TRIGGERnometry - End of Year Review 2024 with Andrew Doyle and Leo Kearse

Episode Date: December 29, 2024

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And we will have a general election on the 4th of July. Well, gentlemen, it has been quite a year, 2024. A hell of a lot has happened. Actually, most of it seems like it's happened in the last like three or four months. But we'll start at the beginning. One of the first things that happened in the video we just played is the stuff that happened on American universities in response to October 7th, which is the Claudine Gay, long-running saga.

And I feel that one of the reasons that's important is that's when this whole woke thing began to unravel because it really hit the mainstream and a lot of people who'd never realized he was really going on suddenly woke up. Well this whole thing of like sort of abolishing whiteness and decolonialism this has been spoken about universities

for years. We've had this Harvard developed this critical race theory and everybody was fine when it was targeted against white people. And then we actually saw it manifesting in reality in Israel where they went across and they killed who the woke left considered to be, you know, white European settlers, aka Israelis. So then we could see, you know, professors and students turn around and say,

well, what did you think decolonialism was going to look like? And then people were like, oh, that's what all this stuff is. It's not just like, you know, having more black people in adverts or something. It's going in and like killing people like that. So I think it woke a lot of people up to the realities of critical race theory. It was very interesting to see because it wasn't just Claudian Gay was it was the three sort of heads of Ivy League universities being grilled about their free speech stance. They tried to use the free speech defence effectively because they were asked the question, you know, is it ever okay to call for the genocide of Jews on campus? That question should always be respond. You should always respond no.

Just as an e-jerk thing, no, no, no, no. Well, it depends what they've done. It's a good point. You're in Hamburg in 1939. Okay, well, let's not complicate this too much. Why I was thinking was the fact that they would say, because if they'd said, if they'd always had a free speech stance. And they'd always said, you can say the worst things on campus because, but they haven't. What they've said is if you, if you exercise any kind of microaggression, we'll make your life hell and kick you out and put you through all sort of tribunals and stuff. But if you call for genocide against Jews, that's okay. So it was completely exposed. And then by the way, she got caught as a plagiarist, which is kind of amazing, because when Claudine Gay, when

someone cleverly, I think it was Christopher Rufo, looked through her thesis, her doctoral thesis, and found out she'd ripped off a lot of it. And then you had all these articles saying that plagiarism is the new weapon of the alt-right. Like to attack people. No, it's just she was ripping off people's work. I mean, surely, you know, that's really racist as if you say that black people can't plagiarise.

Yeah. You know, it's bizarre. I mean, to be honest, you should have plagiarized better. I mean, you change a few words so that then Christopher Roosevelt can come along and do a, you know, a search for certain sentences. It's happening a lot now because of AI. When they wrote these thesis,

They thought no one's going to check these obscure texts. And now we've got these major search engines that can find everything straight away. I reckon loads of people are going to get done with this. Really? Yeah. I mean, it's because, you know, writing a thesis is hard. I did one. I didn't plagiarise.

It wouldn't have crossed my mind to do so. But yeah, a lot of people, they just rip whole passages off it. But it also points to how worthless academia is now. No offence, Andrew. No, it is. Absolutely is. So much of this stuff is just, you know, just a sort of self-perpetuating pyramid scheme

of students' taking out loans to pay these professors to get a worthless certificate that says they're now qualified and, you know, being a victim and crying about it. So, you know, there's nobody, they're not contributing to the world. They're not building anything. Nobody's getting skilled to do anything real. Well, isn't it a good thing then that Harvard and these sort of Ivy League universities are basically not trusted anymore? Because they're not actually interested in the pursuit of truth or knowledge anymore. They're like madrasas. They're just ideological factories to produce a certain way of thinking.

And it's about time that they got taken down. It's great that new universities are cropping up and new institutions are actually going to teach people, give people a kind of actual classical liberal education, because that's what people really, really want. They don't want this anymore. I'm glad that they're failing. I think they should all fail. Yeah, the Dunfries and Galloway College of Technology is finally going to have its moment in the sun. What do you mean? It's in Scotland. It's never going to have its moment in the sun. What did you study? I studied, I did an HNC in media. I don't even know, like, higher national certificate. Can you see the disgust on Andrews?

What was that? I've never heard of 19. This is too low. This is like you get them for hairdressing and stuff. Right. But basically it was either go to sixth, like do sixth year and you don't get any money or you go to the college and you get like a grant and all this money for going.

So we got we got money to go to school. I didn't mean to sound snobbish, by the way. No, I got a full grant when I was going to university. By the way, can I just say that was very funny? Because you were talking about how, you know, the OIB leagues are no longer fit for purpose. they've become madrasas, we need new universities. Leo was talking about a technical college.

He went, oh my God, that's disgusting. Well, yeah. Yeah, I don't mean to sound like that. You just came out naturally. It did. Maybe that's, you know. But it's funny, the attitude to academia has changed because my dad was a gunsmith.

So he did, like, you know, properly skilled stuff with his hands, you know, pretty well paid or whatever, you know, for a tradesman. And he was always like that. No, no, no, you're not going to, because I'll be like, oh, teach me to make guns. He'd be like, no, no, you're going to go to university. you're going to get a liberal arts degree at some, you know, mid-ranking university. And then, oh, the world will be your oyster.

And then I got that degree and it was absolutely useless. I mean, to be fair, I did a degree in Renaissance poetry. And I haven't really used it as much as, I mean, if you want me to scan a sonnet or something, I can do that. But like, it's not, we don't. No, no one does. That's the problem. You know, you end up writing a book that no one's ever going to read. Yeah.

Like, it's a bit depressing. It's a bit dispiriting. But on the other hand, you know, I think we do have to do something about. higher education. I think it's it is basically fucked at this point. And a lot of people do end up going to universities that don't need to. Again, I'll sound really snobbish here, but it's actually the reverse. Like a lot of people are just really stupid. No, it's not that. Well, it is that. But it's also that we've had successive governments who want to prove their worth and their success in the educational field by effectively encouraging more and more people to go to university. But you can earn so much

more by doing an apprenticeship or doing various things. And also some people are good at academia. Some are good at other things. Like you wouldn't put me in a football squad and say, why don't you just do that? You know, it's, you do what you're good at. And there's no shame in that. I don't. Because Tony Blair, this plan to get like 50% of the population to university, but there's no way 50% of the population are in the top 5% like academically. The maths don't work. I know that. I know that because I studied maths at university. But like, it's ridiculous. I remember when I went to university, I was like, man, all these people are dumb. And then I was like, shit, does that mean I'm dumb as well? It was how I found out. You know, there was a very interesting interview on

news night with Jeremy Paxman, a few, back when Blair announced it. And Paxman said to him, you say 50% of, you want 50% of young people to go to university, Blair goes, yes, he goes, why not 49%? Why not 51? Why not 48? Why 50? He just didn't have an answer. He just didn't have an for it because 50 is something that sticks in people's minds in, it sounds good. Yeah. But there's actually no real basis for wanting 50% of people to go to university. Well, I think if they look at, you know, people who went to university in the 60s, when, you know, a much smaller percentage of people going to university, they'd be like, well, look at the uplift in their career prospects and how much they earn.

But then it doesn't work that, you know, you scale up the numbers and they all earn more as well. Like those numbers going to university would have been smarter to start off with. Yeah, absolutely. But the good news is that Claudine Gay has not been fired. She is... I thought she'd gone. No. She's still making a million dollars a year, but I think she may have been suspended.

She's been suspended on full pay. It's 950,000. Whoa. It's a good job if you can get it. That's not bad at all. Speaking of people, this is a very, very shitty segue, but speaking of people who've resigned, Hamza Yusuf resigned during the course of this year,

which I think is course for celebration for comedians everywhere. Because he actually passed a law that criminalised public performance, am I getting this right? Well, it originated with him when he was Justice Secretary. Right. So before he became First Minister. So he'd sort of formulated this new hate speech plan. The idea was that he wanted to abolish the blasphemy laws that existed in Scotland still.

Well, you know, bear in mind, blasphemy laws were only eventually repealed in the England and Wales in, I think, 2008. And then in Scott, this new hate speech bill was meant to get rid of all of that, but then effectively replace it with the new blasphemy law. And he introduced various clauses, things like the public performance of a play. If it could be said to have stirred up hatred would violate this idea. He also said that you could be prosecuted for hateful things you said within the privacy of your own home. And in the original draft of the bill that he put up, it actually said that intention doesn't matter. It was only when lots of police and solicitors and clergymen and all sorts of people said, hang on a minute, this is a problem. I mean, some priests were saying, you know, this would criminalise the Bible,

which I don't think Humza Yusuf would have a problem with, to be honest. He eventually watered it down, but you still ended up with this hate speech bill coming through on 1st of April, whereby the police were obliged to investigate all complaints of hateful speech or hateful conduct. So most of the complaints, the number one person who was complained about was Humza Yusuf. Yeah. Because he'd done a big speech about how evil and terrible white people were. So, of course, it backfired eventually. It was such a crazy idea.

Yeah. And all these laws that are coming through to criminalize speech, I mean, to have a criminal law, a sort of core tenant in the law is it's got to be sort of easy to understand. And the law should be hard to break. You can sort of accidentally steal a car, for example. So these laws are very easy to accidentally break. You can accidentally do a tweet and somebody perceives it as offensive and then all of a sudden you can have broken the law. So it's this sort of vagueness It's a lot like the laws they had under

Communist and the Soviet Union Communist systems have laws That anybody could be perceived to have broken And everybody, you know, as a result, lives in fear of And then the regime can just pick and choose Who's broken them? It's really scary because we went up That we took Comedy Unleashed up to Scotland

On April 1st to test the law Because the Herald had run a front cover article Saying that the police had been trained in Scotland in advance of the April the first deadline to deal with problematic jokes. So they'd actually had training sessions about this. So we tested it and went up there on April the first. But I remember

the week before, I'd had all these messages from people saying, don't take your phone, don't take your computer because the police might seize it. I even changed the setting on my phone so that it didn't open with my face, so they couldn't just hold it up to my face so they had to put a... I'm behaving like a gangster because I'm

worried about this thing, but it never happened in the end. My favourite thing, though, about the speech law is that the Scottish government, wasn't, no, the police created a mascot for it. Did you say, the hate monster? The hate monster. The hate monster's a big fluffy orange thing. And he did this video, I think it's still online. Is it where he says, I'm the hate monster. And he said something like, I'm inside all of you, which sounds a bit rapy to be honest, but I'm inside all of you and I can emerge at any point. And yeah, that was what it was. So everybody has to live in fear and suppress their feelings and suppress what they're saying, which isn't a good way for a

liberal tolerant society to be at all. Are we still a liberal torrent society there? Not in Scotland. My favorite thing about the whole hate crime thing was because I stood for election against Thomas Ousuf back in like 2020 or 2021 and to raise awareness of the hate crime act that was going through parliament. And all this lefty comedians special in Scotland were like, oh what are you worried about Leo? This is ridiculous. You really think they're going to come after comedians? you should just try not being bigoted and transphobic and racist and all the rest of it.

And I was like, oh, you know, fine, whatever. You know, you don't think this is a threat to comedy. Then, like, you know, a few years on, who are the people that are coming after with these hate crime laws? They came after Jerry Sadowitz. He got, like, you know, cancelled from the Edinburgh Fringe. They came after Reginald D. Hunter. They're coming after Paul Curtis. They're coming after all the comedians on the left.

The ones on the left are suddenly finding out that some of their attitudes, some of the things they say about Israel or whatever, turn out to be hateful. Suddenly, I find myself giving less of a shit. Well, Humza, you see, some claws about the public performance of a play, there was a discussion about whether that would affect the Edinburgh Fringe. Yeah. Whether a play could classify as comedians.

And I think it definitely has done. But, you know, as far as I'm aware, it seems to have not worked. It seems to have backfired, hasn't it? Well, for the moment, until somebody goes across the trip wire and sets it off. I mean, look at what happened with Count Dankula, however many years ago. I mean, let's be fair, they've got form. But maybe it's because maybe it will decline because of the decline of the SMP. Because there's something about the SMP that they have authoritarianism

baked into their DNA. They read, I mean, they've always had this thing about, they introduced that named person scheme all those years ago where they wanted every citizen in Scotland to have a, every child born in Scotland to have a state guardian because they didn't trust the parents. They had stuff like... I mean, they are Scottish. Well, there is that, yeah, that's fair point. But then they introduced like minimum pricing for alcohol, ban on two for one pizzas. They want to control how people...

They don't want people to be obese or eat. No wonder they lost the election. They banned two for one pizzas in Scotland. Like, you talk about Nanny State, but there is something about them. Yeah. And they just want to control everything. And that legislation was rolled back. The Name Person's Act was rolled back and had other sort of hate speech legislation,

the offensive songs at Football Act. That's not what it was called, but that was basically what it was for. So that got rolled back as well. But the hate crime act hasn't been cancelled yet. No. I mean, talking to Helen Dale, so she's a lawyer, and she says, you know, because of the sort of the mockery of it, because it was such a car crash when it was launched and everybody made fun of it, there aren't going to be any judges that are going to be willing to implement

it. They're going to be scared of implementing it. So I think comedies had an effect? Comedy's had an effect in that case. But don't you think, though, that there is this trend, not just in Scotland, but across Europe and across countries more broadly to introduce more and more hate speech laws, because the Scottish hate speech law, in a sense, is not as bad as the Irish hate speech law, which they have scotch, but he's going to come back at some point.

Because they actually introduced in Ireland, when they were drafting the bill, the wording of the bill defined hatred as hatred. It actually said, hatred is hatred against a certain group. Well, yeah, this is a circular definition. There's no way that this can operate. And this is wide open to exploitation. So any future government could use it, could use that kind of legislation to criminalize whatever the hell they wanted. Scotland's same thing. I'm sure the Labor government would love to introduce a similar kind of thing.

We've had, what's the face, Evette Cooper has said she wants to bring back non-crime hate incidents. She wants to make them more extreme. So, you know, this is a trend. But it's not just in the UK. I mean, the EU has one of these bills, Australia, Canada, lots of lots of places around the world. And one of the things, you know, you spend some time in America as have we, one of the things that really strikes me is how crazy this is. Like we sit and like joke about it and take the piss and whatever.

When you go to America and you see a society that doesn't have any of this shit. Yeah. It's such a shock to go, oh wait, this is what freedom actually looks like. And they, like, Americans on the left as well think we're crazy. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they've got their First Amendment and they just think, why would anyone tolerate? Like, it's weird that we even have debates over in this country about this stuff. And for me, one of the actual real bellwethers for this is comedians.

You talk to comedians in America about what happens in this country. They literally look at me like I'm mad, like I'm making this up. The idea that you would criminalize and arrest people and take them to court for a joke, it's so bizarre. It's completely outside the realms of possibility. And it's not even like getting down to the real sort of essential route of what these laws are based on. They're based on feelings. So you're criminalizing people for feelings.

It's a hate crime law. So the person's got to feel hatred. I mean, the real sort of Cartesian essentialism is impossible to know what somebody's genuinely feeling unless they honestly tell you because a feeling is something that only that person has. So you can't, you can't criminal. You can't say that what they're trying to do is they're trying to pin feelings. They're saying this person is doing this out of hatred. They could be doing that thing because of, you know, concern for. for their country, out of fear for their children.

There's lots of reasons they could be doing it. So to say that this person's doing it, most comedians tell jokes because they want people to laugh, which is a sort of, it's quite a giving thing. It's not hatred. No comedians are really doing things out of hatred because hatred isn't, it doesn't inspire laughter. Yeah, exactly.

But also, why is hatred a problem in of itself? And so far as, have we sort of evolved to have that emotion from time to time? If you're going to criminalize negative emotions, why not envy? Horniness. Horniness. Caprice. Well, right, we should be criminalizing behavior, not emotions.

Yeah, but this idea that, you know, the police should be auditing your emotions. You should be saying hatred is a problem in of itself. Well, no, it's the action that's the problem. Sure. But I think, you know, guys, the truth of this is, at least in my opinion, what I've been thinking about is one of the reasons that this is, one of the reasons that this is happening is, of course, social media amplifies, you know, the moron in the corner of the pub that used to say, the horrible shit that nobody cared about, now gets amplified.

But I think there's another truth here, which is that as our society increasingly becomes unhappy at the things that are happening to it, the need to suppress expressions of dissent grows more and more. And so if you have tens of thousands of people coming illegally on small boats and the government won't do anything about it and people are saying things about it, well, you've got to jump on that. If you have 900,000 people net coming legally into the country, which no one voted for, and in fact, people voted against time and time and time again. Again, when they speak up about it, if you're not going to solve the problem, well, then you need to crack down on the speech.

That's interesting. So you're saying that effectively the hate speech laws are a kind of ruse to stifle dissent. Of course. And I think it was James Orr, who I think we all love and respect. an essay that he wrote on my substack in the debate, that dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate medicines. And this is kind of what I see, you know, a society that finds itself in a position where it won't fix the things that people keep voting for us to fix. Yeah. Well, let's at least fix the fact that they're saying something about it. So it could, I mean, I'm sure that's an element to it. But I think there is also another element, which is that I do genuinely believe

that a lot of people in authority have brought into this myth that words create violence. They genuinely do believe that the things that, I mean, this is the, this was Mary White House's view back in the 60s.

She launched that, you know, clean up TV campaign. She genuinely believed that if you put something out there on TV, the masses would watch it and would react and behave as they were told to by the TV.

Now, that's the view that the current, most politicians believe, that people act on cue on the basis of social media posts. But we know it's not true because there have been decades of research into media effects theory. We know that never happens. We know there's no causal link between what someone reads online or sees in popular culture and how they behave. So my question is, if this is unevanced, if this thing isn't real and we know it's not real,

why do we keep having people standing up in government and making legislation on the basis of something that isn't real? Why do we have judges sentencing people to two years in prison? prison for a tweet when there is no evidence whatsoever that that tweet caused any particular harm. Because they want to prevent people from expressing things that they don't want to be part of the debate. We're talking about the riots now. Yeah. Yeah.

We've skipped ahead a little bit. But actually, I think we should. Look, what happened in the intermediate between the thing we started talking about and this is the Jeremy Corbyn got forced out of the Labour Party. We can talk about that. Rishu Shunak, the British Prime Minister, called. an election. Kirstama got elected in a landslide and almost immediately after that we had this we all have to be very careful but we had this attack in Southport in which a guy stabbed several children killed three of them young young girls and that sparked the riots that then happened and that's

where you saw the type of suppression of speech that you guys are talking about let's talk about that Well, the judges, well, firstly, Kirstama explicitly said that he was expecting harsh sentences. There was a kind of signal to the judiciary. There was definitely some sort of collusion between the government and the judiciary, which should never happen anyway, where the government was basically dictating that we should have draconian jail terms, which the judges then not only acted out, but were open about their motivations. In court, the judges repeatedly said, I'm giving you the harshest possible sentence as a lesson to other people, to prevent other people from doing.

Bear in mind, there are some people who would just put memes out, offensive comments, to give a very specific example, which I think is one of the most egregious ones, there was a mother of three, Lucy Connolly, who put out a tweet. She got 31 months sentence, so she'll end up serving one and a half years, probably in prison.

Now, the tweet was horrible, I think. It was about going burn down the hotels. She was angry and upset about the Southport stabbing. She deleted it within... I think the way she phrased it was like, you know, I don't care if they, you know, do these things. It wasn't a direct sort of... Corridor or excitement.

Yeah, yeah. But my point, point would be that even if it was, even if she said, go and do it, the fact is that that tweet would have not have caused violence. We know that. There's no evidence whatsoever that if someone burns down a hotel, that's their responsibility. If you're going to mitigate their responsibility by saying, well, they read a nasty tweet, then you're doing a big favor to the worst kind of thugs in society. Why would you do that? She was upset. It was misjudged. I don't like what she tweeted. I thought it was awful. I thought it was appalling. And the solution to that is you

just block it and say, I don't want to read that. Not go to the police. get the woman thrown in prison. I love this idea that there's, you know, violent criminals out there who are like, wait and we've got to wait and see what this housewife says. She's going to have half a bottle of white wine and then she's going to tweet something and then we'll know what to do. It's an absolute nonsense. And also there's mitigating factors.

I can understand why her passions would be high. She lost a child to a doctor from overseas who I believe there was some sort of, he hadn't followed correct procedures so there was some sort of wrongdoing there. So in her mind she lost a child to mass immigration so

for the judge not to give any leniency to this poor woman who's obviously suffering and you know tweeted and deleted in a moment of high high temperature I just I can't believe. We've talked about this before and I know I think we disagreed on a podcast a couple of years a number of years ago about this

about where does the threshold for incitement of violence lie? And I really do believe the more I look into it that we need to adopt a similar form of legislation to what they have in America. They have a thing called the Brandenburg test. The Brandenburg test, that's based on a prosecution of a KKK leader, Clarence Brandenberg, I think in the late 60s.

And that was overturned by the Supreme Court. And they said, we're overturning this because he said basically that he wanted people to commit acts of violence, but that there was no imminent threat. So the Brandenberg test basically says it has to be intended to stir up violence, there has to be an imminent likelihood,

and that it would happen imminently. None of those would apply in the case of Lucy Connolly or some of the other people who were sent to prison for memes. It was a guy who just put a meme out. Yeah. Oh, the guy, the cellafield worker. He literally, there's three memes. And they weren't even inflammatory.

They were just saying, like one of them had a picture of sort of, you know, Muslim-looking guys getting off a boat. and it said coming to a town near you. And it's like, how is that even, you know, that's... He was jailed for that. He was jailed. And that would get you kicked out of most WhatsApp groups for not being racist enough.

There's no way that's even, you know, the foothills. And what about... There's the guy... I can't remember his name. There's a guy's been found guilty already of wearing a Halloween costume that caused a fence. And he's due to be sentenced, I think, in January.

But he's already been found guilty. So he will serve jail time. What was the costume? He dressed up as the Manchester Arena bomber. So he dressed up in like an Arabic outfit. He had a rucksack with the word boom written on it now. Of course, he's funny. He's laughing.

I mean, look, I understand that if you... I'm surprised that's even a crime. Diversity is our strange. But there we go. I mean, look, I get that if you lost someone in that, it's horrible. No one thinks that that was... I mean, people do think that was funny. No, but you think that was funny.

Yeah. Yeah, but you're laughing because it's the whole point. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. But it's Halloween. It's the time of horror. Yeah. The, the...

The joke is I'm going to dress in the most sick possible way. Well, I don't know why I'm explaining this to you. No, we literally have Guy Fox on the bomb fire. He's a guy who committed a big terrorist or tried to commit a big terrorist atrocity. Well, my point would be, I don't give a fuck about a guy dressing up as the Manchester Arena bomber going to a Halloween party. I'd much rather the police spent time preventing the next Manchester Arena bombing, please. Yeah. Rather than not intercepting the potential bomber because they didn't.

want to be seen as racist. That's what happened. Well, that was a security guard who said that. Yeah, yeah. I think we've come to the point now where you see governments, and this is conservative labor governments, and they remind me of kind of crap football managers where they don't know what to do anymore. So they're just subbing people on making these rules. And in order to be seen to do something, well, the reality is they are completely utterly incompetent. They're spineless. They don't know what to do. They don't actually have the moral conviction or the courage to actually confront these problems head on. So what did they do? They just bring in stupid laws so that it can kind of sometimes even mask what's actually happening. This comedy podcast is working

out really. The moment I start talking, mate, they're like, this isn't comedy. No, mate, I started it. But the reason it's hard to be funny about it is just it's so, so serious. Yeah. Well, okay, but I mean, to try and bring a flip an element to it, I mean, the non-crime hate incidents are very, very funny. Insofar as some people have been, you know, we're not prosecuted, but they've been recorded by the police for, there was one for a line call in a tennis match that someone disagreed with. There was one who was whistling the Bob the Builder theme tune got done for a non-crime hate incidents.

It was done in a racist way, apparently. There was a dog that defecated on a lawn got a non-crime haters. There was a child. Actually, do you know, I agree with that. Yeah, yeah, no, that's fair enough. That's, like, if someone you can't, no, so that's fine. The other one. Well, there was the kid who called someone in his class a retard got a non-crime hate incident. Somebody else got a kid got one for calling their classmates short.

Yes, and smelling a fish. And those are children, by the way. An adult got one for giving someone an aggressive haircut. Yep, yep. So, but what I was... But actually, there is something quite sinister about... But they weren't... It was a barber, though. They didn't just... I mean, I'd understand if they'd gone up to somebody in the street and started cutting their hair really aggressive. That would be a soul. be assault, wouldn't it?

I mean, have you ever had a really shit haircut and just looked at the barber? Look my head. We obviously both go at the same person, Francis. Do you remember the guy from G.B. News, who a producer at G.B. News went to get his haircut and they were talking and because he mentioned he worked for G.B. News, the barber gave him a deliberately bad haircut. So it was shaved off half of the back of his head. But what I wanted to say was, you were talking about laws and all these sort of draconian laws being implemented.

If there's an added dimension, an added problem, which I think is revealed by the existence of non-crime hate incidents, not just that the police are, I mean, what have they got, why are they investigating non-crime? It doesn't make any sense anyway. But I think it's because of the activist bodies that now control the quangos. And one of the, you know, you had the horrific murder of Stephen Lawrence back in the 90s. You had them at Fearsome Report in 1999. That's the first time you get this kind of, in that document it says you need to record racist incidents, even if they're not criminal. So that's where it's the seeds begin. It's not until 2014 that the College of Policing said, yeah, we're going to start investigating non-crime. But I only read recently that the guy who was in charge of the College of Policing in that year, the year before had won Stonewall's top award. He was the LGBT envoy to the government. So in other words, it was an activist running the body that is responsible for training police in England and Wales. And that's why we now have a generation of police officers that are effectively activists, or at least who think that their job is to behave like activists. And it's not like the government have been able to do anything about it because you've had two home secretaries telling the College of Policing not to do this and they were ignored. And in fact, since that happened, the College of Policing has recorded more non-crime than it ever did before.

So in other words, the government can't even stop them. Hold on, hold on. We've got a new government now. They're going to fix all this, surely. Yeah. Yeah. Except that, as I say, Yvette Cooper wants to increase the recording of non-crime. Well, what do we make of Stama's first, however, many months?

Oh, what a job? he's done. It's like we knew it was going to be bad, but this bad, this fast, he's really done a sort of speed run into just oblivion. He's like, got minus 49 approval ratings. I don't even know that was possible. How low can he go? Well, what has he done though? Because I'm a little bit wary of a knee-jerk kind of anti-labre, anti-starmer reaction. Because let's be honest, gentlemen, the previous slot fucking useless as well. So I never had high expectations for Starm. And not because he's on the left,

but just because I don't have high expectations for any of them. Can I just say, actually, the conservatives were worse and looser because they were deliberately disingenuous. In the words of Camille bad anok, we talked right and governed left. And that is awful, awful, whatever side of the political spectra on.

Because what she admitted was that the government lied again and again and again about their intentions when it came to their policies, and that is horrendous. Yeah, and that's why I thought Starmar might be better. I mean, he said a lot of the things you were saying were sort of like, you know, your dream Tory leader. And also he had the advantage of being from the, he's a bureaucrat, he's from the left. So there's this perception that he's going to be able to get the civil service

to do all the things that the Tories couldn't make them do. Like Labor tended, when Tony Blair came in, he had a sort of root and branch reform, and we really made sure all his ideas were propagated out. and actually, you know, followed through by the civil service, whereas the Tories just, you know, ponds about at the top and don't get anything done. So I thought Starmour was going to do something. The point he lost me, and the point he lost a lot of people in Britain, I think,

is after those girls were stabbed to death, and I think we all, you know, kind of know what was the motivating factor behind it now. After that happened, he could have come out and he could have unified the nation. he could have said, look, I understand people are upset, you know, and we're going to deal with this issue, but we're also going to deal with the riots and we're going to deal, you know, we're going to deal with both sides of it. Instead, he just dealt, like you've been saying, he just dealt with the symptom, not the underlying cause. And, you know, that was so blatant. To call everybody who was upset about these little girls getting stabbed to death, to call them all like far right thugs is just a disgusting thing to say.

And also, one of the points that I discussed with Chris Williams, when I was on his show, I don't know if it'll be out by the time. You know, Chris is from the north. And he was saying, when I looked around, I just saw a lot of very unhappy people who saw this as an opportunity to go and smash things up and express their anger, which may not be about that particular incident in some cases,

but just people going out, as they have done in many occasions, including the previous riots, when it was a whole different demographic of people doing that. And it's an expression of the fact that there's a lack of jobs, there's a lack of lots of things. And what I found particularly disgusting

about what Starman did is he made it a political thing. When I didn't think it was a political thing. I really didn't. I didn't think that the people who were on the streets were there to express a political ideology or to support a political party. They were there, some of them, to express their disgust of what had happened,

and a lot of others just to smash shit up because that's fun if you've got nothing else to do. Yeah. I don't think many of them had read the works of Ebola and were genuinely sort of far-right activists. But there were some. I mean, there were some who have previous convictions for far-right stuff. And there were people who, you know, it would have been perfectly possible for Stama to say there is an element of opportunistic thuggery going on here. But we also have to look at the underlying cause why so many people are upset. I mean, he did it with Black Lives Matter. He kneeled for goodness saying. And there were people smashing stuff up and hurting people. You know, and that's not legit. There were a lot of opportunistic things. thugs involved in the Black Lives Matter? Like, why not, why couldn't he have just said it in that more moderate way? Why do you think he didn't say it in a more moderate way?

I don't know, because I honestly don't know, actually. I think he was afraid. I think the country was really, I don't think we realized how close we came to a really serious situation. The police, you know, with thousands of people out in the streets all across the country, rioting. And we're close to, you know, the army getting called in to control the situation. It was spiraling out of control for the police.

And do you think the army? would have turned their guns on their own brothers and uncles if, you know, I'm not saying, you know, the army are related to these people. A lot of people in the British Army come from the working class. So do you think they would have, they would have done that to enforce the, the decisions of some guy who's siding with, or is seen to be siding with, you know, this horrible ideology that keeps causing the deaths of girls in the UK? Do you think, though, it might be that he genuinely. when they believe, like, I think a lot of people on the left have swallowed this idea that we live

in this far right hellhole. They do believe that this is much more prominent that it is. I mean, I think if you were to try and assemble the neo-Nazis in the UK, you could fill this room, maybe. Have you thought we've done it? They've mostly been on your podcast. Yeah, exactly. I think what's very interesting is the card that Stama used, whilst it was highly effective at putting down the riots and cutting and stopping them, I think that's a card that can really only be played once. Yeah. And I think what, and I, this, I have take no joy in saying this, I think things could get potentially very, very ugly in January when the court, when details from the court case start to be disseminated into, into the public. Well, I think what they've got on their

side there is it's going to be January, so it's going to be raining. Yeah. And there's a real difference. People riot for two reasons. They're hungry, which you see in the Middle East, every time there's, you know, the Arab Spring or whatever, it's, the riots in Egypt or wherever it is, are never because of, you know, people want regime change. It's because the price of bread doubled. And the other thing is got to be hot outside, which is always hot outside in the Middle East, which is why they riot so much.

But it's only hot outside quite rarely in the UK, which is why we're such a stable country. But, I mean, what you say is true, but they've been, I'm sure they've... I thought it was just a joke, man. No, no, riots are far more likely to happen in summer. That is actually true. And that is, there's a real...

And also as well, in August, because kids aren't at school and so, you know, they can go and do whatever. You're looking for an activity. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You need a summer holiday activity. But also, I think as well, when it comes to an issue like this, it's been a powder keg for so long. And then you put on top the fact that if it turns out that this ideology is behind this awful, awful murder, the people will then think, not only has this happened. Not only have you lied to us, but you have also gaslit us for so long.

Yeah. And I think that people, people message me and they're really angry. And it's trying to calm people down. And I'm kind of going, I'm kind of running out of reasons. Well, it's also partly because people can see they're being lied to. Yeah. Like you said, the gas, I mean, we saw it a few weeks ago where, what was it? Was it, Surrey Police put out this tweet or this post on X about, you know, you're going to see some,

police with machine guns at the Christmas markets. Don't worry. We're not looking out for any particular threat. We're just here to, you know, just like carrying machine guns. You know, just, you know, just be there. Just be festive with, you know, that's weird. Like, if they could just say, look, there is a, you know, the MI5, 75% of the MI5's attention is far right Islamism, you know, fascist Islamism. And that is a problem. 43,000 people at the moment on a watch list. Right. So, so, and just be honest, that's what's going on here. We're not saying all Muslims behave like this. we're saying that there are significant more jihadists now living here than they used to be.

If there was a, you know, now we have the diversity barriers in front of all the Christmas markets and stuff. That's what they're calling them, right? Why not just, they call them diversity barrier? No, the police don't call them. Everyone else calls them the diversity barriers. Why not just be honest about what, why there are people with machine guns at Christmas. I can tell you why you can't be honest. Because if you're honest, then you have to do something about it. And the police and the security services deserve an, enormous amount of credit in this country for the way that they actually deal with that threat. Because we know from speaking to people who actually do know that they are preventing attacks

on an almost daily basis, right? But the problem is that as long as you have the people in the country who want to do that, this threat will continue. Therefore, if you start being honest about it, then the next question a normal person is going to ask is, why do we have 43,000 to HARDIS on a watch list. And why aren't they back wherever the fuck they came from? They're the greatest strength. But yeah, and also But this is what I'm saying, right? Yeah, and also

at the moment, the situation is going to get worse. The circumstances that could lead to large terror atrocity are going to get is going to be much more likely going forward. MI5 has said they've got to move resources, they've got to move focus to China, Russia and Iran. So foreign states, after, you know, 30 years of

foreign states not really threatening us, we've now got to look at them. So we're going to be, Taking the eye off the threat from Islamism, and also because MI5 is, you know, systemically woke now, they also have to pretend that there's this mad, you know, massive threat from the far right. So the eye is going to be taken off Islamic fundamentalism, and I think that could mean it becomes much more likely. And also you're going to have all these, you know, Syria and the whole sort of Idlib, emir is sucked in all the jihadis from around the world, from Chechnya, from wherever, to fight against, you know, Assad or fight for, fight for,

against, to, you know, create this Islamist state. With the fall of Assad, they've won. So they're going to be looking for the next thing. They're going to be returning to their homes. They're going to be returning to some that will be returning to Europe. So there could be, you know, more people with time in their hands to do stuff like that. That's a great comedian. Merry Christmas.

People that tuning in going, I thought it's just fucking comedy, man. Well, speaking of something a little. bit more lighthearted. Did you guys follow what happened at the Paris Olympics? Yeah. That was that was quite something, wasn't it? And I'm not just talking about the bloke beating up the woman and the final in the, in the boxing and that, but this opening ceremony, which I just thought was absolutely, it was, I sometimes think these people are deliberately testing the waters to see if they're almost like doing a parody of themselves. I think it's just laziness. They're like, oh, we're going to be outrageous. It's like the Jaguar advert people. We're going to be new and outrageous. And we're going to do,

the exact same thing that's been done every week for the last 30 years. Oh, we're going to, we're going to mock Christianity. Oh, it's so daring. Man, that was being done in like the 60s. It wasn't even particularly edgy then. It's like, you want to be edgy. Why don't you mock a different religion? You know what I mean?

Why don't you do that? Judaism. Don't you think they're goading, though? It seems deliberately goading to me. Because they know that they can do this and they know that it annoys everyone. And they know that it's NAF as well. Like, Garth Roberts wrote a piece about this. Like that open, you know, where they mock the Last Supper,

The image where, and it was just all drag queens in a row in the style of the Leonardo. And Gareth Roberts made this point that they were doing stuff like that back in the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in the early 90s. And everyone thought it was NAF then, but at least it was contained within our sort of gay world of NAFness, which was fun for us. But we didn't think it was good. Now the gay world of naftness is much bigger. It's much bigger. Although I think, you know, when I watched that, because I did watch that bit, but coincidentally, I just turned it on while that was happening. And I just thought it was boring.

And I just thought it was just uninteresting. I thought the reaction was actually really extreme and hysterical from the right as well. I mean, who was that pseudo-historian who said this was the photograph of Nazis going into Paris during the war was preferable to the drag queens doing the last suburb. Like, that is insane. It's a bunch of drag queens. Who cares? And then there was all these people saying that. Is it, Andrew?

What? Is it just a bunch of drag queens, drag queens? drank queens who cares? Yeah, it's all of it is. I don't know that I agree with that because I think your point actually, I'm agreeing with you while disagreeing with you,

your point about the nature of the stage on which this happened compounded with the fact that as Leo says, this has been going on and on and on and on and on starts to feel a little bit and I don't know if any of us in the room are actually Christian, are we?

I am. Are you Christian? Well, I'm Catholic. Does that count? Well, I mean, the fact that you're asking that question means no, I never thought of you as a devout. No, I'm not. I'm lapsed. I'm a lapsed Catholic. So, yeah. I'm a cultural Christian like Richard Dawkins. Are you? Yeah, because he's, you know, after criticizing Christianity for so long, he was like, oh, wait a minute, I've seen what they've replaced it. To be fair, with the Church of England, you never really have to believe in God anyway. It's more about the tea and muffins. Actually, now, yeah, the Church of England is more like the opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics.

Exactly. So I guess what I guess what I'm going to do. I'm saying is none of us is like, you know, like, oh my God, they're mocking my faith. Right. But I do feel that in some ways they're like mocking our civilisation through this. That's how I felt. Through the drag queen last supper thing. It didn't bother me that. For the start, it's the Olympics.

It's people playing games. I don't care about that. It's just games. It's like, you know. But it's not, though. I know it means more to other people. I have no interest whatsoever in competitive sports. So, you know, it may as well be an origami competition.

I don't care. But it's the one chance you can watch a match. man beating up a woman and clap along and everything's your good person. You're from near Glasgow, man. Happens outside every pub on a side of dinner. Under homes of use of you're not allowed to clap along anymore. Do you not think though that the reaction was a bit, like when they started saying... No, that particularly incident.

That's insane. But then also the whole thing about people claiming there was a guy with his testicles out through the fishnet types, which just wasn't true. It just wasn't true. I'm glad you check. Well, I'm an expert in those things, but, you know, I just thought it was a bit, like, just turn it off. Well, I'm saying that from someone who doesn't care about the Olympics. I disagree. And it's not because I love the Olympics. It's because this is something that is being broadcast to hundreds of millions of people around the world. Did you feel the same about the Danny Boyle one?

You know, because that was effectively a big advert for the NHS, wasn't it? That was a big kind of very left-wing opening ceremony. The NHS is the religion of the UK. So that was like the reinforcement of the state religion. A lot of people did have a trouble with that as well. They thought that was, you know, that was partisan. What I see about it is, is I think the, look, let's be honest, right, whether you or I or anyone else has the Christian belief, Christianity is the bedrock of Western civilization. Yeah, it is, right? Even if you're not yourself a Christian. So when you mock it in that way, bringing in all of this latest LGBT fucking endless acronyms into it, I think you take the culture together.

and you see that as a symbol of what I see is the attempt to destroy Western civilization from the inside. And that's how I felt about it. I mean, you're nodding. Well, yeah. Well, I don't think they thought about it that much. I think they just wanted to go. I am not saying they thought about it that much in the same way that a blue-haired person on university campus doesn't think that they're undermining Western civilization when they try and introduce blasphemy laws or whatever

or advocate for something else. But it is part of that movement. But I just found it banal. I mean, people have always mocked Christianity. And people are, they did it in life of Brian, you know, they've been doing it for years. It's something that is a term that actually, I first heard come from you, Leo, which is safe edgy. Which is safe edgy. And this is what this is, because to me it was a comedy skit.

However tasteless, it will judge you think it is. To me, it was like a comedy subversion. It's a classic subversion. Yeah. You get the something sacred, then you subvert it and you make it ridiculous and grotesque, right? So that's what it was. But they would only do that. with certain things.

There are certain things that you can do, certain things you can't. I don't know what you're thinking of there, Francis. But then the other element of it is you could tell yourself that you're being edgy and then your peers will then clap along and go, isn't this edgy, isn't this interesting, isn't this pushing a boundary?

When the fact is doing none of those things, all you're really doing is re-establishing what we have done for however long, when the real edgy thing to do is to do other things, but they won't do that. So to me, it's part of what the, part of the problem is with comedy. And there's nothing interesting about it. It's completely artistically bankrupt. Well, also, I mean, the whole drag area has become, I mean, drag used to be really subversive. It did used to be edgy. I've seen drag acts that are genuinely shocks me in what they've done.

And I thought, I can't believe you're saying that or doing that. And now they're reading bedtime stories to children, they're opening the Paris Olympics. This is now, like, you've taken a whole underground art form and made it about as banal and tame and mainstream as you can possibly make it. I'm sure there must be some drag queen saying, what the fuck happened to our art form? Well, I think the real edgy drag queens just dress up as the gender they are. You're doing it right now. Double drag. Yeah. Yeah, but it is a manifestation of it's sort of common. communism, like Constantine's saying or hinting at, these ideas that developed on university

camps is like critical race theory, queer theory, they're now in the institutions. And what I'm to the left? The left used to be against. The left used to be, I was left wing in the 90s and we were like suspicious of corporations, suspicious of government. And now the left, they're like, oh, you've got to do what the government says. Oh, the government's introduced this law. And if you don't go along with it, then you're a bad person.

And it's, what, I'm to the left. They've become the establishment. They become the institution. Or let's get the multi-billionaires to censor us. Please. I want you to do it. Well, one of the things that happened to the left this year is they got absolutely crushed in America.

And that's something we've yet to get to, but we should talk about, which is the American election. I mean, first the Trump assassination attempt, Biden dropping out, Kamala, and then the absolutely sweeping landslide that Trump managed to secure. What did your boys make of that? Well, when the assassination attempt happened, that photograph of him standing up shouting fight was almost like a Renaissance painting the way that it was composed. It was too perfect

with the flag behind him and the secret agents and the blood down his face. And I thought when I saw that, he's won it now, that's it. Like, he's definitely won it. And the way the media managed to memory hold it so quickly,

so people would stop talking about it like a couple of weeks later. And then there was another assassination attempt. It was like, oh, well, I thought this should be like major insane news. Like a candidate who was formerly the president almost killed twice. We should still be talking about it.

We just all forgot about it. What do we all think would have happened? I genuinely have no idea how I would answer this question. What do you think would have happened if that bullet had been two inches to the right? Yeah, or even a fraction. He was so lucky.

He just turned his head and it just clipped his ear. I mean, that was an easy shot to make. I'm not just saying that because my dad's a gunsmith. But if anything, it was a real, I think in people's minds, it was the moment the real, the left were so incompetent, they couldn't even make a shot like that. You know what I mean? This was a DEI hire. You know what I mean? This was the sort of manifestation in politics of all the sort of

of, you know, fat, ugly people on catwalk, runways and all that sort of stuff. I mean, wasn't he a straight white man though, the assassin? He let the team down, Leo. He looked at, like, looking at his face. You think he was trans? Is that way he said? He had something going on. Yeah, he had something going on. He had something going on. He was something going on. He You wouldn't put him on the poster. No, I mean, it kind of looked like a mutated jelly baby, didn't he? Yeah. You know, it came out, and then the haircut was terrible.

But you didn't answer my question. What do you think would have happened if he'd been killed? I think somebody, I mean, the Republicans would have obviously had a replacement candidate. Who would have just, you know, one absolutely stormed it? Yeah. I mean, I think actually the assassination attempt was the turning point, particularly because that's when Musk came out. Yeah. A lot of people came out.

A lot of people. And that was like, then it all changed. So much happened in this election. I mean, not just to two assassination attempts. Then you've got the Biden debate, him dropping out, all this revelation. But, you know, the fact that the media had covered up for this obviously senile individual for so long. You know, at the moment when he stood up and called for a woman who died a couple of months ago, was she here?

Are you here? No, she's dead, Joe. At that point, every person in the White House press briefing room should have said, can we see records, the medical records of the president, can we see evidence of his cognitive state? He brought Vladimir Zelensky to the stage as Vladimir Putin. Well, those foreign names are difficult. It's like reading a Dostoevsky novel, you get lost.

What's interesting was it was another one of these things that were told is a far-right conspiracy theory. The idea that Biden's got cognitive decline was a far-right conspiracy theory until it wasn't. Suddenly it wasn't. And suddenly George Clooney and everybody else was saying, he's got cognitive decline. He needs to stand down. And it just becomes, it's like what Kier Starmour did just this week. Like, he's going along, like all the, all the idea,

the idea that, you know, mass immigration is a deliberate plan, is, that's a far right conspiracy theory. Then Kier Stammer stands up and says, this is done by design. And we've been gaslit for the last, you know, however many years into, but then suddenly the window, the Overton window, can not just move, it just jumps to a different place. Did you see the report from Congress this week about how it turns out the COVID virus probably did leak from a lab in the U. As if we couldn't see that coming. But yeah, it's right. All of the things you're told all the far right conspiracy theories come true.

My worry with that is that you then end up. A lot of people I know have gone completely mad and now believe every single conspiracy thing. They think Paul McCartney's dead, that he was killed in the 70. They think the dinosaurs were faked by 19th century paleontologists by assembling sheep bones. They genuinely, but they think the moonlanders. These were fake, all of this stuff. Yeah. I mean, and then everything now is, you go, well, why is this happening?

They're like, it's the Jews. And it's the Jews. And it always goes back to the Jews. And then also, you've got now people saying Donald Trump's assassination attempt was planned by Trump. That was a false flag. By the way, during that, I worked out that with one question, you could work out who was a Republican or who's a Democrat in the US, even if they didn't want to tell you. Because if someone said he was shot in the ear, they were a Democrat. If they said he was shot in the head, they were a Republican.

That's interesting. That's right. I don't know if you noticed that. But anyway, so that's what happened. And then he got elected and what I think is one of the most stunning electoral victories in the modern era. It's been interesting that the meltdowns haven't been anywhere near what they were in 2016. There was no point. There's no point.

They're still counting votes. How slow? Did they count like one a week? They're very thorough. Are they third? I mean, in the UK, we know before people have even left the Poland station. It's mad. We're like Putin when it comes to an election.

But over there, yeah, California still counting votes. I can't believe it. They might still swing it, right? Yeah. You know, it was very interesting talking about California. I think it was 40% of people voted Republican in California. And that's stunning because you look at the job that Gavin Newsom has done in California and you're like 60% of people voted for this.

Yeah. That is mental. Yeah. And, of course, you've got, you know, obviously the black boat is very much swung towards Trump as well. And, you know, all of these attempts to call him race. I think what this all shows is that the racist accusation, the fascist accusation, just not working anymore. No. Like, did you see the MSNBC coverage of the rally that Trump held them?

We were at the rally. We were at the rally. We were at the rally. Jewish Nazi. No, we weren't. We're garbage. We're garbage, yeah. You're speaking of Jewish Nazis, it being New York, at least, like, I don't know, 20% of the crowd,

had Yamakas on? I mean, I saw stars of David being... They weren't there at Nuremberg, were they? No. There was Israel flags inside the thing. Any time any of the speakers said anything about Israel had got a massive cheer. I'll be honestly, I wrote and did a video about this,

that one moment being there and then reading the coverage of my phone while being there, that for me permanently broke what was left of my faith in the mainstream media. Yeah, yeah. Because that's when I realized they've been lying about this guy this entire time. And in Britain in particular, even people, prominent conservatives like Michael Gove and others, were pro-Karmulah.

And I understand why now, because in Britain, what we do is we listen to British journalists who mostly don't ever go to America, so they never see any of the stuff they're talking about with their own eyes. And if they do go to America, they don't go to America. they go to Washington, D.C., which is 92% Democrat, or New York, or if they go on holiday, they go to L.A. or something like that, right? So they're not seeing the parts of America that are pro-Trump. And so they have no conception of how to understand it.

And then they are swallowing the lies of the American journalists who marinate in their neck of chamber. And so what we get in Europe is a complete misunderstanding of everything that's happening. And then you add to that because we speak the same language, we assume that our cultures are the same. And as someone who's been to America, our cultures are not the same. Trump is way more representative of America

than most people in Europe realized. Like the way he talks straight to business, you know, all of that, is how most Americans are actually. Yeah, you know what I mean. And they don't mince words nearly as much and they're not as well as we are. And so the fact that he offends our British sensibilities

is it just makes people blind to the reality of his movement which fundamentally is about what it says it's about, which is we don't want America to go down the shitter. We want America to be great again. So that's quite reassuring though, isn't it? I mean, you saw it for yourself, the disparity between the coverage and the reality,

that now everyone has seen it. Yeah. But, you know, and actually I think that kind of coverage has become self-discrediting because, you know, when MSNBC, they jumped the shark, didn't they? Because they didn't just show the footage from the rally, they intercut it with images from a Nazi rally

in the 1930s. And they said, look, back in Madison Square Garden, there was another fascist who did, you know, even though it was a different building, but that doesn't matter. And so people now can see it. And that tenor of politics, I just think it's over, isn't it? And Tim Walts got involved and, you know, Kamala Harris was suggest. To be fair, Trump also started calling Kamala Harris a fascist. And I think we just maybe just retire the word fascist and say, that happened a long time ago. Let's just not do that.

You know, no, no. See, this is where I disagree with you, Andrew. The word fascist is very important. It describes a political movement and ideology, which still exists. But the problem is, is that if everything is fascism, nothing is fascism. But to what extent does it exist?

I mean, the point is that if you look at what fascism actually means, what it actually meant to Mussolini, right? You can find elements of what he described as fascism in every Western government on the left and the right today. I think it's more on the left, because it's this sort of totalitarian, big state, you know, corporatized government, where the government controls all business and all institutions.

But it's still not helpful to call Kamala Harris a fascist. No, because she's not a fascist. But the Democrats are big government. So they're more, I mean, really, when you get to like a big government, a big state, it naturally becomes authoritarian. I'm going to be honest with really, my problem with a fascist was not their affinity for the big state. I mean, it's impossible to be a fascist if you have a small state. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And also as well, I mean, to me, one of the central tenets of fascism is that the individual has no right and the state has. all the rights. Right. Like Scotland. Yeah, exactly. And then, but when you look at, you know, the way people talk, particularly on the left about things like the vaccine and particularly in America,

and you're like, well, you're going to take it. If you're not, you're going to lose all your rights and you're going to lose your job. That, to me, is fascistic. So then it's... But I just think using that term fascistic, saying that things are fascist in that way, it kind of evokes all of those things, those elements of the 1930s, those elements of the Holocaust, that I just, think aren't helpful in modern popular discourse. I think you're right insofar as I think when

the state is trying to control the way people think, trying to censor speech, that is obviously something that fascist regimes have always done. But I think it's helpful, it's more helpful, to describe such things in modern parlance as authoritarian. Because I think the conservatives and the labour in this country have authoritarian tendencies. Yeah. I think both Democrats and Republicans have authoritarian tendencies in different ways. I think when Tim Walts in the vice presidential debate with J.D. Vance said that the First Amendment doesn't cover hate speech. That is an authoritarian. And it's interesting because that comment did not make the official transcript, almost as though the media didn't want you to note that he'd said that. John Kerry said,

you know, they were going to look at the, look at the first amendment, look at the, or whatever. Is it the first amendment? What amendment is it? The First Amendment is freedom of speech. John Kerry said it was a major block. You describe the First Amendment as a major block. I mean, it is. That's the whole point. That's the whole point. That's the entire point. That's really disturbing that now what you've got is mainstream politicians like John Kerry, like Tim Walts, openly saying they want to amend the First Amendment. That's the thing that makes America the last bastion of free speech in the world. They shouldn't have called it the First Amendment because that makes it sound like it can be amended. Yeah, exactly. It can be amended. The thing is it actually, it's incredibly difficult to do and I don't

think they'll ever succeed. You know, I was going to. I was going to to say that actually I don't find that what I completely push back on what you're saying Doily because I think it's good that they said that. Because they're out in the open. Because they're out in the open. They're being honest. And then people can go, oh, what you are. And Rogan made this point when we're on his podcast.

He went, if you were against the First Amendment, then what you are is un-American. And people looked at those people saying those words and go, oh, you're un-American. I'm not going to vote for you. So actually, I commend them. for being honest and saying, oh, we don't believe in free speech. Great. I don't think he meant to say it. And I think that's also why it was omitted from the transcript when the media reported on it. I think it was a slip of the tongue, which obviously revealed something about what he really hates. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think it's brilliant that he did that.

Speaking of authoritarianism, one thing that did happen during the election is the death, the tragic death of Peanut the Squirrel. Yeah. No, this was a squirrel that was, look at him, he's been weighing all fucking out. I know. destroyed by this thing. Francis, this is squirrel ethnic cleansing. It's, I mean, this is a squirrel genocide, squirrel side. It's, it's a real. Squirrels you're into all those capybara things. I like capybara. I'm a friend to all rodents. So, they're great animals. What I love about, you know, a lot of these, a lot of these rodents, like Capi Barra, it looks like it was made in a PlayStation 1 game. Yeah, doesn't it real? It doesn't have enough polygons, you know what I mean?

It's like, I've never seen one. Are they real? I've seen one. You go and see them, there's a few places in the UK, you can see one they've got... Guys, not offence, but we're getting sidetracked. We've got one at Cotswold Wildlife Park, and it's the threat. It's in with other animals. It's in with tapir and stuff. Can we please talk about peanuts a fucking squirrel? Peanut the squirrel.

Peanut the squirrel was this. He was a rescue squirrel who'd, his mother had been killed in a car accident. I'm not sure. What was she driving? I'm not sure if she was driving. But it was a rescue squirrel. And so this guy had taken, taking the squirrel in and, you know, nursed it.

and then tried to release it into the wild, or release him into the wild, because we're going to anthropomorphize him a lot. But the squirrel just came back and was like, kind of stay in your house. So he was like, yeah, cool. And then he'd start a social media account. The squirrel was doing tricks and stuff.

So they got loads of followers. It's like an only fans for squirrels. Like an only fans for squirrels, yeah. And then basically somebody grasped up, because you're supposed to have various permits and stuff for owning a wild animal. It's got to be, you know, checked off by the state. So because he didn't have these permits, it was basically a illegal squirrel.

So the state sent round its apparatchiks, its goon squad, its squirrel execution force, to boot down his door in a sort of this sort of Stalinist way and seize the squirrel and execute it. Did they machine gun, the squirrel? Dragged out into the garden and shot in front of him. No, it wasn't. It was taken away and euthanized. I mean, that's still, you know, the statists, all the leftists are all like, oh, well, they didn't have the right paperwork for the squirrel. Man, it's a squirrel.

It's not even like, you know, it's not like it's come from another country. It's from that country. What harm is it doing if it's eating bananas in this guy's kitchen? What was it just a bit? Was it that it was spreading disease? It didn't have the paperwork. But then, you know, they're saying, this squirrel doesn't have the paperwork. Well, they're saying this squirrel doesn't have the paperwork.

What about all the illegal immigrants, the millions of illegal immigrants that are allowed to just stream over the border and they get all these benefits and, and they get all these benefits and, and, So much taxpayers' money is sort of lavished on them to provide them with hotels and and EBT and phones and all the rest of it so they can live a life. And so they can stay and get all these legal services and everything to try and work the system. Why would the state not providing peanut the squirrel with a lawyer? Can I push back on that? Squirrels are colonialists. You know that we no longer have the red squirrel population in the UK because those American squirrels came in and massacred them and destroyed.

They didn't massacre them. They had competed them. The red squirrel. They beat them up. They were vicious. They thugs. Squirrels are thugs, I don't like them. Just to correct you, the red squirrel population is actually increasing now in the UK.

And actually where I'm from, there's red squirrels genocide to the islandists. You want no thanks to the American squirrels. And there used to be a feral colony of gerbils on the Isle of Wight. Leo is the squirrel Zionist. Yeah. Zionist, Schillers, Squirrel Zionist shill. You know, Leo, you told me you've got, you've got autism. I never believed you, but now I do, mate.

This is your specialist subject. I've never seen you more in your element. Hmm. Thanks. Are you publicly out as autistic, by the way? But this is not like, I'm fine. Whatever, like, I'm autistic and stuff like that. I mean, if it gets me off, if it gets me off some Greg Wallace-style allegations in the future,

then that's great. You know, that was his excuse. He said, he said, I'm autistic. It's like, what's what you're counting up, these allegations? Like, what do you mean? He just wanted to get to a nice round number, so he kept going. He's like, man, Greg Wallet,

he should have gone. he should have gone for something other than autism. I think, you know, autism's not, he should have been like, hey, guys, I'm trans. Because then any woman, any of his middle class women who are saying, like, I felt sexually threatened by Greg Wallace, they would have then been saying they were sexually threatened by a trans woman. And that's transphobic.

So they would have had to retract the allegations. Could he have done that, though, because he has got a Millwall FC tattoo on his chest. Can you really have a trans woman with a Milvo line? Are you questioning his ability to self-identify as a woman? Yeah. Well, in this instance, yeah. However, on the trans issue, actually, it's something we haven't talked about on the show

for a very long time because we kind of feel like, you know, after about 700 interviews on the issue, we kind of know where we stand on it. Yeah. Trans women are women? Yeah, absolutely. The hot ones are. He actually thinks that.

I know he does. Well, you've got to have a rule. You think the benchmark for self-ID should be whether you find them hot? Yeah. Okay. It's a perfect system. Like so

All right So you know People have got this issue With trans women Going into female toilets or whatever If you So Blair White

Would you make Blair White use the gents No No Of course not Because Blair White looks like a woman So that's the I would disagree with that I think you should have

Single-sex spaces For toilet facilities And I think People who identify As the opposite sex Find ways around that They go to cubicles Or they go to

Unisex Well just for saying that, you're not allowed to use the gents anymore. Well, that's fine. I don't use public toilets anyway. He's got a PhD from Oxford. He doesn't want to mix with the proletary. He's too big for the public toilets. But one of the other reasons

we've not really talked about it more is because we feel like we're actually on the right track on all of these issues in this country at least. And we've just had this... Because they're getting hotter. It's not all about your... It's not all about your sexual preferences. We've just had the Labor government, by the way,

announce that puberty blockers are going to be banned for children in this country. It looks like permanently. So that's an amazing thing that's happened because if you think about all the people who've tried, all the campaigners who've been working towards this over years and have been absolutely slammed. Like the pink news has written a, I think it was 750 hit pieces on JK Rowling. Just like that level of obsession. They did 40 in one week. They did 40 in a week.

Yeah, they are absolutely crazily obsessed with her. Who reads this? Who reads 40 hip pieces about J.K. Rowman? I just say you're going to say who reads the Pink News. Well, no, but the Pink News are just one of those organizations, Pink News, Stonewall, Mermaids, every organization that has been pushing for puberty blockers for children, they're all embroiled in scandals now. They're all falling one by one.

Oh, yeah, I've heard about this. I don't want to defame anyone, but aren't they a bit? Are you talking about Pink News now? Yeah, the two guys are. And they've been accused. There's like, honestly, the list of allegations is insane. You know what I mean? Honestly, you'd think they were BBC presenters.

It's not just sexual allegations. It's also bullying, workplace bullings, all sorts of stuff. I mean, but it always happens. It's like with mermaids. Mermaids took an action against LGBT alliance, you know, because they were four gay rights or whatever. And of course, by doing so, they sort of expose themselves to all sorts of. Because they were, mermaids secretly were sending chest binders to kids without parental consent and stuff. Like, insane stuff.

And it always happens, all of these organizations. But what's great now is, like you say, we always thought that the Labor Party were hopeless on this issue. But actually, West Streeting has been really brilliant on this issue. You know, you had, well, ultimately, to put it simply, there was never any evidence that puberty blockers were good for kids. Yeah. There was always a lot of evidence that they caused damage. There's been cases of testicular atrophy, cancer, brain problems, bone density issues. and this was a massive medical experimentation on children

when we know when all of the studies showed that feelings of gender dysphoria in the vast majority of cases disappear through puberty. So by blocking puberty, they were blocking the cure. And this was all unevidence. The cast review came out, four-year study, proving that this was a problem, this was unevidenced. And now West Streeting is, you know,

first had Victoria Atkins, who used the emergency powers to put a stop on puberty blockers and she was right to do so. And that's now been confirmed by West Streeting. by saying there were all these private clinics as well saying we can work around the NHS ban because they still want to make money out of this stuff and he said no that's going to be banned as well

so this is an amazing thing that's happened and we should give West Streeting and Labour credit for that 100% yeah it's you know all of them like Sajad Javid for commissioning Hillary Cass then Victoria Atkins for doing what she did with the emergency powers now West Streeting by the way loads of people in his party hate him for doing this they've really gone at him for this

yeah do you think part of the reason that he's been and look this is speculation is because West Streeting is a gay man. West Streeting used to be on the other side of this debate, but because he's now read about it and actually spoken to people about it. Because the only way this stuff ever gets preserved is by the lack of scrutiny.

That's why Stonewall for years were saying, no debate. Because when you have the debate, it falls apart. And we've seen it in the Supreme Court in America at the moment, you know, with the Tennessee ruling. You've seen it in the Supreme Court in the UK. You put these people on the stand and you ask them to defend this notion of gender identity.

I mean, let me put it simply. You know, all of these public health policies that have been pushed through on the basis of this notion of gender identity, which is a supernatural belief that there's a sexed soul within all of us, right? No one can define it. Jackie Smith, who's the spokesperson for the government in the Lords for Equalities, was asked explicitly in the Lords a couple of weeks ago. You're talking about gender identity. You're pushing through policy on the basis of gender identity. What does it mean? What is the government's working definition of gender identity?

She couldn't give one. And she actually had a go at the questioner saying, you need to take this more serious. I was like, for fuck sake, we, all the people are asking are taking it seriously. You're not. So why is it that a supernatural belief is pushing policy and no one's questioning it? It's so weird to me. Well, now I think we have to acknowledge actually, like I said, there are some wins being had on there are. Yeah. Yeah. Especially in this country, but I imagine also in the United States, given who's now going to be in power. But is it a win? I mean, you had these liberal parents. They're all liberal parents. There's no like conservatives doing this to their kids. There's these liberal parents who are

basically trans and their kids so they can, you know, one-up their friends at the dinner party. That's just a setup for a punchline. Honestly, it's not. So you've got these people basically removing their DNA from the pool, and they're all lefties. They're all going to make, you know, if you let your kid transition when it's like eight or whatever,

man, and then you put it on puberty blockers and all the rest of it, it goes into surgery, man, you're going to have it. Like, your Christmases are going to be so awkward for the rest of your. life. You know what I mean? So why would you stop them doing that? Why would you stop people on the left destroying their lives like that? No, but like the joke is funny, but also it's not a joke. Yeah, look, no, no, because there are, look, there's a lot of people, there's the real tragedy with this is that kids are getting radicalized when they go online. And the parents don't know. A lot of the parents, they're just normies, they're not aware of all of this stuff. They can, they can go in and the

schools, they can tell schools that they're using different pronouns, different names, the parents don't get told. So a lot of these kids are getting radicalized. Now, use that word in its true sense, and then they become incredibly unaware. And then they've got no power. So there's a lot of parents who are just feeling utterly powerless, all of this stuff. And they're not being told by the, you know, the healthcare system, the schools. It's awful. And teachers are, some of these teachers who are radicalising kids into this nonsense. But it will change now. It will change with someone like West Streeting as health secretary.

It will change if, you know, a parent takes a child to a doctor, a pediatric doctor, and the doctor says to the kid, you know, you're not born in the wrong body. That's not possible. No human being can change sex. If those things were said openly, and if they investigated the other issues, we all know, we know that between 80 and 90% of adolescents

referred to the Tabastock Gender Clinic were same-sex attracted. So they're just kids who are going to grow up gay, basically. You know, the NHS has been practicing gay conversion therapy, which is, you know, an astonishing thing because they do that in Iran as well. And or a lot of them are autistic, a lot of them have other comorbidities. 40% of the girls are autistic. Right. But that's probably less than like the number of people who claim they're autistic right now.

But like clearly this needs a therapeutic approach, right? And there are people who have been abused and there's all sorts of other reasons. But for a long time, medical practitioners were afraid They were told unless you automatically affirm what the child says about their own gender then you are committing malpractice. And so I think there was that pressure as well, that professional and ethical pressure.

But I think you're right, things are completely changing. And I think it's the tenacity of, well, turfs, feminist campaigners, women's rights campaigns, gay rights campaigners, LGBT Alliance, sex matters, all of these people in this country have really pushed for this.

And I think that the UK is leading the world on this because, look, Canada's, still complete. I mean, Canada is arresting parents for not affirming their kids. You've got in America in some states, there was that horrible case that you lose your kids. You lose your kids if you don't affirm, right? So I think we shouldn't be complacent insofar as yes, it's going the right direction in this country. But we're the outlier. Well, I think you're about to see very significant change in America on that issue for obvious electoral reasons. But it is good to see that I think on some of these issues that we've all been

talking about and concerned about. Actually, if you keep up the pressure, if you keep up the work, eventually it will pay off and you will actually see change in the way that people would talk for. Because, look, Leo's joke is very funny, but ultimately. Ultimately, it was about, for me, it was always about children. Yeah. And the safeguarding of children against this horrible, horrible outcome that we have seen for children who really didn't need to go down that path whatsoever. Do you not think that in, like, I reckon in about 50 years time, people would be like, what the hell happened there? That is insane.

That will be like lobotomies. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So on that happy note, we've got to wrap up. And so as we look forward to the new year, what are we looking forward to? What are we excited about? Well, I'm off to America. I don't mean you personally.

Oh, I'm just saying. Oh, I'm so famous. No, I'm so rich. It can't be all about, it can't be all about the issues. It has to. be something about me. I'm also looking forward to Andrew going to. I mean, you know, I'll tell you what I am looking forward to potentially. I'm not saying this is going to happen, but I do see what happened in America and a sense of optimism that so many people in America now have, including

many people, by the way, let's say it quietly, who didn't vote for Trump. I see a lot of people like in the business world who either didn't vote or were kind of very reluctant Trump voters or very like reluctant Carmelah voters even who are kind of going this next four years is going to be great for the economy. Yeah, they are saying that, aren't they? A lot of people are very optimistic.

And it's going to be good in the right ways. I mean, like the economy did great under Trump last time, but he spent loads of money. He spent like the same amount in four years as Obama spent. He added, you know, what was it, almost $8 trillion to the deficit. So it was a big government,

big spending. Now Trump and the people around him know what they're doing and they want to shrink the government. And I think Havi, Malé and Argentina has shown the value, the power of shrinking the government. Everybody thought, you know, Argentina was going to fall apart. You know, the unions or the socialists or the peronists

or whatever would block it. It would find a way to stop him, assassinate him. You know, it just wouldn't work. And he's shown, like, first month. It was, you know, Argentina was in the black. So Millie has shown how it can be done. And I think that's going to have a big effect on all, like, Western governments.

That's exactly what I was going to say. And my great hope, and I think we should be talking way more about this than we are, is we are not there in Britain. We don't want a smaller state. The vast majority of the British public want higher taxes and more spending. And I fear that until we change our mindset when it comes to business and growing the economy, I think it's going to be very difficult to generate those levels of enthusiasm for that sort of worldview. But we're already seeing that, you know, this high tax, high spend state isn't working.

is already failing. We're seeing Futsi 100 companies, big blue chip companies, leaving the U.K. stock market and going on a listing in Europe, going in listing in America. So we're going we don't realize the sort of dividend we get from London being a sort of financial hub. When that starts evaporating to other more, you know, freer, lower tax countries, I think people are really going to have to wake up. It'll be like the 70s again, when we had to have, you know, a Margaret Thatcher. Who's like the Malay of her time? Honestly, I think things have gone so far the other way that, you know, people in the Falklands would like it if Argentina.

Well, it's a very good point. And so Leo and I are basically excited about cutting welfare and benefits for the poor people. What are you excited about? I mean, what about, you know, the idea of having, I mean, I do genuinely believe Kemi Badenock as Conservative Party leader is a really interesting step forward. I think she's a far more interesting individual than the Conservatives had for ages. Why? Why? Because she's been excellent on social justice issues. She understands the culture war. She also understands how the culture war can swing elections. And no one seems to have grasped that. In America, you've seen, you know, the most popular advert that Donald Trump had was the one about Kamala Harris is for they, them, Donald Trump is for you. And all of the studies into that, yeah, it's a good catchphrase, isn't it? All of the studies into that show that when that advert was shown, it actuated a shift. I think it was like a three-point shift in each case. So like for ages, people have been saying that the culture war doesn't matter. You know, but actually, It does. And, you know, as we've been discussing with puberty blockers, you know, she's been on that issue for a long time.

She's understood the problems with unchecked migration. I just think it's, I just think she's a far more interesting person. And she's someone who can hold people to account when it comes to debates and PMQs. And I just think that's more interesting than having, well, Sunac or trust. Well, she'll be on the show soon. So we'll see about testing some of those theories. What about you, Francis? What I'm really excited about is a political realignment we can see in America.

because one thing I don't think we're talking about enough is that you actually look at the Trump cabinet for one of a better way of putting it. And these are people like Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and you look at them, and 10 years ago, they wouldn't even have been on the same team. No, they would have been on the Democrats.

Yeah, they would have been on the Democrats. But if you take particularly RFK Jr. in health, I mean, it's anti-corporate in many ways. It's taking on the corporates. And I find that really interesting. And what I find particularly heartening is he's talking about getting Americans to be healthier because American and the obesity problem over there is a real ticking time bomb. And they need to tackle it.

And the fact that it's now become mainstream, the fact that he's talking about wanting Americans to be healthier, tackling big food and try and get them to produce better, healthier food for Americans, I see that as a real beacon of hope. and I hope that they can do something because obesity in this country as well is a terrible thing. Although he's making the McDonald's chips non-vegetarian. He said they need to be cooked

in tallow. So that's not really fair. Yeah, they'll taste better. And vegetarians won't want to eat them, therefore, they'll become healthier. That's true. And vegans. And the other one is, of course, the Department of Government, what's it called, Doge? Department of Government efficiency. Yeah. So I think that's amazing. That's amazing. So is it Muscan, Vivek Ramoswamy? Yeah.

And they've put a limit on it, haven't they? They've said, we're going to do this job and then disband the department. Yeah, fire ourselves. Fire ourselves. It's a great idea. It's going to be an exciting year. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being back on the show. Always a pleasure to see you both.

Where should people find out about the work that you are doing off in America? Trater. Well, I don't quite, yeah, I am a traitor. I don't quite know yet. But I think just if you follow my substack, I'll probably keep people posted about what I'm doing. Because I don't even know really what I'm doing it. on a sitcom and various other projects out there. Super exciting. Where should people follow you, Leo?

I've got a YouTube channel, so there's probably, can you put a link down there? All right, there's a link down there. Leo Kierce's YouTube channel. Oh yeah, do the link thing for me as well. If you like stuff like that. You don't have a YouTube channel. I've got a substack, they have links. Yeah, he's got a very good substack as well. We'll put it back.

Also I've got a GB News show and stuff like that as well. But please take me to America as well, Andrew. Yeah, I wanted to do that. Okay, brilliant. All right. Thanks for watching. thanks for listening. Merry Christmas and we will see you in 2025. Feliz Navida and proper a year new to our three Latin viewers.

Go home. We're already here, mate. There's nothing you can do.