TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* World of Moggcraft feat. Nish Kumar

Episode Date: March 10, 2020

In this unlocked bonus episode, we're talking Jacob Rees-Mogg's history: his book 'The Victorians' might be the single worst collection of words that Riley's ever subjected himself to (so far), and we've brought on friend of the show Nish Kumar (@mrnishkumar) to discuss it. You might even call it a 'Horrible History,' but that would be anti-British drivel! We've also just released part 2 of this review with Nish, which you can get on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/34742880 *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 

Hello, trash future listeners. Nate here, just a quick heads up. This episode is part one of a two-part series in which we read The Victorians by Jacob Rees Mogg and react to it with the pleasant company of Nishkumar. This episode was originally on Patreon. It's now completely unlocked. And if you want part two, it's been released on Patreon today as well. There's a link in the show notes where you can access it. Patreon subscribers, do not worry. There is another bonus coming out on Thursday as well. So you will have all your content needs met. Hopefully you are not currently under lockdown, but apparently that's the fate that awaits us all. Anyway, hope you enjoy. Hello, and welcome to this bonus episode of Trash Future featuring myself, Riley Milo.

Nate on the boards. Hello. Alice calling in from sunny Glasgow. Hello, Riley. You didn't do the sexy voice you always do when there's a bonus episode. And we are also joined by the official Trash Future Bad Books by Tori MPs correspondent Nishkumar. What a specific, specific brief. I'm honored to have finally got a real job. I can't wait to tell my parents about this. You'll never believe it. I've got a real job and it's listening to the worst writing imaginable. So I said this to you before we started recording. Whatever information it is, you people are trying to torture out of me. I will give it to you. It's a bit like when you're watching a BBC news report and they're like,

now over to our Bulgaria correspondent. And you can see how genuinely shocked they are to be on TV. Like this person like in the very depths of the BBC machine, who's like never been used in a report since 1982. And they're like frantically straightening their tie. Yes, Bulgaria. I've not spoken English in 23 years. So having gone through the sort of various psychoses and mental cul-de-sacs of our Prime Minister Boris Johnson, we figured it was time to go through the various psychoses and mental cul-de-sacs of the old fashioned ghost that haunts our Prime Minister, Jacob Rees-Mogg. Another extremely normal man. One of the normalist. They're living in carnation of the worst aspects of this entire country.

Like it's like somebody brought to life the worst of our national subconscious. And what always strikes me, and this is something we'll get into as we go, is that lots of people like to say, oh, he's not even a real tough. And it's like, he's new money. Yeah. Is he new money? Yeah. He's a hedge fund. He's a hedge fund guy. Do you guys know that he was interviewed by Ali G in the late 90s, the 11 o'clock show? Yeah. He was like the like poshness expert for, he was like, you know, when Ali G used to do segments of the 11 o'clock show, one of the second, he used to interview people and say that he was from a fake youth TV show. And one of the people they got was Jacob Rees-Mogg,

because he was like seen as like an expert on cartoon poshness in Britain. Yeah. He's an expert on it because he's very studied at it. And there are lots of liberals who like to own him on the basis of, ah, you just play an aristocrat. You're not really one. You're just a much more modern, important and effective type of aristocrat. A hedge fund guy. How many boys have you even molested? Come on. It's like, have you ever seen The Talented Mr Ripley? Like it's trying to own fucking Matt Damon with, ah, you're too successful. Yeah, exactly. And this is what we're going to be exploring as we go through his book on the Victorians. Yeah. The Talented Mr Rees-Mogg.

And this book, I believe it has been read under a thousand times. That's under a thousand sales. It's been read far less times than that. Far less times than that. So I am now, I believe, one of a very elite confraternity of people who have read Jacob Rees-Mogg's book. And I think those scholars who've like, who've memorized the entire Quran, you're like, half as Riley, exactly. And I've read all of Jacob Rees-Mogg's book and now I'm taking it out on Nishkubar. Just George C. Scott's pattern with Rommel. You've read his goddamn book. So we're going to jump right in. The blurb from the publisher, as follows. They built a nation. Starting very strong.

Great start. We killed nation before that. We killed nation the first five minutes. It's already a bad start. They built a nation. Here's the better it's about to get worse. Now it's our turn. The Victorians built this community center and the mean developers want to repossess it. But if we can just put on a show. Roger Scrutin. It's the twist end that we've recolonized India. I mean, I don't know what the twist ending is. I think the twist will come to what that is. The prize in the colonizing India competition is exactly the same as the cost of stopping them demolishing the new rec center. So many associate the Victorian era with

austere social attitudes and filthy factories. Yeah. Okay. Sounds about right. Sort of filthy. I associate it with Victorians, but carry on. But in this bold and provocative book, I mean, that's true. It is bold and provocative. In the sense that it's a 600 page history book with like 50 sources, all of which are just sort of paraphrased into 12 biographies. It's free form. He's doing freestyle history. Jazz history. I miss the days when provoke didn't mean I'm going to be a cunt for a bit. Well, because legitimately it's a guy whose qualifications as a historian are.

I'm the monocle wearing version of the guy who posts on YouTube videos. Like I was born in the wrong era. This is when music was real. After he died. This is exactly right. This is like getting the 13 year old kid who's like, I listened to that led Zeppelin all my classmates like swag shit. This is like getting that kid to write a history of classic rock based on what he thinks it would have been like. I mean, yeah, fair. Also, I don't know if you've ever seen Jacob Reese Mogg as a 13 year old, but he was famously photographed for the BBC wearing a monocle and like a double breasted

suit code at age 13. So grim Jacob Reese Mogg, the titular Mogg leading Tory MP and prominent Brexit advocate takes up the story of 12 landmark figures to paint a very different picture of the age. One of bright ambition, bold self-belief and determined industriousness. How can you paint a whole picture with just using white? Also, like as though that somehow is, that is my bad. Sorry. Sorry. I wanted to bring this up to show Jacob Reese Mogg because this was also in 1981. Like he's not even that old. So to paint a very different picture of the age when a bright ambition, bold self-belief and determined industriousness, which as we all know, is the opposite of social, of

austere social attitudes and filthy factories. It's not like these things can coexist or enable one another or anything. Nope. It's one or the other. And also, it's like, it's not as though that's not a picture of the Victorians, which you're completely fed in school of like just men in stovepipe hats who wanted to change the British economy. We wanted to build railroads. It's like slavery. Yeah. Yeah. That is all we were ever taught. They build bridges and nothing else. Don't Google them. Yeah, don't do that. Do not Google them. Whether through Peel's commitment to building free trade, Palmerston's deaf diplomacy and international affairs or a Pugin's uplifting architectural feats, the Victorians transformed

the nation and established Britain as a preeminent global force. There's a weird kind of alliteration or assonance in all of those sentences. This annoying the hell out of you. Yeah. Like, yeah, it's just, there's that's like deaf to diplomacy. And I'm like, oh, yeah, get behind that. It wasn't that diplomacy was so fucking easy in the 19th century, because it was just a bunch of people meeting up to discuss how the various pores were doing and how best to kill them. You just like drove a boat onto somebody's lawn, like informed them that their land was now your land and took a piss in a plant. Yeah, also far be it from me to speak for the colonies. But to what extent is diplomacy, we will own you through a string of complicated trade agreements?

Like that doesn't strike with particularly diplomatic. Well, no, they did it because they did it in a smoky back room, as opposed to in all these austere European chambers. Anyway, so we don't want to go through every ludicrous piece of historical revisionism in this book, because it's basically all historical revisionism. It's all just Jacob Riesmog saying, oh, man, why are you being so mean to all these generals and prime ministers? Why won't someone think of the generals and prime ministers? Every chapter is a book report, but the only discussion is the vibes of that book that he read. Yes. Again, I've read this book, and yes, so among his heroes, he counts his general Charles

Napier, who committed like an incredible, like a massive colonial massacre in India. And this is monocle into soup shit for the liberal commentary in a cool way. What I mean is this is monocle into soup shit for the liberal commentary because he'll get some stuff wrong, but none of us are surprised by this kind of shit from Jacob Riesmog. And to be honest, it would be weirder to us if he didn't bow down in worship to erase the crimes of Britain's greatest bloodletters. So our approach, our approach to understanding this book is, as ever, complicated. It seems as though Riesmog had several motivations for writing this piece. Firstly, as a piece of extremely revisionist history, to support

his view of what Britain should be now and in the future. Secondly, as a piece of myth-making about himself as a kind of oxonean polymath and traditional gentleman. And third, to carry out an incredibly weird and specific grudge against early 20th century Bloomsier, a group author, Lytton Strachey, for writing a book called Eminin Victorians, remembered as a brilliant and sardonic bit of history, but also sensitive and honest. And for Riesmog, it was insufficiently fawning. And so he's constantly referenced. He's just written this book to just like, fuck this one guy in particular. Imagine having a beef that with someone who died a hundred years ago. So Jacob Riesmog, that's now. He wishes it was a hundred years ago and he tries to live

in that headspace. That's what we're going to get to, actually, is the real reason he wrote it. We, as ever, think is fundamentally personal because Jacob Riesmog was raised by Jacob Riesmog's dad, I think William. And William Riesmog is editor of The Times. I'm just going to look that up. He was William Riesmog and he was editor of The Times. And he was also like ideological anarcho-capitalist, which again, should surprise no one. But he would write books like called Blood in the Streets and stuff about how investment has to go to crush worker power to make it all of society must be winner take all these kinds of things like Rothboschet, child markets. Yeah. A manual on how to be a sociopath.

You know, these guys knew something about. So it's, you know, all to the good. And so what we get then is I think that one of the reasons that Jacob Riesmog is so obsessed with this era is that he is a fundamentally empty person and hit this drive to sort of restore nationalism, to restore this drive to nostalgia is for him to connect with something outside of himself that isn't being bought or sold. This is the thing. I am, I love this shit. I absolutely love the psychoanalyzing why he's done the worst book of all time. Why has this happened? I blame the public schools. Like there is nothing as psychotic as an institution as the British public school, like nothing breaks your brain in quite the same

way as sort of flouncing around in an outfit designed by an eccentric 16th century pedophile and like learning Latin and it all being for an empire that means nothing anymore and has long since died. Hey, hey, hey, Alice. We still got Gibraltar and the Pit Cane Islands. Okay. So let's all just think carefully before we start saying there's no empire. I love Pit Cane in Cest Island. We did almost manage from your dad to gather enough money to restore the bell for Brexit. It wasn't quite enough, but I think we can all agree that fucking Spain would have had a bit more trouble doing that. I'm just laughing at the idea that Jacob Rees-Mogg was probably like a secret contestant on the 1900s house and much like somebody surfacing too fast from a dive,

he didn't, he got the bends. He got dropped back into society with no reintegration and now he just thinks everything is the year 1909. It's goodbye, Lenin, but arranged by an entire country. So I want to take a brief detour before we start Jacob Rees-Mogg's book into the preface and most famous passage of the 1918 edition of Strachey's Eminent Victorians by way of contrast. The history of the Victorian age will never be written for we know too much about it. What a line. That's a good line and we're never going to see that after we do this paragraph. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian. Ignorance which simplifies and clarifies which selection emits with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art. It is not by

the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack the subject in unexpected places. He will fall upon the flank or the rear or will shoot a sudden revealing searchlight into obscure recesses hitherto undivined. He will row out of that great ocean of material and lower down into it here and there a little bucket which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen from these far depths to be examined with a careful curiosity. That's beautiful. That's that's a delightful view of like the historian's task and we're never going to like we're stuck with Jacob Rees Mogg for an hour. You have like shown us this light

and then snatched it away. Yeah, the writing of someone who isn't still breastfed. So in the spirit of Strachey, this episode will not be about like I said the historical ignorance of Jacob Rees Mogg that has been exposed by legions of liberal journalists and is mounted to nothing, but instead about insights into the man himself, the spiritual deadness and the frantic need to construct an anachronistic persona for himself in place of anything inside. These will be the little buckets that we examine with a careful curiosity on the sea that is Jacob Rees Mogg. We are rowing out over his ignorance and like lowering down buckets to bring up some anglerfish. I really want Michael Winterbottom to buy the rights to this book

and adapt it like a cock and bull story and like make it into a movie about Jacob Rees Mogg trying to jerk himself off to his eyes. It's IP, that's Strachey's IP. It's like a weird like Charlie Kaufman movie about Jacob Rees Mogg trying to write his book about the victory. Incredible. So because that's not yet been made, the best we have is this podcast. So we're going to start this from the introduction and this is on duty. Victorian religiosity connected with a more general belief in duty, a belief that encompassed those who were not especially religious. The slaughter of the First World War made duty an unfashionable concept to later generations, but surely a true patriot must value dutifulness above other virtues.

So the First World War was bad, but let's pretend it didn't happen. Yeah, let's assume that that's just table stakes. If you believe in being dutiful, well, you've got to accept the somme. I'm sorry, lads, those are the rules. Oh, you don't like getting machine gunned because you've accidentally charged from the wrong trench. Well, sorry to say, boy, but that's what's called being cool. Also, I don't wish to do this too often, but to remind people of the previous thing where we the Boris Johnson novel. It's very clear immediately, we are dealing with another first draft. We will see more evidence of that as we go on. That sentence was like trying to solve a magic eye picture. Like it was like you just

want to hold on to that idea that there's some meaning within it. So I'll predict himself in two clauses. Yeah, also, it's important to know that there's a reason why these books are all released as first drafts because they're not designed to be read. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. It's like the Juche library approach to history. The point is to have a huge book on the shelf. It doesn't say anything. It's just to be big and be printed. But also, I love this as a side detail. We've delayed this episode until we could get an ebook of this because the only other version I could find before recently was the audiobook version that Jacob Rees Mogg himself narrated. And I would not subject Riley to 16 hours of that man's voice. No.

Further to our general point of Britain in 2020 being the Soviet Union, but shits and expensive, we have a shits and expensive version of the great Soviet encyclopedia, where it is just like a bunch of one note biographies stamped together into an enormous volume. So here's another little tasty morsel for you all. The Victorians had confidence in their civilizing effort, a belief in the goodness of their own nation and the drive necessary to finish the job. So he's writing a cover letter on behalf of the Victorians for their first like civilizing effort hit me ancestrally. I just felt right in the lineage. Yeah, go through three generations.

Also, Lawrence Fox is here to argue that this is good. You're actually triggered. The courage to finish the job is like three, three successive invasions of Afghanistan later. It's like, did you really also everybody, everybody ask me if he ever defines what the job is that they're finishing? Does he ever define if it was killing a bunch of them? He's referring to a general sense of stick to itiveness that appears to, you know, this is like we said earlier, not to toot my own horn, but it's the vibes history. Yes, it's a vibe story. Did they or did they not finish the spinning gender?

Why do the kids these days have like invent new genders instead of invading the Sudan? Here's another one. And this is his main thesis. This is what he's arguing. How favorably this compares with the contemporary nervousness about the country where moral relativism accepts an equivalence between good and bad. Did you just say the thing I just said, but worse written? A contemporary nervousness about Britain. Yeah, born out from knowing about Britain. Yeah. And also a contemporary nervousness that hasn't translated into anything political at all. No, I don't know what election results. I don't know what election results he's been reading,

but we could do with a bit more nervous. He was allowed to write this book. So here's the thing. It says that the country now has moral relativism, which accepts there's an equivalence between good and bad. So his main thesis is that in the Victorian times, we thought good things were good and bad things were bad. But in modernity, we think good things are bad and bad things are good. We should go back to how it was. Isn't this basically the same as that article we read where someone said that people were happier during the Victorian era? Because there was more joy expressed in newspapers.

This was funny how that works. But also good and bad are not easily defined concepts in terms of academic history writing. I just like the idea that the Victorians as a thing were like uncontroversial in their own day. There were no suffragettes, Marx was not alive. None of this stuff was ever criticized or questioned because they all stuck to it too much. I'm really excited to get to the graph section in the middle of the book, where it's like usages of the word tally-ho. Let's just speak to your point there. These people are never mentioned because either they're enemies of good things and they like bad things like Marx, or they're people who like good things,

who merely had a misunderstanding with other people who like good things like the suffragettes. It was in fact the spirit of liberalism that existed during the Victorian era that would have allowed the suffragettes to have the votes eventually. That's kind of how he squares all those circles. There just wasn't enough Victorian time. If Queen Victoria had lived longer, we had more votes. Exactly. This is also where I get back to that sense of emptiness, because if you think about this, he's talking about a sense of comradeship and national purpose based around just feeling good about one another, these things that give me a feeling of personal connection and purpose. It's the group side of fascism. I mean, it gets you more of this.

The work ethic of our forebears is also deeply admirable. It is not that people are lazier today, rather that leisure has come to be seen as a right rather as a reward for work. You know, leisure, like the weekend, like the thing that trade unionists fought for as a right to leisure. Just because they existed in Victorian times and affected political change on them doesn't mean they were Victorians. No, that was not the weekend is not a Victorian concept. It's actually a postmodern concept that came earlier because because like all of those existed like entirely outside Victorian, that's because they were doing Antifa shit. So this is where we today can and must learn from our ancestors, he says. After all,

is it not still true that the British constitution is a model that works better than those in other nations? Define other nations. No, define better. Yeah. Define the British constitution. I don't think we even need to do any of that. We don't need to like do any of this Dicean framework stuff. We can just say no, like even if we accept every single part of your thesis here, we can just answer the question with no. No, it doesn't buy your other logic. No. By the British constitution, what he actually means is the ability to endlessly eat boiled unseasoned meat and not die. So what he said, he goes on, that is why the British constitution has been so widely copied.

That's why. Yeah, that is why it was naturally occurring. It fell like rain from the heavens. He does define the British constitution. No, he says democracy, the rule of law, the rights of property and freedom of speech. That's not defining it. That's just characterizing it. Because he literally knew like what Mike was saying, like the laundry list of things. Like the British constitution is in like the British, the body of the British. He means the vibe. He means the vibe of the British constitution. He means the vibe of the government being like cool. No, but also the British constitution is like the baseball stadium in field of dreams. Like the whole thing is like, if you build it, they will come. So it's just whatever you want

it to be at that given moment. Actually, slightly too many of them will come and we have to do something about it. So for the Victorians and us, this constitution led to a stable and prosperous state. From that bedrock, the conditions of the people were improved for the Victorians and continue to improve now. Nope. Nope. So it's from this little. I know we're not doing the like we're critiquing his history stuff because it's all going to be like this and it's all going to be so bad. But it's like, it's worth remembering that right now, fucking horrible histories, a show for children is an enemy of the state for suggesting that maybe some of the things that the Victorians did were bad in the gentlest way. I of course have no comment on that story. However, we brought in

Lawrence Fox. I couldn't possibly comment on that given that apparently even just introducing it makes me anti British and against the values of the country. But yes, it is. It does make it's been an interesting weekend as we record off the back of the Victorian sketch from the horrible histories thing. It does show you the level of sensitivity that people have about even the mildest critique of, you know, like robust debate and freedom of speech are one of the things that apparently in Jacob Rees-Mogg's imaginary British constitution. But if you it's robust debate about what kind of phrenology is good or it's robust debate about things that are so abstract, like, you know, what does good taste like or whatever? It's pointless.

But this is this is actually. What should nanny make for dinner? From the position, from the position of just the starting point that Jacob Rees-Mogg actually has no internal life. Like he's not fully like he's just he's yeah, he's just he's an a husk from that starting point. He's a townsperson who gives you a task. We come to that later because we do think of that, but not quite in that way. So from that position, the view of a honey cheeked, prelapsarian Victorian time where you didn't have to wrestle with people objecting to you doing what you do must seem very seductive. And it's a very personal connection to something immaterial that Jacob Rees-Mogg is yearning for. He's writing himself a happy place.

And so when people on when people who have that same thing as their happy place, people who feel that desperate need to connect with something bigger than them, see their nostalgic vision of what the world was like attacked, they take it very, very personally. And the problem is that nostalgic vision isn't just a personal preference about how they'd like to think of the country. It results in a lot of fascism. Yeah, it's not just aesthetic. They don't just want the stovepipe hats, right? Yeah. We forget what comes under the stovepipe hat. An even smaller stovepipe hat. And within that stovepipe hat, a set of phrenology calipers. So for the sake of my own Twitter feed, all I'll say is you are a bunch of anti-British

arseholes and you try to brainwash children. You know, that actually is deft diplomacy, unlike whatever bullshit he's going to say about Palmerston. So we also have to remember like all pieces of critical writing, and this is criticizing, it's just criticizing criticism. Who is Jacob Rees-Mogg writing against? Because a critical piece of writing always has to defend a position. And this piece of writing is basically critical against critics who would consider like year five history to be overly complex critical theory designed to undermine the legacy of Lord Palmerston. Who criticizes the critics? Well, which is which is personified within Lytton Strachey throughout the book, this early 20th

century Bloomsbury group member. So everything's fine. Don't include my imaginary nostalgia, which I've cultivated in order to feel less empty. So this is wrapping up the introduction. The British today have even more opportunity than the Victorians did to be successful. You know, that is just a tumble joke. If I fed a medieval woman, even one of my sour M&M, she would die. If we cannot share their inner belief and self-confidence that propelled the Victorians, we will stand still, petrified as other nations overtake us. It's a little bit late for that, don't you think? Margaret Thatcher showed how the new Victorian spirit can work and then reinvigorate a failing

nation. What? What? Yeah, it's... Oh, yeah, the Victorians hated coal mining. They couldn't stand it. This book was written for a world in which the Suez crisis worked out quite differently, I think. It's weird to me because I was just thinking about this. I remember there was a story in the news, kind of apropos of nothing here, but they found a skeleton somewhere near like Limehouse and it was from the early Middle Ages, and this person had way, way, way better teeth than most bodies they found from the Victorian era because it fucking sucked because people had... It was actually got worse here for your average person's quality of life. But the glory was up. Glory was on the chart. That's also true of general hygiene. If you read Eleanor Herman's Royal Art of Poison,

there's a long section in there about how for years, during the medieval and early modern periods, aristocrats had worse healthcare because they were just pouring gold and stuff into themselves while peasants were like using herbs and things because that's what you could find. Exactly, yeah. Since Thatcher left office, the forces of stagnation, trepidation and hesitation have returned. These heroes of old who possessed belief and patriotism, a sense of duty and a confidence in progress and knowledge of civilization have shown us... Wait, so Margaret Thatcher is an honorary Victorian. Yeah, that's where this book has gone already. Yes, one big cursed stovepipe hat. What the fuck is he on about?

Well, it's that Margaret Thatcher did Thatcherism, which is where you flog off all of the state-owned resources to private companies, which in a sense is kind of what Queen Victoria did when you think about it and if you've been inhaling smoke for a while. Yeah, it's like you do need a carbon monoxide detector. Yeah, there's a graph between kind of the economy but not defined as to what that means going up and also like amount of table legs covered for the sake of decency. Well, the thing is, you have to remember that this only makes sense if you view it as Jacob Rees-Mogg yearning for meaning and connection because that's what this is. This is the

connection of my personal acquisitiveness and these sort of sets of policies that benefit, well, me and four other people that have been directly connected to the vigor, spirit, and moral worth of us as a national group. It has to mean something and it has to be for the benefit of a nation that still exists. And like, if Britain has changed in some ways since the like fucking Victorian values with which I was inculcated while like worrying about showing the Latin master too much leg, then what am I to do but to try and drag us back to it by writing a fucking polemic? So wait, what he's saying is that nothing of value, including fighting a war against fascism, setting up the welfare state of the National Helter,

nothing of any value happened between the Victorians and Margaret Thatcher. I mean, he's heavily implying it. So basically between 1901 and 1979 is a dead zone. He says that the Victorian period lasted from about 1790 until about like 1920. You know who was cocked was Winston Churchill, right? It was until women got the vote and started wearing those short dresses. That was when everything went downhill. So what we say is the other thing is like this is a fusing of Victorian ideology and Neoliberal, Victorian morals and aesthetics with neoliberalism, but he finishes the paragraph. This is the end of the introduction.

And they're proving all these modern trepidation people wrong. He says, even if the Litton Strachies of the world disbelieve in Margaret, he was wrong. So two questions for you. So that segue into Margaret Thatcher, did you edit that like there was interspersing text or was that legitimately how that paragraph is for? Did you edit out the sentence when we are about to talk some absolute horseshoes? When we put the notes for this together, Riley and I edited this together. And one of the decisions we made early on was that we were not going to abridge Jacob Rees-Mogg at all, because this is just how he writes. Because I just like I realized that your comment previously

that there's sort of like the purview of liberal history, liberal journalists to make fun of the bad history. But like this is terrible writing. And it's a weird conundrum when somebody has gotten to this like sun king position in British politics that like no editor is allowed to change their prose. Because that's Marxism for some reason. What the hell is this? I'm excited for like the future descendant of Jacob Rees-Mogg in 110 years time who will be forced to like quote tweet all of my own tweets being like her owned. We edited very, very little if anything. This is just how he writes. It was about picking the paragraphs, not the words within the paragraphs. So here's our

also our thesis to this thesis. Jacob Rees-Mogg has to be understood as playing World of Warcraft. Queen Victoria has been reborn as Margaret Thatcher and has given him the main quest, which is to make Britain good. The British proletariat are by and large friendly NPCs, some of whom might give you quests, most of them just walk around. The other factions players are lit and streaky and then the non-western proletariat are like random encounters you have to grind for rep with the East India Company or Raytheon or whatever. So it's like bring me nine thuggy belts for a new musket enchantment. Yeah, because he has he has no like internal life, right? He can't we're talking about psychopath shit. He can't picture other people as having like their own

thoughts or personalities. So of course they're just like they're just mobs. I still like because even for someone of Jacob Rees-Mogg's politics, like to sort of essentially even erase like even Churchill seems to have been like a too much for this dude. Well, we've only done a few of the biographies. Maybe Churchill is referenced in some of the other ones. I believe he's quoted a few times, but he's really got to feel like Churchill, even Rees-Mogg must like Churchill. Oh yeah, he does. Like the one Victorian who like dragged us through our soy war. Yeah, right. Yes, that's how we do it. Well, don't forget Churchill was a Victorian. So let's start. Yeah, because being Victorians about a vibe and Britain used to have

that vibe and then Churchill had that vibe. Thatcher had that vibe. And if we do Brexit, we'll all have that. Well, we're doing Brexit. Why write a book about the Victorians? If the center point of your thesis is that you can be a Victorian by being Margaret Thatcher, then why just write about that? Because he wants to connect neoliberalism to some kind of British identity that's deeply rooted in history. That's why. Exactly. He's just very, very stupid. He wants it to be an Angus the Christie novel about why the housing market should only enrich one guy. So let's start the first biography. This is a quick hit because it's so long. We're going to skip through a few of them, but then we're going to go deep into a couple. So Robert Peel.

By 1828, Robert Peel was ready to set about massive police reform in London. And in these pre-Victorian years, he laid suitably moral foundations for the Metropolitan Police, the first truly Victorian organization. And which never had any problems ever again. It says massive police reform, but the police just didn't exist before Robert Peel. What is that? If not the biggest reform of all reform from the opposite of police to police. Chapter one, page one, 72 point font, cop zone. He saw for his new police force, men of the utmost probity, and he saw to it that they would not be tempted by outside blandish mints or financial gain. And what's crucial, fuck off with the word

blandishment. And what's crucial is that Jacob Rees-Mark doesn't say how he went about doing that. He just reassures us that he did. You know who has never been bribed by anyone ever as a Met Police officer? No, certainly not one in the Victorian era, but they're all just... Well, their hats were too tall for them to be bribes. It absolutely never happened that a series of cartoonish villains were robbing a bank and then presented a constable with a helping Christmas ham and would like re-waved on their way. So what he thinks though is that the police force would have been tempted, but we needed Robert Peel to come in and do morality to it. So to understand Peel, Jacob Rees-Mark continues to say, and the age he brought into being... Yo,

what's up? Again, he's not defining any of these things. This is worse than Wikipedia. In 1828, Robert Peel invented cops. And then we learned about being good, because if you're not being good, then the cops are bad. Without Robert Peel, you couldn't have had the TV show, cops, which is very fun. I would totally watch Victorian cops though, like Victorian road wars. To understand Peel and the age he brought into being is to appreciate that. And can we get a little ding every time I say Victorian in the next paragraph? Okay, fine. Is to appreciate that pivotal Victorian virtue of respectability. There are any number of other Victorian exemplars. Such men showed just what was industriously possible. Victorian values

was not a slogan of a century to come, but a real scheme of morals which sought to improve, sustain, and care for the community as a whole, and in a hard-headed fashion, to boot. To boot? You've got to hit the word count, guys. You've got to do it. That is the most Victorian thing, though. Yeah, it's what I used to write. Just keep restating the title. Scrufflanders. It's a code of values, then can we have it codified, please? And secondly, this makes the level of just straight-up determinism here. This makes Hansel and Gretel look like a fucking post-modern novel. I mean,

I just hearing this stuff, I've never heard something this simplistic. You know what's really funny, though, is that Peele did try to codify his own values. The principles of policing was something he came up with, and Jacob Rees-Mogg just doesn't bother to like... No, does not cite that. No. Because it wasn't a runaway success as he would define it, so he just doesn't make it into the book for some reason. Damn, I hate it when you're good as hard. Also, Victorian values was not the slogan of a century to come, but a real scheme of morals which sought to improve, sustain, and care for a community as a whole, and in a hard-headed fashion, to boot. All good history

writing includes the phrase, to boot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If there's one thing I want from history, it's boot. Exactly. And if there's one thing that I take away from my knowledge of the Victorians, it's bringing up the community together with the spirit of community involvement. It's like a Victorian community was the community for Victorians among Victorians in that community. Exactly. This podcast recorded in Whitechapel, a place where the Metropolitan Police famously uplifted and did show criminal moral poverty. Lots of local Victorian industrialists would do good things to the community, like run youth activities for young people where they could come and learn to use a steam loom and climb into the narrow spaces of the steam loom to dangerous

territory of things. All of Charles Dickinson's novels are famously about how equal everyone was. Yeah, exactly. So the other... So Jacob Rees-Mogg sees the task of the historian here as defending the Metropolitan Police as a fundamentally good institution. And if you're criticizing it, then you're lit and stracky. On the one hand, the image of rowing out onto the sea of ignorance and rescuing individual things to carefully consider them. And on the other, the cops is good. So Lord Palmerston. Lord Palmerston. It's so funny that there was just a like decades worth of a generation that only associates Lord Palmerston with Barney's drunken bar fight. So this is my favorite line from the entire book. From the entire book, this is my

favorite line. In February 1855, Palmerston at last attained the greatest office of all with his appointment as Prime Minister. Yeah, in the politics game, there's only one big boy at the top spot. Everyone's talking about it. Who's the Prime Minister? In the Super Bowl of politics, there's one quarterback. And that quarterback's name, the President. There was one other top spot, which was called Being Queen Victoria. That one had already been snapped up by another hot young property known as Queen Victoria. There's a biography in this towards the end. Oh, incredible. We don't talk about it today. Greatest Victorian of all. Yeah, the only woman. So good they named her after the Victorian era. The woman who came to

signify the Victorian era, Queen Victoria. I legitimately feel like that guy who eats old rations on YouTube and ate the fucking potted meat from the Victorian era, learned more about the Victorian era. Steve Emery info is being piloted by Victorian gut parasites right now. He's the only living Victorian. The last line of this book is surely and truly the Victorians were in us all along. So Palmerston rejected ideologically dogmatic excesses, dismissing, for example, the idea that cholera was an act of God that could be halted by penitential fasting. Instead, that's not an ideologically dogmatic excess. That's just being dumb. Instead, he pressed publicly the idea that civics works in the poorest areas were the best

way to stop diseases which led to death. And here's how Jacob Rees Mogg sort of puts this together into a narrative. He says, in other words, his work in government was connected with his Edinburgh philosophic apprenticeship and enabled to bring his intelligence and learning to bear for the good of the people. Wait, because otherwise he'd have to admit that spending money on public infrastructure stops poor people from dying. No, it's that it's that he says he says that of Jacob Rees Mogg's argument is that because Lord Palmerston spent several years at the University of Edinburgh, which was like the center of the Scottish Enlightenment at the time, which was all about reason and science and so on, that Lord Palmerston was able to use A-B reasoning.

Yes, Scotland invented thinking. Before that, nobody like, there wasn't even thinking one back then, little thinking too. Because the historian's job, we go back is to try and draw together a story to bring up insights from the sea of your subject. And he said, I bet I know where Lord Palmerston learned how to think. It was Edinburgh, the place that came up with it. I like how when when Lord Palmerston suggests like maybe not making all the sewers open to stop people dying of cholera, it's like, good is kingshit because it was Victorian. But when someone suggests taking the highly flammable cladding off of the council blocks, that's like, that's dumb guy shit. Because you're not a philosopher king about it. If you go onto the

University of Edinburgh and like, come back, learning how to think and then thought wisely that it would be good to element the poor and uplift them by not having them be on fire, then you know, that would be good. I've done 13 Edinburgh festivals. Does that mean I can now tell Jacob Rees Mug to stop being such a cunt? So this should also remind you a bit of Stephen Pinker, because like, yeah, the old Palmerston's two years he spent in Edinburgh are used as the root cause of his ability to use evidence to solve problems. But now we're going to go to General Sir Charles Napier, the conqueror of sin friend of the show. So everyone do grasp on to something because if you thought that that thing about the police where

he was like, he made sure none of them were bad, check out this next paragraph. Chapter two, page one, seventy two point font troops zone. In the aftermath of the British victory, Hyderabad opened its gates and Napier gallantly returned to the Amirs, the jeweled swords they had ceremonially surrendered to him in token of defeat. Awful sentence. That was nice of him, I guess. He further ensured that Cindy women were guarded and went unmolested. And indeed, when the editor of the Bombay Times claimed that they were systematically violated by the army, all 104 of Napier's officers who survived the battle immediately signed a letter promising they didn't. Well, I have no further questions. Oh, my God. I've never. Oh, this is amazing.

This is like a 10 out of 10. Like, no, actually, all the officers were in pizza express. I don't know what you're talking about. It's very convenient to stay in Hyderabad. Yeah, indeed. This is the next sentence. So he said signed a letter refuting this was what he said for Napier believed in the moral force of intervention and of intervention with honor, because that causal word for starting the sentence absolutely follows from that previous line intervention. Intervention with honor is when you invade somebody's country, but you don't like molest their women or you do, but you say you don't. You promise you didn't intervention with honor sounds like a Tom Clancy novel. You say that if it were to have been done, then it would have been

bad. That is the but it didn't happen. We've established that. How do we know? Because some guys all said it didn't. Yeah, exactly. Johnny Cochran shit. Can I also say that obviously the reason why Jacob Rees-Mogg loves Charles Napier is that Charles Napier did the most Jacob Rees-Mogg thing of all time, which is that when he conquered, when he conquered, sinned, the message he sent to London to the fucking top brass was Pekawi, which is the Latin past participle of the fucking, which means to sinned. So it's like yeah. That's the kind of shit Jacob Rees-Mogg would literally do now. That is insult to injury. I mean, he wouldn't be smart enough to do that now.

You were incestors conquered by a nerd, Nish. I'm sorry to say it. He would say it, but he'd say Pekawi. Yeah. It's a repeated refrain of the great British comedian out here, Sherbert. Can you believe our ancestors were conquered by someone a generation so lame? Yeah. He was like Pekawi. And then when they were like, did your officers kind of molest all his women and he's like, non-Pekawi. Yeah. Part of the problem with that is that Latin doesn't have a distinct word for no exactly. So we had to have this long, signature letter. Jesus Christ. That is fucking horrific.

Yeah. So again, it's just a whole like, well, there's all of these sources that say the thing I don't like, but then the thing that makes me just feel good about this grand national project in all of the forms it has taken, whether the new liberal one or the imperial one, it's morally upright. And speaking of, if the letter is written to you, you must acquit. He gave the important people their swords back and that means that he was gallant. Yeah. So Napier's quest was to pull Sind out of the feudalism. He saw as being responsible for the starvation in squalor, which was visible to every British official.

No. Barbershop quartet from trash feud. Specifically, his plan was to encourage local notables to reject their previous role as armed chieftains and embrace a new role as improving resident landlords. Who was Pete Buttigieg of the 19th century? He tried to be McKinsey Sind. So here, Napier's relative lack of experience told with negative consequences for his policy of moral intervention, because basically he just magicked into existence a bunch of incredibly extractive, abusive landlords by doing what he did to Ireland, which did the same thing there. Pete fucking Buttigieg rides again before his day.

He basically was like, we know how we can improve the lives of people and bring them out from under squalor. Let's do hear what Britain did to Ireland. I assume that'll be fine, but here's why that's actually okay, Nish, and why you're being unfair. Sorry, you're being a bit of a lit and streaky right now, because as Jacob Rees Mogg says, even though it didn't work, Napier's intentions were always good. Remember when you were looking in the mirror and you're being very lit and streaky on yourself, try and give yourself a little bit of Jacob Rees Mogg too. So he fucked up and he killed a lot of people, but he was purer of heart was the thing.

Well, he was also brave and fair, like the maidens of old. He opposed evil practices as well. What if he had opposed evil practices and his intentions were good, but also he was a massive coward just out of curiosity? He opposed evil practices in every sense, except the one sense of not doing them. She deserved it. Oh, I oppose this, he said. That's the least important sense. Also, by the way, Napier's intentions were always good. Good, another word that is just

not being defined throughout this entire book. That's what, again, good academic history writing should use the word good liberally. Well, good means you were wearing a bow tie at the time. Well, no, good means good and bad means bad, and people have forgotten that. But like you say, this is like primary school. Like if you wrote an essay in primary school saying the past is bad, your teacher would be like, come on, mate. I know you're eight years old and you literally just stopped shitting your pants, but let's try and elevate a little bit beyond the past was good.

This is what happens when you have a nanny forever. He deserves, Napier deserves his place in the pantheon of heroes. Definitely. The original title is good. Definitely what he was going for. Percy Jackson book. That Jacob Riesmark would like us to have. It sounds kind of fashion to me, like maybe. Damn.

But that does not mean everything he tried succeeded. If there was no standard, there would be no heroes. Avengers East in Dear Game. The historical point about this, you know, we've made, but the psychoanalytic point is that Riesmark is inventing a fantasy in which his own intentions- I can still be a hero. I can still be a hero. I can still be a hero. I have fucked up everything, but my intentions are good and that's heroic. Well, and you combine two very important qualities of Napier that are the ones he pulls out,

which is that intentions are all that ever matter. And the best way to actually make people's lives better is to be an improving landlord. So this is basically just the more my hedge fund owns, the better the world gets. Fucking hell. This is the big one. This is the big boy we're coming to next. William Saliman. Uh-oh.

Chapter three, page one, seventy-two point four on cop troops zone. So this is from Jacob Riesmark's introduction to the piece. And don't worry, we're going to define all of these terms as we go through. He's certainly fucking not. Fuggy did not exist and it never existed. No, it was merely the product of lurid Victorian Orientalist sensationalism. This is the spectator article phenomenon, isn't it? He's about to say he's saying the right thing for the first paragraph

because we'll get to what Thuggy is in a bit because it's true. It was the project, a product of the Victorians being lurid Orientalist sensationalists. Which is definitely the bit about the Victorians that Jacob Riesmark doesn't like. So he continues. In case you hadn't gotten that from the previous bits. In defining what Orientalist means, he says the Western Orientalists were capable of all kinds of wickedness in the form of tales, stories and accounts, their intent being to criticize and patronize Eastern civilizations,

to diminish them in the eyes of Western readers and consumers, and in so doing to justify Western predation, exploitation, settlement and theft of their land and assets. And to justify the things that I've already said are good. Fuggy was a concept that had to be dreamed up because Indian civilization had to be labeled as violent, murderous and beyond the pale. Beyond the pale is a good word there because that was applied to colonialism in Ireland. The pale being the pale of settlements around Dublin,

beyond which English law does not apply and you can just do whatever. Anyway, yeah, clearly this is the important bit to me because it means that he understands how bad faith this is. Like all of the primary school history stuff, yeah, whatever, fine. But like he's not stupid. He's just summarized in a sort of arch-ironic tone what Orientalism is and he's right about it. Which means he knows what he's doing in this next bit that's coming up, or I'm sure he just takes a giant shit on the whole concept.

Oh, Christ. So he could have stopped here. Mm, yeah. Fine, how would this great book have been written? All absolutely fine. What an interesting thing to have written. Go ahead, I see no reason to assume this will not continue in the same vein. Thus runs the prevailing academic approach to the phenomenon of Thuggy and its untold

thousands of victims. Look forward by certain people from the early 20th century who I won't name. Why are the victims untold? Just told them. At least people on twist will be like, yo, Stalin killed 11 trillion people. Like that's... Told.

So why lift a finger or a pen to combat the actions of such murderers and villains when one could instead avert one's eye and rationalize them out of existence? So that whole thing we said about Victorian Orientalists up at the top, yeah, we're not doing that. That's why this is so cynical, right? Is that he included that first part. He didn't need to. He could have just gone with, this thing was real and it was bad and it killed 11 trillion people.

But instead he had to have this like little aside to get his dig in at Lytton Stryke and whoever else. And it just shows how false and how venomous this whole book and person is. Yeah. And also the whole thing is he says, okay, his argument here is just ignore the other first stuff about how people invent insane stories to justify imperialism. Because ignoring the insane-ness of the story that we're about to tell to justify imperialism, you're the real racist.

What if the Thuggy killed a billion Indians? You feel pretty bad then. What the fuck? So what was Thuggy? I'm going to go now, Nate, I know you know. So I'm going to start with Milo. What do you think Thuggy was? A kind of a very early Indian SoundCloud rapper.

Are you doing the startup round with Thuggy? Nish, what do you think Thuggy was? Well, I'm assuming it's going to be a not particularly complimentary depiction of one of my forefathers. Sort of. The Thuggy were seen as a, they were a murder cult that existed up and down all of wherever the British wanted to go take stuff. What a coincidence.

And the way to understand it is it's essentially the knockout game. It's pure knockout game stuff, where it's your make up a myth that the people you want to police are doing and then you say, well, they're doing it. And if you don't believe they're doing it, then you must hate them. Right. So this is from other sources. In the 1820s, Captain William Sleeman had made the first discoveries of strangled travelers in shallow graves around Madras.

And his just dry reports of these things ended up being sensationalized and exaggerated to create a moral panic all around the English speaking world about a murder cult in India called the Thuggy. You can't rob and murder people for reasons other than cults, especially if you have whatever like phrenological configuration we've decided. To melanin thing. As we know, these guys can see my skull shape. Wait, I'm moments away from forming a cult.

Wait, the British Empire was a cult. So James Sleeman writing about his grandfather in the late Victorian period described the Thuggy thusly. The taking of human life for the sheer lust of killing was their main object. The plunder, however pleasant, being a secondary consideration. Yeah, they just love killing so much. Here was no body of amateur assassins driven to crime by force of circumstance, but men of seeming respectability and high intelligence often occupying positions of importance and

responsibility in normal lives secretly trained from boyhood in the highest degree of skill and strangulation. They were doing assassin's creed shit. Britain, a country that famous for fucking highwaymen robberies thinks that in India, they rob people not not because they want money, but rather because they're all part of a ninja cult. They do like they have kids throwing fucking ninja stars and climbing rope ladders when they're five.

Not to take money, but just for the love of the sport. Fox hunting, but for people. So this is the real history of it, or as close as we can summarize, which is that this is just disparate populations of, as you said, Nate bandits and highwaymen pushed to crime frequently as gangs of demobilized mercenaries who were made necessary by British destabilization of the region as they fostered internecine war between Amir's and Maharaja's and stuff. Think of them as like the Indian Conditieri, and there emerged this myth of a sacrificing cult of murderers devoted to the killing of travelers as a ritual to appease Kali,

necessitating ever more British law, which by the way is good. And that's where we get the word thug. Fucking hell. Love to murder to appease my like, uh, strange exotic goddess or whatever. So keeping an eye on the time, I'm going to talk Sleeman. William Sleeman, Jacob Rees-Mogg writes, was almost a prototype Victorian. So almost, almost a prototype Victorian. Wait, so he's like a pre prototype.

Well, yeah, it's like, well, he's a prototype Victorian. So we know what that means, obviously. Don't even need to say it. He's like a back of a fag packet drawing of an idea for a Victorian. He's almost that. Yeah. So his success exemplified that great if unsung Victorian virtue of sound, strong administration. No, that was de-sung.

Here we go. Hold on. Hold on. This is another one of my favorite lines. It shows this was a first draft. The great if unsung Victorian virtue of sound, strong administration. Indeed, he was a classic administrator. What?

Those two sentences both go together. This is like, this is like, if you just took the fucking the music off of like, HMS Pinafore or something, right? It's like, he is very modern. I'm a modern major administrator. Well, no, it is. It's like, it's got choruses. The tasks he accomplished would stay accomplished.

Jesus Christ. And stay accomplished. The thuggies seem to no longer have been murdering people. This is what would have happened if Hamilton had been written by white people. So it's like, the thuggie are no longer murdering people. We've gone back to good old British gangs of bandits. This is the very idea of being a good Victorian. So he was a good Victorian administrator in as much as his job was to

administrate in Victorian times. And boy, was he good at it. How fortunate, and this is Jacob Rees-Moggian, how fortunate, how providential that such a man was on hand in the subcontinent to take a look at India in the round and to identify precisely those aspects of its life and character that must change. Look at India in the round. That's where he gets to the thuggie. He was a McKinsey consultant once again.

He identified externalities such as the stranglings and right-sized them. So here's another really good bit of history writing. We're going to do a little bell when we have the best words on any history book come in. Sleeman's part in encountering and then exterminating the thuggie came about by chance. He happened to be on the spot when several incidents occurred. History bell here. On the other hand, perhaps fate or destiny had ordained precisely that Sleeman be on that spot. What?

You know, fate, destiny, these historical concepts. Again, concepts that make sense if you're writing to yourself to fill yourself with a purpose that's been robbed from you by your sociopathic father. Concepts that don't make sense in the context of an academic history book. Oh, that is superb. For it needed such a man as he to deal with a situation that so many before him had failed to resolve. Anyway, I love to write a history book that includes the phrase perhaps fate or destiny. I apologize to friend of the show, Eleanor Yannick.

I'm sure you've torn out your AirPods at this point. I love to show up in a country and just start a load of murdering. And then be like, damn, someone's got to do something about all this murdering. Oh my God. It is very similar to like planting a gun on somebody, right? Like planting the thuggy. So he says they were noted at the time as being closely shaved and oiled all over so that if coffee, it's truly the original smooth criminal.

Fellas, is it gay to be smoothly oiled all over? So if you believe, so he says, remember, the first thing he says, it's orientalist, not to it is not, sorry, it's not orientalist, it's racist against Indians because you don't care about them to not believe everything you hear about the thuggy. And so that means that if you're not a real racist, you therefore have to believe that there was a cadre of shaved oiled and mostly nude men running around into you strangling each other. Oh my God, it's like mountain blades. They're just getting robbed by naked guys in prison.

He basically said like that setup in the initial paragraphs you read was to suggest that he's, you are blaming the victim if you don't believe this. You're not respecting Indian agency. You're trying to rationalize away all this bad stuff that's happening. Can we please believe women? We're here, I'm defining women as the British army. So they also exploited what many observers recognized as a weakness implicit in Indian society as a result of the governance of the East India Company because the subcontinent

was split between regions ruled directly by the company in native states under varying degrees of British sway and regulation. And so law and order there tended to be fragmented until Sleeman took an interest. Oh, so this they're willing to nationalize. I'm just surprised he mentioned the East India Company at all, right? Like he does not mention it again, of course. But he calls the East India Company rule a weakness implicit in Indian society. They're not like a weakness implicit in British colonial administration.

I absolutely love that effectively the opening of that paragraph is, racism is bad, said the loser, actually was the real racist. Until Sleeman took an interest, the authorities were aware that something was happening on India's roads, something criminal and murderous, but had no conception that a plethora of individual incidents were part of a greater malignant whole, you know, probably because they weren't. Yeah. Aware of the unwillingness in many quarters to open up the vistas of this appalling case, Sleeman wrote an anonymous article and sent it to the Calcutta Literary Gazette.

The article and the writer to a newspaper. No, he was Q. Oh, damn. He was this the article detailed the material on the Thuggy, which so far have been accumulated, even if it in its slenderness was ghastly enough. He started Q and on, but then India. Yes. Many Victorians, great works were underpinned by having a strong and energetic press willing them on in their endeavors and able to support their works.

So that's a little like a hat tip to the Daily Telegraph there saying, thanks for Brexit. So archaic Mughal provisions meant that prisoners words could not be used against other prisoners. Sleeman. Hold on a second. So having a right against like hearsay is archaic when it's Mughal. But when it's British, it's part of our like our incredible constitution, which has been so widely copied. Well, Alice, this was swept away because central to Sleeman's scheme to deal with the Thuggy

were thugs who turned in former. Oh, good. So basically, human rights law and a society that develops a human rights law that I then deem as archaic after I like overthrow it. That doesn't mean that it wasn't primitive. If anything, it means it was too primitive. Yeah. So he basically the situation is if Captain Sleeman catches you and says you're

in a murder cult, you can avoid getting executed by saying some other guy was in a murder cult. Names five friends. It's a pyramid scheme. Yeah. That's how the murder cult got so big. It's just Herbalife, but the Indian version. And again, here, here's where it comes back round to where he goes to recognizing the sensationalism again, but doesn't under it doesn't connect the two strands.

Thugs were also very first draft vibes. Thugs were part of a delicious mystery to the Victorians. Full stop. Love a delicious mystery. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Thugs were part of a delicious mystery to the Victorians.

Full stop. There was nothing the Victorians relished more than a delicious mystery. No, no. Holy shit. Karma. This is like if EL James had written Poirot. Karma, all the tastier for being revealed a safe distance away. No, that's not even the worst sentence in this paragraph.

I helped edit this and I don't believe you. My brain has purged this memory already. The word tastier really hits the ear, Paulie. We keep the recipe metaphor going. Add to the list of ingredients a dash of the cult of Kali. This is a kid's fun. This is the essay from the episode of the Simpsons where Lisa has to read an essay in Washington where the girl's like, how do you make America?

Take two parts freedom and add a dash of stick to it. It's like fucking somebody watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the worst Indiana Jones movie, with a gas leak in their house. Listen, the cult of Kali, though, phenomenal name for an all Indian punk band. Here was a crime, stupendous in scale, incomprehensible in its motivations and form, and best of all, irresistibly easy to tell as a story. Fucking hell. And yet he struggled.

You don't put that together with the fact that this might have been incomprehensible in its motivations and form. I'm like, yeah, maybe because it's not real. God, none of these events seem to be connected at all. That's just how devious the Indian mob was. Was it none of them had ever met each other or talked to each other before? They concealed all of their crimes as being like a series of unconnected robberies. Every terror cell was one person.

Mindful of time, we have one more section left, and this is Pugin. So Pugin was an architect, and we had a paragraph about Augustus Pugin as an architect, but it was so boring that we had to cut it. That's the problem with all of this shit. So it is so badly written that it's just dull. We can basically, we can summarize. We're summarizing it. Augustus Pugin is a trap cat.

He's one of those press-esque to-go-back accounts that posts pictures of churches and they're like, oh, isn't this great before all of the Muslims got in? Except he also built buildings, most notably the clock tower that contains Big Ben. But then also a bunch of churches and stately homes that had gothic buttresses. Press-esque, yes. So I think he had, Southern Cathedral was one of his, one of the most mediocre and forgettable cathedrals in London.

He built the world's first Eaton Fives court. There, done. Fuck you, JRM. So he also wrote a book called Contrasts that was supposed to be a blueprint for a new and better society through flying buttresses. And the full title was Contrasts or a parallel between the noble edifices of the 14th and 15th centuries and similar buildings of the present day showing the present decay of taste. Okay, this is some Alan Partridge shit.

Well, no, this is just the 19th century version of the Lady Shapes with Alan Partridge. I'm saying is, do we have any guesses as to who this stand-in for Jacob Rees-Mogg in this book is yet? It's not even Lady Shapes though. It is the press-esque to go back account. It is like the high Tory account that like posts a photoshopped picture of some church in Poland and then like a deliberately rundown photo of a spar and stressem. And so you have to see Augustus Pugin as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Contrasts as this book. So he has written himself into his biography of eminent Victorians.

I'm telling you, Winter Bottom is going to make a dynamite film out of this. Cougan's going to play Rees-Mogg. So Contrasts was handsomely and richly illustrated, but it was a classic polemic. It focused on a series of contemporary buildings, set them against a medieval equivalent, and supplied illustrations designed to magnify the beauty and harmony of one and to diminish the beauty of the other. Pugin's comparison of the newly built King's College London with a view of Christchurch-Oxford. The one hunches gracelessly between two larger buildings,

while the other, it's more contemporary Tom Tower edited out, is shown as the picture of Grace. This Twitter account still exists. Contrasts was above all a denunciation of urban life of the day. It attracted the world of the regency, that vanity fair of stucco-fronted manners, high taste and low principles. But that's Jacob Rees-Mogg. That's what Jacob Rees-Mogg likes though. Yeah, he just likes nostalgia as an idea.

Yeah, it doesn't matter what it's nostalgic for. Jacob Rees-Mogg would like anything which for its time was nostalgic. Like a book written in like 600 A.D. that's like, I can't believe that they've stopped calling it Constantinople. He is Homer Simpson with the little pen that just says sports. Contrasts confronted the Britain that had by means of its industrial revolution created the modern world in squalor and misery in monstrous proportions, such as the world had never previously seen.

It claimed to be a work of rigorous impartiality, while simultaneously asserting that no fair mind could find favour in the work of the present century over the Middle Ages. Puget's conclusion was that true buildings were the ones that emanated from the men who thoroughly imbued with devotion for and faith in the religion for whose worship they were erected. Which is also a horrible sentence. So he couldn't write either.

A horrible piece of writing. So that's a quote from Puget to be fair. Oh right, okay. Well, then he truly was the reachmark of his death. Wait, so hang on, he writes this guy into his book. Clearly, it's like a standing for him. But then also admits that this guy was completely wrong. He was like, oh yeah, this guy who is exactly like me,

who was writing a book in the Victorian era, thought the Victorian era sucked and preferred an era. He was just a weird simp for an earlier era because he'd like wanted to feel good about himself. Anyway, he's me. So here's how this works. Here's how this fits in. Okay.

Puget was also fated to be what could be called the first eclipsed Victorian. Just a category of thing. Right. Okay, are we going to define that one? Unvictorious. Even in his own lifetime, despite the very great cultural, architectural and cultural legacy, his people virtually lost sight of his achievement.

He was the first victim of backlash, which began long before the Victorian age came, its kid self came to an end, against what? Lytton Strayke. He got owned by a guy who lived like 200 years after him. Awesome. Against what Lytton Strayke's Bloomsbury contemporary,

Victoria Woolf called the Crystal Palace's bassinets, military helmets, memorial reese, trousers, whiskers and wedding cakes of the age. Everyone I don't like is Lytton. This hero who was forgotten, even as the revolution he had ushered, is me. I'm the guy.

And so that's the thing. It's also the world's first eclipsed Victorian, the first person who got canceled by Libs. The world's first owned Victorian. World's first canceled. The young Pugin was not alone in communing with an imagined past. The first decades of his life, in the age of modernity, though they were,

also witnessed a rising interest in interpreting and from time to time enacting history. This was the age of romanticism, which reacted sharply to the mechanization and industrialization of at work on all sides in multiple forms. But Jacob Rees-Mogg is the mechanization and industrial. He's the beneficiary of all of this. He's a hedge fund guy.

Yeah, well, this is where he writes himself in the book as far as, because he recognizes that his nostalgia for imagined past is like, he's working to make the world a more mechanized and industrialized place. He's working to demolish all of this. It's just he has to console himself, but I continue. Take the Eglinton tournament of 1839, in which 100,000 spectators gathered in the pouring rain in Ayrshire to watch enactments of medieval jousts,

or Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, a romance which depicted a fanciful medieval world and became a bestseller. It was also the era of Young England, a group of youthful Tories that eaten in Cambridge invested in the idea of a medieval feudal golden age. This is, I mean, this is exact. Is this, I mean, I hate to give him any credit here, but is this some creeping self-awareness from Jacob Rees-Mogg?

No. No. I can tell you that it's not, because I can tell you that it's not, because he this, yeah, just like the last biography, there's an opportunity for self-awareness. Yeah, sure. That is dutifully avoided. So just like every problem can be an opportunity,

every opportunity can also be a problem. So here, this is the last of the quotes I'll read from Jacob Rees-Mogg's book, because we're going a bit long and I'm aware you've got to run. The shape he gave to his buildings, and this is the moral of the Augustus Pugin section. Right. The shape he gave to his buildings transferred to the shape

that Britain herself assumed in the national psyche, which is, again, a meaningful sentence. You know, the shape that Britain assumes in the national psyche is quite a bit like Southern Cathedral. You just drew my shape. Well, no, it's quite a bit like the Southern Cathedral. Yeah, dismal, forgettable. Lending his work a potency,

which none of his contemporaries can possibly match, Pugin took the language of the past and placed it in the service of the present. And in doing so, he created marvels, which affect our lives profoundly. If Churchill's famous quip, we shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us, is to be believed. This is like the exposition in a Fifty Shades of Grey book.

What the fuck? You know, it's also like, just, just man, just sentences. Why, why can none of these twats write? That's what offensively, like, it's classically, expensively educated. So this is what they come up with. So we're doing, we're doing metropolitan elitism against Jacob Rees-Mogg.

No. A site of his life and work shows a man who could only ever have been what he was, because he had a greater cause than himself. A noble spirit, it begins the smallest moment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jebediah, Jebediah Rees-Mogg. Jebediah Rees-Mogg.

What an amazing hell. It's a sad bit where he was like, that this guy is like a titan of our age. He's like, shaped the world we live in today. Like, no one's ever heard of this guy. Because of the libs. Because of the libs. Because of the libs.

Because of the libs. Because of the culture. Because of Mitch Kumar presenting a horrible history song. This is, this is like, if we're doing... He was supposed to present the Oscars and they took it away from him. If we're doing psychoanalysis, right, this is the fear that lingers

in the hearts of Jacob Rees-Mogg, is that he is not going to be remembered, or will be remembered dismally, because the libs will get their way and will wash away all of his beautiful, well-intentioned mediocre work. Fucking hell. Fresh Future survives.

Jacob Rees-Mogg doesn't. So yeah, that means in 200 years, there will be like, the Jacob Rees-Mogg of his day will write a book about like, eminent, eminent Brexiteers that will just constantly harp on this podcast. Anyway, I don't think that Milo

would have done something like that. The Trash Future set. And then Comrades from Whitechapel. All right. So that's the first half of this book. Oh, good lord. Can we arrange for Nish to get like, reparations from Brexiteers?

Yeah, Nish will get 10% of the sales of this book, which is at the moment. Four pounds. Oh man, that is absolute shit. How do we all feel? Sullied. I feel like I just ate a pizza that was raw. Not even with meat.

I'm not feeling sick from pepperoni, just that I've just spent the last hour and 16 minutes just chewing on uncooked pizza dough. You know what I think? I feel like, I feel like Geralt of Riviera, when like you drink a potion, I feel like I have high toxicity. I think this genuinely, this episode,

will have made more money than Jacob Ritz Mogg's book has in sales. And in that sense, we are doing upper-class derision of Jacob Ritz Mogg, because to be honest, purely on book sales, this podcast is already ahead of his non-existent stupid book. I think people will listen to this podcast

about his book than ever bought his book. Certainly more than listen to the audio book of his book. Oh, that is, I will not go there. I will do a lot for you people. I will not listen to that book. I'll do almost anything for love. So I believe it is now time to bring this sort of affair to not a real close,

because we'll be finishing this book at a later date, but to a temporary reprieve. So I want to first say, Nish, thank you so much for doing this to yourself again. Always a pleasure. Always, a word I'm using incorrectly, but it is always an experience. And I'd like to thank you all for listening on our Patreon.

You're all lovely and I love and kiss each and every one of you. Do we want to do any plugs before we go? Nish, do you have anything coming up? I've got nothing at the moment. Yeah. Like Nish's tweets on Twitter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Go watch horrible history. Do I have anything? I've got the shows at Vault Festival and at Leicester Comedy Festival and at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. So check out, they'll be linking the bio, the link in the description.

Why have a brain parasite? I'm sorry, Binh Pong, Brexit, Ding Dong. Yeah, click on that and it'll give you all my tour dates if you want to come see me. And also, we thank you for listening to this, for coming to our live inaugural TF Union debate tonight at the Head and Chickens. However, we're also doing a live show

on the 11th of March. And that's going to be at Voxel Comedy Club. It's not going to be anything fancy. It's going to be a normal live show of this podcast. So please do come out to that, mark it in your calendars, tell your mom, tell your dad, tell your uncle, see if he can come. And I think with that, it's just left for me to say

thank you all for listening. Thank you again, Nish, for coming on. And thank you to Jinsang for our theme song. Here we go. You can find it on Spotify. Listen to it early. Listen to it often. See you later.

Bye. Bye.