TRASHFUTURE - The City Is Poised for ‘Bromley Hitler’

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

For this week’s free episode, it’s Riley, Milo, Hussein, and November discussing London local elections, the UK media’s reactions to pro-Palestine student protests in British universities, the huge backtracking on workers’ rights proposals from Starmer, and much more. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *LIVE SHOW ALERT* See us live in London on May 29th with special guest Nish Kumar! Get tickets here: https://bigbellycomedy.club/event/trashfuture-presents-liz-truss-presents-ten-years-to-save-the-west-ft-nish-kumar/ *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hello, it's me, Sakir Starmer, and I'm very excited to announce that the hotline has blinked in the Labour Party offices this week, and I can confirm that Canadian hip hop impresario Drake has defected to the Labour Party. As someone who's long been a fan of Canadian hip hop style rap and also old episodes of Degrassi which I watch with Angela Rayner on a regular basis, I'm very proud to welcome him over to the Labour Party and I know that he's been subject to some criticisms recently but I'm sure he's going to be vital in our plan to reach out to younger voters. And so now I would like to ask Mr Drake to help me with my own diss track against Rishi Sunak. Rishi why is our public infrastructure so under invested from sensible social programs you've divested. You should reorganise our finances. They're in disarray. I welcome what the Prime Minister has done, but I would

request that he go further with sound investment decisions in a sensible way." ALICE AND TROY LAUGH ALICE At the end of the next election, some fear the number of Labour MPs may reach as high as 1738. TROY That's right. And the number of Tory MPs might drop as low as six. Hi everybody, it's TF. Milo is, well Keir Starmer briefly was here. Yeah, yeah, he had to go. Yeah, and Milo's back now. I am, I'm back. I'm back on this side of the world, which is nice. Yeah, Milo and Edwards, the close side of the world.

How about that one? There we go. How about that one for you? Podcasts are now battlefields. I tell you what being away for a long time really makes you realize is, you know, Australia is nice. However, I have like a routine when I'm here and I have so many things to do each week, what I've realized is that the only way I can do that is with like a large amount of autopilot, just by there are certain times and days where I'm

in certain places and I do certain things. And if I'm on the other side of the world, my brain collapses, because I have to remember all of that stuff manually. And it makes you realise just how fallible the human psyche really is. ALICE There's a little sort of box in your psyche when you're setting out to do something that's like, are you in Australia? At this moment. And once that's ticked, you're like, fucked.

That's right. Yeah. You just go into snag mode. Yeah. Now, now, now that Andy Rooney has come and gone as well, I want to get into our episode. We're going to talk a little bit about the local elections. We're going to talk about the ongoing response or non-response or whatever you want to call it to the, well to the local elections, the political environment,

where generally that is continuing the transformation, it seems just MP by MP, of the Labour Party into the Conservative Party. Yeah, into a kind of retirement home for Tory MPs fleeing that sinking ship. Yeah, they're doing island hop. Yeah. Look, I mean, this is the thing, this is a niche we could carve out for ourselves, because obviously, like, some in the Labour Party don't want frothing right-wing Tory MPs in the Labour Party, but they have to go somewhere, right?

And so I propose Trashfuture, SPAC, Oil Warehouse, Hedge Fund, also become a political party, solely for the purpose of giving us a caucus in parliament while all of these freaks serve out the rest of their term. Oh wait, are you saying that we could be like, a kind of warehouse storage for like, end of career frothing right wing freaks? They're just like, nailed into boxes and then like, lifted up onto big shelves in a warehouse. Exactly, exactly. Like, Sakeir, on your way out, let me just pitch this to you.

This is a service we can offer you. If you let Tory MPs defect to us instead of to you, you will hear nothing from them, because we will be silencing them. It will be a cash for no questions affair. You're proposing, you're basically proposing like, tax loss harvesting. Yes, yes. That's exactly what I'm doing. Now, I also want to, and then we're going to talk a little bit, of course, about the, we talked about how the sort of wave of campus protests in the US was going to move to the

UK and there have been predictably UK responses to that. And then we're going to have a little bit of fun with something I've got planned for us at the end. But first, I just need to like, I know that we poisoned ourselves with electoralism in 2019. ALICE We did. RILEY And then we let ourselves get, like, hopeful again, but I... we can't... we cannot rely on electoralism again because Brian Rose lost

the London mayor election. ALICE I know. RILEY It was rigged. ALICE It was Bruce Hall. Yeah, well, cause this is the thing, it's like Russia, they fear real opposition. And so you have to have controlled opposition like Susan Hall or the Britain First guy or Count Binface, all of whom outpolled Brian Rose in the biggest electoral injustice in this nation's history.

You know it was rigged because the following day when Sadiq won, he was on the evening standard wearing a suit, wearing a green linen suit, and I can only read that as like a dig at Brian Rose, the only man who knows how to wear a suit in a way that Derek the suit guy just cannot comprehend. Yeah, he like, as a humiliation thing, he beat him and then he stole his thing of wearing a suit in an interesting way. They are doing this to demoralize you! Part of the resistance inside the Soneek administration. He knows that Brian Rose hates the Riddler.

And so it was a particular... I can't wait to... Brian Rose is like, I tolerate the Joker. He seems like he might drink his own piss. But the Riddler and his ridiculous puzzles? I care not for that man. Which is weird because the Riddler is the most crypto-pilled Batman villain by a country mind.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is true. So no, we are now entering the glorious third term of the thousand year Con Eight, I'm calling it. Unquestioned, moderate, slightly disappointing centre-left policies. Yet like, just riding in, like, at the head of a column of horsemen, erecting a giant kurgan where City Hall used to be. ALICE But they tried that with the mounds, right? That was a dry run.

RILEY That was Khan's kurgan! We're ready to impose one thousand years of, like, a 2P tax on motorists or whatever. RILEY That was why people feared, uh, y'know, on the Eurasian steppe feared the Khans so much, it was the Ulaz policies. Really fucked with all of their ox. Every car owner is now going to have to install a mandatory car bomb in their vehicle. Council employees are allowed to key any vehicle that they see, and Jeremy Vine has been given 007 legal kill status for any motorist he runs across.

Yeah, you actually have to genuflect the guy who cycles around with his cat in the front basket of his bike now. That's obliged, you owe him a salute as he goes past. We should also say that Jeremy Vine, aside from being this nation's greatest living broadcaster, is now also this nation's greatest living video editor. I never see a Jeremy Vine video where I'm not like, the edit on this is crazy. I don't know whether he's doing it himself or whether he has like a zoomer doing it, but like the, the, like the dramatic, like smash cuts, the text,

it's all, it's, it's very, it's got a deep aesthetic. Jeremy Vine's like zoomer hype beast video. So what, what actually happened right with the election, is I think the Tories just have assumed that they're never going to be able... The Tories have assumed that they're never going to be able to win a London mayoral election again. Same thing with New York, the Republicans are like, yeah we're not, we're just never winning there.

Which is weird because they could, if anyone wanted the job who could get elected. This is the thing, it's a poison chalice for any conservative since Boris, right? And the only person, like, the only Tory person they want to do it is Karen Brady off The Apprentice, and she doesn't wanna do it, for any number of personal reasons. So they keep throwing nobodies like Susan Hall at it, and going, okay, when will the fascist coalition of anti-ULES guys build itself together under her. ALICE Under like a kind of wacky art from Hero. RILEY They need to run Captain Gatza.

ALICE It's the only solution. RILEY Actually, that's not a bad idea, because the sort of way that I saw it was like, well, one way is kind of, like, the Tories could sort of win London again if they could find someone who could at least pretend that they liked being in London. But, y'know, I think Boris was sort of like, kind of, I mean, I was pretty young and sort of disinterested when he got elected, so I can't really remember what the campaign was, but he strikes me as a guy who wouldn't, like, his campaign wouldn't be like, yeah, this place fucking sucks and

I hate it, and like... Yeah, Boris's campaigns were more like, he's funny, check out this funny guy, he says the, you know, whiff whaff. But the reason why I was thinking, and like, there was that period of time just before the election where, and obviously we know that it was kind of bullshit and like, you know, political journalists sort of just like took the bait, but one of the things that I, and lots of other people were sort of thinking was, oh, like, Susan Hall could potentially win it. And the reason why she could potentially win it would be because I think there is like

a greater sort of disparity between greater London and the inner cities in terms of, or inner London in terms of what its politics actually are. And so if you had someone who was a bit more politically astute, who could take the anger and take the politics of resentment, but I think it's very ubiquitous in lots of external London. And having lived exclusively in between zones five and seven lots of external London, and like, having lived exclusively in between like zones five and seven most of my life, like, it is very evident. ALICE You're so right. Like, the city is poised for Bromley Hitler. Like, it's only a matter of

time before someone from one of the bits of London that is technically in London but shouldn't really be is like, Leeds... NICHOLAS Ruling London from the Glade shopping centre. Holding a rally at the Chislehurst Caves. The echo you'd get on that. You needed someone who would basically be able to kind of like, form an army of You Les Dri... Like anger at You Les Driven car bombers, to like, you know, just kind of like really drive this campaign and Susan Hall was not bad. So all of which is to say that like, it's kind of tactic that the Tories, you know, the tactics... I mean, again, I feel like it sort of sparks back to the idea that they'd never thought

that this woman would win, and then like on the off chance that like, oh she might, you know, they sort of like quickly change their tune. But if you had someone who could just like really contain that energy, like a Faraj type figure, like it could have gone energy, like a Farage type figure. Like, it could've gone a very very different way, and I don't know what, obviously I don't know what's gonna happen in the next term, but like, I wouldn't necessarily write off that kind of politics becoming a lot more dominant in conservative party stuff. Touching my hand to the lathe here, Nigel Farage is from London, right?

Like he went to school in Dulwich, like, he could be Bromley Hitler if he wanted to be, it's just, it would be a demotion from the kind of Hitler job he's like, auditioning for now. Or at least Orpington Mussolini. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great restaurant. But, the thing is, elections in the UK, I think we've, having sort of sat through quite a few of them, being sort of invested in a couple of them.

Elections in the UK, for a very long time, largely being about dissatisfaction with incumbency. ALICE Yeah, well this is interesting because this election has been a blueprint of boring versus boring, right? And the Cannes campaign was, no one sees him, no one talks to him, you forget he's there, enough people vote out of inertia that he gets his third term, and then he comes out in his new Percival suit and celebrates. Yeah. Not enough, and it's like, all you didn't do is motivate enough people, more or less, against him. And that's the thing, it was basically how many people hate you, Les, and will remember to bother to vote.

Not enough, basically. And it's this, you know, you can map that. There are a lot of political journalists who have been trying to draw, again, a lot of conclusions about how to map the local elections that have just gone onto an upcoming Westminster election and, you know, say a lot of that has been pretty spurious, right? Because you're not going to... People at Westminster elections aren't going to vote for third parties as often. Also turnout does tend to be a little bit higher than in local elections. But nevertheless, you know, there is, broadly speaking, the sort of decimation of the Tories

didn't mean lots and lots of voters going to labor. Labor won out of it, but there was a lot of, there were councillors that went over to reform, there was also wins for the Workers' Party of Great Britain, there were also wins for the Greens, considerable, actually, like Labour support going over to the Greens. Yeah, chipping away on Bristol at Labour. But moreover, I think there are a few things that will probably, there are a few things that got germinated in these local elections that will probably stick around as national political tendencies.

One of which is it looks as though all of the like, I don't know, like unelected fake job people whose job it is to get like performatively scared of anything outside the British political mainstream are now looking squarely at the Greens. Like we have John Mann writing them letters. We have the JLM, the Labour party affiliated group writing about their concern with the Greens, saying that like- It doesn't even go here. Yeah. But they do have a lot of feelings.

And you know, so it's like, okay, well, we now know, right, exactly what's gonna happen with the Green Party, because they are where the left that looks at sort of Starmer's Labour and says we don't want to be involved in this at all. ALICE Yeah, they're the new thing that has to be policed. Because there's enough drift that they're the only credible thing to police. And the Labour right love policing stuff, they love it. They're crazy about it. It's just gonna be really funny when it's applied to the Green Party because it's gonna

have to be like, you're eating lentils in an anti-Semitic way. Like, there's a lot of criticisms you could level at the Green Party, but they're just so fundamentally harmless. We saw it work already, because Corbin was spiritually quite green. He was a lentil man. Like, you know, he was lentiled up. He was lentiled up. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He was allotment maxing. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So we see, like, the sort of, like, I don't know, the monstering of the greens. Again, like, you know, John Mann just, like, getting his, like, getting Terminator vision at the greens, and then, like... Who are, like, an electoral threat, but not a huge one. No.

Versus, you know, Orpington Mussolini, they're not about to become Bristol Stalin. Maybe they should do, but... Do you disavow the actions of the Green Giant? Do you agree that it is violent and intimidating when he says, ho ho ho? Oh, this Spanish Green Giant has some skeletons in his closet. Those tweets, hmm. NICHOLAS He was a Francoist. ALICE Would you nationalize Maros?

NICHOLAS Just the jolly green giant striding into Madrid ending the Spanish Civil War. Grim times. RILEY But we don't want to know what policies he did want to bring about. NICHOLAS He wounded Hemingway. RILEY The other thing, though, the other tendency I think we've seen a lot, but that has come out in quite an ugly way from these local

elections, is the idea that fundamentally it is illegitimate to court, quote unquote, capitals at the start of each letter, the Muslim vote. ALICE Yeah, this is, again, groups being policed, right? This community, we insist on leaving the Labour Party when they shouldn't, and this is because of ancient hatred. I mean, the anonymous Labour source saying one of the most racist things I've ever heard in my life. RILEY Wait, wait, sorry. After this local election, I'm gonna have to ask you you which of the instances of that? Specifically, the one talking about Hamas winning in the West Midlands?

I mean, to be fair, that was a great one on the board for Hamas. No one really expected that. I mean, they are kind of a single issue party and no one was really expecting them to make such big inroads even in the West Midlands, but, you know, fair play to the mass candidate. Was pretty shocked at the count. But yeah, no, you had a bunch of, like, Labour right insiders, you know, texting journalists, the most, like, repulsive, heinous shit, and then, like, having to cover for each other by being like, oh, this kind of repulsive heinous shit wouldn't be allowed in Keir Starmer's Labour Party, and if I ever find out which

Luke Akerst did it, then he will certainly be expelled from the Labour Party. Like, it speaks to a real kind of, well, obviously the repressive tendency of the Labour right that we know about, but also the racism that we know about, but also a little bit of, like, edge of panic, right? Yeah, sorry, Hussain, I want to bring you in on this one as well. Yeah, I'm really surprised that the Labour Party is Islamophobic. It's like the first Islamophobic. No, it's like, it's not particularly surprising.

You know, and I don't really know what to say about it other than we will see more of it. It's an interesting insight where, on the one hand, it's not necessarily that there's a dependency, but obviously for a very long time Muslim votes have made up part of the coalition of which Labour calculates its ability to win. Under Stammer and also particularly in relation to the fallout over anti-Semitism afterwards, one of the things that I think we spoke about on this show during that time was the kind of conflict that this would have with Muslim voices, partly because of the ways in which... And at the time that we were talking about this, it wasn't to say that it was abstract because obviously, there was still, you know, Gazan was still there,

there was still surveilling and policing and brutality, people like Gazans were still dying there, but the current war was not in place, and so it was sort of treated in this very abstract way. And as we've sort of spoken about a lot, a lot of the things that came out of that report have now just been thrown into the bin by the people who were like, and still kind of policing people and chasing them out of the Labour Party. Not most noticeably the idea that you can sort of... The report still sort of says that you can criticize the state of Israel without being anti-Semitic, that is a legitimate position to make. And what we've seen over the past few months is actually, no, that's not true. Any criticism you make of Israel is in fact deeply anti-Semitic, and you don't get to

defend yourself from that. And so, obviously this is going to alienate people for whom a kind of religious war is being- Oh, interesting. Suddenly you think something does have the right to defend itself. Was this like, well, you sort of also manufactured this into a religious war by the nature of like, how you have reacted to what is going on. Of course you're going to alienate people. You're certainly like, I don't think it should be seen as like a holistically like, you know, Muslim votes are turning away from us type of thing. I think that like, obviously voting is a lot more complicated. I don't believe that like the Muslim vote is a kind of, you know,

holistic thing in the way that lots of media types sort of insist it is. Nevertheless, like, voting is a lot more complicated. I don't believe that the Muslim vote is a kind of holistic thing in the way that lots of media types sort of insist it is. Nevertheless, this is sort of an inevitable consequence. And one that is extremely frustrating to see columnists and political pundits and people who have access to actual political stuff and not just like us doofuses who are on the show, who are kind of just pretending to be deeply oblivious to that. And this is just going to get worse. It is absolutely going to get worse. And like, I don't know, the gambit at the moment is very much like, you know, and I think the sort of news about Labour and who it's sort

of allowing into its ranks and who isn't, is very much indicative of a Kirsten Armer Labour Party who have sort of hinged their entire strategy on getting rid of all the voters that begrudgingly voted for them for decades and decades in order to sort of court the most insane Tories that you can even imagine. And like, I don't know, fucking good luck to them I guess. And enthusiastically, shaking the fleas off was like the description about it. And we talk about like the, and I think this can be seen as, I think you cannot see the shift in the color of tie that will be administering the zero hours contracts, basically, right?

You have to see these things all at once. And you know, this, like the great weirdening of the Tories continues apace because the voters that they lost, they lost some to like labor, they lost some to Lib Dems, they lost some to reform. But the only focus of our political media entertainment like edifice that I've seen has been how like the Tories have to what the local elections show that the Tories have to chase the voters who are leaving to reform and labor has to chase the voters that are leaving the Tories as they run to reform.

All of which means, right, like there are two events that happened in the last few in the last few days that perfectly encapsulate this right beyond the local elections. Number one is as a result of just three actually one of them involved in local elections, which is that Tunbridge Wells is no longer Tory. It's a Lib Dems. It's like a Lib Dem council now. Incredible. Great stuff.

Yeah. For those of you not in Britain, Tunbridge Wells is probably like the spiritual centre of English nationalist fascism. The genteel middle class sort of English fascism. It's the site of, I believe, the most expensive boarding school in the UK, in fact. It's the kind of by-right to Bromley Hitler. Yeah. It's your archetypical sort of priggish curtain twitching letter to the editor.

Disgusted in Tunbridge Wells. Exactly. It's always signed disgusted of Tunbridge Wells. And they're going Lib Dem, the Tories got too weird for them. But the other thing- Just like, economy gets one percent too bad, I've now been reading 700 pages of decolonial gender theory. I went to uni with a girl who lived in Tunbridge Wells, and every night she would have a phone

conversation with her dog. I'm not joking, that happened. We were having dinner in our halls and she was just like, oh I've gotta call the dog. And she came back and I was like, could you, could you like say that again? She's like, yeah, I phoned my dog. It's like, because my dog misses me. It's sure. And she was from Tom Bridgewell. Yeah. It's obviously though, like as, as a typical sort of home counties British person, being on the phone with the dog does make it harder because you can, you can see the dog, but you can't physically kiss it on the mouth. You can't even see the dog, because like, you know, this was like, we didn't have, well, I mean, like there were smartphones, but like most of us, if you were really wealthy, you had like a Blackberry, but if you didn't...

Calling my dog on my Motorola Razr. Yeah. So she was calling her dog on her Blackberry. Yeah. The dog has like a Bluetooth headset, like one of those call center ones. Like one earphone and a mic. Yeah. NICCO So in addition to Tunbridge Wells, the epicenter of like people having strange relationships with their dogs. SID Which is woke now. Now they're going to have to ask their dogs pronouns. NICCO Is the Tory defections continue, which we've alluded to. Natalie Elphick, who basically

in- SID Scraped through the bottom of the barrel into the kind of sediment below the barrel. Indeed. Isn't she the MP for Dover? She is. That strikes me as a pretty right wing part of town. Well, now, Kent has two Labour MPs, her and Rosie Duffield. Yeah, Rosie Duffield fucking hates it, which is really funny. Like, Rosie Duffield has

been briefing against Big Keir about this. There's been like serious pushback from like her and some other Labour MPs about this. So I guess they really it's kind of like highlander. That can only be one Kent Labour MP, you know? Yeah, it's going to be Tunbridge Wells. But right. So Natalie Elphick has basically crossed the aisle to the Labour Party and... Well everything's moving so far right. She woke up in the Labour Party and well everything's moving so far right she woke up in the Labour Party. It was like I kind of like post World War One Central Europe where you just woke up and they were like

you're in Poland now. And you're like what? And they're like start speaking Polish now. Yeah, Natsali Elfik has defected to Czechoslovakia. Yeah that's right. So basically the Sudeten Tauri. This is, this is, this is more, this is the best possible like summary of it. Bromley Hitler occupying the Bromley Sudetenland. You know, again, like more, I think the all that needs to be said about it is that this is someone who is a stop the boats right wing Tory from Rishi Sunak was too soft and not sort of speculate.

And we all know, right, that every Labour MP's favourite MP is a Tory MP. Yeah. I said that last time, and it came even more true. And also, do we want to talk about how she got her seat in the first place? I think it is worth talking about how she got her seat, and also remembering, I do hate to bring this up, but it's also worth remembering that in 2019, remember how we expelled sleaze, corruption, and sort of, you might say...

Grafts. Yeah, grafts, racism, things like this, from British politics for good. Yeah, of course. Take it away. Well, so, Natalie Elphick got her seat when her husband, Charlie Elphick, I wanna say? Correct, yes. husband, Charlie Elphick, I wanna say? Was arrested, charged, and then convicted of sexual assault, and she and a bunch of other MPs made submissions that, like, tried to improperly influence the judge in that court hearing, and her submission was, don't convict my husband of sexual assault because

it's not his fault he's hot. He is like a ten out of ten smoke show, he's a baddie, therefore, like, it's not his fault he's hot. He is like a 10 out of 10 smoke show, he's a baddie, therefore like, it's not his fault. Which is insane. And then they major an MP! And then in the story... But how do you fucking grandfather that shit in? How is there a line of dissent on an MP seat to wife after you get done for sexual misconduct? Boris is like, he is hot to be fair. I'd shag him.

What the fuck is this, Crusader Kings? Yeah, right? But, but, right, and not sort of, and of course like it is unsurprising, right, that these people are extremely right wing. It's unsurprising that they're hypocrites. But if you, I sort of pair this in my mind, right, with the same time, a couple days ago, the package of workers' rights that was, that was sort of Angela Rayner's baby, right? But at the same time, a couple days ago, the package of workers' rights that was sort of Angela Rayner's baby, that was to be... That was one of the big

promises as yet unbroken by the party. Because, y'know, they broke their promises about... ALICE Angela Rayner, like, it's worth staying in, because I have this whole package of, like, labour reforms, and I will never get Tonya Harding'd. RILEY Yeah. And how essentially- Kier stalking towards her in the car park with a tire iron. I welcome your shins. But shy before I think what to happen to them.

Yeah. Now. And at the same time, this package of reforms, I have it here, has essentially the renewed new deal it's now called. The new new deal. The newer deal. The newest possible deal we could emphasize. Everything is for the deal and the newest of all possible deals. We've got the newest deal folks. People say they've got a deal it's all done. So just a Trump on QVC.

Beautiful broach, gold plated. What they have done is they they promised a of things, including a new single status for all workers effectively eliminating the gig economy. They promised... What if they get everyone single now? It's gonna be a horny time. Every worker declared single and fuckable. Yeah, that's right.

Submissive and readable. It's hot worker summer. Also, they declared that you would get full employment rights from day one, so no sort of probationary periods where you could be fired without cause, and so on and so on. They had there was to be a low pay commission, who would have a statutory duty and powers to raise wages as much as possible, things like this. Yeah, some of the really obvious abuses like zero hours contracts, like firing you and then immediately rehiring you on worse terms, and the unions were all for this and they were willing to stick up with

a lot of like, Starmer bullshit because they were gonna get this through, and now... It was like, yeah, okay, fine, we're not gonna get the green... Yeah, yeah, yeah, two genders, whatever, fine, fine, fine, can you do something about the zero hours contracts? And Keir Starmer was like, yes. And then it was like, we're not gonna get the Green Prosperity Plan. We're not really gonna meaningfully nationalize rail in any way. We're not really gonna do anything about all the poo in the rivers. We're not...

Bunch of weird turf shit, also. Yeah. Oh, that's not in the rivers as well, is it? But we are at least going to have a bunch of quite labor friendly, it's in the name of course, changes to workers' rights. What has happened is all of these have been watered down to either sector specific, so for example, the fair pay agreement in all sectors, which would see collective bargaining mandated in each different industrial sector, has been watered down to a promise to consult

on a fair pay agreement in the social care sector only. Wow. This is nothing. This is absolutely nothing. It's a lot. It's a big change. This is absolutely nothing. It's a lot. It's a big change to go from all sectors to one sector a bit. Yeah, most of the sectors you're taking out. Almost all of them, in fact.

It will also, basically what they've said is they have clarified that their proposed ban on zero hours contracts will be a right to contract reflecting a worker's regular work pattern over the previous 12 weeks. Essentially, all of these things are leaving so much wiggle room that anyone who is currently powerful, say an employer for example... There's a wiggle your way right through that. Yeah, you just don't have to do it. You won't have to do any of it. Yeah, and so the union's response to this, to exercise their, you know, pretty substantial financial lever on Kirstir Starmer, because they

still fund the Labour Party to a great extent, has been to be like, frowny face. We will have a come to Jesus meeting with Keir Starmer. Which has not happened yet, I believe. Yeah. Keir Starmer's just constantly going around to every single power broker in the UK and going, do you hate me? Do you? Oh, oh.

Are you mad at me? Are you mad at me? Are you mad at me? Can I do something? And the thing is, all of these, like, Labour people are mad at him, but they're also, like, so broken by, like, years of, like, Labour and Tory governance, that they're just like... Their only red lines are, frowny face. Like, maybe I'm wrong, maybe they'll surprise me, but like, I'm not optimistic about how this is gonna go.

Yeah, if Kirstelem's not careful, the trade union congress are gonna send him that emoji of like, the warthog with his head exploding, and then he'll really be in trouble. So, what really, what we have, is you have the same kind, broadly speaking, the same kinds of rights for people who are already in permanent jobs. And the more close, the higher up the scale it is, obviously, the better. You have that already. I welcome the shrinking of the fence, but I call upon it to go further. What you also have then is pretty much no root out of casualized work, no root out of precarious work.

It's the same kind of like, if you want to know, there's been lots of sort of ink spilled about, what is starmarism, what is starmarism? I mean, I'm ongoing with my view that it is a media management project. And it had an idea of, what do we think the papers and the press want to hear? Well, with the Labor Party,

so it should probably be some investment, people kind of liked that. And then there was sort of pressures and pressures and pressures and people didn't like it all. And it's been slowly whittled down to, I will kind of just tell you whatever you want until eventually the plan seems to be to have all seats under one party rule because everybody just joins the Labour party. And it more or less continues the glorious project of Cameronism. It's beautiful isn't it? It's a managed democracy. We're going to be like the LDP in Japan. Like red tie. That's the sole policy left is red tie. Unless you don't like it, in which case

blue tie. Rishi Sunak should join the Labour Party and become leader. He could stay on as Prime Minister. He'll just convince Keir Starmer into letting him be leader. Welcome Rishi Sunak, new member for North Yorkshire, you know? So what is ultimately right, it's not worthwhile asking what's the difference, because there is no difference. It's just interesting to note that what is actually happening is, everybody seemed to agree that the main problem of David Cameron was the Brexit referendum, and then that kind

of threw things for a loop for a little while, as well as like, the Labour Party accidentally becoming a much more, if not, again, having much more popular policies. Those things all happened for a while. We reset though. Brexit, aberration to the right, Corbyn, aberration to the left, we re-centre back to Cameron and Osborne, I guess. We've gone from the guy who fucked the pig's head to a guy who looks like the pig's head that got fucked, but like, the policies remain basically the same. The sentiment remains. It's slightly nastier, in some ways. It's like, Cameronism... Cameronism will never stop, right? Cameronism, it's like the T2000.

You know, you can be- Our goal is the unhappiness of all mankind. Yeah. Cameron's ill. Cameron's. Yeah. Cameron Jill, Cameron Jeeve, Cameron Boudinjie. It's like Cameronism can never be stopped. It can be slowed down. Oh, which is the thing is true. Cameronism has never been tried. Yeah, that's right. Look, maybe we just didn't hug enough hoodies. Um, you know, so it's, it's like, it's just 2015 again and we're just going to pick up as though the last like eight years more or less didn't happen. It was all a dream. Yeah

Yeah, yeah, well I put it to you that it didn't happen. Mmm Look a lot of people have been criticizing the Labour Party saying what exactly you're offering Whereas I think we're very carefully threaded the needle We have a lot of stakeholders that we must take into account for the benefit of people in business and the media I'm actually doing nothing but for the benefit of people in business and the media. I am actually doing nothing, but for the benefit of voters, I am appearing to do something whilst actually doing nothing. And that's actually quite difficult. I think not even it's accurate to say doing nothing, doing quite a bit of very aggressive

activity in foot, but that's homeostatic. It's like he's doing quite a bit just to make sure that nothing changes. Or if it changes, that it gets worse for the people it's supposed to get worse for and better for the people it's supposed to get. You see the thing in The Guardian about interviewing a bunch of climate scientists who are like, oh yeah, we're fucked. We're like mega fucked. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it's cool. We're going to go back to 2015, but with like the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere way higher. It's going to make everyone stupid. So what we're saying is the politics of 2015, the climate of the Paleocene. Yes. Great. Perfect. Yeah, I think that the politics of 2015 is a perfect way to react to, yeah, I don't know, a Pangea climate. Perfect. Well, someone tell Keir Tomer not to eat any bacon sandwiches or he could be in real trouble.

Anyone who's gonna say, oh, Pangea wasn't the paleo scene, that was just the first like geographic epoch, geological epoch I could think of. Don't tell me I don't want to know. But look, this is ultimately, I think what we learn is from the council elections, what we learn from the ongoing, like, you know, shite-festing or whatever you want to call it that has been going on in basically the one political party that runs Britain, is that these things are going to continue defending themselves, and they're defending

themselves most probably, if you're listening to this, from you. Yes. Absolutely. Basically. Not necessarily the you that exists now, unless you're in the Green Party, but like, the you that could exist. The angrier you, the cooler you, the you that throws Molotov cocktails at things. That kind of you. Of which, one, the cooler you, the you that throws Molotov cocktails at things. That kind of you. Of which, one of those climate scientists, the Guardian interviewer, was like, yeah, I give it five years before there's serious state civil disorder, worldwide. So,

you know. And so when we talk about Starmer not doing anything, what he's doing is he's gearing up to defend the current order as much as possible from disorder. Which doesn't include, by the way, the way that you might want it to be, you might want to be defended from disorder, which is, you would want to be kept so comfortable you don't become disorderly. No, no, that's not possible anymore. We've blazed right past that.

No, no. Repression. It's actually quite prescient, right? Because it's... so much of the Labour rights idea of policing stuff is, you know, it's freakish, obviously, in personal terms, to be like, to even like frown at me as disorderly, right? But, if you want to suppress like the disorder that's gonna be happening in five years time, it's pretty smart. Absolutely. Well, speaking of disorder, how about some disorder that's happening now? Ooh.

That's right. Disorder of pasta coming directly to my tongue. And so, oh, you're eating it all. It is indeed as we talked about in our episode with Victoria, by the way, if you're wondering these episodes, if you remember are recorded a few days in advance. Yeah. If the disorder has already happened, if society has collapsed, we recorded this right before it did. Yeah. If all things to Mussolini has been canceled, we're sorry. We didn't know. Yeah. All things to Mussolini makes the night buses run on time. Yeah, if Alpington Mussolini has been cancelled, we're sorry we didn't know. Yeah. Alpington Mussolini makes the night buses run on time.

Yeah, that's right. So look, it's that as we record this now, the sort of ongoing student protests against atrocities and crimes against humanity being committed in Gaza, and specifically their university's involvement in them through investment, has now sort of started to take off in the UK with early victories being won at Goldsmiths, who I believe, so they have, and again, I welcome being corrected here, they actually did achieve divestment, which is the most important aim, as well as some other goals, which is scholarships for Palestinian students, and then sort of changing some like protest guidelines and so on and so on. That's like,

the divestment thing's the most important thing. Yeah, similarly, shout out to Irish students, university college up and they occupied their library for five days, I think, and the university took the correct approach, which was do nothing and then give them everything they want. This is the thing, right? If you were a university administrator and you... Never had this many students in the library, what's going on? If you're interested in maintaining a well administered of like well-administered university,

one of the best things you can do is unconditional surrender. Give, give the students everything they want, because what they did was they went, yeah, we will absolutely divest from like all of our investments that relate to Israel at all, and we will give the students everything they want. And everyone went home, and now you can use the library again. Yeah. But you won't, because you're an undergraduate student. Yeah, exactly.

And it's UCD, so it's full of tourists anyway. There have also been other encampments that have been set up at other London universities, which are some of the earlier ones, and now at universities around the country. Oxford and Cambridge are, of course, meriting outsized coverage because- I got an email from Cambridge University

about the protest there from the vice chancellor. Why? Why'd you get that email? It was the most, I don't know. I must be on some kind of email list. I don't know what's going on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it was, it was such a, it was like the most hilariously corporate email I think I've ever received. It was like, it was like, we are aware of the protest on King's college lawn. We encourage everyone to be respectful of one another. We are aware that there are harsh feelings on both sides." Are they actually mad because all the students are camping out on the lawn and you're not allowed to do that unless you have a PhD?

Yeah. Not unless you're a fellow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, this is the thing. One thing I will say for the average British university administrator is, unlike the average American university administrator, they don't have a full time police force with riot gear just under their own personal discretion, and thank Christ for that. They just have guys with bikes.

Yeah. You're being encircled by like 50 guys with bikes. Yeah. The worst thing that Indiana University can do is have you shot by snipers. The worst thing that Cambridge University can do is find you six bottles of port for some reason. So this is, but nevertheless, right? These sort of the encampments that have that have popped up in the, in these universities and the sort of early victories that are being won at goldsmiths has led to, I would say a full scale media and government panic as Rishi Sunak has called all, like

summoned the ambassadors from the universities to number ten, basically saying, again, basically saying here's what we're all going to agree on, okay? Except he said it in his little guy voice. That's what we're gonna agree on. What? That's the wrong one. Oh sorry. Well, cause he had joined the Labour Party. Guy! Yeah, Rishi Because he had joined the Labour Party. I'm like, Ciaran. Guys.

Yeah, Rishi Sunak standing on the chair. Standing backwards on a chair. Really thrilled by the idea that when you defect to Labour, you have to start talking a bit like Ciaran. Yeah. And for Rishi Sunak, it's a short journey. So well, every journey for him is a short journey. Yeah, that's right.

But so. Well, actually, it's proportionately a very long journey when compared to... It's like if you imagine how far walking across a tabletop is to an ant. Yeah, that's right. But, uh, so... Well, actually, it's purportantly a very long journey when compared to... It's like if you imagine how far walking across a tabletop is to an ant. That's like walking to the tube station for Rishi Sunak is like a day's journey. It's ways to fly everywhere. He has to take like a little snack. Yeah.

So, so, so. He has basically called the ambassadors from the... summoned the ambassadors, like a diplomatic incident, from all the universities, basically saying, alright, here's what we're all gonna agree on. We're all going to agree, right, that we don't want the protest, this is his words, campus protests that could escalate to the sorts of scenes witnessed in the US

where pro-Palestinian protests at Ivy League universities turned violent. That is the framing. Turned violent. Yeah. That's the framing that is being adopted by the government and anyone in the press who is writing about this. Remember, when we last talked about it, they have been absolutely gagging for the same

protests to come over here, because the Tories, the establishment media, whoever you want to talk about, has not had a chance to cheerlead, basically, like the busting of student heads, for about twelve years. It's so funny because it just completely misunderstands how anything works in the UK as well. Like, as in, the reason why those protests escalated to violence in America is because America is insane, and it has an insane political culture, and loads of insane people turned up and were like, what if we hit the protesters, in a way that just doesn't really happen in the UK? Like, no university cops, either. Yeah.

Well, I think there are a lot of... the insane people who turned up at the protests in the US were largely police. The insane people who would turn up at the protests in the UK are, again, internet poisoned or daily mail poisoned lunatics who are going to, like someone already did in the US at a Columbia protest, drive their car into a bunch of people. Or like the UCLA, like, counter protesters and the B.A. quotes. Yeah, those were the ones I was hearing a lot about, were kind of like slightly crazy

pro-Israel people like turning up and doing insane. The Sunak then said, our university campuses should be places of rigorous debate, but don't cancel any of the- don't cancel graduation, don't cancel commencement, no one should be inconvenienced on their way- on the Pitt Rivers Museum! No one should be inconvenienced on their way into the Pitt Rivers Museum! Yeah, they're trying to see the shrunken hands! Well, I- I come back to University College Dublin for some reason, which is that, like, if the ideal bourgeois university has no students and no teaching happening, one thing it does have besides administrators

and cops is a lot of tourists, for some reason. So yeah, Oxford and Cambridge can both just be tourist attractions now. Yeah, that's right. So Gillian Keegan, Education Secretary, said that many of them need an increased police presence on campuses after some were slow to react to the problem. So the idea here is like so many things. No, no, no police left. Sorry. We want to chase America and what they're doing. We want to be... We looked at, or at least our political culture...

We want to be in the culture war so bad. Yeah. But they don't want to be just want to be in the culture war. They want the... There's a desperate desire to have those atavistic angry anger, sorry I'll take that again, there's a desperate desire to have that atavistic anger taken out against people you don't like you find scary or you find somehow both intimidating and pathetic at the same time. You look at the demographics of this and it's mostly like your own children or grandchildren. Yes.

Correct. But also that even though we also have no cops left, crucially Rishi Sunak doesn't have the American cop to draw on. He doesn't have the Punisher Decal guy. Because the British cop, what they would do if you sent them down to the protest would be like, have a lot of very circumlicutory conversations with the protesters, say stuff like, well you yourself were sat on the lawn in a grassland of fashion, this is against ordinance 43, aye?

And then it would just be a ten hour debate in the course of which nothing would happen. I mean, this is the thing, it's like trying to push on, you're trying to pull that lever essentially that turns the British cop from, like, that to, like we saw in the 2008 student process where it, like, you know, met TSG doing coke and cracking heads. But they didn't factor in one thing, which is that British society can all be united by their love of vapes, and so it would end with the police and the protesters all sharing vapes together. Yeah.

The vaping of the 5000. When Jesus handed one elf bar around the crowd and everyone had a toke. That's why the government wants to ban the vapes, because they know it's the only thing that can unite people from across cultures and across classes. Yeah, I remember that one Kendall Jenner ad where she like hands the cop a vape and like want to ban the vapes because they know it's the only thing that can unite people from across cultures and across classes. Yeah, I remember that one Kendall Jenner ad where she like hands the cop a vape and like peace breaks out. Uh, so there's a few more...

No reaction of that. Someone's like, I had fucked up that joke badly. A few more things, right? A few more things, which is, you know, various people have been asked, in the one political party, various people have been asked for their reactions to these things. Um, you know, the, the Tory, one of the Tory reactions, again, like you can see the official line kind of getting worked out here. The, uh, the Tory reaction from Miriam Cates has been, the Blaride aspiration to send half of all young people to university is backfired spectacularly.

Yeah. All of these people should be way dumber. Yeah. Spending three years detached from the real world, spending someone else's money is not the best start to an adult life. Palestine is in the real world. That's one of the places where it is. Yes. Like one of the realest bits. Yeah. If you really want to know how things work. I mean, it's also a pretty funny thing to say as a Tory MP, someone who has never inhabited the real world at any point. Yeah. Did Miriam Cates do anything before being an MP either? Like, I don't remember anything about her besides politics. Uh, hang up, we can check. Yeah, let's pull that up on screen. Uh, okay. She was a teacher for a little while,

and then became a full-time politician. Okay. She was like, these schools are overfunded. Time to join the Conservative Party. Well in fairness, if you're a teacher and you're like, I hate these little shits and I want to make their lives as miserable as possible, being a Tory MP is like, easily one of the best ways to do that. Right, and now, so this is, that's one of the examples, right, which is just, oh, I no long... which is common, by the way way again, in ways that people in Britain's governing class look at the country, which is what are some of the things that would agree with them or not, at least kind of work here as an industry and exporting

higher education is one of them. It's one of the last ones we have and to be like, yeah, I don't like this anymore. I don't like this. We don't, we shouldn't have it. And this is also like one of the reasons why, like the differences between the US and the UK protest in terms of the reaction to it. Because in the US it's like, there aren't really any, there are some calls to be like oh we need to shut down Harvard or Columbia or whatever, but they're in the minority, their argument is very much like oh we need to de-woke-ify the Ivy League and bring it back to its glory.

Which is to say that we still want our kids and our grandkids to go to these elite schools. We just want to get rid of the people who we don't want to be there, which happen to largely be minority kids. And which is also, you can draw a line between this kind of stuff around the resistance towards DEI and the manufacturedness of that. You're so right though. We don't even want to do elite reproduction anymore. We just hate the kids too much. Yeah, but in the UK it's like, no, fuck my grandkids. I don't give a shit if they go too awkward or not, right? I just like fucking hate them.

My woke non-binary grandchild. Yeah. I'll never fuck my wife in case we have a child. Yeah. We have ordered Wadham College to be rigged up with the same explosives They have at TSMC in case any one more person gets a gender We're blowing the whole thing That's right But right that this is the one response which is again like to be so in the culture war about it to be so again hatred to have so much hatred of like either your own children and grandchildren or

to have so much hatred of either your own children and grandchildren, or anybody who stands outside the extremely very narrow, it's a very narrow overton window, and it's very heavily policed. And to say anyone who steps inside that... I'm sure, I understand it's hard to get into Oxford and Cambridge. Like I don't want these things to exist from the right, basically. I want them to exist only as tourist attractions, as you say. Tourist attractions and like warehouses for like the sort of Chinese upper to upper middle class. Yes. And you know, meanwhile. Well then China needs people to run stuff. So we still have to operate Oxford and Cambridge for that purpose. And like it's still going to be prestigious for a while

until they figure out anything else. Yeah, when the Chinese take us over, we want the guy ruling Britain to be saying stuff like, I spent many happy years in Oxford, and for that reason I'll spare you. Yeah, exactly. Things get fucked up when we get like, the Durham Communist Party cater. Yeah. The Durham Chinese guy. He's got a real chip on his shoulder about the Oxford English Chinese guy. Just like, he sort of walks in, is like, you know, the country's been taken over, the troops are

here for your protection, it's exactly as good as Oxford and Cambridge, it's as academically rigorous. Our first move as Chinese overlords will be to assert the power of Docksbridge. No. No. This is, that is one, that is one sort of, you could say almost like spasmodic reaction to people stepping out of this overton window in public. Yeah.

One of the other ones, again, this is David Lammy being interviewed about, you know, progressive realism, says, there's a difference between peaceful protest of the kind Mandela would have advocated. I mean, that's- Didn't he used to blow stuff up? Yeah, he did. He did. Yeah. No, don't advocated. I mean, he used to blow stuff up. Yeah, he did. He did. Yeah. No, don't think so. I checked. Uh huh. I checked. I checked the things people think without really thinking about them list. I checked the Mandela effect. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

You check it again. It's like, oh yeah, it was Gandhi, and Gandhi ended British rule in India by, you know, being hungry and being nice and wearing the thing. By having crazy drip. Yeah. There was like, there was nobody else who was like also practicing any other kind of resistance at any time. Same thing with Mandela, by the way. There was no like campaigns to say, Star of Apartheid South Africa of investment.

No, no, no. You know, it was just Mandela went to jail really well. The thing is, right, the way this works is you get oppressed for long enough, you unlock the guy who like invents being nice. And then when you do the whole thing, you're like, yeah, yeah. It's like a blue shell in Mario Kart. It's like you have to be at the back for a while and then you get it. And then, you know, that works to see that again, brought back up as though

the only again, we know that the the opinion brought back up as though the only... Again, we know that the opinion of the Labour Party is the only thing you should do is nothing, right? Because you should let us do the stuff and what we're gonna do is very safely live in that little window. Which is getting less and less realistic a place to live in, by the way. It's becoming more of an arrow slit. Yes. There's a difference between the kind of peaceful protest of the kind that Mandela would have

advocated and violence and rioting. And I would also argue there's a difference between the kind of peaceful protest of the kind that Mandela would have advocated and violence and rioting. And I would also argue there's a big fucking difference between violence and rioting and what's going on at UK universities right now, unless between the time we record this and the time we release it, a bunch of like, people who got radicalised on Facebook or in a newspaper comment section just go in with a cricket bat or a car and start busting heads. Be very, uh, I'll lay down a marker here and say car and start busting heads. Yeah, be very... I'll lay down a marker here and say that if there is violence and rioting, it's not gonna be the students starting it.

Indeed. Luckily, the Oxford and Cambridge students will probably have a cricket bat with which to defend themselves, so. I'm outraged at what is happening to ordinary folk in Sudan, in Yemen, and in Haiti. And again, it's like, yeah, I'm outraged at what's happening to ordinary folk in Yemen as well. Who the fuck's doing that? I dunno.

Haven't checked. I like that David Lammy's trying to do, like, he cares about some hipster issues that no one's talking about, and that's his tactic, to be like, uh, no one's talking about Haiti. Okay, let's talk about Haiti. What are we doing about that? It's like, hey, hang on a second, who's supplying the planes that are... And also, people have been... these same people often have been protesting against, like, what's been... what we've been fucking doing to Yemen. Also, it's so dumb to be, like, thinking it's a gotcha that, like, people are focused on one thing

right now. People can only think about one thing at a time. And it's the thing we're doing! Yeah. No one gets up in the morning and is like, right, I'm going to compile a list of every injustice in the world and go through them one by one. That's not how brains work. It's sort of INTJ comprehending everything. It's an interesting point to make where it's just like, you know, the real, like, when, you know, to go back to electoral politics for a little bit, like, the real reverence that like sometimes these politicians have over

the ordinary voter, they don't care about what happens in Westminster, they don't care about global issues, they just want their bins collected. That's the only thing they think about. They just think about their bins, they just think about their bins. No one's telling them that, oh you should also think about the potholes or something as well. They're like, no, we respect that you only think about the bins and we will do everything in our power to make sure that your bins are picked up on time. Whether they do is a different question, obviously, but it is interesting to berate, or it's very telling that you'll berate one group of people for being like, oh, you're commenting on all these atrocities that you

see on your phone all the time, because so much horrific stuff is happening, but even if you try to avoid these- But enough about Lewis Anderson. Yeah, but actually, you shouldn't talk about the, like, sort of decapitated bodies you sort of see on social media, like, even if you're, like, not searching for it, you should be thinking, like, you should just be thinking about Haiti and the bins. Haiti and the bins is an indie band.

You should be thinking about issues that are so local to you, that they are basically administrative questions, or you should be thinking about international issues that we have not as much to do with, let's say. Lammy goes on, I say gently to those who concentrate singly on a very ancient and terrible war. A war where one of the sides goes back to being an organisation entering the area since as long as 1987. Yeah. Like, an ancient war that goes back to October. Yeah. An ancient and terrible war that is taking place in Gaza.

Mmhmm. Again, and- Ooooooooh! Yeah. But let us not crowd out a lot of people suffering in our world today, and underlying that the US and UK have to stand firm on so many fronts today. No, fuck you, eat shit. I will continue to think about this primarily. And again, what they always want to do, this is people like Lammy, is they want to say, oh, you don't understand, you're wrong, or you also, oh it's confusing, it's ancient,

and it's too puzzling for my head, oh I can't think of it, ahhh. But no, it is simple. Which is, if you're a student, and you have a university that's invested in fucking Elbit, or whatever, then some of your student fees, and some of your activity, is going to facilitate crimes against humanity in Gaza right now. Yeah, is your university more likely to be invested in Israel, or Jimmy Barbecue Charizier, the gang warlord currently destabilizing Haiti. Just a quick guess, you know? And weirdly the University of Reading log on Jimmy Barbecue Charizier.

That guy gets resolved. Okay? He's funded our entire rowing program. One of those weird quirks where like, Oxford owns a bunch of Haitian gang shares. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oxford is technically the world's biggest supplier of sawn off shotguns. So, right. So, at the end of the day, it's a simple yes-no question that the hand-wringing and the references

to like, oh well it's from like 3 BC, you'll never understand it. No, it's a simple question. Are you facilitating this? Yes, no, well, it's from like three BC. You'll never understand it. No, it's a simple question. Are you facilitating this? Yes, no, you shouldn't be. Yeah, you can do concrete questions like where are the money and the arms going? Where are they coming from and who's paying for them? And, you know, I mean, I'll sort of jump across the pond

for a sec back to the US where, you know, again, as I sort of, I try to follow like AI conferences, I try to look at who's talking at them, what are they saying? And there was, there's one recently where Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, and Mark Milley, former general, basically spoke at this, like, it's gonna be AI for strategic competitiveness summit. The kind of, like, you know. All of this shit is so funny to me.

Like Palantir getting airstrikes done on Kanban boards and all that kind of shit. Well this is essentially right, they say look, and they speak plainly, right? They say what they think, which is that this is a kind of Vietnam moment for defence. Is that good? Well kind of, is it? Let's say, attitudinally, among the future generation of American elites. Now we know the previous Vietnam moment certainly didn't end American Empire far from it.

Yeah, John Kerry became Secretary of State. What it did do, however, was it took quite a while for ordinary Americans to be on board with putting a soldier in another country. It certainly damaged its reputation. So what Alex Karp says, if this quote unquote argument is lost, right, the idea that that the argument being put forward by the student protesters, which is this is bad, we should have nothing to do with it. We should have nothing to do with this country. Why do we keep propping it up and so on. This argument is lost. And then legitimacy of the US empire is gone. He says, if we lose the intellectual battle here, we will not be able to employ any army in the West ever again, ever.

And you know, this is bullshit. There's Chinese elites at Durham right now who would love for that to happen. But it's absolute bullshit is the thing. Like, slippery slope bullshit. Like, listen, if there's actual threats to the west, people are quite capable of seeing them and responding to them, and like, the biggest roadblock to fighting them turns out to be the right, again, as with Ukraine. But also it feels as though they're like, well, and I think Ukraine is a very pressing

thing to bring up, in the sense that like, it's, they're failing to learn the lessons of what other people are up to. Like, Putin massively overplayed his hand by invading Ukraine. And as then he was much more influential before, he had much more sway on the global stage before. And then the US could have just told Israel to knock it off like six months ago. Like they could have just quietly, without publicly disavowing them or anything, just quietly stopped this from turning into the huge clusterfuck that it is. But they chose not to for like, question mark, question mark, question mark.

And now they're stuck in this situation where they either keep having to like doubling and tripling down on like the worst foreign policy mistake of the last decade, or they have to like completely disavow this like ally that's very like politically important to them, whatever. And it's like you didn't need to get into this situation. Well, it's, I suppose the, if you go back to no, you didn't, but also you did because the whole point of, and especially as we've talked about in this show, the point of empire is to extend and crush and push and never back down. And the problem is, right, is, and I think the, why this goes back, why Carp and Millie are talking about student protesters in such harsh, in such sort of, let's say, extreme terms, is

A, they represent a political tendency that wants to carpet bomb every university, send all the pointy-headed professors back to the land, or whatever. ALICE Which is very funny, because if you look at Mark Millie you can find a lot of cartoons of people making him woke, because he, like, isn't transphobic or whatever. RIght, that's one tendency, but also, I think there is a sense that there is... and again, this is what Miriam Cates, I think, is reaching for as well, and David Lammy is kind of wishing away.

Which is that we, elite reproduction requires these organizations, it doesn't require these organizations to teach you anything, really, it requires these organizations, it doesn't require these organizations to teach you anything, really, it requires these organizations to credential you and give you the network that you're gonna be invested in being an elite, managing whatever this whole thing is. ALICE Yeah, and because it's gonna get more brutal, you're gonna have to come out of these elite institutions willing to kill, right? Because it's gonna be a hotter world, it's gonna be a more unstable, more violent world, and to kind of imagine guarantees of security as such that, no, you

need these people to be on-site, that you need them to be on the team of empire, and maybe they're not. And so David Lammy is saying, I wish that they were just different. Miriam Cates is saying, universities are not the place, again she's not smart enough to realize it, but she's saying universities are not the place to be training our incoming class of elites. And then Karp and Millie I think are saying it a little more clearly, which is that this incoming class of elites, we cannot depend on, not all of them, many of them will still very eagerly go be like Raytheon executives. Yeah, and that's why we have to automate so much and put as much as we can in the hands

of the careerists and far right freak shows. But huge swaths of those people, they don't care about them individually, but those people are opposed to the project that they are trying to carve into eternity. Which is the unquestioned river of blood that is spilled in the name of United- I am trying to build a statue of the great king Ozymandias, and these woke little shits seem to think that it won't even last. And in some ways doing this has made me feel more optimistic than I have in a while, just because it is passively obvious that people are losing

control of this, y'know? And, y'know, why would these legs be trunkless? THEY'RE FAST! THEY CAN EASILY SUPPORT A TRUNK! And so, like, I don't wanna say, like, oh yeah, I'm dumb, I'm not saying, oh, the kids are alright, etc. etc. I kind of am a bit. But it seems as though there is at least a crisis of elite reproduction that it seems,

or at least these people think there is, that they don't think they know how to respond to. Yes. And I always like seeing these people think they don't know how to respond to something. Yes. And you can even see, I mean, just sticking in the US for a second as well, you can even see it with Kevin O'Leary, Mr. Wonderful. And also you can see this is a man who does not understand AI, when he gave an interview about protestors at American universities, saying, um, there's

plenty of consequences for all these people. Even an image that far away, AI can generate by the way the body moves. What? Yeah, Kevin O'Leary is, if you're, if you want to get work for Kevin O'Leary, you're gonna have to do like some kind of a body movement AI assessment assessment so that he can see if you were ever at a protest. I enter the Columbia encampments and I walk without rhythm. Yeah, that's right. I'm going to sand walk right into one of Mr. Wonderful's companies and he cannot stop me.

He's not going to be able to tell. It's also just, it's very funny to do this thing. Just like, oh, look at the students protesting foreign policy. The universities have gone irredeemably woke. And I'm like, sorry, do you think that students doing like, little encampments to protest foreign policy is some kind of new or shocking thing? It's like the thing that canonically students have always done. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, elites have survived this before, as was Vietnam. Like, the stuff they're bitching about, like...

Famously, it doesn't really work! It went fine! American Empire is still there. Also, who taught you how to tie a kefir like that? Just seemed the right way. Yeah, yeah. So he says, uh, yeah, that's Mr. Wonderful's actually. He's fighting against it so hard. So he says, I can't believe the stuff I find in background checks now.

These people are screwed. He added that due to the use of high quality cameras to record footage of protests that are posted on social media, employers may be able to find evidence of a person participating in those in those behavior. Every single image, even at night now, goes into an AI generator and will tell you who that individual is. I hire people. I have lots of companies. I've hired thousands of people. Within weeks, I'm going to be able to I'm going to be able when we're doing your background check, I'm going to find where you were because it's going to be out there on the dark web. I'm just I'm just thinking about my knowledge of history, and I'm putting both hands to my temples,

Professor Eckstah, and going, ooh, please create a class of unemployable, like, would have been elites who are very highly educated and organized. Please do that. I am begging you, please do that. Yeah, so this goes back to, like, I don't know how necessarily we respond to the crisis of elite reproduction, the only problem is, is that we've sort of, one thing we talked about in the last episode we talked about the universities was, we've largely, that's yesteryear's sort of place where elites get reproduced.

We wonder how many of them do you need, to, you know, to run your, to run your empire? You know, I guess we'll find out. Yeah. I mean, it kind of moved upwards, right? Like university is preschool now and the real place of elite reproduction is the graduate scheme. Yeah. I mean, I was going to say it also strikes me as kind of stupid that they would like immediately dismiss people who were sort of at these encampments because if I was a recruiter and I was just like, well, you know, so, so you sort of like set up your own like little enterprising zone, like, you know, you're being very resourceful, you're sort of providing lots of kind of resources, you're providing meals, resources, you know, makeshift infrastructure

on the, using very low cost materials. ALICE guy who goes to the encampment because it's good for his CV. RILEY You can get t-shirts printed very quickly. If I was a recruiter I'd just be like, you know, the way that I would sort of like break it up wouldn't be through like violence. It would be like, hey, do you think that your skills would be better suited at McKinsey? Yeah. You've started your very own Swin Zone here. But what about entering the Swin Zone of life? And of course the other reaction from the UK papers has been to start identifying just members of the protest by name in the paper because they like left some digital

garbage in the wake of like- Please don't create a class of unemployable shiftless future revolutionaries. This encampment participant has a Montblanc pen, but they were given as a graduation present, which means that they're very out of touch with the biro writing majority. Well, they're in the pocket of the Swiss. We're getting into like 19th century style news. It's some kind of Swiss insurrectionist. Yeah. Anyway, that's all we have time for today for this episode. So I want to thank you for listening to TF. Remind you that we have a live today for this episode. So I want to thank you for listening to TF. Remind you that we have a live show that is almost sold out.

Yeah, it's getting close to sold out. People are, they are hungry for trust content. They want to know what happens in the nine years and 11 months we have to save the West. In Liz we trust. Yes. Yeah, we've got nine years and 11 months of Western hegemony left. Yeah. And we're going to be reading all about that in London on the 29th of May. The ticket links as ever are going to be in the description. It's going to be

Ash Nishkumar, the Chinese elite who went to Durham. It's going to be great. And we are going to see you there. And also we will see you on the bonus episode, which this week is we are going to be talking about the strange economy of Europe and why it generates so many guys with frequent recurrent guest Rob Smith. I love a bit of Rob Smith. People are calling him the Kay Wiggins of the London office. So if you are in Berlin, we, I rather, have a show on the 16th of May, please come to that, I need to sell tickets to that.

I will also be in Berlin. Yeah, but you can't see him. No. He will go unseen. I will be in Berlin from the following day, Dressed predominantly in black. Pursuing my own social social agenda hanging out with my girlfriend and our friends who are there I will not be performing anything me in

this case and Sean shouts out to Sean you know why will not be performing anything I will not be selling tickets anything yeah if you and you can't come see me if you unless you just walk past me in the street mm-hmm yeah that's right don't say anything no I also have a bunch of like you can't come see me if you know unless you just walk past me in the street. Yeah, that's right Don't say anything. No, I also have a bunch of like you can say work in progress shows and stuff all over the UK Uh, my lab was the code case. That's live dash shows for all of that. Nice sick. Perfect. Bye everybody. Bye Bye!