying a Garfacino. The only time in my life that both me and Cathy have said, ah, about the same food and incorrect. So that Scott Adams, because of, he was like, all right, well, the dill burrito is not going to work. Instead I'm going to be like a kind of, I don't know, fascist hypnotist. He's because of the audience that has cultivated.

Now, in his response to having Biden ass, he needs to like talk to his followers to be like, stop telling me to take ivermectin, stop telling me to drink juice, stop telling me to take vitamins, stop telling me to do a line of soil None of this is gonna work Yeah, he definitely feels like if John McAfee had agoraphobia

Like at least John McAfee would have fucked a whale just to see if it cured cancer You cannot imagine Scott Adams doing that Maybe maybe him and Biden should get their asses stitched together like a kind of like backwards human centipede. You know, the idea that I had was that actually that it's the same cancer and that this split bifurcated personalities from the same being that you can become either Scott Adams or Joe Biden. Yeah, Scott Adams is like Joe Biden's venom. Well, yeah, exactly.

When you put the suit on, you become Dilbert. But the suit is sentient, unfortunately. The Dilbert mask whispering to me from the closet. So are we like positing a kind of like microbe or like microbiome? Like this is like the giant Aspen tree that lives in Colorado and it's got different nods that are Scott Adams and Biden.

Yeah. Yeah, well also, I mean, if you're following the sort of epistemology of the Spider-Man universe, this implies that Dilbert came from a hell dimension. And like when his power reached, he was ableistemology of the Spider-Man universe, this implies that Dilbert came from a hell dimension. And like when his power reached, he was able to take over the Spider-Man, or Scott Adams for this example. Hey, you know what, what can I say? I did read the Spider-Man comics at one point.

So you know what? Well, at the end of the day, our IP in advance to Scott Adams is his asshole. Probably the only part of him that is, you can actually say, I do feel bad that you've got ass cancer, but I don't feel bad for you, the person. I feel bad for your ass, but not for you. Your ass didn't deserve this. Yeah, exactly.

Your ass didn't have a choice to be Scott Adams' ass. Yeah, wait, this just sounds like you're hitting on Scott Adams now that he has cancer. It's like, damn Scott Adams, it's a shame that your ass got cancer, cause I love it. Yeah, it's a beautiful ass. I hope they don't have to amputate your ass. It'd be a shame to see it go. Damn Scott Adams, I's a shame that your ass got cancer cause I love it. Yeah, it's a beautiful ass. I hope they don't have to amputate your ass.

It'd be a shame to see it go. Damn Scott Adams, I hate to see you go, but I love to watch you leave. They're gonna put that, we're gonna put that on his tombstone. We're gonna crowdfund a tombstone for Scott Adams that just says Scott Adams, we hated to see him go, but we love to watch him leave. Burying him face down ass up.

Yeah, he's just, Scott Adams is, for his dying days, he's gonna go to Ultra Miami. He's gonna be taking pictures, doing like that sort of kneeling pose in the front of a yacht, like looking over his shoulder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's gonna have like really long black hair and influencer lips.

Or if he goes bald from chemotherapy, he can do body modification to have his skull shaped like Dilbert's Oh, yeah, so we're saying he's gonna be like where he's gonna be influencer at ultra Miami But wearing the curled up Dilbert time. Yeah when I see Scott on his ass my tie curls up at the end That's why Dilbert's tie was curled. He could see Scott Adams through the page and was constantly turned on by his juicy, now unfortunately time bomb of an ass. Do you think that Dilbert's little crenellated nodules

on his head also become erect when he's aroused? Like is the default state of Dilbert's skull floppy? Anyway, RIP to Scott Adams. It's very, oh, RIP in advance, I guess, to Scott Adams. It's very funny that you cultivated a fan base that is gonna spend your last days on this earth annoying you Anyway, welcome to tf. That is the scott. That's the scott adams update section

Uh, it's so weird. It's that both me and november. We both used to read dilbert as like 10 year olds Okay, all right getting the lore right but why yeah, it's like it it's like, it's a references to things that are completely out of your orbit. It's all just like office culture stuff. I remember this is this, I mean, this is almost more of a sort of glue factory reminiscence, but it feels like it works here, which is I remember because I'd been reading Dilbert for so long, by the time 9-11 happened, I understood it. I was 11 years old when 9-11 happened, and I understood it. I was 11 years old when 9-11 happened and I understood it in Dilbert terms.

You were way too aware of 9-11 because of a memorial comic with his tie went down because he's sad. It's more like because it was offices getting attacked I understood what was happening in terms of status reports and cubicles. You knew what Dogbert would have to say about it. But the Slavic boss is basically Osama Bin Laden. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, anyway, welcome, welcome to TF.

It's the free episode this week. It is Nate, Milo and Riley are your regularly scheduled Hussein's in November's will be back next episode and then the following episode, respectively. But we are here today with, I would say, one of the most most oft requested repeat guests. It's Dr. Eleanor Jannega. Dr. J, how are you doing today? Yeah, I'm great. Probably thinking a little bit more about the epistemology of the Spider-Man universe that I'm used to. But, you know, happy to be here. Happy to see the lads. Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

Eleanor, now an official member of the Trash Future Medieval Court. She gets free mead in the Great Hall. Free premium mead. And then there's a sort of horrible buffet of- Unlimited mutton from the buffet. A horrible buffet of turkey legs. Yeah.

But it's like they're sort of gray and sad and under a heat lamp and there's no one attending them so you don't know how long they've been there. I like the idea that in all of them is sort of medieval plenty in the good times when people weren't starving the best the trash-eater lounge can hope for is like a medieval ponderosa steakhouse. That's right. The Asaiya, they bring this to you from the farthest flung parts of the earth. It is called the Dilburrito. It was created by artisans in Ceylon. It's that you go and then you get like a turkey leg and then you spoon some peas pottage onto

your plate, you know, and then you wash it down with some like 1.5% beer and you're eating that at what, like four in the morning. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a medieval guys were all on the lucky saints. Yeah. Like, you know, there's like hackney guys are engaging in like medieval guy behavior. I'm training for the medieval hackney half marathon, which is mostly in a marsh. Honestly, like it's as good as a regular beer. Like it's actually, I love them. You know, I'm still very off drinking at the moment. Yeah, no.

That's the medieval guy. The medieval guy has that accent. So the medieval guy has the non-rhotic accent that came in in the 19th century. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I'm doing the half marathon soon. That's right. I'm doing the middle, the middle sex half. That's right. I'm doing the middle, the middle sex half. That's right. Right. The non-rhotic R came in and like the 18th, like this is relatively

recent for English. Yeah. Yeah. That is true. And we think our best guess actually is that middle English and earlier was a bit more like American standard English is. Kevin Costner fucking vindicated and Robin Hood Prince of Peace. They all talked fucked up. He talked normal. It's true. Andrew Tate is actually what they all sounded like. That's actually not a bad, we can't just go back into Tate voice every time. Listen Robin Hood, I don't care about you or your merry men. Yeah. So if you're going to do an impression of a medieval English person, maybe you should use my voice. That's all I'm saying. Also just for the record, since I'm rarely on episodes,

I am a different person than Riley. I realized that sometimes this has to be stipulated. Riley, Canadian, me not Canadian. There are some slight differences, a few things here and there that will let you tell us apart. Why is Nate talking about wine again? I wish Nate would shut up about goddamn hauntology. You're killing me, man. We're going to talk a little bit about some news.

And then, Eleanor, you've been doing, you've got some stuff coming out in the next few weeks about the use and misuse of the Crusades and among this sort of modern far right. And we're going to talk about that after the news. Yay. That's it. That's it's a thumbs up for this audio medium. Listen, you know, I'm like, hell yeah, brother. We're absolutely going to get into it.

I've been spending way too much time thinking about the Crusades with the good homies over at American Prestige. And it is an incredible time to be alive in this time of right-wing nationalist resurgence. Because these people are just talking about the Crusades constantly. And it's very, very funny that they wish to die of dysentery in Syria so badly. But you know, we'll get into that later. But unfortunately, I'm poisoned because I've had to think too much about the Crusades and I'm making it everybody else's problem.

So yeah. I think JD Vance should do a children's crusade where he and all of his friends just like get on a ship and then vanish. And then just they get on a ship disappear and then their next scene changed to an or a Barbary pirate ship. It's the biggest problem with the English crusade inside. You get so many promising under 21 crusaders and then they just, they do too much too young, they get injured and they just never make it at the top level.

They end up trying to win all. Yeah, you never see them beheading any Saracens at the top level and it's a shame. I'm just, I'm really excited for the Eastern Mediterranean Darby where the French team is to take on the Byzantines now that they're owned by the Venetians. I actually really prefer the Lady Crusade. I think it's actually better to watch. I mean, all I can say about this is I imagine I'm mixing metaphors here, but a children's

crusade led by JD Vance is going to be like a version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, where the Pied Piper has zero charisma and no children follow him. He's weird. He just looks... There's something wrong with that guy, Rizzless. He's mad at the pipe. Yeah. He's the Pied Piper who keeps saying, oh fuck, wait, every three notes. Yeah, he's doing three blind mice but very hesitantly. Yeah. He's like, oh fuck, sorry, sorry. Oh fuck, sorry. I gotta say, Catholic converts and you say children's crusade, I know it's

something that we made up right now, but I'm just cringing out of my fucking skin. So you know, just I don't, I don't trust it. I don't trust it. That's all. It's terrible. Well, we're going to get to that first. A little bit of news, a little bit of UK news, which is always good. I live there.

Uh huh. Yeah. Don't most of us. Well, it seems like the Labour Party is deciding to panic. No. Again. At the disco? No, the whole country.

Including but not limited to the discos. So basically, what seems to be happening is that the Labour Party leadership is now saying, shit, we made everybody hate us by trying to outflank reform to the right. So they are now... There's not much room to squeeze around them. It's quite a narrow gap there. Basically giving ourselves a bunch of sort of, you know, impossible labors. We've had like blue labor and the next one's going to be impossible labor. They're going to be clearing out the Hyperion stables at any moment. It's going to be great.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're going to, they're, they're slaying lions, hydras, et cetera. So the chasing that's reformed to the right might not be a great electoral strategy. Someone, somewhere finally, like, I don't know, did like a dodge roll past Morgan McSweeney so they could say to Keir Starmer, things are not going well. And most of the people joining reform, most of the people going to vote reform are leaving the Tories. Very few of them are leaving us. Our people are going to the Lib Dems or more likely staying home. And so now what's happened is, number one, it's very amusing that everything being briefed to the press is that Morgan McSweeney, a hired advisor, not elected. Can't stress that much.

Easily, yeah. Easily fireable in theory is blocking the reversal of the two child benefit cap and the winter fuel allowance cut. Hell yeah. Right. I don't know how he's doing that. Yeah, he has no political power. Yeah.

Unless he like has photos of like exactly what Starmer was doing in Lord Ali's penthouse. I don't know how Morgan McSweeney, a hirable and fireable advisor, is able to meaningfully block things. We need to stop losing voters to the Lib Dems and that's why I am committing right now to going on a helter skelter, going down and chasing the wheel of cheese down the hill. These are all things that I'm going to do to prove that I can be as good as the LibDef. We're going to make Labour the party of,

neither left nor right, but whimsical. Yeah, that's right. Any case, it seems like in a huge panic, they are briefing to the press about rolling these things back. And at the time of recording, they are still considering how to reverse the two child benefit cap, but it's back being talked to in the press. Lord knows if they'll continue

it. But basically the statements they're making are, we're going to do something about child poverty. And this is basically all you could possibly do. It's also a relatively recent policy. It was brought in by Osborne. And then considering how to reverse the winter fuel allowance cut. Now, here's the thing. All of these things are good to do, but it's very easy to remember that I was the same age that I am now when Starmer whipped the entire party to vote to cut winter fuel allowance, yeah, like a few months ago. Yeah. Yeah. Imagine. We were old enough to remember it because it was very recently. It was super recent.

Yeah, there are actually like babies that are old enough to remember it. Yeah, exactly. All of the kids that were born on this show, like on this show, all of the kids that were born to people who are hosts of this show are older than the policy to cut the winter fuel allowance that Starmer whipped Labour MPs to vote for. I don't know, maybe the idea here is that enough Nan's have died. They're like, yeah, we just needed to get rid of those ones specifically. Now we can cover it again because enough of them are dead. It'll be fine. It's going to be fine. It's like a test of the emergency broadcasts. So we had to make sure it worked. It's like, does the kill your nan button work? OK, it's working.

All right, we can turn it off now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Matt Hancock had used it quite a lot, but we need to make sure it works when we press it as well. Yeah. Well, Matt Hancock had outside help. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's true. That's true. Yeah. So this is what's happening. And on look at that. Right. And I remember also in like less than a year ago, not only did he whip labor MPs to vote to cut winter fuel allowance, it was the most it was the thing that lost them the most votes at local elections. And then he like took withdrew the whip from seven MPs like in peeling Zara Sultana for doing for doing that. And now it's like, joking, psych.

Well, I mean, like to be fair to Morgan McSweeney, which I don't think we need to be at all. Right. I mean, if we take his ideology seriously, the trouble with reversing these policies, which they absolutely should do, to be clear, is that, well, then how come there's no money for anything else? Like if the idea was that, no, you can't have any of this because do you know the incredible real forces of the market mean that there is no money to keep your nan and also these babies alive, then why is there now? Right? And if there's money for this, then why

isn't there money for the NHS and why isn't there money for anything? And you know, the answer is, of course, that there is money for all of this. But if your ideology says that we have to keep doing what it is that we're doing, then there is no real way to back out of this. But also, what I, what I go back to is imagine just having campaigned on these things. Imagine if you had gone into the local elections campaigning on, or not going to local elections, you would have done it already. But imagine, imagine having campaigned on removing the two child benefit cap, which is like, I remember, you know, the 10 pledges. I don't know if anyone else does.

But imagine campaigning on removing that. Imagine creating a constituency for it, telling people, if you have kids and like, if you have kids, so basically already this is dangerous. Cause they're not going after the votes of dead people. They're going after the votes of people with young children, which is like, that's woke. Well, we've got to kill more nan. so they'll vote for us once they're dead. That's right.

It's then they'll be in our core demographic. But still, right? Imagine having that in your corner, that thing you've done for people. Could you imagine actually making the case for economic justice and showing leadership in doing so rather than being dragged, kicking and screaming by polling into doing so reluctantly and with half measures and briefing, maybe we will, maybe we won't. I see you hated that. I'm sorry. Do you like us now? I told you last week, no, I can't imagine that. We only know one way of doing it. Well, it's just the idea that I think at the risk of bringing up a familiar topic, it feels

like anytime this comes up, there's always the specter of Morgan McSweeney overturning the barbecue grill and saying this whole thing smacks of Corbin. But the problem is that these are policies, these are incredibly unpopular decisions. And it does feel like labor in its current incarnation, its leadership's response is that any criticism that it faces from any of its constituents, its voters, people affected by its policies, it basically is like that student politics and we can just have a bunch of bald guys say, way at you in council, local council meetings in order to intimidate you. And it's like, well no,

these people do get to vote. They don't have to be members of the Labour Party to vote in the fucking national election. And they're always stunned, befuddled, flabbergasted when people don't vote for them. When it's like, well, yeah, you're a dick to everyone. And you're like, I'm going to do shit that harms you. And then you do. And then you're like, but you're still supposed to vote for me. It's like that. I genuinely believe there is at least some grain of truth to this idea that they are so internally fixated on disciplining and banishing the left from within the Labour Party that they keep forgetting about. The election that then comes after you have, you know, salted the earth within the party.

That regular people who don't give a fuck about any of the briefcase shit, they have an option to vote for you or someone else or not vote at all. I guess I'm always frustrated because, you know, I'm Schroedinger's leftist here, right? And I'm literally one of the people that they tried to get rid of. And it worked. I left the party, right? And I was doing the thing that everyone says, well, of. And it worked. I left the party, right? And I was doing the thing that everyone says, well, what you should do is get involved in the party at the local level.

And like, I was doing that. I was showing up to meetings on Thursday nights and pulling my hair out. They got very mad that my particular branch of the little local branch was incredibly lefty. So they forcibly joined us with another more centrist group nearby to dilute us and put more centrists in. If they were losing votes or they saw that there were more lefties in the meeting, they would terminate the meeting and kick us all out and be like, no, we're not having the vote tonight. They did every single thing they could to screw us over. And I was like, okay, well, that's it. When they called us fleas

that the dog was shaking off, I was like, okay, yeah, right. I'm leaving. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And has left the party. She's joined reform. Will you be racist enough to win her back? This is with throwing down the gauntlet. And it's like, you know, then they changed the boundaries. Now my MP is Ellie Reeves' sister, which is going great. And like she didn't even bother like coming around to our neighborhood and saying, Hey, by the way, I'm going to be your MP now, because we're just captive as far as they're concerned. They're like, you are labor voters. That is what you are. And then you see them be like, well, wait a minute. What do you mean you've wandered off? You know, like, which is what most people are going to do. You know, like I, there are a lot

of debates to be had about whether we're going to do green party entry ism or what it is that is going to be next. But I think a lot of these people who are really involved are just not going to vote. And so we're either losing elections because we did something too woke and it makes people not vote or we've cost people the election by not voting. And it's like, well, am I powerful or not? Right? Like, that's what I don't understand. Because if I'm powerful, you would think that they could just, you know, not starve babies, you know, or something like that. Which is I'm asking for very little here. You know, I'm used to being disappointed electorally, right? I'm an elder millennial. The first the first election I ever voted in was the one that George W. Bush stole.

Like, right. I'm like, I my my standards are through the fucking floor. Right. And all I am asking is for a modicum of don't starve kids. And these people are like, absolutely not. Well, and even then, to be clear, labor is just now briefing that, oh, maybe, maybe we're going to do this. And surely now, again, it's the product of a lot of internal party wrangling as to what's going to happen at the next fiscal event. They're definitely going to do some kind of U-turn on winter fuel allowance. But again, is this is like, this is because people who are interested in not dying or not having children starve or not having old people free, like

just be pensioners in poverty, basically, people aren't, are actually concerned about that, which is fucked tons of people, are being told you are fleas, fuck off. And then guess what? An election happened and they fucked off and now they're panicking. And it's like, if they had just been in touch with reality, they would have, even if they are the same kind of cynical, like cynical people that they are, right, they would have understood that this was at least likely to happen and they wouldn't have been surprised, which they clearly were. It's interesting because I think that, oh, you know, when you see like liberals in the

wild when they talk about them, like right around the election, they all felt as though they were like receiving direct brain waves from Keir Starmer, and they were like, I secretly know what he's going to do, and I know he's saying all this terrible right wing shit, but actually, we're going to rejoin the EU and something is going to happen, right? And it's like, okay, yeah, dope, cool. But they've disappointed those people too, which is, you know, the people who actually will show up and vote and kind of do think this is like a team sport and it's red versus blue. They're all voting Lib Dems now. Exactly.

And like, you know, they simply love to pay 5p for a grocery bag, you know, like that's the sort of shit that these people are into. So like, I don't know. The helter skelter of history is long, but it bends towards Ed Davey as Prime Minister somehow. And the thing is, this isn't even, is that because Nigel Farage is allowed to occupy the position within British politics that he is, which is no one at the BBC or the Guardian or whatever, no one thinks that like reform is a real party, they still think it's like

an outside challenger party, not the likely next government, he's now allowed to just say, oh us two, we also would scrap the two child benefit. We also are going to like restore winter fuel allowance, but we're also going to like cut taxes to their lowest and we're going to do and do all this stuff. And again, it's like, okay, well, here, labor party, these are such small claims, right? These are small things that like, they're big in terms of the effect of on people's lives. But in terms of like making this, making living here better, it's not such a big step.

It's going back to where we were 10 years ago. And again, they're not going to learn this because again, they're being dragged, kicking and screaming into this. They're not going to, I mean, who knows if we'll get dragged, kicking and screaming further. What they are is like, you know, twitchy and reactive and techy. Like they've always been this way, even personally. Right. Like you, you, these people melt down at the slightest criticism, which is what we've seen time and again since 2020. And this is just another version of that. And guess what? You're getting outflanked because you're not showing leadership. You're not showing leadership.

But also I'd say too that in the end, even if they did wind up both reversing the cuts and also scrapping the two child limit, they would basically, they won't get any credit for it. Both. I mean, part of that is endemic, I think, because of the media in Britain, but also some of it is because they are so unconvincing and had to be dragged and were such dickheads and were seem so indecisive. But in general, the impression people will retain is that like, regardless of whether or not they got a good thing or an improved thing in their lives, it's basically going to be, fuck those guys. Like they, like everything about them just exudes negative charisma.

I hate to say that or use that word. It's like some kind of James Carville shit. But genuinely, the impression that people come away, even if they suddenly turned around and decided they were going to do just like ultra-Corbanism overnight, people would still find them slimy and untrustworthy because they would be just using their eyes and their ears. Everything about them seems so insincere. And also like, I mean, the idea that you have to be convinced or that, I don't know, that like you went along with it in the first place out of, I don't know what kind of like fucking ideological reasons, because quite frankly,

a tiny fraction of people are gonna be like, right, we need to cut the state and cut excess spending on old people not freezing to death. Most people are gonna find out about this when they suddenly don't get the money they're used to getting. Yeah. And it's like, you're just going to... It's just going to come across as vindictive and shitty and not responsible, just mean, and people are going to remember it. And so it's like the damage is already done. And I just, I don't know. At a certain point, you stop even being like, who's advising these people? Because they all kind of exist in their weird

sealed ecosystem. And they think the next Thatcherite right wing turn is gonna win them the support of everyone in Britain. It's like, how is that going, guys? How is that going in this practically half century long project you guys have been on? How is that going for you? I'll tell you how it's going is that reform is currently rooting through like the bins

and the cupboards in Durham council trying to find the secret woke button. Remove all the flags. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, all there is is the kill Nans button. Speaking of the bins, I'm speaking of the bins. I want to be on one day. A reverent hush comes over everyone. A reverent hush falls over the room. A minute silence for the bins please.

It's bins and then we're going to talk crusades. Yeah, bins first, crusades later. That's what Richard the second said. I got to throw something in before you go Riley. What if they had like a Serco style outsourcing in Durham for waste pickup and the bins collection company was some local company, but their name was an acronym and it was DEI. Can you fucking imagine? Can you imagine, man? It would be the British singularity.

Richard the second was not a crusader. Sorry. Sorry, everybody. Apologies. I was mistaken for a different Richard. Pull your head out of your ass. All right. Right. Right in front of me. Damn. That's what he did. That's what it was. He he he got stuck with the bins. So he didn't go crusading. Exactly.

He was focused on domestic policy. He was doing his part for society. You know, he knew what was more important. That's what it was. The surf's party would knock on your door and you'd be like, I care about what we're doing in the Holy Land. And they'd be like, why do you care about what's going on in the Holy Land when we're not taking care of the bins at home?

Do you know what? I'm like, I'm sorry, I'm voting surf. I'm like, so true, Bessie. There's buckets of gong building up in the sort of mud path outside me, outside me up. And the Lord of the Man is not interested. He's busy with the Holy Land.

But what about, what about, why don't we look after our own first? The town crier has a new scandal that, Sir Keir Starmer saying this in middle English name version does not in fact say Gardi Lu when he chucks the bucket of slop out of his window. You know what? He doesn't care at all about his fellow man. Hold on. I'll tell you what happened. He didn't say Gardee Lou when he chucked the bucket of slop outside his window and then it hit a guy who was distributing bread from a donkey.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The bread delivery, the on-call bread delivery service. That's the problem. His children don't even want to cross the crusade anymore. I think they should bring back national service. Well, first we have to come up with a concept of a nation, which kind of requires printing technology. Never seen a pamphlet. Don't know what it is. What do you mean, nation? I'm tied to the land of my lord. Back to the future medieval period, where Marty McFly is handing out pamphlets

he's like maybe you guys aren't ready for that he's traveling back from like 1580 hey to like 1230 hey it's your cousin Marvin Marvin Gutenberg you know that new press you've been looking for oh perfect uh yeah this is gonna be for England. What's that? What is that? All right, all right. Look, we gotta get to the bins and then we're gonna get to the history. This is, that's the thing. I think people might sort of slowly realize that most, this is a podcast about lots of things, but at base it is a history show. That's right. Because that's all I ever want to talk about. Well, it's hard saying, but also when you really think about it, it's all history. Damn.

Damn. That's fucking right. All right. Bin's update. Look, and yes, I've been sent, by the way, the article about Airbnb one trillion times that we're going to talk about either the next episode or next week. But this felt like I wanted to tell Milo about it. Okay.

All right. So you know how the Labour right, which is... The Labour Party. The Labour Party, but specifically like that faction, loves jail. Oh yeah. Yeah. They're crazy about jail. And everyone basically since Blair, like late Blair, has been crazy about jail. They're like, build jails, more jails, we're going to send more

people to jail, just need to jail more people. We're going to dissuade people from committing crimes with jail. We're going to make jail nice. jail, just need to jail more people. We're going to dissuade people from committing crimes with jail. We're going to make jail nice. We're going to make jail bad. We're not going to fund any of it. So it's going to be incredibly more dangerous to be there than like even just the basic sort of premise of the carceral state, blah, blah, blah. Right. We all know that. Well, basically some of those internal contradictions have come home. Can a contradiction come home to roost?

The contradictions have come home to roost in a mixed metaphor. Yeah, I like that. Thank you. And what they have, what has happened is that the great lovers of jail, but the great haters of spending money on anything, have run out of jail. Oh no, the chickens have been heightened. Yes, thank you, Mel. The chickens are heightened to never before seen. Yeah, well, it's the chickens inherent to the capitalist system. The chickens have been placed upon the rack and stretched until they recant their faith. Yeah, turning them into a sort of millenaisie. Yeah, that's how they, you're going to make you into a medieval schnitzel.

That's what they call it. No, that's what it is. We're going to make you, we're going to give you the old Aragon schnitzel. No, anyway, they ran out of jail. Oh, fuck. Yeah, so now it's one of those things where there's like, oh yeah, if we jail one more person, it's gonna be like Mr. Creosote

and the whole system's gonna burst, right? There's no more space in any of the jail. Someone's gonna like pop out the top if we put another person in the bomb. Yeah, they go to jail in Toontown from Roger Rabbit. But Bronson's gonna be accidentally released if we put one more guy in jail. He's gonna start beating up everybody in the country.

He's gonna grease himself up and start a fight with everyone. He's gonna go door to door in Britain and just start punching whoever answers. Honestly, he would win if he ran for election. Like, if he was just like naked greased up and he's like, I'll fucking fight everyone. Everyone's a fanny now. Like, people would be like, yeah, I'm fighting for him. I'll tell you what, Bronson, he speaks his mind.

MP for Rochester almost assuredly. I'm telling you right now. Maybe that's who that's who the Labour Party should make. They should make him a Lord and then he should lead the Labour Party's Charlie Bronson. So anyway, they ran out of jail. So Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood says she wants to have a new and innovative way of punishing offenders, which is... The rack? To be broken upon the wheel.

Yeah, the iron maiden. The skull's girdle. Skull's bridle. No, she is understood to want probation teams to work with councils so that local authorities are able to assign council jobs unpaid to offenders. Oh, slavery. Corvay. Nice. Yeah, we're bringing it back. Oh, fantastic. No, I love this. Yeah. The example they gave was because again, Shabana Mahmood writing for the Telegraph, obviously, said,

she's a card carrying member of the party's law and order wing. Oh, I didn't know they had cards. Okay. And what she said basically is what we're going to do is we're going to have like people who are not on custodial sentences. So the general guidance right now is if you're going to be sentenced to less than a year in jail is they should figure out something else because there's no space. So they basically want to force you to do community service. But like actual council work that usually you would be employed by a private company to do, then they would donate your wages to like a victim's charity or whatever.

So you'd go work for Serco, but in the Serco penal division. But they can't exactly threaten you like, like, you know, carrot and stick here that if you don't, they'll put you in jail because apparently there's no jail anymore. No jail. Yeah. You're like, everyone knows the jail is it's like, how many people can you fit inside a Volkswagen? It's like, well, we fit the maximum amount because there's someone tried to put one more

person and they all died. There's this rotting massive flesh in a Volkswagen and we all know the answer. And exactly. Yeah. And so it's like what they have that but for jail. So what, what can they threaten you with? Well, the thing is I was doing blags for years and then I got caught but there was no room in jail. So now I'm an Ofsted inspector.

Yeah, which is ironic really because I never finished school. It's sort of part of the reason now I got turned onto a path of crime really. A lot of it is about social disadvantage. And ironically, I've now found myself in a position where I can combat that social disadvantage, but as a slave. Yeah, this is the this is the council ironic punishment Seconded into the police It's like a suicide squad. Yeah Well, this is a suicide squad of doing things like filling up potholes and cleaning bin

But the fly tippers are all being arrested by kia star was drones and they're being forced to be bin men It's like fucking jigsaw. Do you want to play a game? Do you ever see the letter pecker in the room with you? There's like lots going on in UK crime and justice, obviously, right? Like there's a huge amount of, again, a lot of chickens being heightened specifically because like the thing that they used to do to try to paper over that crack, which is jail everybody, is no longer working. And they're having to, again, much like sort of

labor is having to do with it's like electoral strategy, basically, they're having to rapidly paper over cracks by just sort of throwing up whatever ideas they have and seeing what works. I mean, these are the same people who are like, I don't know, what if we go back to chemically castrating like sex offenders? I was going to say, wasn't Shubhana Mahmood also publishing another right-wing app read recently saying that sex offenders are going to be chemically castrated? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, there's a problem. Chemical castration drugs cost money, so we need to get people in local councils to make them free. I see. The issue is going to be like, you're going to end up getting people who are arrested for nonsing

and they're just going to kick each other in the dick until it stops working. Yeah, find the biggest waster in the local council and figure out what amount of nons structures you need to never get an erection again. And that's going to be the penalty. The noncer games. Like one nonce is allowed to live. The Labour Party simply cannot stop thinking about other people's junk. Like it doesn't matter who they're just like, is there a way we can bring genitals into this? I'm thinking. We gotta do it.

Anyway, anyway. But it's ultimately, this goes back to like this thing that the labor has done again and again and again, which is trying to paper over cracks in local service provision by being like, let's just use people from the town maybe. Or in this case, people not from the town, people from the jail in the country.

Yeah, they were like, what if we let personal trainers prescribe some antibiotics? What if we let you know, just to be fair personal trainers are dying to do that It's that just with a punishment angle It's the same thing of just like we got it We have to keep papering over these cracks, but the papers getting expensive They should make the prisoners personal trainers. That'd be great. Charlie Bronson personal trainer. You'd be motivated. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Is it necessary for me to be naked and greasy? Yeah, it's part of the integrity of the process. So you're doing setups, and he's just got a fist cocked back at you. He's just like, I've got to keep going. He's holding a screwdriver to the back of your neck so you don't go down too far. It's just a matter of height, your son. You're going to get abs like me and you'll be beating

prison guards senseless in no time. If you don't work on your forearms, how are you going to get delicate brush strokes into your artwork, which you also do? How are you going to convey your complex emotions about spending a whole life in prison? I think we need to clarify for American listeners, number one, this would be a great Britnology, just a tip for you guys, that we're talking about a famous British criminal who's famous for being a criminal who took the name Charles Bronson, who just loves fighting and violence and is spending his entire life in prison because he refuses to stop punching everybody

he sees. Yeah. And he also sort of refuses to like get parole. They're like, they're like trying to release him. And he's like, no, no. Yeah. He's like, I love jail. He's the perfect citizen of a labor right. I will say also that this, this pause is a very alternate ending to a British version of the Shawshank redemption where the guy is like, no, I don't feel like leaving jail. I get to punch way more people here. It's like, hmm.

No, it's that he tunneled into the walls, but not so he could escape, just so he could get into the ceiling panels and then drop down on the guards who were investigating the hole. I'm the only greased up man in Shawshank. Yeah, now, it's time to talk crusades. We have been sort of grabbed from the land

by our Lord, told to outfit ourselves with a sort of triangular shield, long sword, and more importantly, a spear. One of us can afford a horse and we're going to get on a ship, go to the Holy Land and we're going to die en route. That's right. That's the plan. Beautiful. I'm really excited about it.

The podcast is crusades. Yes. Yeah, it's an interesting one, right? Because of course, being a medieval historian is kind of like a form of purgatory at all times, you know, because you devote yourself to this thousand years of history and everyone doesn't want to think about it at all, but they want to repurpose it all the time. And I don't know if you guys have noticed this, but Crusader imagery and Crusade stuff is like back in a big way at the moment.

Yeah. Especially in the Department of Defense in the United States. Yeah, yeah. Hegseth has some questionable tattoos. Yeah, he does. Yeah, Crusader in origin. Yeah. I was going to throw this out that, I mean, obviously this did become a thing to some extent

with the start, you know of post-911 wars. But I think what's interesting is that I don't really recall, and I could be wrong here, having the right-wing shud culture warrior sort of cache as directed towards domestic politics in America, for example. And now it definitely does. You had the weird LARP, or I'm a crusader guys with you know Davis volt shit because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan But you didn't have the sort of like we were kind of trad wife influencer crusader imagery Amalgamation that you see now. Yeah, that's new and it's weird because it feels like one follows from the other Thus it did kind of start quite a while ago, but it's just suddenly gotten way weirder

Yeah, I think that you're bang on here, Nate, because what used to happen was there was this like ironic detachment, you know, like, oh, actually, I simply love to get sent to a meat grinder in Baghdad because like days full something, something. And it was like, that was all fine because it was external, right? You know, the immortal enemy and trying to kind of like push forward this idea that Christianity and Islam have always been at war with each other, right? Which is like this very adorable understanding of the Crusades and you know as we go into in some length in our new Crusades project and like completely untrue the Seljuks are like what who?

I don't know. Who is this guy? The Franks? Like what? What if a Middle Eastern guy was French? Can you imagine? Yeah, this is like what if a Swedish guy was French and then became a Middle Eastern guy? Right? Like that's, yeah. So ultimately, I think what we're getting at is there is a very, very convenient reading

of that history that is as much about internal French politics or internal Frankish politics as it was about like Christendom as some kind of idea and Islam as some kind of idea. That is so much more complicated. And yet, and one of the reasons I think that it become so endemic in the modern right is that this was always the preserve of online weirdos. It's that online weirdos were always the foot soldiers and now the online weirdos are the generals.

I mean, the way I understand sort of Trumpism generally, and that also includes reform as well over here, is that these are influencer projects and the influencers are now in charge. Yeah, quite so. And it's very striking because the influencers are, as you sort of mentioned briefly as well, Nate, there is this whole kind of like a trad thing happening around that, which therefore kind of makes sense that they're glomming on to crusade stuff. And to be fair to them, I mean, thinking about the crusades and jacking off about the crusades and pretending that you're going to go on crusade. This is a very time honored tradition, right? Like the number one thing about the crusades is actually not going on crusade, but being like, oh yeah, man, someday. It's

like, I'm thinking about it right now. I've been sold a Destrier at 29.9 APR by a Jakub Fugger. But also because so much of the art even that you wind up seeing as representations of heroic crusader actions. If it was actually art from the era of the crusades, it would look like weird outsider art scrapping on scrap paper because the art styles and the materials were very, very different at the time. It's mostly like nostalgic, weird, retroactive historiography stuff from like the 19th century when like French artists getting really in their feelings about this war that happened in 1870 decided to start painting paintings of the Franks.

So much of it has always been retrospective and accumulated weird nostalgia and projection. And now it's just like, I don't know, it feels like a new version of that. Yeah. I think that we're very much experiencing something akin to what was going on in the 19th century when there was this intense nostalgia for the Middle Ages. And you know, the 19th century medieval nostalgia is really predicated by advances in industry, essentially. So it's like, oh yeah, we're looking back to the Middle Ages when things were bucolic

and people really were all very good Christians and we all lived in the countryside and wasn't at all very nice for all of us. It's basically the same thing as the people getting the soap ads from the 1950s and being like, this is what they took from you. Exactly. 100%. Right. And so I think that we're because we're we're undergoing this other and stupider kind of technological change at the moment. That's making people go back

to the Middle Ages again. And the trouble with the Middle Ages and why it's so possible to just completely misinterpret the Crusades and do all this kind of weird stuff about it is because they don't fucking know what they're talking about because nobody learns about the Middle Ages, right? So they're like, yeah man, the Crusades, that was like awesome and I presume it went really well. Anyway, hey ho, right? Which is, you know, the project that I've just kind of done with the guys from American Prestige, we're looking very specifically at the first crusade, which is like the successful one, right?

Quote unquote. And that was in like the 11th century, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah, it was really early. Yeah, super early. And it's the one that- Before woke. Yeah, exactly. It's the one that theoretically succeeds, right?

But it succeeds because the people in the Middle East did not expect a bunch of like quirked up white boys to be in their backyard, right? Like it's, and it was a failure on other accounts though, right? Because like, if you asked Byzantium, they'd be like, this was a dismal failure. We tried to get these, we tried to get these French guys

to like come help us out and they stole all our land, right? So like from a Byzantine perspective, miserable failure. Most people just died in a ditch of dysentery, you know, like hundreds of them just kind of like rot in the sun because they're wearing plate mail and they just like absolutely cack at it. There were people starving everywhere. It's just like an absolute absolute disaster and they kind of like a trip over their dicks and land in Jerusalem and manage to take it for like five seconds but then turns out everyone fucking hates them. It's a long way from

France and like the entire thing just completely collapses. And then you have to have several more crusades over the course of time, trying to retake it. Right. But none of that matters to these people because they don't actually know about it. Right. They just know that there were some Kings of Jerusalem vaguely for a point in time. And so therefore they're like, Oh yeah, this is, this is something that is. Sick as fuck. Edward Norton wore cool ass armor.

All right, let's not talk about leprosy, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, exactly. And so it becomes this really kind of like useful rallying cry where you can imagine these things. But what is kind of less clear to me, even though they're talking about this a lot, is what they exactly mean by that, right?

Because you have idiots like, I mean, Britain first exactly mean by that, right? Because you have idiots like, I mean, Britain first who still exist somehow, right? So like they were out here tweeting about like crusades in Birmingham the other week and they're like holding big crosses and I'm like, I'm sorry, you what? You're going to have a Pope led ride on on Birmingham? And this is the thing that the American Pope is going to ride in Birmingham What's so complicated they're doing a Maoist standard English the ones that becoming like the Ottoman Habsburg Wars and the gates of Vienna and stuff. And it's like, I think, yeah, at its core, a lot of it's just Islamophobic. But then it also kind of seems to imply too that they're like, but the internal enemy is also the Saracen, you know, there's a Salahuddin in every school board preaching woke DEI. And so it's like, it just becomes so confused because like, I think to me it's just, it's the iconography

of like, well, the Knights had swords and big shields and rode big horses and apparently did heroic feats. Yeah. That's it. For so long, I mean, this is I think an oft quoted Walter Benjamin line, fascism is the addition of the aesthetic to politics. And if you are a sort of hyper alienated suburbanite who... This is what I always go back to, as like the main, one of the people

who are like the political drivers now are how hyper-alienated suburbanites who consume media all the time and consume largely the same and similar media and are just being agitated by the same people thinking in the same ways, what are they going to do? I mean, look, we also know that the hyper-alienated suburbanite

tends towards falling down, but very few of them have the like courage of their convictions that Michael Douglas had in that movie to actually go out and be the change you wanted to see in the world. But then like 5% of them listen to Trash Future though. So you know what, like they do fall, they do good falling down.

They do nice good falling down dog day afternoon. Yeah, that correct. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we need you guys to be pecking paw. Not everyone has a Unibomb in them. So the thing about the Crusades, why it's sort of so attractive to these people and why you also see it's like now it's the influencers who are in charge, this stuff becomes much, much more apparent at the higher levels of power

is that that is an exciting aesthetic that most people know about because history is kings and knights and deeds. You know, just that's what they and that's all crusaders. That's what they would want history to be is kings, knights and deeds. Effectively saying if I were living in the 11th century, I would totally have been a badass crusader, you know, like William of Orange or something. Not William of Orange, but I'm trying to think of like the Chanson.

I would have crusaded to end the tyranny of being a Jacobite. I was thinking of Leprince d' tyranny. I was thinking of the priest around. I was thinking of different, different thing entirely. But it would be very funny if there was like a, yeah, like a Napoleonic era weeb for the crusades, who was just like insisted on wearing crusader armor. But yeah, it's like this idea that you would have totally been this person and you want to like live out that fantasy. It's a version of a superhero that's not soy and lib and Marvel and all this stuff.

And it goes back to... Wait, Riley, are you saying that in the minds of the American suburbanite who's alienated, a crusader is basically anti-woke Captain America? Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Captain Jerusalem. I am. I'm stamping this. I'm using that. No, I think that's really right. And it's a really kind of useful stand in for themselves, right? Where they are so convinced that they are somehow the subject of history, right? Where it's the thing that drives me the most insane when I'm having to deal with the general public,

other than the like people who think that medieval people don't bathe, is the idea that like they're a knight, right? Back in time, I would be a king, I would be a knight. And like I'm one of the important people. Like I'm one of the ones that history has written about. And it's like, baby, you're not, you're a knight, right? Back in time, I would be a king, I would be a knight. I'm one of the important people. I'm one of the ones that history's written about. And it's like, baby, you're not, you're a peasant. 80% of everybody is a peasant, right? And sure, there are peasants who go on crusade.

Maybe you're a currency trader, maybe. Could be that you are a leather worker. If you're a leather worker, count yourself fucking lucky to you. Yeah, you're doing good, right? Maybe maybe that give you an Albert. Doing a really bad job of reading and deciding you're going to be a medieval character and not doing the background on it and be like, I'm going to be a noble

like William of Norwich. Things are going to go great for me. It's going to be good. It's going to be so good. Yeah. If you are renting from a from a lord who's so absent or drunk that he doesn't put your like rent up and his sheriffs don't fuck with you when they like trade your corn for your flour and then your wife starts a sort of prosperous beer brewing business and then your son is able to like lend a small amount of money to someone else.

You have just made your entire fucking bloodline. You were not going to be a knight. That's the best you could hope for. Spinning the medieval noble character selector wheel again and getting Piers Gaveston again. I'm like, oh. Every time. My ass is barely recovered.

Yeah, anyway, sorry, sorry. It's like the Scott Adams of medieval England. Yeah, it is completely this though, right? Where it is quite funny because, I mean, there is the people's crusade, right? Especially with the first crusade and which is what these people would be on. And yeah, that's the one that like kills all the Jewish people on the way over and then gets like absolutely fucking destroyed by the Seljuks. Right. Like they get they get to Constantinople.

The Greeks are like, you like we did not. This is not what we ordered. Then they just get like shoved out onto the Anatolian peninsula and all slaughtered, which is 100% what would happen. Conveniently we have been developing comically oversized guns and we've just been waiting for something to fire at. Just going for it.

Today we decided to make guns as big as our turbines. Yeah, oh, you have the sort of bonds of fealty and competitions to do acts of violence with skill. We have a centralized proto state that is capable of producing and servicing artillery. Good luck. Anyway. The entire thing is like bonkers. But you know, there's also this this massive overlap with what I am 100% going to go out on a limb. And I'm going to call the great majority of people

who Catholic post adult converts. I'm allowed to say this because I'm like culturally Catholic. I did my 16 years of Catholic school. So I'm allowed to diagnose these people as repugnant. But there were all these ones once Pope Leo got made. There's all these posts that are like, I love the Catholic Church and I will go on crusade right now. I'm ready to like crusade for Pope Leo the 14th. And it's like, I'm sorry, you think the Pope from Chicago is going to call a crusade on what bitch? They have to rename Comiskey park. All right. They need all the faithful to descend on Chicago and rip down the fucked up sign

It's through name Really what what we're getting around right is like these kinds of there has never been a good fascist understanding of history Ever ever ever there's never been one and but also what you don't need you don't need a good understanding of history What you need is a good story. And the idea of, you know, chivalric knights doing brave deeds against a sort of foreign other, and that foreign other, by the way, is still here, but they're no longer elsewhere.

The foreign other is among us. And so the crusade must start at home. Making a crusade logistically much simpler. That's true. Yeah, I mean, there's no transport involved. Yeah, you don't have to make a deal with Enrico Dandolo. We'll ultimately screw with you. That sounds like a start-up guy we would talk about.

Yeah, I'm doing a crusade, love. I'll be home at six. Yeah, get a dinner on. Yeah, just doing it around the area. The thing is, after, you know, when there was a huge uptick of crusading imagery in Britain, I'll tell you when, during the post-Southport race riots. Oh, good.

Yeah, yeah. Good, good, good, good, good. But that's what you're talking about, right? Police arresting anyone carrying a Zwei hand. Suspicious. Yeah, yeah. What do you mean? I'm not threatening anybody. I'm just wearing this ringmail shirt and harbor. I'm allowed to wear chainmail. It says it there clearly in the Magna Carti. It's in plain Latin. Thumbs in chainmail. Yeah. We're having to arm the police with Zwei handers. In Britain, they have to call like the special Zwei hander police who are going to come

in to do special training. Morale among Zwei hander police is that an all-time low? Although to be fair a sword much more of a holdout weapon Then like a pistol then the spear which would have been more like your long gun anyway Yeah, I know I've seen Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet. I'm tracking everything you're saying You don't need a spear for home defense. It's not maneuverable Most people own spears are actually injured by those same spears. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my toddler got hold of my spear.

Look, I'm not saying we have to ban spears. I'm saying we have to ban... What would the spear version of a bump stock be? Like a sort of... Having a really beefy right arm. Anyway, the whole idea of the crusade imagery, it's like... It's typical for history to be misused in this way, right?

Because the actual history of actual people is never as simple as Christians are over here, Muslims are over here, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight. I mean, the Fourth Crusade is a perfect example of that. It's Christians killing Christians because they mismanaged their funds and were manipulated into it by Venetians. Yeah. Venetians were the secret third gender, right? Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. That's the story of the fourth crusade. And so I go back to, it is the last, most easy to understand version of there being a specifically anti-Muslim version of a superhero. Yeah, and it's the one time that you can say that the war ever quote unquote worked, right?

And they've been, it's been a thousand years that they're still trying to like get this one back, right? And it's really kind of depressing, especially when you see all of these things in conjunction very specifically with like AI generated art, which it always has. And which kind of tells you everything because it's so imaginary that you can't even like,

these people lack the wherewithal to even go find a fucking medieval image of the crusade, right? Yeah, because if they saw one, it would just look like, like a childhood drawn someone burned at the stake with like a lot of serene frowns. Yeah. Those people are frowning a lot considering they're on fire. I hate being on fire. There's a really good, there's a really good one that I like. Um,

the, that comes from one of the medieval paintings of, I think it's actually the Siege of Antioch. And they're saying, oh yeah, they've got witches on the walls that were doing dances to try to bewitch the crusaders. And the witches are like, twerking. They're shaking their asses. And the knights are like, no, sexy witch, no. Like, and it's a... I'm just imagining like, yeah,

cause you see the art of like, you know, when they finally got tired of the, you know, the Knights Templars and all the different fucking, the Hospitalier and stuff like that. It's like Hugh Dispenser being eviscerated and the look on his face is like, well, this is a bit inconvenient. Oh, that sucks.

I need my viscera. I need my face. I kinda like that lower intestine actually. But bringing it back, right? It's a story that's been told for a while, you know, Oh, that sucked. I knew my viscera. I kinda like that lower intestine, actually. But bringing it back, right? It's a story that's been told for a while, you know, that has become more mainstream. And the reason it's become more mainstream is, you know, primarily because if you want to excite people about a politics that punishes your neighbor because he's Muslim, then you

really could do worse than the Crusades. Or does it just feel too gauche to be a weeb for Slobodan Milosevic? I mean, because there is a more contemporary example of this. It just winds up being a lot more obvious what it is. And I mean, you know, these are, they're also like, that's not to say these aren't people who, you know, will walk around the town singing remove kebab. It's just, you need to be a bit more plugged in to a more complex version of history to

like appreciate that source of Islamophobic inspiration. Exactly. And I mean, I suppose that it's, it's to a certain extent, you know, I'm attempting to kind of like command the tide back here by saying like, why don't we actually like look at the history of this if we're going to go around yelling about it because obviously they don't want to do that they just want to be racist yeah they're excited about being racist they don't want to hear that like the county of Tripoli was in cre- was fucked or that Acker was like let people enjoy things okay guys we're so negative they're really having fun being racist it doesn't

really matter if it's like not really cool or like doesn't quite make sense. But that Acker was only like a square kilometer of Christian control, really. Yeah, you do. It's like granted, I understand that like I'm showing up trying to be like a like a pedant and well, actually these people. But I mean, also fundamentally, like these people are fucking nerds, right? Like, oh, yeah, man, you're going to go you're going to go do a crusade. That's what you're going to do, dude. That is like posting AI generated pictures

of, you know, Baldwin the first. Yeah, absolutely. Like I completely fucking believe this. And- That's Alex older brother. But I mean- Much, much, much older brother. Well, he didn't know that sword had been sharpened.

But it's- Oh, Jesus Christ. He was handed it by the armor and he thought it was a play sword. Yo. It was a whole, yeah armor and he thought it was a play sword. Yo. He was a whole, yeah, they were doing like a play and... Uh-huh. He was posing for a tapestry.

The other person in the scene had already got their frown practiced, ready to go. Yeah. And then they got to frown for real. Sorry, please, go on, Eleanor. Oh, no, it's just just one of these things, right? Where I think that this is genuinely a really interesting part of history, but not for the reason that people

think that it is. And I suppose that what I'm sort of attempting to do here is like some form of actual public education about what the crusades are. So at least you can just be like, shut the fuck up, nerd, when people say things like this to you. Which is the only correct answer to it.

And granted, it sort of doesn't matter how much actual real history you do because they just don't want to hear it. But I think that it makes it useful because there are so many people out there who think of themselves as history buffs, she says, in incredibly loose quotations. Yeah, like Patrick Wyman. Yeah, this guy, the buffest historian I can think of. I mean, I think that man can probably bench me. So yeah, like that's that's what

we call history, right? So yeah. And so it's like one of these things where at a point in time, you do actually have to know about this to tell people to shut the fuck up. And we also need to kind of be looking at these histories because they do get misused in these really terrible ways. But you know, I'm not trying to take these people seriously, but I am trying to kind of like take away their toys a little bit. I just want to like, I just want to give them the spanking that they so are all begging for. Right. And then like, you know, send them back home to kind of like, go think about that. so are all begging for, right? And then like, you know, send them back home to kind of like go think about that. That's all, right?

What we really need to do is have a football chant where to the tune of like, can't fight the moonlight. You do like a song about how Boniface I of Montferrat was redirected to Sac Byzantium by the Venetians and didn't get to go to the Holy land at all. Oh, that's, I'm working it up as we speak, Riley. That's fantastic. That's right. Yeah, we just need more.

We need more football chanting about the Crusades. Anyway, anyway. So where can people find with this? When this project comes out, where will people be able to find it? It's going to be out in mid June, and you can find it either by following us at We're Not So Different, my lovely little medieval history podcast, or you can check it out over at American Prestige. So it's a fun little crossover that we did. It's 10 episodes. It's a kind of standalone series that we're doing. And I think it's

really good. And it was really, really fun to work in depth with Derek, who is, you know, an Islam scholar. So it was nice to kind of like, you know, bring that in and just like nerd the fuck down for hours and hours and hours. But really, really great. If you want to if you want to argue more effectively about the Crusades, come check it out. And this show, you also can get a second episode. We're going to be talking a little bit more in depth

about South Africa on Thursday. So Milo, I'm sure is excited about that. Let me tell you, it's going to go off. With Ben Fogel, a historian, who is going to be in studio. So- Not that Ben Fogel. No, a different one. Not the guy, not the guy who rode across the Atlantic. No, different guy.

He used to be on the one show. No, so we're going to be talking with Ben all about South Africa on the bonus episode, which you can access for now, four pounds 50. We have changed our main currency to pounds due to dollar market volatility. Let's fucking go. That's right.

Today is the day trash used to officially became British. Yeah, by the way, just to, just so you, if you're wondering, you're already subscribed to the Patreon, nothing changes for you, right? It's just future people will be like, will be paying four pounds 50 rather than you. So that's the situation.

Don't concern yourself. Also, if you are going to subscribe to the Patreon, do not do it through the Patreon iOS app. Do not do it. Because you will be charged almost double. And we will get no more money than it normally would. If you subscribe to this show through the Patreon iOS app, you are donating money to Tim Cook.

And I really wish you wouldn't. Sign up through the Patreon web browser version and you can still listen to it through the Patreon web app if you decide to do so. Or you can listen to it through the Patreon iOS app. Just don't sign up on it. Don't do it. Because otherwise Apple takes a fucking a tithe. That policy is currently working its way through court right now as it's been obviously challenged

by the FTC. Yeah, it does seem to be hugely obviously illegal. Yes. But also live shows, Trash Future live show on the 21st of June. And also there's Glue Factory and Lions Led by Donkeys, either side of that. You can go to all three in one weekend if you so desire. There's also Trash Future at the Fringe on the 31st of July. Tickets for that are on sale. They're going fast. And I'm going to be in Ireland this week, actually. This week and next.

It's going to come out on Tuesday. Yeah, so I'm going to be from Friday through to the following Friday of the following week. I'll be in Ireland. I'll be in Ireland. I'll be in Kilkenny, Dublin, Cork, Belfast. And then I've got shows in Bristol, London, also London, 19th of June, Refugee Action Live Show. Please do buy tickets to that.

Christmas Island, Easter Island. That's right. Palau, Kiribati. Norfolk Island. Yeah. Yeah. Palaeo. Yes. All right That's right. Palau, Kiribati. Norfolk Island. Yeah. Yeah. Paleo.

Yes. All right. All right. I think that's all of the end. That's all the end matter. The theme music, which I've forgotten to say for about three years. Acre. He's going to be in the County of Antioch.

Yeah. That's right. The County of Tripoli. Addessa. Yeah. He's going to be performing for the king in the Kingdom of Jerusalem for Crusader action. Yeah. The Donbass.

All right. All right. Enough of that. Do I have anything else to say? Yes, the theme song is Here We Go by Jinsang. I forgot to say that for the last three years. Oh wow, for like a year, yeah. I should probably mention that more. Alright, see you on the bonus episode everybody. Bye! Thanks for watching!