TRIGGERnometry - The Truth about Lenin, Stalin and the Soviet Union - Michael Malice

Episode Date: January 19, 2025

Michael Malice is the author of Dear Reader, The New Right, The Anarchist Handbook & The White Pill. He's the host of the "YOUR WELCOME" podcast on YouTube @MichaelMaliceofficial | SPONSOR: Aura. Stop leaving yourself vulnerable to data breaches. Go to our sponsor https://aura.com/triggerpod to get a 14-day free trial and see if any of your data has been exposed Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Introduction 03:27 The White Pill 09:24 Lenin Was A Brilliant Man 11:58 The Brutality Of Lenin 17:17 Aura Advert 18:51 Was Lenin Honest About What He Was Going To Do? 23:43 Did The People Of Russia Want This? 26:44 Who Was Trotsky? 29:44 The Ideological Splits 38:38 Was Stalin A Faithful Communist Or Just A Tyrant Dictator? 43:53 How Similar Is North Korea To The Soviet Union? 46:21 The Message Of Michael's Book 'The White Pill' 55:18 The Russian Upbringing 01:07:51 What's The Thing We're Not Talking About That We Should Be? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

He had the camps, he had the secret police, all these things. People are getting put up against the wall in huge numbers. He did not hold back in terms of this is going to have to be, you know, an abattoir. It was very much war, class warfare. And when they said war, they meant war. So Stalin introduced the idea of socialism in one country. He went through group after group, which were threats to his power and just killed. The number of people he killed was just astronomical.

The example after example after example that you give, it felt like would there be anybody left in Russia? Michael. If weight management is one of your new year goals, quicksilver scientific's GLP1 amplifier can help. This science-backed formula supports metabolic balance, curbs cravings and promotes healthy blood sugar levels, making it easier to stay consistent and in control. It helps give your body the boost it needs to keep you on track. Feel confident and energized this year with quicksilver scientific's GLP1 amplifier. Get 10% off and free shipping at tryqs.com slash podcast.

Again, that's tryqs.com slash podcast for 10% off and free shipping. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Francis. Francis. Michael. Michael. Michael Malas, welcome back. He's laughing already.

Yeah. It's great. We're going to talk about the Soviet Union. Before that, how are you? I'm doing wonderfully, thank you. By the time this airs, I'll be doing terribly. Yeah. Well, we're recording this right around election time.

Yeah. So we won't talk about that. So we won't talk about that. There's nothing we can say about it. Yeah. I'm just looking at you. You wanted lots of banter at the top of the show. I did.

I didn't, when did I indicate that? Well, you indicated it to both of us. How? You said, I want it to be fun. I said banter. I didn't say fun. You see, really, your soul is in England, because that's what we do in England. We have banter, but there's no fun.

Yeah, that's kind of true. I see PMQs, and it's banter, it's not really fun. Yeah, exactly. So, but it's wonderful to have you on. You're doing very well. Are you looking forward to this bright new dawn that is awaiting us? By the time this goes out, the dawn has already happened. This golden dawn.

Yeah. America's over, depending on which side you support. Yeah. Right. And I think we're at an interesting point where no matter what happens, there's going to be a huge loss of faith in the electoral system, which is really going to be interesting to see. Why? Well, because if Kamala gets in, it's like, come on, this is a joke. This woman didn't go through the primary. She got installed by the machine. And if Trump wins, well, obviously, you know, insurrectionist all that nonsense. Yeah.

So it's just like, I think people are going to start giving up. I know my voice just broke there. Your voice came up on you. My voice gave up. He gave up. But that's a really dangerous moment, isn't it? I mean, that could that. Yeah, Michael loves it, though.

I don't love danger. This is wishful thinking. I don't love danger at all. He wants everyone to lose faith. I want them to lose faith, but it's still dangerous. I mean, when people are desperate, bad things happen. Yeah. And good things possibly happen, but it's still scary.

I'm not Barack Obama. I missed the fly. You mean in the men's room? There we go. There's banter. There's the banter that we wanted. There's the banter that you were. How are we supposed to have a serious conversation with you, Michael? Is it impossible? I was on John Stossel, who is the greatest.

Yeah. His producer, many years ago, was going to have me on and ask my other friend, Andrew. He goes, can he ever be serious? And Andrew goes, can the North Korea guy ever be serious? Yeah, he can. Yeah. Yeah, and that's an interesting jump-off point,

the North Korean guy can ever be serious because I read your book, it's brilliant. Which one? The White Pill. Well, no, the Dear Readers about North Korea, that's what I'm asking. Oh, right, okay. I read The White Pill. And there are some, it's a beautiful book.

Well, thank you. There are moments of real darkness within that. And as somebody who is not O'Faye, Soviet history, the characters, you really bring them to life. I mean, let's start off with Lenin, because how Lenin is presented on a surface level to the Lenin you describe in the book is completely different. Well, how so? So with Lenin, we kind of see that, you know, he was a founder of communism, he was this visionary, he took, you know, he took communism and was the founding father of the Soviet Union. But I didn't realize the psychopathy and the brutality of that.

Yeah, the thing that's always fascinating when people, there's two points I want to make here. There's this hypothesis in university system, like good Lenin, bad Stalin, that Lenin came in and he was kind of good cop. And then Stalin, this is kind of a Trotskyite idea that Stalin came in and the revolution was betrayed by Stalin. And it's really completely historical that, you know, all the roots that Stalin later developed and certainly cranked up the dial had its antecedents during the Leninist period, we see this directly when Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman,

who were too anarchists who had been deported from the States, you know, talked to Lenin to his face and were like, look, you were arresting people from political views, you promised free speech, and he goes, look, that's a bourgeois concern. You know, he had the camps, he had the secret police, all these things. And when people talk about like, oh, you know, that wasn't real communism or, you know, he hasn't been tried, he was willing explicitly goes,

we're not holding back. This is our one shot to get it right. We're not going to be like hemming and hawing. We're not going to be, you know, mincing words. People are getting put up against the wall in huge numbers. And one of the people in the secret police said, like, look, better, what is it? Better ten innocent people die than one spy gets away.

When you're chopping, when you're splitting wood chips will fly, meaning you're going to have a lot of, he explicitly and constantly talked about like blood flowing, you know, the blood of our enemies and, you know, liquidating these classes. And they did it, you know, just huge numbers of people were killed or deported or so on and so forth. So you have to give him credit in a very, very, very loose sense of the word where he's like, all right, we're doing this for real. This isn't like, oh, you know, I'm a conservative. We're going to have a free enterprise zone. or I'm going to privatize the electric company.

He's like, we're going balls to the wall as fast as we can. He pulled back when things weren't going as well as he wanted with the new economic policy, the net policy. But he did not hold back in terms of this is going to have to be, you know, an abattoir. Michael, you mentioned this idea of real communism, you know, this meme, real communism hasn't been trying to. So according to Lenin, what was real communism? What was he trying to do? Well, the communist model, it was funny.

My friend Ben was giving a talk at Hereticon early this week, and he goes, what can I say? It'll really piss him off, and he wanted to give a certain topic. But it was, and this is going to upset a lot of people, which is why it's fun to say it. But it was essentially a transhumanist movement. Their vision was, we're going to fundamentally, long term, remake the nature of man and the nature of society. They thought that human beings are almost entirely plasticine.

that people are born and their subject, a function of their economic class. And if you just get the right knobs and levers, you can create an ideal society at the end where the state will wither away. This is kind of this almost biblical sense that when communism is done, you're not going to need a government because everyone's going to know the role and do it naturally. But what people don't appreciate now, because when we look at the Soviet Union or Venezuela or Cuba, and there's that joke about what did the socialist used

before they used candles, light bulbs. But the idea was, no, no, no, we're scientific. This isn't this kind of shopkeep, you know, bourgeois, oh, you've got a little greengrocer in this corner and you've got a little library that's all very quaint. We're going to turn the entire country into a factory or a laboratory where everyone's working together and there we're not going to waste money on profits

for some billionaire while everyone's starving. and we're going to create this super efficient machine. I mean, if you look at the iconography, you know, nowadays, leftism is much more environmentalist, but it was all about smokestacks and, you know, electrical wiring. Like, we're going to create this kind of very industrialized nation state. To what end? To the point where because we're producing so much,

because the Industrial Revolution came out, and Marx was very much a function of the Industrial Revolution, now there's so much being produced, you're not going to need to work, right? Because we're going to be overflowing with college, and bread and everything you want, because everything's being done efficiently and scientifically. Frederick Taylor was kind of a model for this. He was an American thinker who basically went to factories.

It was an efficiency expert, right? And they took that, like, what if we apply this to society at large? So when they talk about real communism, you know, it's really this kind of thing where it's kind of redundant. It's the sense of like, real communism means it works. This didn't work, therefore it's not real communism. It's like, sure, but, you know, But real is what you put into practice, not what's in your head.

And if he, who didn't hesitate in any sense to impose this vision on a country, if that wasn't real, I don't know what is. And also what you encapsulate brilliantly in the book is what a... I mean, he was a brilliant man. Terrible man, awful man, evil you could even describe, but brilliant at the same time. That was never a question. And the thing that I talk about, my other book,

and you write, is when you're in the middle, and you look at the fringes, madness and innovation are equidistant, right? When you hear some great visionary, you don't know, this guy's a complete lunatic, or, holy crap, this is what's going to be in 20, 25 years. I'm going to use a very gauche example. I read Cindy Lopper's autobiography,

and, you know, she dressed in a very idiosyncratic way. Before she made it, you know, she was working at this story called screaming memies in Manhattan, dressing in this kind of thrift store, free hipster, free, like, 90s hipster, and women would, like, make fun of her, and she thought to herself, your daughter's going to be dressed like this in five years,

and she was correct, right? So a lot of times what seems crazy today will be reality, and not only the norm, but popularized soon after that, and the reason the Germans wanted to get Lenin back into the Soviet, into Russia, excuse me, obviously on the Soviet Union, during World War I

because the idea was, all right, this is completely bat crap. This can never happen in real life. He's a loon, but the guy's charismatic, he knows how to make trouble. Let's throw him in there and kind of put a monkey wrench

into the gears. And when he sees power, everyone's like, well, hold on a minute. So people realize before this, today the word socialism is synonymous with having government control.

That wasn't what socialism meant before in 19th and There were different strands of socialism because it meant the idea of everyone working together for the betterment society. So anarchists were considered socialists and corporatists and so on and so forth. Once that hit, and we have

the first real self-identified socialist country, a lot of the left were like, all right, we got to see if this works. This is our one shot to make it happen. Yeah, there's some kind of broken eggs, wink, wink, which means murdered children and people. But this is still our one shot.

to put into practice. So we got to give them every opportunity they have. It was what I think was Eugene Lyons called the Guinea Pig Theory of Revolution. Like sure, you know, I have the quote in the book, sure these Russians squeal and make noise, but what are we up here? We can't worry about the animals. This is our chance to, you know, kind of experiment on them and find out, you know, what makes the entire world tick. And you've saying experiment and we've touched on Lenin's brutality, but I think it's really important for people who may not be over. Faye with this historical character. Let's really delve into the brutality aspect of it, because it's really important. What did he do to his own people that meant, to my eyes,

that he's a monster? Well, I think he's, so what's interesting is all the things that, or most of the things that the Bolsheviks and their allies hated about the Tsar, they took and implemented later and again escalated to an extreme degree. It kind of, so he had, under the czar you had internal passports, right? So you couldn't travel from, you know, one place to another without the permission of the state. This, the Bolsheviks later implemented. They, they had the concentration camps, but the amount of people in the camps that the Tsar had were quite small relatively. These were for political radicals. And also, like, they had books, you know, they could write letters. It's jail, but it's not what we think of as this kind of intense prison system. He, you know,

basically they would take entire populations, and one of the big things about Marxism, and this is what conservatives kind of harp on, and quite understandably, is their absolute hatred of faith and religion. So they really wanted to make sure anyone who had any kind of religious background bent the knee and repudiated their faith. And you can imagine how difficult it is to maintain this sense of faith when your entire country is against you, when the costs are. are extremely high and you don't see any glimmers of hope and they were right.

So there was a group of religious people. They basically put them on an island and they wouldn't take like Bolshevik money. And they said, all right, well, if you don't take this money, you're not going to eat. And they all starve to death. They would put people, you know, the Soviet Union is, or what became the Soviet Union, wasn't exactly Tahiti in terms of climate. So they had no problem putting people above the Arctic Circle with no clothes and being like, all right, you're going to stay here and you're going to work for us.

And if this doesn't break you, that's perfectly fine. So the German Auschwitz model, Arbach-Mach-Fry, was apparently a sarcastic reference to the Soviet vision of, if you work hard enough, you're going to kind of divest your evil history and become a productive member of society. You could pay off your debt that you've made for your parents were wealthy landowners or bourgeois or something. Like, you are punished for the sins of your ancestors.

Most people would associate those camps with Stalin, But what you're saying is they were implemented under the Tsar and then really expanded under Lenin. Yeah, under the Tsar was the Katorga system. But it was, Lenin just really made it much more. And Stalin, you know, took it to the nth degree. And because what was really interesting in the book is you're hearing about the way he's treating political dissidents. You're hearing about the way he's treating people he perceives as his enemies. And then in the left, the journalist.

some of the intellectuals in America and in my country, like the UK, you know, heroes of the left, like Malcolm Muggeridge, extolling the virtues of the Soviet Union and Lenin in particular. It's really fascinating. Yeah. So before Lenin, you had something called the Fabian Society, which was the precursor to the Labor Party, and they were heavily involved with the London School of Economics.

That was a whole little scene. And this sounds like a joke, but the Fabian's original logo was a wolf and sheep's clothing. And when they thought that was too on the nose, they changed it to a tortoise, meaning slow and steady wins the race. Because they wanted socialist control, but their vision is, all right,

we're going to do it in a democratic way, gradually, you know, piece by piece, we're going to take over the entire country and have everything run by the state. So they were, and the Webb's, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, were two Fabians who really had a complete love affair with the Soviet Union. But the thing that's really kind of fascinating that people, I think, don't appreciate is

they thought these Westerners who were extolling the virtue of the Soviet Union, there were two types. There were those who knew the truth, and they're like, all right, we need to kind of downplay this because we got to give these people every chance to make it work. So we don't want to be criticizing them too much in undermining this very fragile thing that they're building. but even worse were the ones who had never stepped foot like east of Paris

who knew perfectly well what's going on there because they read the right books and newspapers and maybe if you read a book you'd understand this glorious experiment that's happening over in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Lenin grads. So it was, it's this arrogance of the intelligentsia and Lenin very much played into it.

I mean, the term useful idiots applies to these people that was a Soviet concept because the idea was they weren't that big a deal in the West, but the Soviets were like, oh, you guys are great, you're basically our ambassadors. It made them feel important. And they were the ones you would go to for that full quote that journalists needed then as they do now.

Right. There's a lot of that going on in the words. We live in an age where everything about us is online. Our names addresses even social security numbers. Now, we think we know you. The trigonometry audience pretty well. And I'll hazard a guess the idea of that gives you the creeps. And so it should. That's why we're thrilled to introduce you to our new brand partners, Aura,

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Don't leave yourself vulnerable. Click the link in the description or scan the QR code to take control of your digital safety today. How honest was Lenin about the stuff that he intended to do, like before he actually came to power? Did he say, we're going to kill all our class enemies? Did he say we're going to have this, all of the things that they went on to do? Did they talk about, you know, taking the farms away from the Kulags, the wealthy peasants? Did they promise to do all the stuff they ended up doing? Or did they have just very kind of flowery slogans that sounded really appealing to people?

Oh, it wasn't flowery. It was sordy. You know, the slogans were very much, because this is the workers revolution, right? So it was for the workers. So it was very much a philosophy of strength and muscle. It wasn't flowers at all. You know, it's not this kind of hippie thing from the 60s. It's this idea that we're the strong ones. We're the ones who are literally building these buildings, building these factories off the sweat of our brow and this fat, lazy capitalist is sitting in his house, smoking cigars, lighting them with currency, while we're starting. and hungry, you know, and we're gonna, it's a revolution. You don't have a revolution with flowers. So, and it was very much war, class warfare. And when they said war, they meant war. They didn't mean, you know, like, oh, we're going to play monopoly and I win and whatever. It's like, these people have to be liquidated. They have to be driven out of society. And in terms of the farms, it wasn't like, oh, we're going to get the farms from the Kulax. We're getting the farms from everybody. Everything is taken from everybody for the sake of the greater good. When they were first starting out, like we're basically rebuilding society from the

ground up. And the idea was if something was old, it was probably bad, right? So, and unscientific. So let's have communal lunchrooms. So everyone eats together. Let's have communal bathrooms so that people don't, this whole concept of privacy is something that they fought against because whatever's bourgeois was bad. If grandma liked it, we're against it, right? So this, and even the concept of a family, it's like, wait a minute, if we're about fairness and equality, maybe you're a great dad. Francis, you're a terrible dad. It's not fair to his kid that your son has a good upbringing and his daughter doesn't. So let's raise all the kids together in these big kindergartens. And the line even was like, listen, if you want to visit your kid, you'll have every chance

if you want to. Now, they didn't go as far as that in the beginning, but that certainly was the vision and in East Germany later on, up until even the 80s. If someone was, it's difficult to even discuss, if someone was regarded as politically correct or politically desirable, and the line for that is very, very low. This isn't someone who's secretly a spy. It's just someone of bureaucratic regards a problem. They took the kids and gave them to be raised by good communists,

and many of these kids and parents never saw each other again, or even more disturbing, or not more disturbingly, disturbingly, after the Germany reunification, some of them did get reunited, but that kid you got taken away from when they were four, and now they're 20, you're looking at a stranger. You're never going to have that relationship if you raise them.

So this, when you talk about putting the common good before the private good, every family is a conspiracy, because you're always going to choose your family over society at large. It's a very human basic thing. But this is a problem for them because that's unequal. So you really have to break up this kind of family and these family ties. The very famous example, and you mentioned it in your book, Constan, as well, is Pavlik Morozov.

Like, Americans can't even wrap their heads that this was real. But it was this kid who turned in his dad to the cops because he was hoarding grain or selling sweaters. I remember it was the kid got killed by his family. There's statues of him. And, you know, he's this basically kind of Paul Bunyan. mythical figure. And the message to children taught in schools is, if you see your parents doing something wrong, turn them in. Even if it costs of your life, that's the right thing to do.

Now, you know some of these kids came home and if their parents are like, you probably shouldn't do that. That parent has to wonder, wait a minute, if I tell my son, you shouldn't do that. Is he going to tell his teacher that I told him that? Now I'm in trouble. So this kind of separation between kids and parents is, I think Americans are very, very naive and Westerners as a whole about the nature of evil, right? I talk about this all the time. They think someone's the crazy mustache banging desk.

No, it's that teacher, school teacher, who's very sweet and very nice, and she pats your kid on the head and pats them on the back and says, good job, who also tells him, if you see your mom or dad doing anything, let me know, and she will trip over her sensible shoes to call the cops to turn them in.

That is, to me, is the nature of evil. And it's so much more pervasive and insidious than some crazy man with epaulets and all these metals, bang your desk. Michael, just coming back to the agenda of the communists and how transparent they were about it, was that a popular offering? Did the people of Russia want that? Would they have voted for it in an election? So when the Bolsheviks came in, they weren't there by themselves, right? They didn't have the numbers.

So there were a few other groups that they partnered with. Bolshe, as you know, in Russia, means more. You had the Mensheviks who wanted things to go a little bit slower, who partnered with them. You had the left SRs. You had the anarchists who wanted a very localized control. The Soviet is a workers' council. This was an anarchist idea.

So they kind of teamed up like, all right, we're going to put our differences aside. We're all completely against capitalism. We're all completely against aristocracy and the Tsar. And you can understand why for each of those things. Let's get together, make it. The whole point of socialism, the vision. is we're all in it together.

We're all, from each according to his ability, each according to his need. Everyone is going to do what they can to make the society work, and then everyone's going to have what they need, and no one's ever going to have to go hungry again, right? So that was the model, and everyone's like, all right, this is our shot,

this is our chance, let's make it happen. And as soon as Lenin had enough power, he's like, I think, well, I forgot the exact quote. It's in the book, like, we've had enough talk of political discussion. It's time for action. And by the end of the year, I think it was 1922,

anyone from any other political movement was in and of itself grounds for arrest and if not execution. So explicitly so. So it's like, all right, we've won the Russian Civil War, the forces of the czar were defeated, the Reds beat the whites, it's going to be read from here on out, enough time for talk,

the party is going to be running this country. But just specifically to your question about the popularity, I think people often forget context, right? It's not like this was like 1910s America and Lenin comes in. This was Tsarist Russia, where people were serfs, where they had, they didn't have a pot to piss in. Everyone's hungry. You had his troops, you know, basically having no compunction about inflicting violence on the people.

They see the West where the industrial revolution is happening. People are getting more and more food or things are getting a little bit better in many regards. And they have nothing. And Lenin says, you have nothing because those people have ever. So join with me, and we're going to remake the society of the future, and you could very easily understand the appeal. And the thing that I found interesting with Lenin is the complete lack of loyalty he had to men who served him very well. He had absolutely no compunction at all once he decided that somebody was done of killing people, and that was it. Because that's a private bond, and his only vision was the public bond.

So again, it's the correct thing to turn in your friends. It's the correct thing to execute your former allies because the only thing that matters is making society a better place. And then you look at the kind of the relationship with Trotsky, which I found particularly fascinating. So let's talk about that now. What was a relationship between them and why did it end up going? Who was Trotsky?

That's start with that. So Trotsky came late to the Bolshevik cause because he thought, okay, it was a little bit loopy. He actually lived in New York for quite some time. not that long, made a couple of years. His old newspaper was on St. Mark's Place, and the stairs that go to that newspaper are still there. You can see them if you ever visit,

which I thought was very cool. And he was one of those people that, you know, when things were happening in what became the Soviet Union, he said, holy crap, this is our big shot. He was in many ways even more than Lenin, the visionary, the ideologue. I mean, a lot of these college Marxists in academics they would describe themselves as Trotskyists because the idea was, all right,

he would have done it correctly, he wouldn't have stolous brutality. It's like, we know that's not true, by the way, because there's something called the Kronstadt Rebellion. So Kronstadt was this island near St. Petersburg. There were a bunch of sailors there and military people. They were essential to winning the Russian Civil War.

As soon as the Civil War was won, they're like, all right, we got a list of demands. Free speech for leftists. The demands weren't even like, We have free speech for everyone. He goes, free speech only for like socialists, anarchists, and Bolsheviks. We want elections between these three. Free the political prisoners of the left.

They didn't care about the capitalist. They didn't care about the bourgeois. Leftist political, all these things that Lenin promised. And they put up a rebellion. And Trotsky took charge of it, and they were all slaughtered. A few of them escaped to Finland. They said, come back. You'll have, we won't do anything to you.

The naive ones came back. sent to camps immediately, but this was the last rebellion of any size in what became the Soviet Union until late 80s, early 90s. So when Trotsky had his chance to show his true colors, he had no hesitation about shedding the blood. And he was right there with Lenin from the beginning. What was fascinating, of course, this is very much parodied by Orwell in 1984, is when Stalin came in, Trotsky was brilliant and he knew it.

And that's a very bad thing for a politician to be because many people around you are not going to be brilliant and they know it and you're going to be rubbing them the wrong way because these people have very, very important, politicians every country and have very little reason to feel important because they're not impressive personalities as a whole. And he made them realize that they're not impressive personalities. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Stalin was working the party.

He wasn't a big name at all, but he was laying the groundwork. So as he consolidated the power, he got Trotsky kicked out of the party, then Trotsky kicked out the Soviet Union entirely, and basically Trotskyism, a term which was largely undefined, became synonymous with everything that's going wrong in the Soviet Union. So he got Trotsky kicked out of the party. What were the accusations?

What was Trotsky's crime? Hold on. Before you go into that, because the accusations would all have been fabricated anyway. The interesting thing is, wasn't there also an ideological split? Because there were those communists who believed in communism within one state and then that would spread elsewhere.

And there were others who believed in a world revolution that would sweep the world immediately. Wasn't that part of the split? Yes, there were two big kind of ideological splits. So at a certain point, so Lenin was an ideologue and a visionary, but he wasn't completely detached from reality, right? So he understood, all right, this isn't going to happen overnight.

This is a process, and it's going to be a long process, and since it's the first time we're running this experiment, excuse me, since the first time we're running this experiment, we don't know how long this is going to take. We're the first, we're the alpha data testing. So at a certain point, things were going poorly for even Lenin's taste. He goes, all right, this crap isn't working. They pulled back. They had something called the new economic policy, and they reintroduced an element of market capitalism into the Soviet Union. And a result of this, this huge middle class almost overnight sprung up. And these people called Netmen, any new economic

policy, netmen. And, you know, a little bit of liberty. And all of a sudden, sudden entrepreneurship takes hold and so on and so forth. For a lot of Bolsheviks, this was like, hold the phone. This is exactly what we're fighting against. And you, Lenin, our guy, you're putting this back after we defeated. This is completely unconscionable. And Trotsky is one of those who was just like,

this is really not what we should be doing. We should be going harder on the gas and not putting on the break. His other model, this is Trotsky v. Stalin, is this idea that, all right, workers in the world unite. You have nothing to lose about your chains, meaning a working class person in Russia has more in common with a working class person in Peru or the U.S. or Australia than he does with like a capitalist in Russia, right? There's inherent class antagonism. So it is a worldwide movement for the working classes for their own liberation. Stalin, when he kind of came in, this is like the mid-20s.

And so later, he understood, he's like, all right. Because the model was once we have our revolution, and this was very scary for Westerners, Western governments, once Lenin took power in the Soviet Union, that's the queue. So in Germany, in Britain, in the U.S., there was a huge amount of fear like, holy crap, this is going to happen here next, because the more time that went on and the more that the Russian government under Lenin didn't collapse, the more other people like, hold on a minute.

now it's our term. This is a very kind of like what's happening here moment for Western politicians and intellectualists. And that was the idea of the Russian Revolution. That was the point. It was supposed to be the spark that started a world revolution. That's how communists saw them. The agenda was always to spread this ideology to the whole world. It's why the symbolism of the Soviet Union, you know, even the flag, the flag didn't have borders on it. It was the globe and the hammer and sickle. And Lenin's newspaper is called Iskra, the spark. That was literally his newspaper before he took power. But Stalin didn't see it that way. Right. Stalin was like, all right, it's not that Stalin didn't see it that way.

It's that by the time Stalin comes around, he's like, okay, this didn't happen. So what do we do? So do we pretend like it did happen or it's about to happen or do we kind of double down in what we have? So Stalin introduced the idea of socialism in one country. Now he very much still had his tentacles, you know, all over the world. Spain is an extremely important example. Germany is another major example, and to some extent Britain, but nowhere near to extent that there's the other two that I mentioned.

And France. There's a huge communist movement in France. One of the reasons France did so poorly in the war. Sure, sure. Not to the extent that the Germans and the Spanish, certainly, much more than Britain. But that was kind of his, and this was one of his big budding heads moments with Trotsky. But as I talked about in the book, what these political differences are are almost always a front for. power plays. And if

Stalin really wanted to work with Trotsky and have this kind of intellectual discussion, which supposedly Marxism allows, it's like, all right, now that we have the capitalists control the newspapers and publishing, everyone, the lowest of the low, can come up with their ideas and we can take what brilliant ideas anyone has and create something that's amazing. Under that

model, you would have them just hashing it out, all right, now we can come to this kind of consensus and move our way forward. But of course, that's not what ended up happening. So one of the really interesting moments in the book is when you talk about the end of Lenin's life, when he had the stroke. I mean, let's discuss that, because that's not something I don't think many people have heard of, and also Stalin's involvement in it. There's this amazing kind of kitschy movie here that you might not might know about called Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. Are you familiar with this movie?

Yes. No, no. Okay. So for those who don't know, it was really this kind of big, innovative movie because you had Betty Davis, playing Baby Jane. And Baby Jane was a woman who had been a child actress, like a Shirley Temple figure, and now she's like in her 60s, whatever, she's old.

But she starts losing her mind and starts thinking she's going to relaunch her singing career. So you have Betty Davis with this like her little curls like Shirley Temple and putting on this makeup and looking completely, absolutely deranged. It's brilliantly done. Her sister, Blanche, who was played by Joan Crawford, was in a wheelchair.

And baby Jane was taking care of her, and she was basically a prisoner in her own home, Blanche. And as Jane gets crazy and crazier, it gets more and more dangerous for Blanche, because how is she going to escape, how is she going to get the word out? And Jane starts torturing her more and more and more. And there's this one very, very famous moment

where Joan Crawford is sitting there and being like, Jane, you know you wouldn't be treating like this, me like this, I wasn't in this wheel, she's trapped in his chair. And she's, baby Jane's at the window, and she looks out, she goes, She goes, but you are, Blanche. You are in that chair.

And you ain't never getting out of it. And you never got out of his house either. And she locks her in the door. And it's just a very, like, very chilling moment. Lenin had a series of strokes. And Stalin was his caretaker. And that meant Stalin kept track of all the communication in and out. He kept it kind of quiet what state Lenin was in.

And Lenin had a will, which basically said Stalin should not be taking over this party. he doesn't have the character. Stalin was very much a thug. He used to be a bank robber, just hoodlum kind of figure. Lenin was an intellectual. And Trotsky were intellectuals. So Lenin was like, this guy doesn't have the character or there's many other problems with him.

Well, you know, that Stalin made sure to suppress it. And what Stalin introduced, he may have been the first, but he did it certainly to an extent other people didn't, was, again, this is very much parodied in 1984, was his idea of historical revisionism in the sense of falsified. the past. So there's this great book called The Commissar Vanishes, where they have side-by-side photos that the Soviets basically falsified. So you, they had the four, you'd have four pictures

would be like Lenin, Stalin, and two other guys. Then the next picture after one of the guys gets unpersoned. You have Stalin, Lenin, one other guy, and at the end it's just Lenin, Stalin. Now they're staying next to each other. And we laugh, but think about this, for the internet, if I'm looking at the newspapers and all the photos I see are Lenin and Stalin hand in hand, and I'm being told Stalin was Lenin's right-hand man from the beginning and Trotsky wasn't even there, what are you going to believe? Of course you're going to believe that. So I think Americans don't understand to what extent people in these totalitarian regimes and not at all exclusive to the Soviet Union are comfortably blatantly lying about the history to the point of just falsifying

information that if anyone had access to free information would clearly be disprovable. And absolutely, because the moment you also, you want to go and disprove it, that's the end of you. Yeah, oh, yeah. Oh, that's not even a question. Yeah, yeah. There's the, yeah, and the Russians, I'm sure this happened when you were still there, had something called anecdote, these little jokes. And there was one story about Kalinin, Mikhail Kalinin, who was hype in the Soviet, you know, I forget it's the exact title, was talking about, oh, we're building all these great skyscrapers on Karl Marx Street. And one of the workers like, but comrade, I go on Karl Marx Street all the time. There's a scratch script. He goes, what are you going to believe?

Your eyes are what's in the newspapers. You read a newspaper once in a while. But the joke is you shouldn't trust your own senses. You should be obedient to what the experts are telling you. Michael, and was Stalin, because there's a lot of debate about Stalin, whether he was a faithful communist who was just willing to enforce that ideology by whatever means necessary or whether he was just a tyrant dictator who just in what was necessary for his own ends.

Was he a dedicated communist? It's very hard for me to kind of sift between those two or to figure out the utility of this distinction. I don't think that he was this, he was certainly dedicated. We're not committed. He was passionate. We're not going to quibble about that word.

So that much we have down. The fact that when one of the first, I talk about in this book The Purges. So during the late 30s, he went through group after group, which were threats to his power and just killed, the number of people he killed was just astronomical. And the first group he went after was the society of old Bolsheviks. These are the people even before Lenin, who did their time under the Tsar, who really were true believers where the idea of communism is like, okay, yeah, communism is going to happen.

Okay, buddy, like cool story, bro. Like he went after them. He went after the military. The number of people, it was like five out of seven. generals, like 110 out of 112 lieutenants, just some crazy numbers. Slaughtered all them. Then he went after the secret police,

killed a ton of them. Then he went after the judges who put people in jail. So he went systemically every power center and the amount of ministers that were killed, like 20s, the entire Bella Russian Congress was arrested, like 100 out of 102 people. It's just crazy numbers where the only analogy would be like if John Adams

got up and said everyone the continental Congress had actually been working for King George secretly and then you were expected to believe this. So I don't think that can be compatible with this idea of like, okay, this is communist ideology. That was clearly self-serving. And the reason we kind of know this is Khrushchev in, I believe 56, had his so-called secret speech.

He gave this speech in the middle of the night. No one was allowed to attend other than the party loyal party members, loyal party members, and he goes, he just went through the numbers. He goes, this cult of personality that Stalin created is completely antithetical to the spirit of Marxism, Leninism. Lenin himself did have a lot of humility. He wasn't living in a palace, you know, he, very Spartan surroundings. He was the true believer. He's like, I'm going to practice what I preach. Stalin had all these daches and, you know, limousines and so and so forth. So when Khrushchev came in, he goes, this is not what we're about. It's completely antithetical to the vision of an equal

a society. So by the way, for those of us from Eastern Europe, and this applies to you certainly, there's this great YouTube channel where they take historical speeches and use AI and you can hear them and you could hear Khrushchev deliver the secret speech. And it brought a tear to my eye because you can, you just hear him in 1956 after 40 years almost of Soviet communism being like, you were all right. The critics were light, right? It's all true. Because up until that moment, people like, oh, this is, why would he do this? Why would he kill so many people? This is just Western propaganda. You undermine the Soviet Union, blah, blah, blah. And Khrushchev's like, it's all true. This is a complete, the, he used, he was explicitly. He goes,

these people were tortured to give confessions. Like, I really believe that all these people were, the only things people were guilty was crossing Stalin and you hear him go on and on and on. And it's extremely moving. Because one thing, the book Brins Salif so brilliantly is, I understand Stalin was ruthless. I understand he, you know, wiped however many people he wiped off the face of the earth. But the example after example after example that you give, it felt like would there be anybody left in Russia? Yeah. And it's, it's, this is the relentlessness. I'm Rand, you know, who left the Soviet Union in 1926, she wrote a semi-autographical novel about her time there. It was called We the Living.

But her working title was airtight. Because the idea was, and Kim Jong-Kibil-sung, the great leader of the founder of North Korea, did this kind of more successfully than Stalin to this day. The idea is we're going to make an airtight society from which there is no escape possible. So this is one of the reasons I went to North Korea is I think it's impossible for any of us on Earth right now, certainly the West, to imagine what this was like. Because there's certain things about politics all of us don't like, people watching this don't like. We could turn it off. We could read books that are kind of silly or books that have our political point of view. Maybe it's going to take more work. We could watch YouTube channels, whatever, music, whatever we want. We don't know

what it's like where it's 24-7 and everywhere. It's impossible to wrap our heads around this. And your compliance is required for survival. Yes. That's why it's called a totalitarian system because everything is controlled. It's everything. And when you went to North Korea, because I haven't read your book in North Korea, which is a mistake I will rectify over time. But how similar was it in terms of what you saw there to what the Soviet Union would have been like?

Is it a modern Soviet Union, is I guess what I'm asking? It's not modern because I mean, you laugh, but like, Westerners have this idea that when you go there, it's all like lights, like Broadway, this is beautiful, like Disneyland Paradise. There's everywhere you go, something's wrong. So if there's an elevator buttons, one button will be wrong. Every wall has a crack. The smell of mildews everywhere.

Everywhere I went, even on the plane, there's a fly, which is like a biblical symbol of evil. And even in their central park, the fountain's not running, and it's covered in mildew. You know what I mean? So this sense of decay is pervasive. The books I brought back, you can even smell it in some of the books. So I don't know, there's a big difference, I think, in many ways, because North Korea is nowhere near as powerful as the Soviet Union was. And there's certainly my friend from St. Petersburg saw my picture.

This is like St. Petersburg with Russian people, with Asian people. He just blew his mind. So I left the Soviet Union when I was two, so I can't obviously remember that but I I think there's a lot of parallels and it's I think the closest thing we have to it especially this the thing that is very similar is this complete sense of which was a soviet term political correctness like they do not want to talk politics because you don't know if you're going to say the right thing or the wrong thing I remember my mom who's not politically you know some politically activated she go like it wasn't complicated

because one day this guy is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and the next day he's been a traitor since the beginning, and then two years later he's amazing again. And you don't have to have any intelligence to be like, this doesn't make any sense. So the thing that people don't appreciate with these totalitarian countries, it's not like, all right, if I just say Stalin is wonderful, I'm fine.

No, it's that there's other people to talk about, and if I had said three years ago, this guy is great, well, now he's been unpersoned and I could be given the death penalty, because three years ago, in front of you, you saw me say that he was great. So because the reality constantly changes, you're never on secure footing. And I think that's by design. Michael, so your book is called The White Pill.

And your message is basically, things have been really, really bad in the past. And we're very lucky to have what we have. Does that fair? No. No, you're looking at me going, no, that's not the message at all. I think the message is no matter the good guys won before. And no matter how dark it gets, there is always, hope and this hope isn't based on some kind of Pollyanna like oh good always wins in the end it's

not true but here are the receipts that as dark as what we were talking about happened they didn't win and that's something that happened in our lifetimes and that's something that you can understandably not expect the New York Times to tell you so if these people who had far less than any of us had and were up against people who are far more ruthless far more entrenched and far more in many ways intelligence if they could do it we could do it who can, not will, can. So that will be in the case. The reason I asked you about it is what are,

you and I have talked about this a lot, which is the difficult, in France too, by the way, the difficulty of communicating this stuff to people who've never, I'm about to go into the devil where it's proud of speech, this stuff? Yeah, because, Because it's not ideas and it's not facts.

It's like, it's almost like a felt sense, like some kind of understanding that comes from knowing about these historical things that changes the way you see the world. It just does. If you know this was real and you experience it, even by reading about it. It changes the way you perceive everything. Oh, yes, for sure. But the vast majority of people in this country and in the UK and elsewhere have not done that, have not had that.

So what are the, like, how do we, I don't even know what I'm asking, like, what are the lessons? How do we communicate? So what really drives me crazy is the, you know, there's the Tinder versus Real Life that mean, like what they sell it as than what actually happens. Right. I'm not a conservative in any sense. The argument for conservatism is we're the ones who look at, at the lessons of history, that human beings aren't really that different 2,000 years ago is today,

and we apply these long-learned historical lessons to contemporary times, and we don't try to reinvent the wheel because it's not possible. And conservatives in practice think history started a perpetual 20 years ago, right? The left, it's always the left, the left, as if there's one left. The left took over the institutions 20 years ago, and we got to stop them, and then 20 years later, oh, 20 years ago. And they are very intellectually and curious. And I think a lot of conservative pundits and influencers don't talk about history enough. And it's bizarre because I think it behooves anyone.

And you don't have to care about politics. History is fascinating. It's just a fascinating field. Instead of this works in theory, what happened in real life? What happened when people try this? It teaches about the limits of human evil and the human goodness.

And this happened to, not just this, all these stories, how many people over so much time? It's just, I think, a fascinating endeavor for anyone who's in the slightest intellectually curious. So I think it's also important. One thing is what it's called the white pill, the black pill, is this idea that it's a rap. The West or the world is over.

I really hate this Greta Thunberg conservatism that like, oh, if we lose this election, it's over. It's like, tell that to the people in Polaro. Like, tell that to the people in, you know, in Latvia or in Ukraine or Russia that it's not a rap. And they were, they were, when Margaret Thatcher went to meet Gorbachev, you know, towards the end of her prime ministership, the foreign office basically told to look, nothing's going to change in the Soviet Union, like, take whatever wins you can get. And then they also gave her a, like a silver hairbrush as a present for him, even though he's completely bald. And we laugh, but it's just like these people. I'm going to spoil it a little,

but since this is history, it doesn't matter. Helmut Cole, who is the head of West Germany, was meeting with Lech Walesa in Poland. And Lechvalesza is like, I don't think that the Berlin Wall is going to be around for much longer. Helmut Cole laughed in his face. He goes, look, I'm a lot of older than you. Like, I know these things take time.

And he's like, maybe it fell the next day. The next day, and Helmut Cole, got his German ass on a plane. He said, quote, I'm not the wrong party and flew back to Germany. So there's this quote about how did you go bankrupt, I think it's Steinbeck or Hemingway, I always forget, gradually, two ways, gradually, and then suddenly.

Amazing things happen, what seemed like overnight, because we don't see the parts that built up to it. So, you know, look at one of the things that was very important to me in writing this book, which I didn't understand is, what was the Berlin Wall and why was it such a, big deal when it fell. And when you realize this was a wall that imprisoned an entire city,

and as one historian put it, it was a deranged prison, were the ones on the inside were the ones that were free. And to see that, you could go on YouTube and see the footage of people dancing and cheering with champagne on top the wall, what that meant. And again, this is 89. This isn't, you know, grainy World War I footage. These are amazing moments of freedom that happen in our lifetime, and I think it's important for all of us to take the wins that we can get. It's such a profound point, because in many ways, the black pill is, it's giving up. Oh, yeah. It's a glorified way of giving up. It's a way to justify being lazy and cowardly. I hate it with every fiber of my being. Yeah. Because all you can, yeah, it's a way to do all of

those things, but you can intellectualize it and point out things and go, but you know what, I'm the smart one and you're the idiot for having hope. We recently reached a huge YouTube milestone with a million subscribers. Amid the celebrations, however, there have been a few cynical voices too. Some people are asking, how did two guys with weird hair and no obvious talent manage to create some of the most sensible, balanced, non-partisan conversations on the internet? How do they attract massive guests? Some people have even gone as far as to ask,

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I'm curious, let me ask you this, because let's get personal for a second. One of the things that... Okay, I know that's funny. One of the things in my rush... is when you jab your finger in someone's direction, you go, let's make this person. I wish that's the letter right now. One of the things that I talked about this several times,

about the Russian upbringing, there was a show called Russian Dolls, which was a Russian version from Brighton Beach. Or spitting image. No, it was Russian version of Jersey Shore here in the States. We have had this misunderstanding on the show before. Okay, anyway, carry on.

So the point is, have we talked about this already? With the girl in the hair salon? I don't remember. Okay. So the audience doesn't remember either. Okay. We remember. It's Trotsky.

It's memory hold. It's never happened. So this girl, she's a young, whatever, college age. She's with her mom. They're in the beauty salon, getting the nails done or something. And she goes, she'd been frustrated not knowing a major to have, right? And she took an absolute test. It said you'd be a good lawyer.

And she's like, mom, I've been struggling. I've been four majors. I'm going to do pre-law. I'm going to be a lawyer. And finally decided. First thing on her mom's mouth, how are you going to pay for it? And she complete, the girl, breaks as a breakdown and if you're an american

you're watching this like come down like like you're she's like why is and what it really hit close to home because in how I was raised and that's what I want to ask you is whenever you're excited about something or like this is something oh this might be this might lead to something the first thing from

Russian household is pulling the rug out like finding a problem and it's just like everyone who's achieved anything has had to overcome problems people what no one's figured out how to pay for law school like this somehow to There's nothing to Google. But it's always immediately like, oh, I went on this date with this chick.

Things like, well, what's her background? Where does she live? It's just like, why is that always your first question? Is that what, were you raised? Yes and no, but it's funny. We had this guy Mark Walsh on the show a while ago who's kind of like psychologist. And we talked about why Russians are the way they are. And I kept pressing on him.

And eventually it just went Russian history. Look at the history. I mean, America is a completely different situation because it's a nation of people who conquered a continent and enjoyed the fruits of that. Right. So if you go back only a few generations, really, these are winners. These are people who won. They came, they conquered the, and they built a civilization out of nothing. But look at the history of Eastern Europe.

It's famine, it's war. it's all the terrible things that can happen to humanity have happened there. And so I think that the reason that people are like that is that look at what we've just been talking about for the last hour. Imagine living in a society where if you say the wrong word, you're going to get executed. That produces a very different type of human being to one where everyone gives you high five and cheers you on and, you know, all of that. I've had this conversation before, but I think it's chicken egg.

no i don't think it is but i get that what your point but the thing is you can get to that later you could have the like all right this exciting and then like all right now let's worry about the threats and the costs why is that always the first concern because americans and their parents and their grandparents didn't grow up in a society where every mistake was likely to be that costly and and the mistakeness or otherwise was so arbitrary and random. Like, yes, if you're conquering this continent, if you go the wrong path, you're going to get killed by Indians or whatever, right? But that was a kind of survival of the fittest in an adaptive sense, right? The people who were the most entrepreneurial, the people who were most industrious, the people who were the most driven, the people who were the

most capable, they were the most capable. But that's not what happened in Russia. In Russia, of the people who were the most capable and the most industrious and the most intelligent, they were the ones that were killed off. And you were left with a lot of deeply traumatized people who knew, above all, not ever to rise above their station, not ever to question, not ever to do anything that made them stand out. Whereas this is a country of people who've been trained to stand out. That's why, you know, to us Brits, Americans are like ridiculously confident and everyone thinks they're great at everything and whatever. I just think it's, it's the history of these two countries.

Yeah, I think you're right. And it doesn't make me despise it any less. Oh, well, it's so pernicious. Despise is the wrong word for me because I think that if someone is deeply traumatized by generations of terrible history, you can understand and have compassion without necessarily thinking it's the right way to be. Yeah, but I think at a certain point, I have a lot of friends in recovery. At a certain point, you have to own your trauma.

Oh, yeah. And you have to be like, all right, like this is something, a tendency I have. Let me kind of keep that in check. I'm not there anymore. Yeah, yeah, for sure. But your point about the blackfield, I mean, it's interesting. I think that sometimes people would admire accuse me of being blackpilled, and I'm not blackpilled. But I also think there is value in saying that the path we're heading down is the wrong path. And if we keep going down this path, we'll end up in a bad place. And so the black pillness comes in, for example, the UK is very different to the US in this way. We're sitting here on the eve of the election in which Americans actually have choice. Sure. It may not be a great choice, but it's a choice. In the UK, that doesn't exist.

If you think like we do, then 14 years of a woke pseudo-conservative government followed by a labor, not even pseudo-conservative government, there was no choice at the last election. People didn't have one, right? You had a choice of two parties that are basically going to implement a very similar policy. So I think that's why America is different because you still have choice. you still have opportunity and yourself sufficient. You can make your own energy. You can grow your own food. You can build your own stuff.

And that's why America has a lot more reason to be optimistic, I think. Yeah. I am not white-pilled about the UK. One of the things I talk about extensively in this book was The rise of Thatcher in 79. And I think many people, including Brits, don't realize how bad Britain was in the 70s. They had the winter of discontent.

The line I have in the book, is they used to say truthfully the sun never set in the British Empire right because it spanned the whole globe you had mandatory blackouts in the 70s right you weren't allowed to work because to save electricity the garbage in lester square was six feet high the grave diggers were on strike inflation was with 20 percent something crazy they would alternate between labor and conservatives and the policies were the same and nothing was getting done and it was a given and this is kind of astrology for men this whole idea of like cycles of civil that like every empire enters a decline.

Britain's in a managed decline. Like, it's a rat for us. We're never going to be great again. We're just going to get less, more and more miserable. And Thatcher's quote was, I just can't bear to see Britain in decline. Like, we were the ones who stood up alone against Hitler and who helped, like, helped liberate half the world and now look at us. And she gave them that sense of hope. And she was now at a great cost.

I mean, the idea of Thatcher is a lot better than the reality of Thatcher and tell that to the miners and people in Scotland. Let's be fair. and to the Irish. But point being, the claim that Britain will never have electricity again, and it's only going to get poorer and poor or stay poor, was false. But it was a long, you know, the window, it was a long period of managed to climb. Point being, I don't see any trajectory in the near future for Britain for things to turn around. And on top of that, the difference between the Thatcher period and now is that, at least under Thatcher, there was a sense of the British people being one people.

There isn't that sense anymore. Now, well, because we've got the blah, blah, blah, community and the blah, blah, blah. And now we're all different communities instead of one people. Well, no, there was the idea of the unions versus everybody else. That was a thing. So there was some division there, and certainly Scotland, Ireland, versus Great Britain.

There's always division. But, yeah, there seems to be consensus in Britain And among the people, this is where, you know, we have talked about this off air. The consensus is towards more tyranny. Like, the people want the cage. And that is something that under, you know, in 78 and then 79, the Tory slogan, which Sachi and Sachi came up with was just three brilliant words, labor isn't working. So they had the photos of the cues of people getting relief.

And it's just like, there's an alternative. To your point, there is no alternative. It's, I mean, it seems to be, it's just like, it's just going to get more and more dictatorial. So it's, I feel, as someone who identifies to some extent as an anglophile, I definitely feel for what your country is going through. And I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. But there's also the note of the White Pill, which is, we could have communism. Yeah. No, White House is whole not autism. Yeah, but there is a chance where there are people who can come to the fore, just as Thatcher did. Oh, sure. I'm just saying it's

going to take a minute. It is going to take. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, it's going to take longer than a minute, unfortunately. But I agree with you and hopefully, look, we all hope because the way things are going is not ideal. It's just, it's just heartbreaking for me as someone who has so much affection for Britain and what the British have accomplished to see just that footage. And everyone knows this clip of a guy with this camera on his phone in his house and this lady cop is telling me, explicitly you're being arrested for a Facebook post or whatever it was, social media thing. And you're watching this and it's just like,

it's easier for me to wrap my heads around the rioting in 2020. Every country's had rioting, America was started because of rioting. But to watch that and it's just like, holy crap, where did you take such a wrong term? And not only that, it's that when you see this footage, that there isn't this national like, hold,

oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. Because one of the things, and I hate praising him, because it's such a boomer thing to do, but one of the things Martin Luther King did that was brilliant is he's like, all right, we're gonna force people to face the consequence of what they're preaching. Your for segregation, you're for racism, okay, you're gonna see men and women in suits

getting attacked by dogs and shot with fire hoses. Is this what you want? And many people who are still prejudiced looked at it, it goes, okay, this, okay, we're, this is a bridge, I'm not comfortable crossing, let's take a step back. And the fact that that footage went wide, and other examples. I think there was a guy

who had a sign that's a Hamas, a terrorist organization was tackled by the cops. The fact that the Union Jack is regard to the symbol of racism and hatred

in your own country, my God, I was in Japan in April. And one of the things that I really didn't want to because I hate anime and I hate Weyambu culture. I'm like,

don't make me fall in love with you guys. I completely fell in love with Japan because it was so great to be in a country which had national pride. They love Japan. They love being Japanese. They're proud of what they built.

They take pride themselves and their work and everything else. They're actually much poorer than Westerners in many ways because of this. But they still have this sense of pride. And this is something that I think Britain, how could you know? Have you guys ever talked to Dankula? Yes. I've had Dankula on my show a couple of times. Like the Scots, the amount that this little island

brought to the entire world is so disproportionate. Like, you guys should be, like, just talking about Scotland. You know, Scott's this, got to that. The fact that they're not taught this Scottish pride is, as someone who's never stepped foot in Scotland,

is crazy to me. And just downright reprehensible. Michael Malice comes out in favor of pride. That's going to be the thought. We'll have a little LGBT. LGP. LGBT. LGBT.

No, there's going to be trans and queer, you fucking bigot. Yeah. Stop being racist. Trans and queer. Okay, go ahead. Trans and queer, exactly. All right, on that happiness, head on over to, oh, no. Wait, we've got the final question.

Oh. We've got a final question, the one we always ask, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about, Michael, that we should be? Oh, that's a great question. What are we not talking about that we should be? Can I think about this? Because I think it's a very important question. I think it's important you think about it, Michael. What is the one thing we're not talking about?

What are we not talking about that? Oh. Oh. Is democracy a system that is compatible with freedom or is inherently or even in any way freedom seeking? You did a Kamala thing that. Do you notice that? No.

Extra slow. Like, you know, you would like, is democracy, Well, I wanted to word it correctly instead of talking words. That's what she does. But she doesn't get to it. Well, she might be president by the time we're talking about this. No, she can't. It's going to air in January?

Oh, Biden might die. That's fair. It's true. Am I wrong? I think the funniest outcome, we recorded this before, someone said to me, there's a line that the funniest outcome is most likely. The funniest outcome is Trump gets elected and she becomes president before January. That's the funniest.

So the first female president's there for like two months. Wait, Trump gets elected. Right, but he's only not- In incapacity. It doesn't have to die, but she becomes president. Well, there is the other possibility, which is, there is a very small possibility that they both get 269 votes. Yes, it's very unlikely. In which case the House and the Senate get to pick one. And potentially you could have Joe Biden, not Joe Biden, you could have Donald Trump's president and Tim Walters is his vice president.

I don't know that they- That would be funnier. I don't think that they would put Walts as VP. Don't you? Who would they put it as VP? They'd probably put her, right? Donald Trump president, his president. Would that be smart, put hers too? And because you know, he's, you know, there's plenty of people who've got their finger on the trigger.

That'd be incredible. Yes. Well, let's hope it's happened by the time this is. You want Trump to be assassinated? Holy crap. Wow, we all heard it. Listen to this queer. My God.

I meant her being his vice president. Head on over to substake where we must ask Michael your questions. Is there a reason you've been more quiet on the Israel-Gaza conflict? Do you have any clear preferences for future policies? Okay. Let's talk about this. Okay. Here we go. IP vanish protects every device you own, your phone, your laptop, your smart TV.

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