Episode 65 – Empire, Propaganda & Who Really Pays

Oh yeah, it helps when you turn it on, eh? I'm just being facelicious because it's fun. Always correct. I make a yaw and teatok yet. Let's just see where the river runs tonight. Hate Breeds hate. Facebook shout he pub talks about. Oh, I've written some notes that don't really make much sense to be honest. A partless prick, but it can't go unchallenged. And it's been a long time since we did a potty. By the way, the deal's done. It's worth about 12 trillion. 12 trillion bucks, so. Oh, that'll. Look, package shit up. A cynical person, obviously we're not cynical, so we wouldn't say this. 100% I reckon we should fucking kick things off, Mick. I've got a list. We started already. I've got a list. Says Bondi, Venezuela, ice shooting and Greenland. That's the list. Oh my god. And we're what? Fucking nine days into 2026. Yes. Well, welcome, Chris. We had to do significant research, dusting of many leather-bound books to find out what fucking episode we're in. Turns out we're in episode. I've forgotten already. Well, it actually rhymes with your age, so we're in episode 65, which is pretty cool. Oh, fuck you, all the funniest candy. I am a funny person, that hasn't changed. But. That hasn't changed. That is early 2026, believe it or not, so don't forget to update the date when you're right or on a bit of paper. That'll take some time. How did everyone's 2025 end up? All your bingo tickets were punched. I'm sure. A couple of things happened last year, Chris. Charlie Kirk had a neck problem. We've got Trump and tariffs and all the stuff we did with that. Who would have thunk it? We had the ISIS-ex-ISIS bloke take over Syria and everyone's like he's now sick bloke. Love him. Great dude. He's going to be most wanted. Now he's actually pretty sick. Well, he's pretty tough guy. Fucking good on him. But it's crazy, it's crazy that. And if you don't. If you don't, even though the frequency of the bombs dropping may have lessened, the crisis in Gaza is still ongoing and absolutely outrageous thing that's happening in the world, largely as the new cycle goes, we've moved on from that in the mainstream media, which is fucking pathetic. But I'll use that as a segue into the tragic events that happened in Bondi where two gunmen murdered a heap of folk. And the thing for me, Mick, that off the back of that that I found pretty disappointing was the weaponisation of that event for political gain or political points by the right wing and the Murdoch media, which has now led Albanese to call for a royal commission into anti-Semitism. This is a thing where I think that side of politics is relentless and they have no shame if they see an opening regardless of where it's come from or they will double down and they will use it to the best effect they possibly can with our shame. Almost seems like Friedenburg's tried to use it to relaunch his political career. It's exactly what he's doing. But yeah, so that's happened. So it's a hard subject or emotionally charged subject to talk about, but I think it's something that we shouldn't shy away from. And one of the other glaringly obvious things for me in regards to this thing that no one is talking about is they're saying these perpetrators were anti-Semitic. And so therefore we have to focus on that aspect of their particular type of racism. But no one's talking about, well, how do we get to a point where that type of incident can happen in Australia and what was the root cause that brought that to our shores? That no one I can think of in the mainstream media has been talking about that. How do we get to a point where regardless of it seems to be our who's to blame as far as national security, asio, the federal police, the local police, customs, whoever in regards to how they managed to get a gun and perpetrate these horrific acts? Or, but why did they feel compelled to do it in the first place? And it all comes back down to the Middle East. And this is just my view, the Arabian Peninsula, the colonialism and imperialism that's been going on there for a couple hundred years. And as a result of the genocide in Gaza, hate breeds hate. It's created just like a raqq did a new generation of, I suppose you could call them. I don't know whether extremists is the right word, radicalised people when potential relatives and families have been indiscriminately killed in Gaza under the banner of, oh, it's a military operation. So we had to level an apartment block because there was one person in there that we needed to eliminate. So the collateral damage is just something you're going to have to live with because that's where we're at. Those sort of decisions, they've lead to events like we've seen in Bondi. It's a big inmate. How are we going to have to start somewhere? One place to start would be a reflection that potentially the Bondi incident has really shown a sharp step towards that real American style of media saturation where it's just really angry, like literally people yelling that saturated media that's so partisan, that kind of shocked me as something that we haven't really seen too much in Australia before. Like when you look at previous horrific events, not to minimise Bondi and not to minimise anyone else's suffering. And it's hard to unpack it without sounding like a heartless prick. The concern about all this is the precedence that it's being shown is when everyone that's not involved or doesn't have an opportunity to get a leg up out of labour goes absolutely pair and it is just totally stacks on regardless of the reality or the raw facts or the history of who was in government and when everything has just started to gravitate around this elbows a week later and anti-Semitism started three years ago when the ALP were elected. There's all kinds of weird intersections and people coming out of the woodwork. So that real media saturation piece was a bit of a shocker, clucky. And another part of it, the reality is that when you talk about the state of Israel or anything to do with Israel, it is a very dicey one way street. And as soon as you start to cast any sort of doubt on Israel's motives or anything about the people supporting the state of Israel, we've now got to a point where it seemed last year in 2025 like the unpopularity of Israel's campaign in and genocide in Gaza and Palestine was getting deeply unpopular. And now you can see the Bondi incident, a lot of these loose ends are kinding being tied together. So more recently you've started to see things like anti-Zionism is actually anti-Semitism better or worse kind and just really strange re-riding of history and what the whole thing is about to try and neat up the horrific stuff that's going on in Gaza and that reputational damage that the state of Israel has ended up putting on always railies and by a little bit of extension Jewish people. There's now a total combination that any criticism of Israel's actions is now totally anti-Semitic. And I suppose I'll just try back to you by drilling down into this idea that, and again, it's hard to talk about without sounding like a heartless prick, but a lot of people have suffered through colonial activities in hundreds of countries over hundreds of years. I'm uncomfortable with the fact that one set of people get a different, deeper, more important standard of discrimination or racism than anyone else. So any other culture or anything that is criticised, they disobey, well that's racist and these are the reasons why. But as soon as you approach a much less standard of that, as it relates to Zionism or Israel or Jewish people, everything goes to 11. And it's very uncomfortable that now it seems in the mainstream and a lot of our leaders have just completely succumbed to this thing where now basically Israel's off-limits. You can't say, and I hate this thing, it's really a bit of Aussie redneck comedy. I can't say enough anymore, but you'll almost, if you just state a fact about or share an opinion that the slaughter or genocide of a whole race of people or some of those methods that you were talking about in their genocide in Gaza, that the point is to eradicate the people very clearly under the guise of all this bullshit, her mass is everywhere stuff. Now that's exploded to not only, we can't allow any criticism of Israel or anything it does, but now it's awakened, it seems like, depending on how dead the internet really is, a lot of people that are now struggling with this equation of saying, well, radical extremist Muslims and Islamists are all coming here, there's no way to filter out, we're getting to a really binary talk about immigration, which is also fucking nonsense, but it's so fucking unhealthy, it's not funny. Yeah, there's a lot of good points that you raised there, Mick. One of the ones that seems to be, it's almost like the leaders should be leading us through these times have completely capitulated to the Zionist lobby. And they're almost, and they're clever in their tactics. I've doubled down now. I feel to use those events as a silencing mechanism for any criticism around what's previously happened in Gaza and always ongoing in Gaza and the West Bank and in Palestine. If you look at the level of racism around the globe and who it's targeted towards, I mean, all of its horrific nature, the probably one of the things that's pretty uncomfortable is like the level of racism that exists in the Israeli parliament with elected politicians and some of the horrific things that they say about Palestinian people. 100%. They basically view, describe and want to treat them like animals and say so. Like have said in parliament, it stood up in parliament and said, "Words the effect of, we should just wipe off the Gaza Strip and just kill everyone there." Like politicians standing up in parliament and saying those things. They're actions towards achieving that aim. Once again, you close the loop in the full circle. They lead to these types of actions like we've seen in Bondi. Hate breeds hate. I got one for you. Let me make a different extension of it. Is a lot of people are saying, "Oh yeah, if the fucking radicalism is one of fucking punch on and poor old Israel and just you shouldn't be coming here. We're a fucking better country. This is fucking Australian all that shit." You can see where that leads. But the reality is that Australia has been fucking following colonial powers around the world for fucking, since 9/11 before that. Look at Pine Gap and Goff and Vietnam. Like we were fucking about, basically after the Second World War and the Cold War and all that, we picked aside our efforts to try and be friends with and talk about both sides of our mouth as a country and try and be friends with the East and the West and say, "Ah, it's all good." There was always a risk factor in that. And that risk factor based on who we were fucking friends with or things that we weren't able to police 24 hours a day, like immigration. It was almost a certainty at some point. You would get the wrong person being led in and let's not talk about civil liberties for a second. We can later because I think that's really important and it exposes massive hypocrisy of a lot of right-wingers. Is we've been fucking around in brown countries in the Middle East since fucking not certainly 9/11 and take it to the micro example. Say Australia may have been involved in shitty stuff in Afghanistan, certainly in Iraq and say the wrong plane dropped the wrong bomb on the wrong village and say a bloke loses his whole family. There's hundreds of examples of these things. As wife dies, his kids lose their legs whatever. What are you reckon he's going to do? Do you reckon he's going to sit there on a pile of rubble, just rebuild and go, "Ah, fuck, shit up and stun it." Just unlucky, I'll just get on with my life, it's all good. Or do they become extremely radical about this whole G-Had fucking have a bit of a look into Islam? What happens there? Like is it any wonder that over the journey of these millions of deaths across the Middle East, that we've effectively engendered hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people whose whole life mission has been totally fucked by Western occupation and imperialism and they go on to radicalise other people. Like why would we be surprised by that? Yeah, just after revenge, really. Of course, and what would you do? What would you do? I'll be fucking tell you what I'd be doing. I'd be fucking fuming. We look back through history. Iraq was a fucking sham. We're about to do the same thing in Venezuela, don't want to take that to our, we'll go there. Iraq was a fucking mess. Vietnam was a sham. 100% career was fucking nonsense. It didn't take long after the Second World War for it to become apparent that this was a whole fucking Western globalisation campaign, right? So we've been fuck arcing around for 50 years and trying to tip-tell in beyond the Western powers and thought there'd be no fucking consequences. I just, there might not be a direct link, but the risk factor has followed us along every time we have made a fucking, we have followed those bigger Western powers around the world fighting these fucking effectively energy wars. And something was going to give. And then you add that the ingredient of a lot of folks being, as you say, upset about what Israel's been up to, widely condemned, not strongly enough, and you can see how piss weak a lot of this whole world order, rule-based order of the world. These people shit scared. They tried, what did they say about Netanyahu? They were going to indict him in the hagg and who's going to go get him and say, can you come with us, please? Yeah. Well, no one, just a chopper in the night. Of course. So Bondi is a shockingly brutal way to have something come to your door and fucking knock out it pretty hard and express a lot of problems in one go. But to me, I don't know why in Australia we'd be so fucking shocked or surprised. Like the warning signs have been there for fucking years and years. Well, even when you think about the subject matter experts, like the heads of AGO and Defence and Doves talked about this at length for a long period of time, like there is a risk in going to Iraq and Afghanistan and backing in these things that this stuff can come to our door. Like, look what happened in Bali. None of this is new and when we get on our next subject, which is Venezuela, it's not new. Like, none of this is new. It's horrific and it does hurt my heart a lot that now those people had to lose their life. They don't get out of this cycle. There will be another event. Of course. And we've got some stage in the future. It might be 10, 15 years from now. And the political, but it's going to happen again. 100%. There's no way it's not going to. And it's not going to be, I think when you look at some of the pundits that try and use division, they dumb it down and go, oh, it's one religious belief versus another, which is complete fucking bullshit, by the way. It's got fuck all to do with religion. It's all to do with the colonists and imperialists interests, economic foreign policy men in resources, in other countries. And the structural violence that's caused by trying to achieve those aims of maximum profit for the people that actually, but now we're good now, tinfoil had on, but the people that actually run the world, which ain't the politicians. It's the people with all the wealth. They run the world. They're the ones to blame for the complete fucking out of shit show that we currently see in the world. It's fucking, and until we get a class consciousness and decide on who the actual real fucking enemies are, because from my point of view, it's not a fucking electrician in another country. It's the people that own all the money that pull all the strings that basically are in control of any geopolitical outcome across the globe. They're the real enemy of the working class because they're to blame for all of this shit. And one of the things that also wanted to mention around, they're going to have a royal commission into anti-Semitism. We've seen a heap of marches recently in Australia where neo nazis, who basically their whole fucking stick is to fucking hate on Jews, were participating and or organizing these events, but I think because they were white, they never come under nowhere near enough scrutiny as to what we're now potentially now it's time to have a royal commission. Like because it was potentially Islamic extremist or radicalised, ISIS sympathizers that have now perpetrated these tragic events in Bondi. I now have to have a royal commission, but when neo nazis were organizing marches, that's okay. We can allow that to go through to the keeper, sure when those fucking idiots assembled outside, I think it was the New South Wales parliament that they crack down on them. But prior to that, as an almost seen like, well, we'll allow that to happen because it's counter to the support for the Palestinian people were receiving. It almost seemed like these marches were like the counter march to that support, which was pretty weird when you think about like, okay, so it was almost, when you think about anti-Semitic stereotypes, it's just fucking like, okay, so if you were that outraged at anti-Semitism, like all these people on the right, what were you doing about these fucking neo nazis? Like they just get let off a hook, but now we've got to put a microscope over this and go, oh, fuck what's going on here. And you touched on it before, but the politicisation to attack albo as I'll week later and this is outrageous when you look at the actual facts of, because some of the things they're saying, which I don't think have much merit to be honest, is I fucking terrible leader, but then it's like how did Lady Minn, they went and they got radicalised under the last LNP government's reign in federal parliament and it was their gun laws and all this sort of shit. State-based gun laws. That fucking created the avenue for this to occur, but still just like, well, the amount of resources that we've got are going to get spread thin. There is going to be cracks and people will slip through of this nature, but you know what prevents them from slipping through, not having the root cause in the fucking first place to create the environment and all the attitude and people that feel the need to go and do these things to enact revenge after they've had their family blow to fucking bits in a country on the other side of the planet. in an imperialist colonial resource graph. It's the, my fear is, based on the feral politics that have happened since Bondi, and the scapegoating of people that can't and objectively didn't have anything to do with it outside the mainstream, like take an elbow, for example, like it wouldn't have made fucking any difference what he had done since becoming Prime Minister essentially. You've already got the intelligence agency sitting there doing their thing. You've got the, they put in the anti-semitism envoy there, like they've come up with these unpreased and ended roles. But the thing that scares me is, it's almost a guarantee that we'll have a repeat every so often of this, like a link cafe siege or a Bondi or fucking other things that have happened of that nature because they're not going to those structural root causes like you say, and they're just wanting to try and take some bark off the ALPs, 9% fucking lead in the polls. That's what it's boiled down to, like every Josh Roddenberg coming out taking a lead role because he's Jewish. That's obviously pretty helpful for him. Obviously, it sounds like he's going to re-nominated in the draft in the future. No one to the fucking right of elbow essentially has missed a chance to try and punch him in the gut here. If people think that is going to be the fix, even if elbow resigned tomorrow, that's not going to stop another radical whizzle that's getting through. And this sort of goes further that the call, a reference to before my frustration about some of the hypocrisy we see is we're always talking about, "Oh, government hands off, don't tell us what to do, civil liberties, live your life, don't tell enough men what to do, or how to raise your kids, and all this other total fucking bullshit right." So we're a country, apparently, of absolute fucking freedom lovers, but we're at a point now where we're saying, "Well, we need to weed out radical islamas. How the fuck do you do that?" Like no one's got the depth of knowledge or understanding of fucking foreign culture or religion to understand any of the dynamics involved. So that really only lands at one thing, which is anyone that's brown that looks like they're from the Middle East, a fucking gunner being no good, because apparently everyone that comes from there is a radical islamas. That's what the fucking Facebook shouts he pub talks about. Pretty much. And it can't be solved. You can't solve that problem, because no government doesn't matter whether you're fucking bluered or whatever, is no government is going to shut down immigration, because rich people need a fucking exploitable labour pool. So ultimately, those big dogs that you've been talking about, the people that do have a fair bit of pool beyond the scenes and tell our public representatives this might be a good idea, the last thing they want to do is shut down immigration, because it fucking puts down with pressure on wages. That's their whole thing. It comes out of, it moves away very fucking quickly from religion and the calorie you skin and gets very quickly to the total cause of economics when we start talking about how many people we need in this country to fucking run our service industries. So that's a good segue when you think about both colours, blue and red, use immigration as basically a shot in the arm when it comes to economic growth. And apparently economic growth is what they're used in the mainstream to try and tell us about how good they are in economic managers. So our economic growth equal good, which is complete fucking rubbish by the way. But immigration helps that tick along by itself without any real need to do anything and that's why both sides of the fucking floor love immigration. So. And there's, and outside of that political cynicism of say, of people getting used, both people that live here because people are getting used and farmed for their emotions about immigration and the people that are being brought in are being used as an economic tool exploited. But reducing people to the level of sheep like everyone's a victim of this, every fucking person in the 99% tax bracket working class is fucking a victim being played like a fucking fiddle by the immigration debate, by fucking starting to massively ratchet up the fear and doubt about people from the Middle East and lack of understanding about culture and religion. It's fucking awful and it's going to go to fucking get cranked up to a million. Just to come back to the raw commission, there is, I don't know, I'm uncomfortable because the idea doing a raw commission into such a specific issue when you can see that it's really just a cause and effect that it's unlikely to get tapped. But think for a minute, if they did the right terms of reference, that could be an amazing fucking political exercise to find out where the power really lies. Because pound for pound, there is no group of people or culture better representative than better representative than Jewish folk. They have organised themselves so well in terms of having public voices and people talk about their issues and all that. No one does it better. There's so well representative in all sorts of places that make decisions. So if it did, for instance, the raw commission went a little bit behind the curtain and examined that a little bit more, that would be a fucking absolute banger. I suspect that it's not going to go there, but it will back the onion. Probably not going to go there Chris. That's not happening all the time. So fucking move on. Another one, another one. Because we're told that anti-s. sorry, I don't mean to be too cynical, but if you just take snapshots of the media reporting and even peak bodies and a lot of people that should fucking know better in public office, you'll basically hear that anti-Semitism didn't exist three years ago and it basically, Albo. Albo, such a weak leader that as soon as he became Prime Minister every anti-Semite, can't fly an out the woodwork and started doing their thing. But, and I don't want to minimise the use of any language or imagery that actually does hurt folk and is designed to cause harm by fucking Rubbin, Jewish folks, knows in things like the Holocaust. And the swastikers in example of that. For one thing I found really, and I couldn't figure out whether it was just an actual fuck up or it's actually part of a more coordinated campaign to seize the moment. But what I found really odd about these, more so last year, maybe early last year, maybe late the year before, was there was a lot of examples where the news would take a video or a photo of a swastika, maybe it a Jewish business or something like that. And people are going, "Oh, so you look, this is fucking no good. This anti-Semitism on there." And that's clear. And the media angle was that people were saying, "Oh, we love the Nazis and basically the Nazis got it right and you're no good." But the reality of it is, a lot of people, and I know some of them, a lot of people were starting to equate because of what happened on October 7 and a culmination of what's happened over decades, were starting to equate the Israeli state's activities in Gaza and Palestine as quite similar to what Nazi Germany had done to the Jews in the first place. So I would imagine that some of those, the graffiti of swastikers near Jewish schools or synagogues or businesses or whatever, were not about saying that the Nazis were great. They were saying that Israel is behaving like Nazis and you're, and do you get what I mean? Yeah, 100%. And that's exactly, but they never missed the opportunity to say I'll rampant anti-Semitism, but saying that a regime like Netanyahu's Israeli state and what they've done to say they're behaving like fascists and trying to exterminate a race of people based on who they are, that's fucking what Germany did. And that's the one thing that was never spoken about me. Like it was almost like we're going to get back at you by spraying a swastika on your business or on a Jewish church as to rile them up as in like, oh, when, as in the person spray painting, it was a Nazi wanting to put their Nazi symbol on that place when an actual fact give it the nail on the head. It was around, you're no better than trying to embellish them. You're no better than the Nazis. You should have a swastika on your fucking thing because you're behaving like a Nazi. Exactly. And that got totally missed. And now that's built up this body of evidence to say that anti-Semitism's been alive and well when people were actually just outraged about the activities of the Israeli state. And the fact that hasn't, that was, it's obviously a fuck up because it wasn't expressed properly in its work, it's, it worked totally counter to what the aim was. Yeah. And there's better way, there's clearly better ways to go about it. But when you look at how things have been going over that period, it's been a long time since we did a potty. But you rightly say, like yes, there's technically a air quotes a fucking ceasefire. But it hasn't been fucking observed and people are getting locked out of providing humanitarian aid and healthcare and all that sort of shit. So although the media has moved on, there's no end to the fucking suffering. No. And then filled over to another fucking proxy war in the Ukraine and Russia, people just get fed into the meek grind over there. I was thinking, and I actually remember saying it the other day, I might be a bit fucking not in a great place to be talking about all the stuff we usually talk about because it's so fucking depressing. But I gave myself a little bit of a clip because you're like, if you wanted to think about a better time like where there wasn't so much overt fucking slaughter going on in the world and there wasn't so much bad news, just because we don't see it in Australia on our social media or on our TV screens, it doesn't mean that fucking millions of people aren't dying in proxy wars, in fucking civil wars, in our nutrition. Amen. Capitalism is not fucking killing the same thing. about a million people per day through its fucking bullshit and its wasted units, creation of scarcity and how it's exploited by world powers. Like who the fuck am I to say? I'm uncomfortable by what I saw on TV. So, like I gave myself a triple, Chris. But not fucking good. It's not a good place to be being bombarded every fucking day with like all this heinous shit that's going on because you wonder where it went. But just because my privileged real life in fucking Tazzy was an invaded my living room of an evening observing the news or whatever. It didn't mean that fucking any, the world was a better place at any other point in time. Still fucked. Yeah, 100%. Sorry for that uplifting little piece of shit. No, but it's a good point, Mick. I just want to say condolences to everyone that knew someone or lost their lives in Bondi and our aim in talking about that subject matter is not to downplay the horrificness of that event at all. No. It's very difficult. When you think about the things that we've spoken about on this podcast over a long period of time, especially like calling out Zionists and what's happening in Gaza, you can get a bit, have a bit of trepidation about, I will now that the Bondi event has happened, oh should I take my foot off the gas and shut up and not say anything at the, because you don't want to offend anyone. But it's, I think it's important that we still soldier on and call out a lot of the hypocrisy that we are seeing and we'll continue to see. And the political point story that's been happening around this issue, it's fucking horrific and it can't go unchallenged. Yeah, and it's super important to, and I have never observed in Tazzi like a big public sort of expression or gathering of the Jewish faith that's not something I've seen down here, obviously in other parts of Australia there is. But people expressing a peaceful, their peaceful religious views should not be fucking in this country in any sense, should never have been targeted ever. And the fact that happened because of potentially things that have happened overseas is fucking atrocious. But it's also true to say that the our old favourite in Catholicism or another sect of the Christian faith, people that go there and live their life by Jesus and fucking make people cakes and give to the poor and all that shit that apparently the best bits of being a Christian, it's also not fair to say that they're the same as the feral right wing, Mago, fucking white nationalists in the States or any other version of Christian nationalism that exists around the world, there's degrees of it. So we're very sensitive to that, but we just, we don't have weeks and weeks to go into all levels. So just take it as our word that we're an ally of fucking anyone that wants to see the downtrodden and the fucking underprivileged do better. There should be no fucking profiting of the expense of anyone else. And it shouldn't matter, we should be free enough and secure enough through largely economic policy than anyone that wants to peacefully fucking practice their religion or their beliefs or whatever is free to do so without pressure or someone feeling like they've been fucking ripped off by them or whatever because that's what gives rise to all this shit. Absolutely. And I'll just finish off by saying anyone that tries to label us as anti-Semitic for calling out the actions of the Israeli government and the genocide that they have perpetrated, I would suggest is an enemy of the working class. Yep. Simple as that. And there's a lot of Jewish people that are anti-Zionist as well. 100%. So it'd be a bit weird to call them anti-Semitic. After October 7th, although that was another event not as feral in Australia as obviously Bondi was. And I mean, feral in a bad way just mean a massive shock to the norm was the footage of orthodox Jews in Tel Aviv protesting for an on behalf of the Palestinian people after October 7th. And that's some people can prepare to go out on an limb and do the best thing by their religion and everyone else's religion to say that we're all together like we don't have to be fighting over fucking bits of land. The extreme nature of like fundamentalist religion and the economic piece, that's fucking no good for anyone, least of all workers. 100%. So we'll segue now over to a different part of the world. Over to the Western hemisphere, to a place called Venice Wailer who very selfishly put their country on top of America's oil and now have found themselves in a bit of a blue with the Trump administration. I'm not subject matter expert on Venice Wailer but I do know a little bit when Hugo Shavez came to power they nationalised their oil industry. So they kicked out the Moli Nationals, took back ownership of their own oil to which they then got the fucking shit sentient out of them by the US because of that and that's been happening for quite a few decades now. But it appears as though the Chicago School Milton Friedman freaks in Washington now that they have someone as bold as Donald Trump in power have taken the opportunity now to figure out a more streamlined way in which they can get their hands on that oil again. They tried to do it in their previous administration where they said that the last election where Maduro got elected was read and they recognized the opposition leader, can't remember his name, Guadal or fucking someone. One Guadal. Yeah as the I know he's a real leader and the watcher thing that was weird. tried to do what they've done in South America over and over again which is the CIA goes in and agitates for a coup or a takeover, chili being a classic example of that. That didn't work. Trump got booted out, Biden got in, Trump's back in now so now they're just going, well fuck it, fuck the over shit. We will just go and fucking coup or kidnap whoever we want and we're just going to fucking take their oil Michael. Well, well, it's tripped down fucking memory lane because we actually did a bit of a deep dive a couple of years ago on a bit of a history of Venezuela. There is obviously a lot to unpack but what you'll see in developing countries, Latin America, Africa especially, is any country that's mineral or resource rich, all of a sudden has democratic problems and their people aren't very free and are oppressed and the standard that the West looks past and the deals that they've done with countries who have fucking horrific human rights records and no democracy and all that. It sticks out a little bit. It's a little bit cheeky to say that, oh no, these folks are no good. So if anyone's wondering how oil rich Venezuela actually is, based on rough numbers of how many billions of barrels are in the ground at normal calculations, it's worth about 12 trillion. 12 trillion bucks. So look, a cynical person, obviously we're not cynical, so we wouldn't say this. You could look at it and say, well, late stage capital is starting to fucking show that it's ugly side in the States and the extreme wealth inequality where the capitalists don't really have too much left to squeeze that rag of the working class more because wages are already fucked. They don't believe in stimulating the economy from the ground up. They just believe in giving more rights to people at the top and trickle down but it's starting to fail and there's not many more places you can just make people richer and it works, right? So if you wanted to prop up your economy and there's pretty good reason why if you added 12 trillion to your bottom line and you had a supporter base who were pretty dumb and just said no, we're actually like the best and he's the numbers. That's what a cynical person might say but just going back to the democratic issue. It's been also quite interesting while we're on a bit of a roll with that sort of media saturation piece where the equivalents in America of saying, oh, Maduro's fucking no good and a Trump's actually good bloke because he took him alive and all that. Whereas a farmer and Clinton and that they killed Gaddafi and they killed Saddam and all that and you're like, that's a big step to say that Maduro's the same as those other dudes you were talking about. Bin Laden was another one they threw up. It started off the year pretty rough about all this because they're talking about Greenland and Columbia and basically Trump's next press conference was like, yeah, fuck, it will just take them over to and it seems like this rules-based world order isn't really keen on fucking interfering with anything because they don't exist anywhere and have got no backing of anyone. When you look at Maduro being arrested now, America's just going to sort of do that in a little bit of a bloodless coup. It's important that people realise that Trump's already let the cat out of the bag and his supporters have like it starts off with those real political statements about freedom and repression of civil liberties and all that and we've got to go and free that shit up because Venezuela is a great and we love them. When Trump just came out and said, no, it's just oil, it's ours and they stole it, which is pretty wild but I did see it in other interesting fact because I always had the thought that they'd be like a pretty hand-to-mouth reaction of if the West goes into a country and just steals their resources basically then that would be a political tool to oversupply something and then bring like fuel prices down or whatever but it was actually real interesting to read about how in Iraq you would think well that was like pretty obviously about fucking oil and contracts and all that. The bigger issue in Iraq was the big zero-tender contracts so big political donors were like, yeah if we've got a whole country to rebuild you pay us whatever we ask you to pay that'd be pretty sweet and that even that oil thing a took years and years and years for oil to come out of Iraq the same way as it did under Saddam Hussein when they were like, oh it's so inefficient it's all shit and they've got bad technology so on the news they're saying the White House is sitting down with all these oil companies and they're going to talk about modernizing the oil industry when you think about it if you're an oil company it doesn't make sense to fucking over produce something that you already set the price off so if you're already a cartel you aren't doing fuck all about accelerating that production. Why would you want a glass? Why would you do it? Remember the golden rule, maximize profits so slowing down the development or even the extraction of Venezuelan oil it's always about resources and oil is a big one but the way in which they play their cards is not always as straightforward as you may think and we've seen things escalate to the point now where where the quiet things were never set out loud, but now they are. - Because the supporter base of the political movement is just post-truth, and they don't really give a fuck anymore. - Well, it's like Team American now, where it's like, well, Trump's our man. And if he says it's our oil, and we're gonna go and get it, fucking that's what we're gonna do, and fucking out tough away, 'cause our military's the best, and the merits of our claims around doing that, we don't care what anyone else says, 'cause facts don't matter. We're gonna go and take it and try and stop us, and that gung-ho attitude, it's fully endorsed by that mega cult supporter base. So it's very, I don't know, it's fucking very tense times, there's seizing tankers on the high seas, saying it was Venezuelan oil that was basically a blockade runner, 'cause there's sanctions around. Like we talked about before, sanctions because they nationalized their oil resources. Funnily enough, a lot of people in Australia like, "Yeah, this is fucking bullshit. How come we give all our stuff away, and we should get maximum value for money, and if we did what Venezuela did, and said to the exons or fucking, whoever's over here taking our shit, by the way, the deal's done, pack your shit up and fuck off, and now we're gonna extract these natural resources for the benefits of Australia. We would become the Venezuela of fucking Asia." - Yes, and we'd have a, I reckon a bit like another golf wittler moment, did it just be too extreme. And this is a hypocritical problem about politics in Australia at the moment, is everyone, because Facebook reinforces everyone's biases, thinks that they're real smart, 'cause it keeps telling them they're right, us included to an extent. But at least we know what the political spectrum actually looks like, what the battlefield looks like, where there's a lot of folk have fucking no idea, and basically it's white Australia or woke. Basically free markets, or, won'tness is communist, and the government tells you what to do, and fucking you don't own anything. Like it's so messed up, it's not funny. - Yeah, and I was thinking about that today, making how, like, Friedenburg made me think about it, to be honest with some of the things that he was, how he's hung out of the woodworking. Just the similarities on a very broken down level, this class war right where, if you look at it from a workplace level, there's an information war between the workers, those that represent workers, and the employer. It's basically an information war, and the whole idea of how you win that war, is you control the vote. You get the leverage and you can control the vote. This is just a massive extension of that, comes on a domestic level, so on a national level, and then geo-politically on a global level. It's an information war to control the vote, to allow basic call embosses, but really it's the people that run the world, and it's super ultra-wealthy. They want to control the minds and the votes, and the feelings and the emotions, to be able to do whatever they want. And it's just on the workplace level, but expanded to the whole globe. I'm in a mate, I know that's probably dumbing it down a little bit. But that's fucking exactly what this whole, information war is about, of whether you like the division, which they try and do in the workplace. So let's divide members from non-members, and try and divide and put the information out there, divide into the care tactics, and then it goes from the workplace, okay, let's bump it up a notch, and then on a national level, when they run their campaigns. Basically, if you're anti-nuclear, you're woke, so you're fucking idiot and fucking whatever, and then on the global scale, oh fucking, if you're not backing in Trump, and he's tough as and does whatever he wants, you're woke. Yeah, like it's just these, it steps up, but it'll come, come back to the shop floor, and that's why I think unions do play such a crucial role, because we're playing in this space every day. It may expand like I just very poorly articulated, expands out on a massive level and goes globally, but that's where it starts. Like unions are at the forefront of this class war, and the unfortunate thing is, I would probably say the overwhelming majority of workers don't even realize they're in a fucking class war. No. But it is on unionists to educate, because over a long period of time, the education system doesn't paint a real clear picture about the importance of unions, so people entering the workforce, it's no wonder that it's not their fault. They're not actively making a decision yet, but as soon as you get paid by a boss, and they claim that our special they are, and that sort of real enterprise-y benevolent goodness of employers, that all they worry about all days, they're 24/7 about their workers, and right to disconnects just, it's breaking those bonds, Chris, it's just no good, where when you break it down, entrepreneurialism and running a business is just a hobby, but you're trying to profit-seek. Like, it's no one solving any problems, they're just looking to get paid, 'cause there's no good coin in making a better product or sorting a problem out. It's just maintaining a market condition where they can make money, so. - Yeah, I mean, politics can be as complex or as simple as you want it, but the only advice I'll give to workers out there, if there's a politician or an advocate that's advocating for things that's gonna make it more difficult for you to achieve your goals, as far as what it is you'd like to achieve in the workplace and/or receive a fair share of your profits, then they're the fucking enemy. - Yes, Michael. So, the old Venice Whaler, we've covered that on this potty for a while. - A comma, and it's come full circle, to fuck now, we're actually seeing it plating out. We used to joke about fucking drones overhead and so on and so forth. - Can I talk quickly about sanctions, my brother? - You can talk quickly about sanctions. - Just as a reminder to focus, you'll see probably in your algorithm, you'll probably see a lot of stuff where there's kind of philosophical debates going on and self-proclaimed experts about, they think they know what a real left is and they'll talk about socialism and communism and why Venice Whalers fucked or why these countries are backwaters or whatever and I heard someone the other day banging out fucking basically the whole of Africa saying, it's fucking no open to shit, all and all that. So the reason why they fucking struggle so badly is they're not subject to the same fucking international relationships that we are as soon as it was identified that they had valuable shit. They don't want an educated fucking able, mobile population of people that can fucking self-determine their own resources, look at Thomas Anchor and all that. They want fucking constant civil war and civil strife and poverty and they make that happen by gutting the country and then doing a mini version of the fucking freedom wars and civil liberties and say, you need us to run your country and then they privatise a fuck out of everything, leave the locals with fucking nothing like fighting over scraps while the foreign companies just fucking mind their country's flat. You look further over into the Western hemisphere and close to the heart of capitalism and you got Cuba and the reason why Cuba was a holdout 'cause the locals saw what Castro people were trying to do and those movements. So you had some countries that fell to the sword like UL Salvador as you fucking Honduras, you got a Marley, you're Chile, Argentina or all that. They went through that fucking whole Latin America like a fucking Dosa Salts and left hundreds of thousands of bodies in their wake and there's only a couple of holdouts left that didn't succumb. Cuba's moment was a bit of pigs and they fucking threw them back in the water and Venezuela's had a checkered history but the reason why the West have this real tight grip and this self-fulfilling vicious cycle of being able to talk shit about these countries, take Venezuela for example, is they cripple it with sanctions then they like, "Ah see, this country's got all these problems when they're being deprived of the fucking incoming resources that they don't make themselves." Really expensive and all that and then the country's got a fight uphill to fucking look like everyone else. Just beware about people claiming to know what an actual left is because there's a real fucking quick succession of things. If you actually implement left policies, you get sanctioned and then your country is real fucking hard to run. That's how it goes. Ask Venezuela. - 100%. - Ask Cuba. They're still under sanctioned and people still fucking live there and you wonder why fucking right wingers in capitalists are so fucking scared. We've talked before about capitalists and the real fucking realms of power want exploitable working-aged people to create a controllable society through fear of unemployment and not control costs and all that sort of stuff. You look at the projects that were undertaken in those Latin American countries why the fucking capitalists got the shit on. They'd like fucking eradicated electricity in a matter of fucking years. And Bob Hawke had these dreams and bless his cotton socks who didn't end up the best, but he still made strides like Whitlam and Hawke and that still had visions. But around that time there were countries with fuck all nothing to rub together that just came in and said, "We're gonna fucking do these things to make everyone's life fucking heaps better like real soon." And magically they just didn't have enough freedom and died and stuff. These are not accidents, like these are absolute fucking dependable patterns. You don't need to go, "Oh, well, I don't know enough about that country or whatever." Look at their economic policy. If it's sent a right, does what it needs to under capitalism and ticks along and you've got open markets, no problem, you sweet. No one will fucking bag you out, no one will fuck with your elections or whatever. As soon as you say, "No, no, we've got to fucking actually work from the bottom up here and we're gonna tackle these social problems or whatever." And say the scary things like redistribute wealth. You're gonna find you've got all these democratic issues, all of a sudden. Well, it's a threat to the status quo. And it makes it look bad. It's a threat to neoliberalism. It's a threat to that Chicago School of Economics doctrine that all these fucking right-wing grubs seem to think is gonna be the solution to every worker's problems, which obviously is not the fucking case, Michael. That is as bad as your age. So apparently, as the US descends into chaos, it's okay now just to fucking execute people in the street. If you've been watching the internet recently, there was an incident in Minnesota where an ice agent shot and killed a lady at Point Blank Range. She was in her car. I'm not sure that they'll try to entertain her or telling her to get out of the car or whatever it was, but she proceeded to try and drive off. And the ice agent shot at Point Blank Range and killed her. The rhetoric from the Trump administration is, "I know she was trying to run this bloke over." The footage doesn't say that's the case at all. and double down trying to to say that he was well done at a rights to execute that person and the right and the MAGA cult. Some of the things they're saying is, "Oh, well, if you did not obey a lawful direction by a federal agent, therefore it's your own fault that you got murdered in plain view." But isn't it funny like this, the hypocrisy of the right wing crowd are like, "No, I won't be told what to do." Refused to comply. I've got all these fucking strong, fucking views about, no one's going to tell me what to do. And then as soon as that's actually happens in real life, they're like, "No, you should just don't done what you were told." Yeah. Well, at least be fucking consistent. At least, you're not a right winger if you're consistent Michael or you're not a massive hypocrite. No. So you're asking a bit much of him, brother. Well, whatever happens, I just hope they go and interview the CEO of Antifa because apparently they know where he lives and it's a well-coordinated fucking campaign of people, videotaping, ICE. Well, he's got a lot to answer for. No doubt about that. And the shareholders need answers. So he'd better rock up to that. George Soros is going to want to fucking feed back on his checks that he sends out to all the protesters. To the AGM. They interviewed Jesse Ventura, who's an ex. I think he's a Minnesota governor. He's pretty famous back in the days of wrestler. He's served in the armed forces. served in the armed forces. And he said, "Words the effect of America is a third world country now." And you know why I know that's the case because I've served militarily overseas in third world countries. And I've been there when they've gone from a democratic country to a country that's been taken over by a military coup. He's actually been in the country when that's occurred. And he said, "The difference is, one day you're walking down the street and everything's normal." And then the next day you're walking down the street and there's military people on every corner with guns, fucking keeping law and order. And that's how you tell your inner third world country. I don't think that's entirely accurate articulation, but that's why he's saying now that America has slipped into that category. But I'd describe it as third world because of the rampant inequality that exists in America now with these massive, I don't know, for vellas slums that you call them where you see massive amounts of homeless people in ten cities and things like that. So that's probably more of an indicator rather than whether you've got ice running around looking like black rock fucking sabbys. What is it? Black water. Well, I've seen shit, black rock, black water. Yeah, fucking same deal. The mob. But yeah, no, it was fucking sad to see. And now just the lies in the bullshit that they're coming out with around what they're saying occurred when the footage is pretty clear. And I was only saying to you the other day, Mick, the mega cult now have dropped the bar so low that you'd be scared to walk outside in fucking America because you do the wrong thing and apparently it's okay just to get fucking shot at such a low bar. And I was only thinking about to when I'll make try to run you and me over when he back to his you, you know, us. If according to those people, we had a been in America where let's say somewhere like Texas where a lot of people carry side arms, we would have been well than our rights to pull our guns out and shoot and kill that kind in that situation. And it's been wild in it to go like that would have been justified. Like, fucking just boggles the mind. It's sad to see and watching some of the follow up footage of where people were throwing snowballs at the ice agents and some of the rhetoric coming from the right of, oh, well, you fucking do the wrong thing, expect to get shot. It's like, okay, well throwing a snowball at an ice agent, probably classed as assault. So you've just assaulted a federal agent. Do they have the right to shoot you dead now? Yeah, that's right. Like, where's the fucking line in the sand here? That cold of personality and the fact that the truth left the chat after Trump's reelection at some time, because now there's people openly saying, oh, yeah, we know Trump's pretty corrupt, but at least we're open about it. Like we're not like the Democrats who just like, I was like, why do you need? We don't know how to hide all our corruption. Like, at least he's open about it. No, that's why I'm pro Trump. So all these like, he's honestly corrupt. So it's fine. Then let's not forget that all this wild shit is seemed to accelerate right around the time that they were bound by law to release the fucking Epstein files because the worst, the worst kept secret ever is it's pretty clear that the leaders of most major countries are fucking peddlers. Chris, but how surprised you, please. Not surprised at all, Michael, and I'm going to call it here on this potty. I reckon he's my prediction that Trump's going to try and get elected for a third term. Yep. And the scary thing about that is for anyone that doesn't know, like America has two term limits. And was that a dog? Is that a dog? Was that a person? Jesus. The biggest scary thing about the lead up to will Trump go for three terms is because his supporters no longer give a fuck about the rules or the truth or whatever. And they actually wear it as a badge of honor to not do those things. What happens with his supporters when they've got on a number of front, the Epstein thing you've got, Trump's a crook in plain sight. There's all this grifting and fucking inside a trading like the joints one big fucking dodgy country race. What have they got to lose? Where does it end? I can't see at this point why they wouldn't just fucking march on and ask their supporters to ignore the Supreme Court and take up arms. That seems very fucking logical at this point. I remember called it a couple of years ago said the most important thing might have been the start of last year or the year before even. The most important thing that could happen to provide a clear window from ordinary folk that think that society's this reasonably functioning structure where there's good and bad people in every level and everyone tries to do the right thing. Don't really understand why rich people are really rich, but they are and that's just the way it is and I just stay in my lane and I work away and I just wish things could be a bit better, but it could be worse. I always thought that the Epstein files would be critical to some sort of awakening because it's clear that through the conduct and the stories and the people that are on those lists and that we've already seen through thousands of photographs of who was hanging out with who, which we already knew is rich people just don't give a fuck about anything that we have to abide by. We abide by laws. You worry about if you do the wrong thing the police will come and get you. You worry about a range of things. What happens if I don't pay my bills or that? The rich don't give a fuck. They need to give a, they were taken photos of each other being petos. Like, they just think they're not fucking accountable and that just made me so fucking angry because I'd always hard, hard to knew that was their attitude, but that ultra powerful class like the political heavyweight class, regardless of how rich they actually are, people with real influence. Think about the Panama papers and all that shit now we found out they were money laundering. Like it's only one hops given a jump to go, they're just going to do what they want anyway and to find out that their people trafficking and child trafficking and half of them are petos. Like, who's fucking surprised there? But the question still becomes, what are we going to do about it? All this shit looks as in the face every time we get asked to vote and the media is a well old fucking machine. It convinces us as in a four or five or six week election campaign that something really irrelevant is all we've got to worry about with our vote. We keep missing opportunities. Tazzy's a great example with the shit that we've been going through for the last couple of years, three elections in fucking four years or whatever it is. And then after it, people go, oh, I'm fucking shuky, shuky, shuky, shuky that. And I just say, you don't even remember what you voted for. Oh, why? What did you vote for? Oh, but Pauline ancient fucking, she's awesome. So I, you know, what her voting record is like in the Senate. Do you know that? Because if you don't, and then you're voting for a thinking that she's a friend of the working class, you are the people that we're talking about. Yep. She's not a friend of the worker. How about vote? She doesn't vote accordingly in the fucking Senate. When it comes to working class issues, she's clearly no friend of the worker, but her marketing campaign to convince you that she is obviously done a very good job on you. One of the things that did surprise me about the Epstein filesmeek was Marjorie Taylor Green. Yeah. Fucking double down because she was a fucking feral mega Trump supporter and she got fucking cut loose. Yeah. So the fracturing of the right and you see that little bit of this in the UK as well with reform. So they made a coalition of basically anyone that's racist or a fucking white nationalist or anything like that. They put this huge coalition of people together and obviously rich people have to grab hold of that because they're not creating a number either. The same is in Australia with advance trying to get a coalition together so the conservative party at any one of those countries can get back in. So you got your traditional people who would just openly racist conservatives and then you got the billionaire class like mask and those fuckheads who are doing all this not racist stuff because actually need exploited fucking foreign workers to come in. Ice raids being subjective so major donors don't get their farms and factories rated for on-documented workers because they need them because that's part of their business model. So you see all these lowering of the standards and the true believers, the hard cause of fucking getting the shits on with that because they got told this will all be done. They wanted equality in their fucking racist f**k. Yeah. When really the White House and all these coalitions of fucking rich people and racist are just open for business. The rich people are just looking to farm the racist for votes and hysteria to get their end and then they'll cut them loose. Like the funniest one for me is the people discovering that mask has got a special deal on visa programs in America so you get through immigration or every once because you want these clever people to work at Tesla and say he just skirts around it and Marjorie, Tali Green calling out that hypocrisy, that can only be a good thing about those movements starting a fracture. It's a real brutal f**k around and find out for workers who had access to this information not every union has done a great job of communicating with their members politically and they get shut down and not everyone has a courage to keep that chattel off but it has to happen because you look at the ice thing we were talking about. out then. Tell me what the difference between that and the brown shirts in Germany and the fucking 20s is, please. They're the militant arm of political ideologues who were just carrying out the will of the fucking Supreme Leader for political show. That's all it is. The signs are all there. It looks through history, black shirts in fucking Italy and Mussolini and all that. It's all the same shit. Don't get me started, Chris, on how we're currently on that little roundabout of Hitler was a fucking communist because it was National Socialism place. Sorry mate. One of the dama sings, I did say one. It's only one of them. There's a lot, but one of them was when someone tried to say that, "Oh no, fucking Hitler was all for you. You didn't fucking talk to him." First thing he did was fucking shudder and steal their money. Fuck you, you want to be out count. Like, Hitler fucking, yeah, 100%. And just to be clear, Hitler was fucking funded by the ultra wealthy German billionaires who were no friend of the fucking union dickhead. So, because you've got no internet, it's really annoying. I was going to bring up a TikTok because, by the way, I'm not on TikTok, so I'm going to try and shame him throughout this year to get on TikTok and I'm going to create a new segment. We're going to kill mixed memes and it's going to be killed something like fucking get me on TikTok, you dickhead. No, you know what? It's a national security threat and you're. I don't care. You're an Australian. Has my fucking information, Michael? China can have all my information on I care. We have to. I'm a legitimate point Chris. So, have a read about the dead internet theory because. Dead internet. AI Slop has been. has accelerated to a terrifying amount. Like, the amount of fake news and obvious AI Slop out there is really fucking scary. How dare you call dancing babies AI Slop. I'm fucking just. It's outrageous. But more insidiously. Sorry, wait on. You mentioned Brown shirts. Jesse Ventura when he was talking about the Third World Country. That's what he mentioned about history and he said, "Look at what's happening in America now compared to what happened in Germany in the 30s." He said, "You should learn something from fucking history." And that's the whole point, me. Like, it's the whole Brown shirt fucking Gestapo thing. Like, ISIS literally kidnapping people off the street and America's deporting them. Before due process of actually finding out whether they're fucking citizens or not. And then going, "Oh, sorry." And sending them to fucking El Salvador, or whatever. Oh, you're actually. Oh, no, sorry, you're actually a citizen. Oh, sorry about that. And the problem is when you look at the arc of dictators is eventually the dictator doesn't have to ask for anything from the people anymore. They demand it. Yeah, I mean. It's like this orgasmic fucking nationalist, June. This is why it's so fucking nuts. You look beyond the scenes and look at how many farmers have got fucked over by the tariffs. And if you want to feel really smart, ask a man, a person about tariffs and get them to try and explain to you how it's actually good for the people in the US, even though they've just had a massive effective tax icon or the shit they buy. And if you were on TikTok, you'd know. But there's a heap of man, a people that were like crying about the dough stuff early on because when they'll put in the razor gang through the public sector, they lost their jobs and that. Now, like, "Oh, someone needs to let Trump know that I've lost my job." It was an unintended consequence of this and I've lost my job now. And we've sold our house and we're going to move to X-Stake because we had a job lined up in the government now that job doesn't exist. And someone's going to let him know that I've been impacted and surely this wasn't meant to happen to me and fucking all this shit. I'm a bit of a tangent and I can't remember why I went down it. It's such a bubble that they don't have to try and fucking hold anything up to any factual standard they take it as gospel and like, "Fuck, it's got to be a genius level." How naive those poor burgers must be and you see it heaps about healthcare coverage and that because now, even though they're fucking public health systems fucked, there was some safety nets that's all been wound back. Still, the externalisation isn't that there's plenty of money there and private health is a shit idea. It's art only because of illegal immigrants that we can't afford to fucking do better on anything. And then that's the working class thing and then on the other end of the spectrum, the rich people go and I just fucking the illegal immigrants are fine because we need them to run out of shit for cheap. Who are we going to exploit if we don't have undocumented immigrants and do you know what to fix most of these problems, Michael? Gillatine's. Chris's gone a little bit away from where I was going to say, "If the US just fucking takes over Greenland, all these problems will be solved." I remember last year was like, "I have ticked off none of my bingo card because last year you seemed fucking feral." And as I've said before, we're like, "What a week and a bit into 2026 and we're already literally just talking about pretty full team America shit." And so it's Venezuela, Colombia, Greenland. That was just like two days ago when I was last paying attention about it, but it's pretty much open-slavery now and it's like, "Oh, just whatever you want." Like I remember when Musk said, "We'll just cool whatever we want." Yeah, and that was, he actually did mean that. It was believier about lithium or some fucking thing. It was believian presidents, said fucking, "Don't come here and we don't like you and Trump's a dickhead or Musk's a wanker or something like that." And it's like, "I was cool, everyone, don't get whatever we want." Fucking wild. But it's a quite thing out loud. And now the scary thing about all that is with the mega cult in the US backing the sentiment of, "We need it for national security because if we don't do it in China or a Russia will and we can't have China and Russia sitting on our doorstep, say, Denmark or whatever, just because a boat rocked up there a couple hundred years ago, how dare they claim that it's theirs and we're going to get it somehow and that's it." That's like crazy cold-washed shit straight over again. Fuck, it's fucking mental, but that's 2026 me. That's the start. We started. Just the start. Just the fucking start of where we're at. I can't even like when we were rattling off just some stuff that happened last year. It like that was wild, but was it off to such a mad start to this year? It's just out of control. It's what sort of strain is it's going to put on our fucking health systems with mental health crisis getting worse, like stress and anxiety going through the fucking roof. Constelliving is still at unsustainable levels. Public systems are not in good order. These situations where they'd be worse, but having a centrist government is not very helpful because there's blows that should be struck right now to keep on doing better. Yeah, it is frightening and the class war that we are fighting unfortunately workers are massively outgunned when it comes to the resources that are deployed on the other side of this argument. You just mentioned Constelliving there, Mick, which made me think about something that was said last year during an EBA negotiation when one of our members at that time had lost his way when we were talking about wage claims and what's going to go into the log of claims and for those of the people that may listen to this pod class that don't know what a log of claims is or how EBA negotiations work. Basically, you come up with a list of items that you either want to improve. So whether they're clauses in your current agreement where you want to get paid more for certain things, let's say we'll use travel as an example, you get paid a certain amount of money for starting on site and we want that to increase. This person said, "I will, I think this time what we should do is not ask for too much wages but just focus on things that help us with the cost of living." And it's like, "Hake, that is your wages brother." What is it that you're actually not picking up on? How are you not joining the dots here between that cost of living is directly proportional or your standard of living in disposable income is directly proportional to the quality of your life? Do you think social media, algorithm, where people don't understand that they're being gamed all the time by something re-enforcing their bias? I think there's a lot more closet experts about now who are more openly opinionated than they probably used to because of that factor that social media makes them feel safe to express fucking stupid opinions. Definitely, Safari's unionism is concerned. And in more extreme ways too, a lot of more people express an opinion on pretty hardcore political stances like right wing stances and it's real mismatch with the idea of being a union member. It's probably always existed but it just seems like it's a little bit more common now. Yeah, absolutely. Maybe. As much as it irritates the fuck out of me when I see someone who should be an ally because you're a worker, when I see them gunning for the oppressors, I don't begrudge them because the amount of money that is spent in the class war, the social engineering and propaganda machine and the trillions of dollars each year that are spent to make these people vote against their own best interests and the best interests of their family is fucking phenomenal. Yeah, up against it. And it's no wonder that people do become susceptible to this type of propaganda because of just the amount of economic stress that they're under that they don't have time to do the critical thinking or analysis to unpack how this structural violence is actually enacted. And it's way easier just to be emotional about it and blame new immigrants or someone else. But we're getting along so we're going to have to wrap things up Michael. It's everywhere. Billions and billions of dollars of conservative mindset, science, doubt into social media algorithms or doodia. So I just want to say happy new year to everyone. For 2026 I've recently become Grandparent which is one of the most fucking amazing things anyone will ever do. That's fucking awesome. That's why family and kids and wanting a better future is the main reason why we do what we do Michael. Hopefully you'll get something out of this podcast, have a conversation with your friends. Don't shy away from difficult subjects. Someone's got to talk about this shit. If you're struggling, make sure you reach out. And if you're not in your union, join your union, go and strike, flip cars, have a good time and we'll see you on the next one. make. Congratulations again on being a pop, very age appropriate. You'll probably be quite a aging grandparent, I would have thought. No, you would do a right mate. Yes, welcome to 2026. We were a little bit lean on the back end of last year, but life comes out you're pretty fucking quick and there's always shit to do. But we do fucking love doing this and I do love doing it with you mate. So we'll endeavour to pump a few more out. Talk to us, reach out, whatever you need. Let us know if you've got new ideas for the show or you want to hear any particular themes. Getting contact with us, that would be fun. Other than that, fucking take good care of yourself. Peace out. (rock music)