TRASHFUTURE - There’s (No) Power in a (Free Speech) Union feat. Angie Speaks

Episode Date: March 3, 2020

This week we’re talking Free Speech Union and the strange assortment of bitter British Gen-Xers who are convinced that they’re being oppressed because people don’t think they’re funny anymore. YouTube superstar and Low Society podcast host Angie Speaks (@SpeaksAngie) joins the cast of Riley (@raaleh), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice @AliceAvizandum to rejoice in removing Toby Young’s right to free speech. Also: Angie will be joining us onstage for our Bristol Transformed show, so please come out and see the gang in action! Follow Angie on Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUtloyZ_Iu4BJekIqPLc_fQ And listen to the Low Society podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/low-society   If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture  *LONDON LIVE SHOW ALERT* We’ll be playing at Vauxhall Comedy on Wednesday, March 11 at 7.30 pm! Tickets are £12, and you can get them here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trashfuture-live-tickets-91817874735 *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS.com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/  *COME SEE MILO*If you want to catch Milo’s stand-up on tour, get tickets here: https://linktr.ee/miloontour  *BRISTOL LIVE SHOW ALERT* Come see us perform at Bristol Transformed 2020 -- we’ll be performing on the night of Friday, March 6. Doors are at 8 pm and the show starts at 8:30 pm. Get tickets here: https://www.headfirstbristol.co.uk/#date=2020-03-06&event_id=58254

I'm recording on my end. All right. Three, two, one, Mark. Sweet. Go, sorry, Alice. You start us off. So, Boris Johnson has over-posited. He has spawned. And we're all to be very happy about this. Dan Wooten had a tweet, which was, yes, with an exclamation mark and a picture of Boris Johnson and Carrie Simons sort of celebrating together because there will be a prime ministerial baby.

And we're all to be very, very distracted by this. And his name will be Harry Cole. Personally, personally, I'm excited for him to take over as the, as the, as like that prime minister at the age of 14, but then of course have Harry Cole rule as his regent, but then do nothing Harry Cole says. Yes. Our child king, who we all welcome and we all wish only the best for. It's the quiz at Tatarac baby.

Yes. So does that mean Boris Johnson is Lido? Yeah, definitely. Personally, I think that this, this, let's say, ministerial baby will finally set Britain on the golden path, which I mean, considering the golden path is basically all about eugenics, who can say? Yeah. I really want to see Boris in a still suit.

Hello and welcome back again to this free episode of trash future that podcast you're listening to right now. It's me Riley. I'm in studio with Hussein. Yeah. So Nate on the boards. Slow here again. Alice in sunny Glasgow riding that gender dial.

Yes. I have the gender dial right here and it goes fuck. Is my gender dial broken? Jesus. If that isn't a metaphor. The SNP got hold of your gender dial. I'm seriously hammering the, the like gender button and nothing appears to be happening. Oh no.

And also we are joined by Angie speaks from YouTube and also the low society podcast. Angie, how's it going? I'm good. Thank you guys so much for having me. And also just we're going to do some plugs up front. Angie and your favorite TF boys in including Milo, not including Alice will be at Bristol transformed as we were last year with Angie on the panel. So if you are in Bristol or around Bristol or Wales or basically anywhere in the UK,

come to see us there. There's going to be a whole weekend of great shit and we'd love to see you in the audience. I'll also be doing some other stuff. Angie's doing some other stuff and it'll be great. Oh, I found the gender dial. Oh, thank goodness. Yeah. It goes all the way down.

I'm having like negative gender right now. Yeah. It's, it's, oh, no, that's the Jabba dial. This is maximum gender and I don't know how you feel about that because I don't have the mic monitor up. So I can't hear myself. It's Salacious Crumb. It goes from Jabba to Salacious Crumb.

Yes. The Star Wars dial. Yeah. And also while we're doing plugs up front, also don't forget we are going to be live with friend of the show Molly Goodfellow on March 11th at Voxel Comedy Festival. Links to all this shit is going to be in the description. We'd love to see you at 100% of it. Come say hi.

All that shit. However, now that that's out of the way, I have to, I have to just, I have to just say that what's been really inspiring me to get out of bed and do my taxes and go to work and face every day is Elizabeth Warren, adulting like a boss, being the adulting like a boss candidate in the American primaries. Leaning in. Absolutely. Angie, you've written and spoken about how the weird personal projection that's going

on in America right now. What do you think about how PMC, especially PMC people are looking at Elizabeth Warren and being like, this, this is the character I projected onto as a child. Well, I feel like it's like, I guess she represents that archetype for sure. And also she's like the kind of clean alternative to the kind of populist left that's arising at the moment. I also kind of am generally irritated by how she's sort of using liberal feminism as like a shield against criticism.

I don't know if you guys heard about what went on last night with the New York Times Chapeau trap house drama that was going on. One of the things that was complained about was the fact that Elizabeth Warren was mentioned at one of their rallies and people were hissing doing like the snake thing. And people were like, oh my God, how dare you. Classic misogyny. Yeah. Absolutely.

It's misogyny. How dare you throw this woman under the bus? And it's kind of used to obscure class in that regard and obscure the things that people are really resonating with in terms of the emerging populist left movement. And it's something that I find really problematic for lack of a better word because she does represent that sort of managerial affect kind of like it almost like in the way that Hillary Clinton did back in 2016. I don't really, I don't really admonish people for being suspicious of that because it's

not great. Yeah. What I like about the, about those arguments, it's like, how dare you do misogyny by disagreeing with her just because she stands against everything you want. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. One of the things I noticed and the differences between the ways that people project onto Hillary

versus the way people seem to be projecting onto Elizabeth Warren is with Hillary, it always, this is my mom. This is my abuela. This is the authority figure, et cetera. Yeah. With Warren, it seems to be more like, this is my responsible friend who's just going to be generally supportive of me, which leads me to ask, do these people know what a president does?

No, no, they don't. The president is there to make them feel good. They're sort of a national vibes consultant. And if the national vibe is that of a cool RA, then so much the better, right? I definitely like the comparison to a cool RA because when it comes to this sort of liberal status quo, it's all about affect. It doesn't matter about what you're saying, what the context of what you're saying is, it's all about tone and affect.

And if your tone and affect goes against what they deem to be palatable or agreeable, then you're automatically wrong. I mean, one of the things that I've been the most kind of critical of is the fact that people, especially on the liberal left, have been critical of Bernie Sanders for yelling. And it's like, he's yelling about injustice. He's yelling about the fact that there isn't basic healthcare, all the different things that his platform is built on is basically based on this deep injustice that's going on in the country.

And yelling about that does not make you toxic. I don't understand how affect has become the thing that everybody sort of deems into. It's really strange. Yeah. It's the thing that I thought I had invented for the longest time, and it turned out that I stole it from a Brandy Jensen tweet, so sorry, Brandy, but it was that liberals are like dogs. They only hear the tone and not the text.

Yeah. Yeah. I was also thinking too that one of the things that concerned me is that to appropriate a British leftist turn of phrase to talk about Elizabeth Warren is that she was doing quite well in the polls, and her supporters thought they had it in the bag, and then she melted on Medicare for All, and then her polls began to depreciate. And I think one thing that really gets me about her is just the terrible political instincts that she seems to represent, whether it's her advisers being bad or whether it's her

in particular, the way in which she handled things like the recent open letter she received from the Cherokee Nation with regard to her having claimed Cherokee ethnicity and heritage and the way she responded. The whole thing about taking the DNA test about a year ago, the whole thing about the website that says, no, she doesn't take antipsychotic medication, like responding to every right wing insane thing as though it was a question that needed to be responded to. It struck me that her instincts are quite bad, and in a way, people are like, oh, she's this great manager.

She has all this experience. She can get these bills passed. But it strikes me that what we're seeing right now is proof that if all we have to go on is this idea that she's going to exercise better judgment, her judgment doesn't seem so great. Yeah. And it's weird to me. It seems that people are unwilling to acknowledge that and instead are just like, oh, well,

she has all the credentials that someone, she's a Harvard professor, Bernie Sanders, he's just so, I don't know, goshe, he's so grumpy, he's not professional enough. And it's kind of revealing that bias in a way of saying like, this person literally has demonstrated that they can't be trusted with the most basic decision-making when it comes to how the messaging narrative works. But because they have the credentials, you believe in the credentials so hard, that should count. You think that should count for more.

I have two things. Firstly, we saw a little bit of this during the debates when even just on a tactical level, when she was punching right, she was very effective. She handed Michael Bloomberg his ass and then just sort of never really did that again because she was just going to go against the left. I was just going to say, I think it's like, because of how deeply ingrained the logic of neoliberalism is and how that market logic also kind of affects the way people view themselves in relation to the world, the fact that there is this sort of strange deference to this

managerial class is something that we're kind of ingrained to portray and to accept. In terms of her platform, she did cave when it came to Medica overall. I think that that's a massive thing that's worth critiquing and worth analyzing. But people, like you said, care so much more about somebody's affect and they're not actually here. I mean, it's not even just with political candidates, as a person of color on the left. Sometimes when I'm dealing with liberals, it does sometimes feel like they're not listening to what I'm saying.

It's just like watching me get animated. Yeah. I don't know. The way that I saw it was two things. First of all, Elizabeth Warren is like the cool RA who's like doing a PhD and Bernie Sanders is like the grumpy provost for all the college heads there, especially the people who went to non-Oxbridge related schools. The second thing is more to do with the way in which lots of liberals are sort of seeing

this kind of like imagined electorate. So like there's this whole idea and this was mirrored in the British left as well, where they couldn't imagine the idea of a populist left candidate who wasn't kind of approaching things in like a managerial, incremental way. The idea that like change can only happen from the left incrementally, so Bernie Sanders is going too far. Like I've heard so many things about, oh, we like Medicare for all, but that's going to scare people.

Some people like their plan. So we want to like, and this is like the bootage edge thing as well, right? Like we want to create, you know, Medicare for all who want it, which is like a bizarre thing to say. Not just in terms of like a policy position, but also in terms of let's like how fearful so many of the candidates are about so-called like alienation where they want to kind of make their battle to do with like being anti-Trump rather than kind of much more structural. You can say if you want that how can you stand up to Trump if you won't stand up to

like a squishy electorate, right? But like I did see one thing that I thought was very, very revealing, which was some campaign reporters tweet, not just to do Twitter review, but it was like her at the end of one of those long handshake lines she does. And this reporter tweeted, I've never seen anyone work harder than Elizabeth Warren. Yeah, I want to know whether that's actually true because to be that oblivious is so amazing to me. Did you see that fan art where someone drew the cartoon that said she's fucking electable

if you vote for her? It was really, really cringe. It was like this terrible like Etsy fan art. And for me, the first thing that came to mind was like, what if you change the words out and said, no mom, I can't pause Runescape, it's online. That seemed more authentic than what was written there. So one of the, I think sort of summing this all up as well, right? If we're looking at her questionable judgment, if we're looking at the tanking popularity

levels, the fact that coming out of South Carolina, she's refusing to drop out and making very obvious that her strategy is to do a brokered convention where she's going to be anointed by party bigwigs as a leader. How am I gonna be granger shit? Yeah, that's yeah, because she's just is so knowledgeable about the arcane process of the Democratic Party. That seems to be again, like of all of the people who have been excited to actually campaign canvas and knock on doors and all of that canvassing machinery, all of that voting machinery, all

of that voter excitement. If your strategy is to tell them that they mean nothing and they're worth nothing, good luck. However, I also want to move on to a couple of choice posts about this. I've asked some of our fans to gather me some Elizabeth Warren projection coming up from the cellar with like a canter full of Liz Warren. I'm blowing blowing the dust off the shoulder of a of a fine Liz Warren post, uncorking it and pouring into your glass.

The sentence, Senator Warren showed up tonight, did her homework, everyone else's homework and then taught the class. Oh dear. Awesome. I never outgrew at university. She's Joe March and Shirley Katniss Everdeen, Elizabeth Bennett. Every female fictional character who is smarter, more gracious, and worked harder than everyone around her for all eternity because, you know, she's all of this is a comfortable fiction.

You know, there's something that this rings to mind is that Elizabeth Warren, I mean, her wing, the Senate seat in 2012 was a huge deal and she for that time seemed like the furthest left a candidate could be or a politician could be in the Democratic Party and be viable beyond like a John, John Kate. Dennis Kucinich or Sherrod Brown or something like that, like who, well, I also think of like a Sherrod Brown kind of person who is who is like a union left guy, but also very much like a kind of like trending social conservative in a way. And so it's just weird to me because it represents how much things have shifted in the last

eight years. This is what dialectic is, is we must make ruthless war on everyone who has who has previously been on our side until we get left enough, Bernie canceled immediately after winning. I agree. I definitely agree. It's interesting, though, because in this specific tweet, you see this like strange sort of liberal white feminist kind of kind of, I guess, ethos that really doesn't make any sense considering how much more to the left the rhetoric has has moved, you know, girls

who idolize Elizabeth Bennett as a character. And, you know, it's very kind of out of touch in terms of where the discourse is at right now. So I'm kind of wondering who these people are. Like, who are these people? I have an answer and it's a science fiction writer of my passing acquaintance who had an epic thread about how epic Hogwarts was for her as a kid. And I like just from having met her a couple of times and knowing how old she was, I was

like, but you weren't a kid when those books came out, you were in your 20s and I said that and she blocked me. So that's the base. That's the base. I mean, I've been thinking about this for a bit, actually, I've been I've been thinking about sort of the right way to share this because I've been one of the things I try to do, especially because on this show, we tend to make fun of other people's points of view.

And I tend to think that it's funnier and more impactful if you try to do a charitable reading of it. If you try to be kind, empathize with that. And I mean, I was I mean, I kind of was thinking about this, right? Like, if you it must be very there, I think there are a lot for a lot of feminists, this I imagine this is very frustrating because you've been told from the age of nothing that you have to work twice as hard as any man to get half the recognition. And then as we all know, you know, in the game of politics, everyone's talking about

who's got the top job of president. And you see you see women like Hillary and women like Elizabeth Warren, who are quite visibly working extremely hard and are very qualified and have been adulting like a boss since they were eight. And so I think there are a lot of women who have probably made a lot of sacrifices to themselves, adult like a boss, but since they were eight. And to then see that, but that's a very individualist point of view. This idea of I'm qualified, I deserve it, my merit.

And so if you believe in meritocracy, which again, we don't, but you know, they do, if you believe in meritocracy, it must be a real motherfucker to watch it just basically not work twice in a row. Well, I think this is the thing, right? I think this is one of the legacies of the Hillary campaign was that Hillary Clinton, if you want to talk about personal quality and personal merit, was probably the single worst person to like go forth and try to implement that kind of feminism because of her policies and actions and political instinct and just generally being so toxic and alienating that

you produce something like the tweet with her high school photo with happy birthday to this future president. It's so presumptuous that it just kind of like, I feel like it's a lot easier to be sympathetic to Warren fans. There's like even with all of the things that she's done, even with all of the baggage, it's never going to be the same as Hillary. And Hillary, I think, was so poisoned that particular kind of feminism that it's just, I think it's just, it's just done now.

This is like the rump left over. But I think this is also like a continuation of just like where we left off at the end of 2016, right, where so much of presidential politics, I guess even before, but so much of like the presidential election and the whole like Trump-Clinton thing was really a projection of did really become very, very personalized. It was the idea of like Trump was every kind of asshole guy that you knew and met and was like an abusive and Hillary was like the saviour of it. Like where Hillary is like the anti-Trump and that's how it was kind of presented, right?

Sure. Obviously, when Hillary understood it, I don't think it's possible to like overstate the kind of psychic wound that it inflicted. Since then, that culture war has only kind of gotten bigger and more bizarre in a lot of ways. So in kind of like the aftermath, we had like things like the Women's March, which obviously had a very kind of social purpose towards that. We've had, you know, Trump kind of continuing like sexist and misogynist and racist comments, which have also fed into this idea of like personality politics and everything.

And we've also had all these characters in the right who have done like the same stuff. I remember again, someone like tweeted this a long time ago, but they were basically talking about how Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek had become the foremost thinkers of our time. And they both kind of came from a perspective of psychology and psychotherapy rather than sociology and politics. And there was like a personalization reason for that. Anyway, I guess like the point I'm trying to say is that we're now at this stage where we very much have to think in terms of politics and what the Bernie movement and like the leftist

populist movement have been trying to do, or at least trying to kind of articulate is the fact that there are like political objectives that we should be aiming towards. Right. But for lots of people, like they haven't gotten out of like that kind of 2016-17 world. So for them, Warren is like, this is a competent person who is more to the left of Hillary, like let's give her that. But she also represents like these socio-cultural things that we've been carrying for a really long time.

So imagine coming across someone who not only like has a more progressive medical proposal, Medicare proposal, Van Hillary, Clinton, but is also a hufflepuff. And you don't want to vote for her. That's crazy. Yeah. I mean, also, it's like that brainworm. Like you said, that like brainworm is definitely like leftover from 2016. But I guess my initial issue is the fact that that form of feminism was always flawed.

It was always flawed and it was always alienating to anybody who fell outside of the white middle class sort of college educated racket, which is the reason why I feel like her platform is alienating to so many different people. But more ever, my main issue is the fact that those who don't play ball are pathologized. And I think that that's like a huge problem. The amount of times that like my femaleness and my blackness has been erased simply because I'm outwardly a supporter of Bernie Sanders is absolutely ridiculous by these very people that claim to be bastions of like feminist theory and culture.

And I find it very frustrating. It's because we're all bros. We're all bros here. Two female bros and then the rest. I'm the biggest bro here. What also makes me, I mean, I think about this in the context of the, you know, Labour Party is having a leadership election and I pretty open that I support Rebecca Long-Bailey. And I mean, it's obviously frustrating that this notion of Kier Starmer with his amazing hair

representing some kind of electability means fuck the policies, fuck what matters. We're just going to go with this idea that this person is somehow going to appeal to the rest of the country. That's obviously very frustrating. But I, in the case, for me, I look at, I don't think that this is a question of the wider electorate is a question of the Labour Party and apparently they've been traumatized. And so they've decided that what we have to have is, is someone with a suit and a fancy accent who's a knight of the realm and has, you know, has great hair, looks like an RAF pilot.

Yeah, you just do Blair again. And I think Blair is instructive because that's kind of what happens when that personality-driven neoliberal politics wins. Like a Hillary presidency probably would have looked and worked in a lot of very similar ways to the Blair Prime Minister ship. And I guess that the point I was trying to make is that if Elizabeth Bourne and Bernie Sanders' policies were reversed, if Bernie Sanders were, were melting towards the centre and going for this kind of like weird means-tested shit, and if, if Elizabeth Bourne were proposing

universal healthcare, universal childcare, you know, not means tested, I would support Elizabeth Bourne. Same here. Absolutely. And I'm in a situation where I, I see a candidate who I really, whose policies I really support in the United Kingdom being stymied because of people believe they want this fucking weird 1950s dad who's a really wooden and not charismatic politician. So I understand, I empathize.

I'm not sorry. I just, I don't think all Elizabeth Bourne supporters are the weird kind of caricatures that you see online. No. But there are a lot of them is what I'm saying of those people. A lot of her surrogates are like that. Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's just like, I really do think it's, it's weirdly like essentializing basically

saying that you should, you should feel this way. You should support her because don't, basically you're, you're fooling yourself if you think anything better is possible besides like this 1% incremental improvement that she represents. And that's just, that's just for one insulting for another like, I don't know, the idea that the wider American electorate is like, oh, this reminds me of pride and prejudice. It's like, no, it fucking doesn't. Yeah, I feel like there is some call for, as, as you said, Angie, like yelling, there is some cause for anger and hurt and, well, also haste, like 10 years of climate

left give or take is, is not something that marries up very well with incremental reforms that don't scare people. And you know what, I think we're going to see, because history, history repeats itself now in what like 10 minute cycles at this point. Well, we've had the 2019 time dilation where 2019 took 10 years. And now we have the 2020 time compression where it was new year a week ago. So we're going to, I mean, I think one of the worst things we could probably see is after South Carolina and Biden winning, Warren staying and getting into a brokered

convention, ignoring all of the kinds of things. She's not even going to win her home stage. No, she won't, but she's going to stick it. She's going to stick it out and go to a brokered convention. The super delegates could fall in behind her or someone else as a supposed compromise and then get completely obliterated. I have a nightmare about this, which is trying to, then we got to move on. Trying to LBJ the convention in Milwaukee, a brokered convention and the super delegates

looking for an undivisive figure who is beloved by all sides of the party to come in and be like a safe pair of hands to guide them to the presidency and in the woods of upstate New York. Hillary Clinton. I thought the exact same thing. Playing the longest game. Incredible. It turns out her time in the woods, she was just getting stronger and faster.

She was doing a 26 way parlay with a swirl. So I want to move on from American politics a little bit. I'm going to be so mad if I lathe this. The American politics worm that is living in all of our cerebellums. And I want to move on to the other worm that's going to, hopefully not cross our blood brain barrier, the coronavirus. Not a worm. American drug makers have recently been suggesting that the vaccine will cost over $3,000 per dose

and that the government will not be implementing price controls, but will instead allow the free market to... Yeah, no bailouts, bootstraps, bootstraps. You know, because the thing is, if we give everyone the coronavirus vaccine, then what's to stop them from just being life queens? What's to stop me from going to the CDC and like rolling after that with 10,000 individual vaccines just because I want them? It seems very, very funny to me.

What the justification for this could possibly be other than, let's turn the entirety of America into the running man, but instead of being killed by a guy with an electro shocker on a bike, it's just a guy on a bike with a cough who's delivering you your food and can't take the day off because he has no sick days and he's working four jobs. Look, human beings aren't like Goldman Sachs or Bear Stearns or whatever, because you can't just bail out people. That's for industries and banks and things of that nature.

Yeah, besides, look, if you get... All this is, is actually, it's a stimulus to America's gyms because now everyone has to go and get healthy and take vitamins and take pre-workout and do protein and stuff so they can get stronger. We're trying to make the country hotter by letting a fire in everyone's ass. Won't people get this? Andrew Tate's doing the stand. Also, another thing to note, America has only 30 million N95 masks in stock,

which are the paper masks that you wear to keep yourself from getting sick, the one-time use ones, and it needs 10 times that just for its health workers and has no plans to increase its stock. Yeah, because people keep buying them. The Surgeon General's office just tweeted, stop buying masks because health workers need them and you don't. So I'm looking forward to some very rational purchasing decisions. I don't know if any of us have masks yet, I'm sure.

My mom gave me too. Of course, of course. Mine too. Angie, what do you think of this? No, I'm just like, I'm like a generally like hypochondriac paranoid person and I want to know how much of this shit do I need to be worried about. I'm very, my self-interest kicks in whenever fear, longer... I'm a human being at the end of the day.

Someone once told me that like, if people knew how much bacteria and just like general kind of danger varies like on one tube journey, they would never travel again. Oh, that's me. That's me. Like if someone actually was like, these are all the ways that you could die on one tube journey. Yeah, was that person...

No one would ever take it again. Was that person my internal monologue? If you want to take this closer to home, actually, I have a little dispatch from our sweet precious boy. That's the thing that we don't want to do is take it closer to home. Well, just before we continue, I kind of feel like at some point in this timeline, Martin Shkreli is going to come back.

Oh, yeah. And like privatize. And we kind of like forgot that he exists, but he's still like... He's in jail, isn't he? Yeah, but that's the thing nearly like fucking... Wilson Fisk starts season two of Dead, Evelyn Jail, you know? Yeah. I mean, well, maybe Martin Shkreli is actually just like,

brewing up the coronavirus vaccine in his toilet. He's getting huge. He's making... You would make anything in a toilet. Like he's making his prison vaccine. He's making whatever. He got big in prison. Yeah.

It still has a tiny head, though. So on UK shores, our sweet precious boy, Matt Hancock, has... This is... It is surprisingly good move. Yeah, he did the grime thing again. Yeah. Matt Hancock, I feel like every once in a while, he gives me this little hint

that if only we could just have one conversation. He's programmed him. He can't seem to come over. Yeah, Matt Hancock, come to Bristol Transformed. Yeah, let's make it happen. Matt Hancock, if you can hear this, please come to Bristol Transformed. You are the person in Britain who I want to meet most,

and that is not a joke. How can you say that when Apex Twin exists? I don't understand. Look, when Apex Twin does a Kew Parkour video, then we'll talk. But Matt Hancock has actually confirmed that workers who are self-isolating in the UK to stop the spread of coronavirus will receive statutory sick pay,

even though they're not legally required to. So it appears at time of recording, and I'm very willing to be proven wrong on this. I hope I'm not going to be, but it appears as though we're actually going to be making a good decision about this. However, the hint as to why this is actually not super great is in the wording statutory sick pay, because if you're on a zero-hours contract,

or if you're a casual worker, or if your boss is an app, then you don't get statutory sick pay. No, of course. So, and what reminds me, what kinds of people work on those? Is it people who... With food services. Child care, people who work in places where there are lots of other people, effectively.

Yeah, it's fine though. You just take 15 to 30 seconds to wash your hands after each individual case of hand-to-hand contact, which if you're working on a counter, yeah, you can totally just do that. Just go and take... Yeah, absolutely. This is also just one of the big issues

with delivery drivers and cyclists is that there's actually very few places where they can go and wash their hands. Yeah, because restaurants ban them from their bathrooms. Right, and it's really hard to even... Anyone who's ever lived in this country knows how difficult it is to even just use a bathroom without having to buy something. It is the uncut gems scene, but we're referencing it from uncut gems scene.

So, yeah, I sort of feel like even when it comes to containing public health stuff, the gig economy is going to fuck us over and lots of... Well, I think what this... What are the things that I think this really demonstrates to us, right? Because over and over and over again, you get hit with that canard that, oh, socialism's impractical, you need the market, etc., etc.

Oh, tractor production, blah, blah, blah. Well, I think one of the main points of this podcast has been to over and over say that's absolute horseshit, look at the ways in which this market is deeply inefficient, look at the ways in which... Think of the ways it could be better if we just, as a population, took more control of it. And this is the object lesson.

So, at any fucking time, someone says to you, tractor production, you just say coronavirus. One of our draft titles before we settled on Trash Future produced practice much, my good bitch. Well, now, I don't know if any of you saw the Boris interview when he was asked about this, and he gave this very flippant response, which was just along the lines of,

we've got it all sorted, so just wash your hands or something. And it feels like this is the attitude that they're going to take. They're now not necessarily downplaying it, because I know that when it comes to things like this, there is obviously a lot of people who overplay the situation. But it seemed to be this kind of thing. Keep calm and carry on. Right, just keep calm and carry on.

And by the way, I'm getting married and I had sex once. Which I'm impressed by. There was actually a Zizek article that he wrote for RT that came out recently about the coronavirus and how he basically sees it as the kill-bill death blow to capitalism. Yes, I heard about this. And I was like, I don't really read stuff on RT for mostly kind of traumatic reasons.

But I do like, what was it about? It's basically the gist of exactly what you were saying about how it just kind of shows the contradictions of the system and how inefficient it is actually distributing the things that everybody needs. And also, he sort of did this like galaxy brains, like Lacanian thing, which is what you expect from Zizek. And he was talking about how he used the film kill-bill as an example

and talked about how, you know... Oh, it's the two-finger death blow. Yeah, the death blow basically. And how the bill, like he could stay alive as long as he didn't move. And how that's kind of how capitalism is like operating right now. Like the death blow has been dealt. And it's just kind of in this like limbo state trying to sort of justify its existence.

We've seen the stock markets sort of have this massive dip because of like Chinese manufacturing not working anymore because we operate in an economy based largely around getting treats with same-day delivery. And we may not have our treats. Our treat supply lines may be compromised. And I think that more than anything else may be... That would be the funniest thing is if the overthrow of capital comes

because people aren't able to get their treats. I think that there had been the potential for a huge sell-off for a while. And I think this happening is going to... There are a lot of problems in the economy already with regard to... What's happening in the United States is just complete math. It's basically like Keynesianism for stock buybacks. Like it's just been this massive splurge of tax cuts. But that hasn't translated into enough labor gains for people to actually buy shit.

And so you're dealing with a huge deficit problem with people having student loans and mortgages and particularly deep subprime loans on cars, things like that. So there's so much consumer debt in the United States. I feel like this moment was coming and this might have just been the moment that it happened. But also I was going to say, but with regard to the Boris Johnson thing, it doesn't surprise me that their approach is... They're presuming they'll just do the thing they always do, which is like, oh, a funny guy with a fancy accent is going to condescend to you.

And that's going to be enough. But when people start actually dying and you start... Especially in places in the country where in the north, particularly of England, where you're going to see the fractures in the ability for the NHS to provide because of how underfunded and cut it is from austerity, when that starts becoming manifest, I do wonder if Boris Johnson condescending to you with a fancy accent is going to be enough to make your racism dad just be like, oh yeah, it was all in safe hands.

They're going to give him a pith helmet and everyone's going to... No, it's fine though. He would just be like the traffic warden in Threads. I've also seen some weird xenophobia going on. There was this article I was reading about how Chinese restaurants are suffering at the moment because people are just not ordering Chinese food. And I also saw another article about the tube and how if there's Chinese tourists on the tube, people are moving to the other carriage.

So there's been this weird xenophobic kind of thing that's been going on, as well as the fact that obviously the treats that we order from China are like... There's also like a bunch of conspiracy theories. There was like one of the more popular ones is that like, actually, this isn't a biological infection. This is a plot by the people who created 5G. Yeah, yeah, I heard that. It's a Huawei thing because in my super brain, I have heard of two Chinese things,

the coronavirus and Huawei, and so they must be connected. Yeah, but I mean, the thing that I really like, though, is as it expands beyond China, as it breaches quarantine, we'll discover all kinds of new and exciting forms of racism. Iranians, for instance, are getting some racism because of the outbreak in Iran. But my fondest dream has come to pass. We have found a way to be racist against Italians again. Yes, it happened in Lagos because there's now an outbreak going on in Lagos, and that's my mom's there at the moment.

And it was an Italian business person who was working in Lagos that was then quarantined. And now in Lagos, people are basically not letting white people go to their restaurants. Yes, this is what we want, we want the entire tube carriage to empty because someone is talking with their hands. It's just articulating just a little bit too much. All of history is a mirror in that it's all repeated, but it's all backwards. My favorite reaction to this just before we move on as well has been Bill Mitchell, who thinks that the Democratic Party, because the other person I love is Matt Hancock and Bill

Mitchell, my two favorite people. Bill Mitchell firmly, because he's a stocks guy as well as a Republican strategy guy. He's a guy who thinks he's a big market player because he's just investing what he saved up from running a boat dealership or whatever it is that he did. He's like, yeah, of course, the Democrats would want to dampen Trump's economic record, so they're exaggerating all this coronavirus stuff. Oh my God. And now even people who want to do racism against the Chinese are replying to him, like, no, it's very bad, it's very bad, it's very bad.

And he quote tweets and is like, yeah, I'm pretty sure I'd be fine if I got coronavirus. Correctly predicted Trump's nomination and his win. So maybe we should hear him out on this one. Maybe it's not that bad, maybe Hillary really was like in a bio weapons lab in Wuhan. And then this surveillance cameras in the corridor just mysteriously went off right before. The only conspiracy theory willing to believe about coronavirus is that everyone who had the coronavirus also had information that would lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton. I mean, in the pants suit opening the vial of virus.

I feel great. If you go back and like trace the first strands of coronavirus, you will find it in, you will find its origins in a pizza place in Washington DC. So it was all contained in an elegant string of pearls configuration. But the thing that like, fuck her, like going to the 9-11 Memorial and then like having a fit of meningitis or whatever, just all in all the pieces fall into place. Nothing, nothing ever changes. So I want to talk about one more, one more thing today that's happened in

Britain that has been on my mind much to my regret. Because I'm personally tired of having to think and argue about every wet fart produced by Toby Young. It is boring. It is stupid. And yet he has passed conceptual wind that is, and it's called the free speech union, which is neither stands for free speech, nor is a union in any meaningful sense. It's a group of guys who love hanging out. Yeah.

And if that's not a union then what it? So it's a holy posting empire. Yeah. All we know for sure is that it appears to be a group DM and a group of friends. You basically pay to be in the group DM. And then they'll gang up on people if they're mean to you. So Young says, nobody is safe from these. And then you could put in square brackets, woke, which finder generals.

It's a compound plural, which finders general. Which is why you're, you're, you're, you're hating free speech, Alice. Yes. Which is why Maverick's and dissenters of all type will be welcome in the free speech union. Okay. So the Muslims against Crusades guys who are like burning poppies on Remembrance Sunday, are they welcome in the free speech union? I can only assume so. I mean, I read an article by a researcher, Neha Shah, who talked about,

I believe she's of the same who's saying with similar background to you that she's Gujarati or parents were immigrants from Uganda. And she basically wrote about why, why that community right votes overwhelmingly Tory. And she's getting ganged up on massively by a weird mixture of like white dudes who write for unheard and like Hindutva people, basically calling her, not just calling her a racist, but calling her an anti-semit for some reason, which doesn't make any sense given the situation. And one guy in particular that I was, I noticed was basically calling saying that this is like an anti-semitic tract saying that she, that this group of people is dissenting from the

vulkish beliefs of, you know, they should support the Libs instead. And if they don't, then they're betraying the vulk. Like this is weird projection. And this person is basically like getting threats. She's getting weird DM. She's getting harassed. Like, is that not a cause for the free speech union? No, of course not.

Because they only do this for right-wing people who like say something racist or sexist or misogynistic or any kind of thing. And they don't even get canceled for it. Just get told, hey, fuck head, don't do that. I could not have called the free speech union on Graham Linehan's like three day meltdown about me. It's kind of a bit of a headache because you have both liberal cynicism and you have right-wing cynicism and they're basically two sides of the same coin. And any sort of conversation that has to do with any form of identity is always polluted

by these two sides, sort of like pushing and pulling and so much nuance gets lost. But for sure, these right-wing people wouldn't defend, you know, the right of somebody who, the rights of, I don't know, like the people who are burning poppies, for instance. They wouldn't even defend the rights of anyone in this room. No, they wouldn't. I don't think so. It's not this not necessarily true, but it's more like one of those things that they'll entertain because they know that they'll never have to like confront that kind of problem.

No, yeah. So when we talk about like the Muslims against Crusades people who were like very, very evidently like really kind of trolling and pissing people off and deliberately doing that, they knew exactly what they were doing. They wouldn't, they're not the kind of people who like even need a free speech union or want a free speech union. No, they don't want to be in a room with Toby Young. Right, yeah, they don't, they don't want to be, they don't want to, like all the,

and they're all like all in fucking like Belmarsh prison right now, but they don't, what they would rather be in Belmarsh prison than hanging out with Toby Young. Again, who's the monger? So what these, I mean, I'll make these very quick, but like what the free speech union basically is are for the most part like guys who feel that they should still like have respectability. And even though they have like a network of kind of all pals who like they all go on each other's podcast, they all have like healthy Patreon networks, they get Edinburgh shows, they get broadsheet space, they get broadsheet space, they get to go on like TV and do like

the papers and they get all this type of respect, but nothing is enough. And that's because like, unlike the Muslims or Crusades people who actually like for what it was where I've had some sort of purpose that went beyond themselves, these guys don't, they're just kind of people who want attention. And this is like the next big attention thing, which is like we're all shitheads and we're all going to be like shitheads together. And they're also just like extremely online. So like for them, it's like a union is well, if one, if, if like a bunch of leftists with like red, red rose emojis keep making fun of us, like we're just going to get our mates to pile on as well.

But what do you think the left's like response to this sort of cynicism should be? Because I honestly do think that the way that we respond to it is flawed, as things are at the moment. Um, more posting. More posting. More posting, more sharing. Increase the supply of posts. Now I think Cassania were right about this being like largely self-interested, tedious white dudes, but what interested me though was the outreach to TERFs that's contained within the Free Speech Union. One of the points that Toby Young mentioned specifically is like if you're a feminist professor who's critical of gender ideology, then you know, the Free Speech Union is there to help you. And I'm just, I'm very taken by

the idea of all of these radical feminists in a room with Toby Young as he complains about being censored by the woke SJWs because he's not able to just tweet about tits. I have a theory about this and I'll make it really quick. I'll make it really quick, which is like every time one of these people goes and does an interview, they always kind of say the same example. So both Andrew Doyle and Toby Young and a few other people have used the same thing about there was this kind of former police officer who tweeted out something that was like transphobic and supposedly like the police had kind of, um, had contacted him. Now, I don't know whether the police contacted him via Twitter or like just immediately executed by a squat or just like

or like sent him to Belmarsh for a day or something like that. Steven Seagoury drove a tank through his front wall. The story changes a lot, but I think like my theory behind this is that like the, these types of like right wing, like commentators, they're now at this like weird crossroads because like Brexit is done, Trump is done. There isn't really like any, like any big culture where they feel they have to fight like the whole like campus walls thing is done. So, but they also are dealing with the secondary problem, which is that they've got like a group of younger people who were once kind of like Jordan Peterson fans and stuff who are now like

becoming groupers, like they're becoming like people who are listening to guys like Nick Fuentes and like listening to like this quite ardent white nationalist, Christian nationalist, trad shit and none of like the people who made their name in 2016 know how, know what to do about it. Like Jordan Peterson is in hospital right now, but like none of the other like, like Sam Harris and Toby Young and all these like acolytes, they don't have any idea what to do about it. They don't want to kind of veer towards the white nationalist territory, but they also like have to make a living, right? So I feel like going towards like the whole gender thing or like the whole like so like quote unquote gender ideology stuff is like the next logical

thing that they can do in order to maintain their respectability. And I think as you were saying, Angie, about like where like the liberal, the liberals in the right are kind of the same side of the same court, like the same coin, like that's where like their kind of meeting point is. But like also, I think very quickly, we can tell when a conspiracy theory has finally got legs. And the way you can tell is that it becomes anti-Semitic if it wasn't already. And so we've made that jump now. I've just started seeing turfs getting very, very interested in this trans-Jewish millionaire called Jennifer Pritzker. And they have now decided that it's all some kind of elaborate Talmudic plot. So that's great. Yeah. I love to experience that

and think about that. And yeah. All reactionary politics eventually convert, they all find ways to agree with one another. That's how like the second way of feminist are going to be able to get together with Toby Young. But I think like the other thing to remember is like, in the free speech union, they say, we believe that free speech is currently under assault across the Anglosphere, particularly in schools, universities, the arts, entertainment, industry, the media, the aim of the free speech union is to restore and protect it. Like it's almost hacked to say that's transparently horse shit. And I think who's saying you hit the nail on the head that Toby Young is a rodeo clown. And his role is guys to hang out. If Toby Young

were 20 years younger and from like Baltimore or like the surrounding area, he could have just been in jackass. He could have just been like one of Steve-O's friends that like, you know, gets hit in the nuts on a bet or eats a pie made of like cow shit. Like he could have gotten all of his like visceral naughty thrills that way. And yet because he wasn't and because he was Michael Young's son and he was here and he blocked his way into Oxford, we have to keep reading what he said. Like this is the thing, right? We're also, we're falling into this trap, right? We are being, we are the bull being distracted by the rodeo clown in that it's very easy to make a segment about the Toadmeister, the damn Joker living in our society who knows

what he will do next than talking about, I don't know, Prissy Patel going full like femme tarp on civil servants. It's interesting though, because they have their own kind of weird, the right wing kind of cynicism has its own kind of weird industrial complex. But here on the left, we have our, what I like to call chud dunking industrial complex as well. The Posts Factory. Yeah, basically, where, you know, there are quite a few of our figures who are reliant on having chuds to dunk on and a lot of, a lot of the momentum that could go towards spreading class consciousness, doing better analysis that is outside of the sort of neoliberal consensus is wasted on like paying like copious amounts of attention to people like Jordan Peterson,

like Sam Harris, like, and the two market demographics sort of feed each other in that sense. There is a strange sort of market logic that goes into the way these right wing pundits react and interact with the left and vice versa. Look, I can do class consciousness or I can call Sam Harris, Ham Saras. I can't do both. Well, you can do both, but I guess there's so much emphasis on the chud dunking, especially, I guess, in the sphere that I come from, YouTube. That's like what takes up the majority of the thing that's also the most incentivized and the most popular. And I feel like people don't do the job of like looking at how the market incentivizes certain types of behavior and how the market

leads us towards certain types of loops and like dynamics that we just kind of fall into, especially when it comes to something as important as combating reactionaries. We kind of end up just following the market's incentives, carving out our own consumer demographic and talking about the same things like ad nauseam, which is the reason why I find culture war stuff so fucking tedious, like it's so tedious and exhausting. I don't love being a debate, although can I say very quickly that I do think that chud dunking is my favorite Chambuamba song. So the thing is, I think that the point is, right, the free speech union is there for liberals to

dunk on it, right? And for me, this is almost the same as the announcement on the front page of the Telegraph that Boris Johnson is having a baby. What a happy time for the country. It's the inverse version of that. It's the let's get super pissed off at this entity that is just an organized version of the country's reddest, oldest, baldest id that really exists to be pissed off and resentful. I mean, basically, all the people trying to write twee songs about sue, you're shouting at T are the same thing as this free speech union. It's this weird kind of self-contained environment where people basically are trying to use opposition to whatever as an opportunity to be like, I'll build a brand this way. And we all do it. We make fun of, I mean,

all of us has done it at some point. And I would be low to claim that I'm not doing it considering I've been doing it all weekend. But it's one of those things where I do realize that there will never be an end to their made up bullshit complaints because they just want everything in this country and they're still furious. I feel like we can circle back to Liz Warren again in that even on the left, there is this kind of obsession with personalities and this idea that if we can just kind of defeat this one personality, if Caitlyn Bennett can go to a university and get called a shithead five times in a week, then maybe she'll go away and that will be the end of that. And we don't want to address the material causes that will produce

the next Caitlyn Bennett. Exactly. That's what I was going to say. It's so personality-focused and driven to the point where people think that debunking talking points ad nauseam is what's going to stop reaction from manifesting when there are actual material conditions. Like I said, for example, the Joe Rogan endorsement from Bernie Sanders, the Libs got fucking... They were wiling out on Twitter about the facts that Bernie Sanders touted the Joe Rogan endorsement. The fact is, it's not as if Joe Rogan hasn't said things that could be considered reactionary or hasn't had people on his podcast who are reactionary, but it's interesting that when you present that reactionary tendency with sound, material analysis, it sort of dissipates. Especially

when you're talking about real normal kind of everyday people, people who aren't part of the pundit class, people who don't have an incentive to be married totally to a specific ideological framework because it's not necessarily benefiting them. And I think that those are the people that the left should be focusing on is kind of presenting those people with the analysis that can lead them towards better aims. So if that leads almost perfectly into what the free speech union says it's trying to save, they say robust debate, appealing to reason, evidence, and our shared values, as though there is such a thing, is also the best way to resolve disagreements about issues big and small without resorting to violence or to intimidation. But what they actually mean

is that they want never ending debate. Debate can never be over. More posts. It's going to happen forever, endlessly debating and debating and debating. And for some people, that means being a debate forever, which just seems like hell. Cool. What I will say is that I feel like there is a dialectic here, right? Between the extremely serious materialist thing and the very flippant personality thing, I don't think that necessarily if Caitlyn Bennett comes up to you at your university and sticks a microphone in your face, that you should just start reading from the grundriser, right? But I think what we do on the show is to try and deploy a certain level of irony and

entertainment in order to like the sugar that makes the medicine of the grundriser go down is us making fun of people, right? Of course. I think you can balance those two things. But yes, certainly they what they would like is to continue the posts with like nothing else outside. For me, the issue is the over focus on one over another, which is something that we can't deny is an issue even on our side of the equation, especially because we are part of the pundit class too. There are certain incentives that we have. The PMC is calling from within the house. Yeah, literally. There are certain incentives that we have to kind of perpetuate this endless sort of debate culture as well. And exactly, as you said, it's kind of irritating

to have certain people constantly have to be that objective of scrutiny. So yeah, I don't know. I think there are market forces that encourage us to set ourselves up as being in opposition to a certain thing, ad nauseam, and it kind of obscures a richer and more robust discourse from emerging. And what that's allowing us to do, right, that idea that we're going to be tricked into fighting forever because they are going to fight forever because so long as the debate is never and that's the trick. That's the conservative trick. So long as the debate's never over, nothing can change. Just living in a blasted hellscape with sea levels 20 feet higher than they were, and the last guy on earth turns to you and says, did you just assume my pronouns?

Like Toby Young is going like, I don't know. We're in this exact same situation, a blasted hellscape. Toby Young, the free sea-tuning is now like a horse-bound raiders and they gallop in to steal your fresh water. And Toby Young just says, oh, are you triggered by how much I like to talk about big knockers? Just more like the idea that Toby Young, as they finally, the nightmare fascist government he helped usher in, has finally decided that he's no longer useful to them. And as they're conducting a tactical airstrike on his final redoubt, he's like, you can't shoot me. I identify as an Apache helicopter. I think you're absolutely right in the whole idea that the kind of debate culture is a farce in the sense that particular groups

of right-wings and liberal people will use it as a way of preventing things from getting done, like the idea that... And I've been thinking about this just in the context of Brexit. And again, it's like the fact that 2016 doesn't seem to have actually ended, or maybe it did end very recently. But we went through that period where 2016 was just being played over and over again. And part of that was because the whole debate culture, and unless the right one, then it's just something that continues to go on and on and on. And basically, it's a rigged game. It's fundamentally a rigged game where one person can win, but it presents this situation where right-wing people can present themselves as being rational and

present themselves as being reasonable. We just want to have conversations. We want everyone to have conversations. But ultimately, it comes down to... Well, when we win, it's over. And we'll just move on to the next stuff. So now it's kind of gender identity relates to things. And when, I don't know, like fucking hell, when they win again, maybe there will be something else. When the podcast has won fewer hosts. And yeah, and that's like... And I don't really know what left-lingly people can do about that, because you're right in saying that we are kind of... We're very privileged to be part of a class that has a platform and is able to communicate and is able to kind of advocate for our positions.

But we're also kind of playing a rigged game. And it's one that's always stacked against us. And it's one where if we kind of reach out and say that we will, we support activists and we support direct action. And we support people kind of throwing themselves in prisons if that's kind of a formal process. Or even when it comes to union striking, for example. There was all that drama that happened the other week about some chud kind of tweeted something along the line. Or it was a newspaper reporter who tweeted, like, oh, the guy, the people who work in the tube, they earn like 70, 80 thousand pounds. They retire with a really good package. And they're still protesting. They say, well, yeah, that's what happens when your union is one of the few

that wasn't kind of destroyed in the ACs, right? But for them, it was... For them, it's just again, it's about like respectability. And I don't really know how leftist in the media can really... Unless that whole system of how we have conversations and how we have debates, if you want to call them, unless that structure changes. Yeah. But it's like, don't accept the premise is my whole thing. And I feel like we're constantly accepting premise. Like there have been so many times where there's sort of right-wing free speech type people will come to me and be like, debate me nerd about whether... Well, it's because they get like a platform of privilege, right? It's like the same as...

Whenever we ask a question, like, why is kind of this IEA child like on to like daily politics all the time, right? Or why is it that like they can only find like two leftists? One of whom is like Ash Sarko, who gets like enough of her own shit. And the other is like some moderate, like a moderate kind of person who just says, I identify on the left and oh, lo and behold, it ends up being Andrew Doyle. Do you know what I mean? So it's almost a way of saying, well, we'll only let you advocate for these positions on television, which are really effective in a lot of ways. If we think about like the Corbyn movement, for all the kind of way, like bad ways are ended, or the setbacks, let's say.

So we'll call them like setbacks, like conversations about like the failures of kind of capitalism as a whole, like a new generation of young people who kind of recognize these problems, which I guess is like mirrored in like the Sanders campaign as well. You know, that's happened because leftists have kind of like forced themselves into public conversation. The whole kind of thing that we're trying to do is trying to seize the opportunity to enter the zeitgeist and be relevant with it. But we also never really pay attention to the stumbling blocks that like lead us that are like that are on the way into that kind of into that kind of space and how the medium kind of is the message in a sense, a lot of the time.

Listen to these parasocial relationships that you formed and place all of your trust in Bernie Sanders. It's strange. It's strange to me though, because I feel like we're constantly not doing it on our terms. We do play the respectability game a lot of the time. We do indulge and entertain nonsense when we don't really have to. Like I said, there are so many of these like right wing, you know, types that are like, debate me nerd, I want to talk to Angie Speaks about how there's like a bone in black people's brains that makes them dysfunctional. And I'm like, no, I don't have time for that. And it's not something that really affects my life to the point where I'm going to like waste time talking to you about that.

I feel like we're constantly involved in arguments that like, number one, don't necessarily resonate with like the average person. It's this like weird philosophical deconstruction of everything. And I feel like the right wing kind of you takes advantage of that and distracts us from things that are actually, and look at Bernie Sanders message, it's resonating. It's about the things that everybody needs, common areas of struggle in that regard. Whereas, you know, the right wing kind of canon that they're relying on at the moment is mostly kind of shit that like guys on the internet think about, you know, ad nauseam, things that have been played out for the last four years, whether it be the debate about free

speech or this or that, you know, I feel like we need to divert some of our attention away from this bullshit into this shit that because that's where we're going to get that kind of popular support in the sense of advocating things that affect everybody and that everybody can kind of get behind in that regard. That makes any sense. Sorry. No, it does. I was thinking about this just in terms of not letting yourself get bogged down and stuff that wastes your time. I don't know. I saw Sean Fay, who is a trans activist, made the comment that she was approached by the BBC to be on TV. And basically, the question they wanted her to be on a panel about was, you know, do women still have to fight for their

rights? And she responded with, I recognize that as a trans woman, you're going to put me in opposition to a feminist who wants to say that my existence as a trans person threatens her rights somehow. I'd rather die. I hope you can find someone who, but hopefully you give them the kind of, you know, aftercare they're going to require from all the abuse they're going to be exposed to once you put them on TV that way. And she said, she followed up a few days later, she said, they wound up canceling the segment because they couldn't get any trans people to come on, who would be willing to get a fucking abuse by some turf. In a way, they'll always be the Lawrence Foxes, they'll always be the fucking idiot right wing water carriers. But I do think that like,

there's an extent to which you're not going to be a, it's not trying to argue with all the people who get in, you know, in your mentions and try to do like post fucking red face gammon memes at you. Like that's not necessarily going to work. But I do think like what Hussein said makes sense to me that if you can, if you can find a way to get people who are disinterested or who are feeling the same way, but don't have any kind of like, like-minded people in their life or in their social circle, like you will actually start leading people in the same way that I mean, everywhere you go, you know, every fucking idiot, ham face more in this country who's over the age of 40, who's raging about Corbinism, is convinced that Navarra is both this Stalinist plot and also

a huge waste of time. But think about all the activist spaces we've been in where young people, people young way younger than me, we've met, Riley, you've met, who Navarra was their entryway into leftist politics in Britain, and now look where they are. Like that means something. And that's certainly in my opinion. Yeah, that now all Maoists, yeah. They want, they want, they want, they want to murder half of this podcast. For the right reasons. I think that like, there is something to be said for refusing to be a debate. And like from, from the trans side too, I like, that's not to say that you should just ignore the many problems, quite the opposite. But I think there is something to be said for letting the more obsessive of our

enemies obsess and like very visibly obsessed while you just kind of be relatively normal. Exactly. I think that that kind of like, let, let Graham Lennon scare people because he's very good at that without meaning to be. And I think, look, what are the things, right? This Alice, you and I were talking about earlier, which is that this is exactly right. That when, when these people are left alone to stew in their own resentments, then we're just going to see what happened in American politics lagged by a few years, where they're going to start emptying their bank accounts to buy Corrigs to smash with a nine iron. They're going to get very weird. Or they're going to like, you know, photograph themselves eating a,

eating a brick out of charcoal with ketchup or making a snow angel in a big pile of medical ways to piss you off. So long as we do the work and like are, relatively speaking, confidence and content in ourselves and thriving, the more they will be normal, powerfully normal. And like, all you have to do is just say, just, just, you know what, just, just next time they, if they, if you get into a, get into it with one of these goons, just say, you know what I really hate? I really hate when someone eats a big ball of salt with a spoon. Boils my blood. It pisses me off. No end. If you ate a big ball of salt with a spoon, that would ruin my fucking day. I'd have to go to bed if you ate a big ball of salt with a spoon.

Please don't film yourself doing it either. But on that note, we've gone for a bit, so I think it's going to, it's time to wrap up. Angie, thank you so much for coming out today. Thank you so much for having me. I had a great time. Like we said at the beginning, follow Angie on, on Twitter, get out or on YouTube, listen to Low Society and check us out at Bristol Transformed. It's going to be on the Friday. Doors at eight for a start at 8.30. We really look forward to seeing you all there. Don't forget the March 11th as well. Don't forget our Patreon coming out this Thursday. We got a real, a real banger of an episode we recorded with Kiran Dold of the Cornerspady podcast

about what comes next for Ireland. Lots of big question marks there. There's a review of Jerry Adams' tweets. That the top 10 of the genre. Otherwise, our theme song is Here We Go by Jinsang. Find it on Spotify. Listen to it early. Listen to it often. Nate, what's up? Milo is out with the flu, not the coronavirus, just the regular flu. But I will include the links to his upcoming live shows. For Australian fans, just bear in mind, this month, after I think it's starting on the 15th, he's going to be heading to Australia to perform in the Melbourne Comedy Festival. So look, if you're in Australia, if you're in Melbourne or you're nearby,

look for that in the show notes for the links to buy tickets. And if a right-wing person yells at you to try to get you to do culture war bullshit, say, it really pisses me off when you pray for our boy Milo Edwards, this speedy recovery. Yes, but you have to pray Islamically or it doesn't count. So everybody say a shahada for our boy Milo. And we'll see you in the Patreon on Thursday or see you on Bristol Transformed on Friday or both.