“Ireland is the Ultimate Victim Nation” – Brendan O’Neill

Ireland is in a bad way at the moment, Ireland's gone very woke, but on the Israel-Palestine issue it has gone completely insane. There are so many interlocking crises in Ireland, and yet all that the establishment talks about is Israel. It's gone from organising itself around the Catholic religion to organise itself around the woke religion, and there was no breathing space in between that. Anti-Israel sentiment, I think, is a cancerous outgrowth of anti-westernism. Can we just acknowledge elephant in the room, which is it's a class thing? Yep, it's a class thing. We have a situation now in this country where the ruling class is, I think, quite suicidally destroying everything that makes Britain great. A YouTube popular is life too easy, then head over to our merch store and change your life forever by telling the world you watch trigonometry. You'll be able to buy hoodies, t-shirts, capstickers, posters, and, of course, the world-famous trigonometry mug. Go to Shup, dot-triggerpod, dot-co, dot-uk. That's Shup, dot-triggerpod, dot-co, dot-uk, and become part of the show. Brendan O'Neal, welcome back to trigonometry. Pleasure to be here. We were just reminiscing. You were actually one of our first ten guests in the entire history of the show, I think. Wow, fair to say. I love that. That's good to hear. Yeah. And we've talked with you about all sorts of different things. But this time, there's something going on that the Francis have kind of, and I have kind of experienced and observed and whatever. There's something going on with Ireland and Irish people in the context of Israel and Gaza partly, but also just more generally. I don't know what it is. People assume because, you know, we're controversial. Like we get people coming up to industry and, you know, screaming. Never happens. I've literally never had anyone say anything negative to me in public ever except one time. And it was an Irish person who said, "I used to love what you do, but then you've changed, man." And it turned out that not being wholly massively pro-Palestine is, you know, you've violated some sort of sacred commitment that I apparently had made. Is it just Irish, a lot of Irish people think their Palestinian? Is that what's going on here? Ireland is in a bad way at the moment. I say this as, "I'm a thoroughbred Mick. I've done 23 and me. My whole history is just the west of Ireland. I'm about as Irish as it gets, even though I don't sound like I am." So it pains me to say that Ireland has completely lost the plot, especially on this issue. On quite a few issues, Ireland's gone very woke, but on the Israel-Palestine issue, it has gone completely insane. And we've now reached a situation where the cultural establishment in Dublin defines itself by its hostility towards Israel. It defines itself by its opposition to the idea of Jewish sovereignty, the idea of a Jewish homeland. You will meet people in Dublin everywhere you go who either wear the kefir or wave the Palestinian flag or openly say that it's time for the Jewish state to be wrapped up. You've had your fun pack it in. Let's go back to just having a greater Palestine. That is a very common view amongst influential people in Dublin. And they have become rabidly obsessed with this issue to the exclusion of almost every other issue in the world. It's almost like Ireland has defined itself as being the anti-Israel state. And given that Israel is the Jewish homeland, that's a really problematic position for Ireland to be in, because it means it's effectively becoming increasingly anti-Jewish. And I think that's been played out in Ireland. We can see it in the invective that is used in Irish conversations, the insults that are leveled against Irish Jews, there aren't many Irish Jews. It is becoming a country that's falling under the spell of anti-Semitism. And that I think is awful. Well, I think it's really important to delineate these things. I think the discussion about Israeli behavior in Gaza and the West Bank has reached such fever pitch. I hear friends of mine who I respect conflating disagreements about military tactics with anti-Semitism. And I think that's a bad thing to do and unwise thing to do. And actually, it's not beneficial to people who want to defend Israel if they choose to do that. But what I'm getting at is you see this with the Ed Sheeran controversy recently, and more broadly, I was curious because perhaps it's an easy leap as an outsider to make. But I sort of go, you know, Ireland has a history of being oppressed by a greater neighbor power, committing some horrific atrocities. I mean, reading about Cromwell and all of these other stuff. And so I kind of go like Frances and I, we have experienced the communism. So we are more tuned to that. Is there a lot of the sentiment that you were talking about driven by this history of objectively being victimized? Yes. Yes and no. I mean, yes, in the sense of that's how Irish people would explain it. They would say the reason we're pro-Palestine, the reason we're pro-Garza is because of our own history of colonization, famine, all the terrible things that the Irish suffered under the boot of British rule. And all of that's true. There's no doubting it. My grandfather used to tell me stories about the town in which he was born, which was burnt down by the British in 1921, kind of quite ceremoniously joyfully. They burnt down this Irish town in the west of Ireland. Loads of people will tell you stories like that. So it's all true. But there is a real strain of ignorance in all of this because my view is that if people knew the first thing about history, they would know that Ireland has far more in common with Israel than it does with Hamas ruled Gaza. So Ireland and Israel are both very small, very plucky countries. They're both countries that have huge diasporas around the world. They all spread all four corners of the earth. They're both countries that won their national freedom through four swarms against the British Empire. The Irish did it in the 1920s, the Jewish revolutionaries did it in the 1940s. And in fact, historically, there are loads of common connections between the Irish fight for independence and the Jewish fight for independence. To the extent that some of the Jewish revolutionaries of the 1940s gave themselves underground code names that they borrowed from the Irish of the 1920s. Irish books about guerrilla warfare were translated into Hebrew and spread amongst these Jewish revolutionaries fighting against the British Empire. There are so many connections between the Irish fight for independence and the Jewish fight for independence. There are so many commonalities, but that gets completely forgotten. And what you encounter in Dublin in particular, but also in the other big cities of Ireland, you encounter these kind of incredibly privileged, well-educated young people who align themselves more with a death cult, a mass, that murders Jews and rapes Jews for sport, they align more with a movement like that than they do with the Jewish nation. Even though historically speaking, it was well recognised that the Jewish nation had far more in common with the Irish nation than in terms of differences. So there's a lot of historical ignorance in relation to this. Why is there such a passion and a strength of feeling about this issue in the opposite direction to what you argue is the logical way to look at this? It's partly ignorance. It's partly, Ireland has been overrun by a victim culture. To me, as a person, a proud person of Irish heritage, I find it incredibly grating, but Ireland has become the ultimate victim nation. They are obsessed with the idea that they are the victims of history. They were starved to death by the British. They were colonised by the British. You hear this now, even in relation to the Ed Sheeran thing, some of the statements that the Irish musicians made when they pulled out of Ed Sheeran's American tour, they said, "We know about famine, we know about colonisation." No, you don't. No one in the Republic of Ireland has been colonised or famished for more than 100 years. This is history, but they define themselves through this. It's like a form of cultural appropriation, or really historical appropriation. They pull on the rags of the starved from the Irish famine of the 1840s. In order to feel that kind of allure of victimhood, that kind of shroud of victimhood, it makes them feel good, it makes them feel important. So, Ireland has become the victim nation, and it sees Gaza also as a victim nation, and they connect on that basis, but it's built on falsehoods, it's not true, it's historically illiterate, and I think it's demeaning to the Republic of Ireland, which fought so long for its independence, to align itself with a place like Gaza, which is ruled by an army of antisemites. I think that's an incredibly demeaning thing. It's interesting, you make the point about the 1840s, being from Russia. I'm not sure. I even know what was happening in Russia in the 1840s judging by the general thrust of Russian history. I can't imagine it was great in many ways for a lot of people, but even for me to claim that my people have been the victim of terrorism now, and therefore XYZ, therefore Naive Bukheli and El Salvador, who seems to be unquestionably non-democratic, let's say, or maybe he isn't. I don't know, but for me to make those sorts of leaps just doesn't seem rational. And yet, here, this seems to have endured through the ages. Yeah, it's not rational at all, but we see it across the board in Western culture these days. People will dip into the horrors of history to find some costume that they can wear, some idea that they can embrace for themselves, you know, black activists in the Western world will talk about slavery, for example, having never experienced it. They will accuse people like us because we're white, well, you know, you're kind of white. Or, you know, benefiting from slavery, we never own slaves and they were never slaves. That's the starting point of the discussion. And that's got to be the starting point of the discussion about Ireland as well. No one in Ireland right now, as we speak, has been starved to death or colonized by a foreign power unless you include the European Union, but that's a whole other conversation. So it is that sense of plundering the horrors of history in order to look in a desperate search for some kind of sense of victimhood because victimhood is the currency of our era. You know, you don't get ahead in life these days by being autonomous and ambitious and self-willed and confident. You get ahead by saying, I'm a victim, I've suffered, I need state resources, I need sympathy, I need your help. That's unfortunately, in my view, the way in which you make your impact in the world these days. And the Irish have made an art of that and they plunder history, they plunder the genuinely awful things that were done to their great, great, great, great, great grandfathers and they borrow that in order to make themselves look like victims today. I think it's actually quite sick. What's weird about it to me is, Francis and I have been over to Ireland a number of times, and actually this portion of my life in terms of my career actually started in Ireland. I had a very good friend of mine who used to run a comedy in the economics festival called Kilkenomics and used to invite comedians to host debates between economists and political figures and I used to go over. And none of the stuff you were talking about, I have ever experienced from any person I've met in Ireland. My impression of Ireland when, you know, eight years ago, nine years ago, whenever we started this was, what would I say, I'd say, a nation of storytellers, hilarious, funny, warm people, people who were expressly anti-extremist, anti-political, just get along with each other, no grandiosity to them, none of this, and definitely no victimhood. To me, it was almost surprising how little people, how little animosity that would have been to people coming over from England for a festival or anything like that. I was shocked, actually, by that. So for that, maybe I was just blind, maybe I didn't see certain things, but for this transformation that happened in this period of time is remarkable to me. Yeah. I think it was probably beginning at the time you were talking about, but it's really snowballed over the past 10 years, I would say. You know, Ireland used to define itself by anti-colonialism, particularly through 1916, 1916 is the year in which the Irish people first made their strike for independence from the British Empire. They took over the general post office in Dublin and basically that's the starting point of the Irish nation. They used to define themselves through that. But now they increasingly define themselves through something like the Irish famine of the 1840s, which because that's the historical moment through which you can claim victimhood, whereas the period of the 1910s and the 1920s is all about heroism standing up for yourself, fighting back. And that's become increasingly unfashionable. So that part of Irish history is slightly being part, and it's also complicated by the fact that the ideal of sovereignty is now increasingly out of favor. Not only in Britain, where sovereignty has been shot to shit as far as I can tell, but also in Ireland, which has completely subsumed itself into the European Union, sovereignty is seen as this old-fashioned, nationalistic, dangerous idea. So it's increasingly difficult for them to celebrate the war of independence because that was all about fighting for sovereignty. So they increasingly looked for moments in Irish history where they were victims, where they were just oppressed, where they were dehumanised, and there are many of them for them to pick from. So there's been a real subtle shift in the way in which the Irish conceive of themselves, even historically, in order that they might make a claim in the current realm of victim politics. And I think that's really what's happened. 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We had a conversation a couple of weeks ago about this, Brendan, and you made the point that you think that it's a really interesting point, it's something that I've been mulling over for weeks actually, which is, wokeism always hits hardest in a post-Catholic country, and you gave the example of Spain and Ireland. So let's talk about that, because I think that's really interesting to delve into. Yeah, something's going on with these Catholic countries, you know, because Ireland and Spain have both become very woke countries, both become countries that have basically thrown open their borders to whoever wants to come in. I mean, the statistics in Ireland are staggering. Around 20% of people in Ireland were born outside of Ireland. I mean, it is genuinely extraordinary. Now, just to be clear, a lot of those are people like me, people who were born outside of Ireland to Irish parents, and then they go home as they see it, and I know people who've done that. So that 20% of Irish people are not of people in Ireland, are not all people from Eritrea or from Syria or whatever else there are, a significant section of Irish people born overseas. But that's astounding, the fact that in this tiny country of a population of 5 million people, 20% were born outside of Ireland. Spain is similar. Spain seems to not give a damn about its borders. It just kind of, you know, we've seen the invasion. I think that's an appropriate word to use in this situation. From Suetta, in terms of people pouring over the border, tens of thousands of people. And both those countries as well have become very woke. Both of them are super pro-trans, for example. Both of them are very self-flagulating in terms of historical issues. Both of them have embraced the politics of victimhood. There is something about Catholic nations then shifting towards being woke nations. And I think it's really clear in Ireland because it seems to me that what's happened in Ireland is that it's gone from being a Catholic country to a woke country. It's gone from organizing itself around the Catholic religion to organize itself around the woke religion. And there was no breathing space in between that. It just went from one to the other very, very quickly. And in relation to the Israel question, which is so pertinent in Ireland right now, it feels to me that Israel has become almost like a Satan substitute for a post-Catholic country like Ireland. Because I remember growing up, I grew up in London of course, but I went to Ireland all the time. We were always told to fear the devil and to love God. And in Ireland in the old days, people don't believe me, but it's absolutely true. There would be statues of the Virgin Mary on the side of the road. And if you drove past when you had to stop your car and you got out and you did a little prayer, all of those very ritualistic expressions of Catholic faith existed for a long time. It seems to me that the Israelophobia, the hatred for Israel, this venomous loathing for the Jewish homeland has become a kind of substitute for that, a substitute idea of good and evil. And the idea of evil now is Israel. The idea of good is the Palestinian people and literally the chattering classes in Dublin in particular, but also many people across Ireland have reorganized their moral compass around this very simplistic black and white. And I would say false dichotomy between Israel and the Palestinians. So I think what's happened in some Catholic states, similarly in Spain, is that they've embraced the Gaza issue because they're looking for a replacement for the simplicity of the Catholic faith and they found it in this. It's also as well that the Catholic faith, I always quite find the Church of England quite funny actually is somebody who has raised Catholic because people go now, "Oh, it doesn't represent anything, it's always milk toast." I'm like, compared to the Catholics, it's always been milk toast. It's such a powerful religion. And when you look at Ireland, it had its grip everywhere. It wasn't just some people's behaviour, it was a politics. It was the way that your weak was structured, the way that you call. If you rip that out, I mean, you're left with a rotting great vacuum at the centre of your society. That is so correct. And I think people underestimate, and I probably contribute to their underestimation because I say post-Catholic Ireland, but the extent to which the Catholic faith reached into every aspect of life was just staggering. I hear it from my parents. My father, who's still alive, tells me about this. You went to Catholic school, of course. You were educated by priests and nuns. They beat the shit out of you if you stepped out of line. You went to mass every Sunday. The priest would read out the names of people who had failed to come to mass, because they were hung over or whatever. The priest would keep a log of how much you had contributed to the offering that went around. You know, whether you go 50p or one pound or whatever it was. Everything was organized around the Catholic faith. Every single facet of life, social life, sexual life, political life, everything. When that goes, and the Catholic faith has been falling in Ireland since really the 1980s and now it's completely gone, because of various scandals and so on, you need a replacement. You can't just go from being organized around one faith to having nothing at all. So, yeah, there is a real moral vacuum, or there has been a real moral vacuum in Ireland. And sadly, it's been filled by this dross. That's what's happening. And I think the Ed Sheeran thing really demonstrates this, because the response to him in Ireland has been just mind-blowing. For people who may not have followed this, which may not be a lot of people, because it became a big story. Just tell everybody what happened and what the reaction was, etc. Yeah, so Ed Sheeran is doing his. I've got a soft spot for Ed Sheeran, because I'm getting on in age, so I like this kind of middle of the road. Acoustic music. He's doing this American tour, and Macklemore or Macklemore, there's so much disagreement on how you pronounce his name. The kind of hip-woke rapper in America was thrown off this tour because he went into a couple of. he was a support act for Ed Sheeran. And he opened a couple of his shows in New Jersey by saying free Palestine, genocide, blah, blah, blah, all the usual crap. And then various stadium owners said, "Well, we don't want this. We don't want our stadiums to become anti-Israel rallies." So Ed Sheeran, you've got to get rid of him. Now, I am uncomfortable with that, because like you guys, I'm not favorable of cancel culture. If you have an advertised act, you should stick with that act, regardless of what they say. That's my view. However, it blew up. And then what became clear to me is that it. It wasn't McLemore who's been canceled. He's all over the place. You can't shut him up. And that's fine. He can say whatever he wants. It's Ed Sheeran. The venom visited on Ed Sheeran has been staggering. The demonization of him on the internet. The fact that there were protests at some of his gigs, his subsequent gigs. The fact that he said in one of his statements that his own family has turned it on him. That's when you really know you're dealing with a cult. When your own family turns against you, because you aren't bowing down to the commandments. You aren't saying the right things. You haven't embraced the ideology as fully as they would like you to. So there has been this monstering of Ed Sheeran for failing to bow down to the free Palestine movement. And I think that more than anything else we've seen over the past three years has demonstrated that the free Palestine movement has become a political neo-religious cult. It's like McCarthyism in a kefir. You have to imbibe all of this stuff or you risk being punished. And it's played out really dramatically in Ireland where one radio station removed Ed Sheeran's songs. They said we're not playing him anymore because of his sins of failing to speak out. Politicians condemned him. Literal politicians who should have other things to worry about. There have been newspaper articles saying he's no longer welcome in Ireland. He needs to rescind his Irishness because his grandparents are Irish. They've basically unpersoned him for the supposed moral crime of failing to be enthusiastically anti-Israel. And I think that's when you know that you are dealing with not a real political movement, certainly not a peace movement, but a cult around which influential sections of society have organized themselves. And so I just feel increasingly sympathetic for Ed Sheeran that he has become the kind of backward of this lunatic movement. I'm going to be honest with you. I used to think grilling was simple. Meat goes on. Meat comes off. You look vaguely competent in front of your mates. Jobs are good. Then I tried to grow anything that wasn't a burger or a steak. My frustration before Hexclad was that while the actual meat takes 20 minutes scraping the grill afterwards takes 45. At some point I stopped inviting people over for barbecues because I couldn't face the cleanup. Turns out the problem isn't you. It's the grill. Standard grates were never designed for anything smaller than a steak. Which is why your prawns end up in the colds and your salmon ends up in three pieces. 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Every piece comes with a lifetime warranty, so you're not replacing this next summer. Don't spend another season fighting your grill. For a limited time, all audience gets 10% off with our exclusive link. Head to hexclad.com/trig. That's H-E-X-C-L-A-D. com/trig. Tell them trigonometry sent you. As someone who has Irish family, one of the things that I always associated with them was they were. Essentially, there was a real freedom of thought culture to Ireland. The number of times someone said something and I thought, "This is going to kick off." And it invariably does and they'd be back and forth to it. And someone would say this and someone would say that. Someone would then burst into tears all the rest of it. But you look at it now and it's a completely different culture. Like you said, it's a uniformity of thought. And to me who was exposed to something completely different, it's quite bizarre. Yeah. I feel the exact same. I grew up in an Irish part of London in the 1980s, the 1990s. Like a really Irish part of London. So the school I went to, which was a conference school, like 90% of the kids were Irish heritage. Everywhere I went, whether it was Swimming Lessons, Church, School Disco, everyone was Irish. We only ever met Irish people. So we didn't integrate particularly well. But that's another story. And the culture as it existed then was quite contrarian. The Irish were known for being quite outspoken, for shooting from the hip. Literally. Yeah. Well, yeah, exactly. There was also that stuff. And it did become a bit of a caricature. You know, the fighting Irish, you know, shooting off their mouth and every Irish person was seen as a kind of Brendan Beam who was this 1950s, 1960s Irish, although he was an alcoholic and used to say crazy things. There was a tendency to see all Irish people as being like that. But there was some truth to it as well, which is that the Irish were pretty free thinking, because of the culture they came from, which was an anti-colonial culture, a culture that valued freedom, a culture that valued sovereignty. So they were pretty freewheeling and free speaking. That's gone. That has gone. And, you know, I go to the, I talk about dub, I slag off dub in all the time. My parents are from the extreme west coast of Ireland, a beautiful place called Konamara, most beautiful place in the world, no offense to Russia, or Croydon, or Venezuela, or destroyed me. No offense to any of those places. Konamara is the most beautiful place in the world. But even there, I was cycling there recently, and I cycled past a field of sheep. I'm not making this up. And there was a Palestine flag in the middle. And I thought, I genuinely thought to myself, sheep for Palestine, which is like the perfect explanation of all of this. So even there, you'll go to a pub in the extreme, like the first pub I ever got drunk in, which is on the very west coast of Ireland, has a Palestine flag flying outside of it. So this is a pretty widespread phenomenon in Ireland, and it's so stifling. It's so suffocating. You feel that you can't say, if your pro-Israel, which I am, you feel that you can't say it. So Ireland has about 3,000 Jews, and I know some of them. And they feel even more stifled, because they feel that they can't express themselves, honestly, fairly, that's a pretty bad position for Irish Jews and Ireland to be in. I never had, this was an observation. I was going to make it into a joke, but it was an observation. But I think there's real truth about the observation. And basically, the Irish are the Latinos of Europe. You like dancing, you like a row, you like a party, and you also like a bit of political extremism. And Ireland has that undercurrent to it. How much of this do you think, and as someone who's saying this, has noted it and seen it in the culture, both in Latin America and Ireland? How do you think? How much of it do you think is a temperamental thing, the identification, the romanticization of the rebel or the terrorist organization or whatever it is you want to call it? Yeah, there's an element of that for sure, but it's become like a caricature of itself. Like kneecap is a good example of this. There's three arseholes from Northern Ireland, one of them wears a tree-coloured teacozy on his head and he's almost 40 and he's a former schoolteacher. No offense, no offense to former schoolteachers. If you want to talk about extremism and all sorts of other dysfunction, look at teacups. But kneecap's a good example of the kind of thing I'm thinking about, which is that it's this kind of glorification of extremism without being extreme if that makes sense. So kneecap are the most celebrated act in Ireland. The Guardian loves them, RTE, which is Ireland's version of the BBC loves them, gushes over them constantly. If you read some of the Guardian coverage of kneecap, you will literally cringe. It's so forning. Every bourgeois tit in London loves them, goes to their gigs and jumps up and down. Hezbollah, it's become incredibly ridiculous and performative. So yes, there's an element of that, there's an element of kind of celebrating the extremists, it's become just so absurd and insane and I think that's an element of it. But then if you look at kneecap, for example, are alleged to have said up Hezbollah, up Hamas. I mean, there's video footage of this, but we say they are alleged to have said that. See, for me, that's a problem because Hezbollah and Hamas, in my view, are genuinely far-right organisations. They are genuinely organisations that are pretty much organised around their loathing for Jewish people. They're loathing for the Jewish state. Hezbollah has openly said that all the Jews of the Holy Land need to be expelled and sent back to Europe. Hamas has a constitution which is devoted to exterminating the Jewish nation and therefore expelling the Jews from that part of the world. These are incredibly racist movements, violently racist movements. Am I often think to myself, if there was a rap act or a pop act that had said up the KKK or victory to the neo-Nazis, would they be in Kanye West? Yeah, but Kanye West is the outlier in this. Although I think he's had this episode, he's back to normal. With him, it genuinely was a mental health point. I take your point. Which is if that had happened. If that had happened, you wouldn't see these shortage arseholes jumping up and down. They're saying, "What, what, we love them?" Of course you wouldn't. That's the broader question, which is that Jews don't matter, as David Bedil has said, to those people. In the Identitarian landscape, Jews don't get a look in because they're seen as being hyper white and at the top of the privileged ladder and therefore we don't care about them. There's so much hypocrisy, so much ridiculousness. I do think there's an element where it's a celebration of extremism, but it's becoming incredibly conformist, if that makes sense, so it's a contradictory thing, I think. I think we also have to acknowledge that we were talking before we started. I'm not saying that I necessarily know how Israel should behave in its communications or the rest of the world, but I think we can all agree what there's different aspects to what one of them is kinetic, but another one is public communication. They've absolutely lost that part of it. By the way, I don't know if Yeh Yeh Netanyahu, Benjamin Netanyahu, son is a public figure by virtue of being the son of Benjamin Netanyahu, but he goes around basically saying things on Twitter about how the Maldives, the Falklands are part of Argentina and all this stuff. I appreciate that for domestic Israeli consumption, this might be a good thing, but you just look like an asshole and you irritate your friends in the West who are trying to say to be honest about this situation and trying to persuade people and, of course, you're giving ammunition to your enemies in the West. That's one part of it. Another part of it, though, is, let's be honest, it's technology. I mean, I don't believe if you're a person with a normal brain, it's possible to be rational in the face of video footage of babies being blown up or, you know, children being pulled out of rubble by their parents or whatever. I just, I think at that point it becomes you cease to be objective and you react to the horror of it, which is perfectly normal human reaction. And then you cease to ask the correct question, in my opinion, which is, who is responsible for this baby being pulled out of rubber? And I think for a lot of young people who've never thought about war conflict, have never had to deal with it in their own lives, whose parents have never had to deal with, have a told them about any of this. We are generations away from that sort of conflict in the West, certainly. And we're insulated, therefore, from those realities. So when we see that, it's far more persuasive than any argument, Brendan O'Neal or Benjamin Netty-R, who or anyone who seeks to contextualize Israel's response to October 7, which is what we're talking about, there's a power imbalance between the visual medium and the logical argumentation. Yeah, I think that's true. You know, the moral pornography of war and it's been incredibly pronounced in relation to the Gaza conflict because it is so viral, it's spread so widely. And we've got a whole new generation of all people, Hillary Clinton, made this point. We've got a whole new generation who opened their phone and because of the algorithmic prejudices, they are fed this stuff 24/7. So all they see when they look at their phone is the Jewish state killing children and they think, oh, Jews kill children. And it's incredibly dangerous, in my view, because we know that there have been conflicts over the past three years, since 7th of October, in Sudan, for example, other parts of the world in which more people have been killed than have died in Gaza. And we don't see it. No one gives a damn about that because they're obsessed with this one conflict. But the thing that strikes me, I've been thinking about this for a while, is that all the things that people used to say about the Jews, they now say about the Jewish state. So they used to say the Jews love killing children. They drain their blood, they make bread with it. Now they say the Jewish state loves killing children. The obsession with Zionist baby killers is remarkable. And we've had actual demonstrations in the UK where people have marched through the streets holding dolls wearing bloody shrouds and saying the Jewish state kills children. They used to say the Jews control the world. They had their fingers and all the pies. They were the secret puppet masses of politics and finance. They now say that about the Jewish state. They say the Jewish state has got America and Europe eating out of the palm of its hands. They used to say that the Jews were the block to world peace. If only they didn't exist, then everything would be hunky-dory. The world would be fine. People now openly say that about the Jewish state. They openly say that the liberation of mankind depends on the liberation of Palestine. That is literally their slogan. So if only the Jewish nation would take its boot of Palestine's neck as they see it, then we would all be free. This kind of rehabilitation of that ancient prejudice that the Jews are holding humanity back. So they expect us to think it's a coincidence that all the stuff that peasants and bigots and lunatics and fascists and Nazis used to say about the Jews, they now say about the Jewish homeland. But I'm not willing to accept that, that's a coincidence. I think we're witnessing the rehabilitation in a kind of pseudo-progressive, pseudo-political language of some pretty ugly ancient prejudices. And you were saying earlier that it's important to maintain a distinction between people who are critical of Israel and people who are anti-Semitic, completely agree, but in relation to anti-Zionism, I just think anyone who defines their political personality by their opposition to Jewish sovereignty, I'm going to be suspicious of that person. If you're every waking hour is consumed by thoughts of the wickedness of the Jewish homeland and the desirability of erasing the Jewish homeland all the way from the river to the sea. And this notion that Jewish sovereignty is uniquely barbarous, unlike British sovereignty or Lithuanian sovereignty or whatever else, Jewish sovereignty is the problem in the world. Then I'm going to say that you are a bigger and you have a problem with Jewish people. And so I do think we are living through a situation where anti-Zionism is becoming the key means through which old anti-Semitic prejudices are being expressed. And untangling that is difficult and I think quite important. Well, I do think that's true for some people. And I think the sort of anti-Semitic coming out of the woodwork has been revelatory if such a word is appropriate. But I also worry a little bit, Brendan, and I said this earlier that people, it's kind of what people did with the word racist, the well-backed, where there's, you're painting, not you personally, but some people are painting with a little too broad a brush. And I can logically get myself to a place that you are describing without thinking that that place is anti-Semitic. So here's how I would get there. I would take a mid-level IQ woke white girl. I would feed her a daily dose of footage of some of it real, some of it staged, that, you know, Pollywood is a real thing, but also, you know, the Gaza is being attacked bombed all the time, right? So that's also happening. People being killed, the consequences of bombing, the aftermath of war, all of that stuff. I would feed that to them on a daily basis. And then I would feed them a version of history, which is a pretty conventional view of the creation of the state of Israel, which is, here was this ancient land called Palestine. And then Churchill or whoever sent in a bunch of Jews from Poland, and they took this land and formed a country called Israel, they kicked out its native inhabitants because they wanted the land for themselves. Now, those, all of that is deeply ignorant of the realities on the ground as we've come to understand them through interviewing both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel people. But if you give somebody that, they may have no hatred or malice in their heart for Jews, which is what I interpret antisemitism to be just like racism is antipathy towards people because of the color of their skin. And yet they arrive in exactly the position that you talk about, and I worry personally that sometimes people who are so convinced about the Israeli cause being just and right, go to the place of calling those things antisemitic so quickly that we never give, you know, maybe it's a big ask of people, but we never give the benefit of the doubt of the stupid girl who's been fed war footage all day and all day, just saying. I, I tried that for a very, very long time. I was one of those people who argued for a very long time that we need to maintain an incredibly clear moral distinction between antisemitism and not liking Israel. Because people are perfectly at liberty to hate a country that's within their rights and so on. I did that for years and years and years, but for me, it fell apart in the aftermath of seventh of October because I think it was Howard Jacobson, the great British Jewish novelist who said that everyone says you have the right to criticize Israel. Of course you do. You can say, I don't like it's food. It's too hot. I think it's government is crap. I think Netanyahu is a son of a bitch. You can say all of those things, but he made the point that they're not criticizing Israel. They're actively agitating for its removal from the family of nations. And that is what people are doing. That is what from the river to the sea means it means that a state of called Israel will no longer exist. So it's something else. Now, I've been against so many wars over the past 20 years and I'm sure some of your viewers will agree with me on some of them and disagree with me on others. I was against the Iraq War of 2003. I even thought the Afghan War of 2001, even though I think America perfectly had the right to respond to 9/11. I even think that was a bit crazy because America was essentially punishing Afghan peasants for crimes committed by Saudi rich boys. So even that was a war that I felt uncomfortable with, but not once did I say destroy Iraq, wipe it from the face of the earth. These are the most evil people who ever existed. Not once did I say that about the Americans who were fighting against the Iraqis. Not once did I say America is scum of the earth, get rid of them. I didn't say about Britain, which was involved in those wars. I didn't say Britain is an illegitimate stay horrible blah, blah, blah. So there's something going on here, which feels really ugly and makes me feel very uncomfortable. But I think, you know, in terms of the benefit of the doubt, I agree with you to a certain extent because people are being bombarded morning, noon and night with this stuff. But I do think we have to have an expectation of reason and an expectation that people are people should be ought to be able to distinguish between truth and fiction. You know, the idea that what's happening in Gaza is a genocide is an obvious fiction and anyone who looks at the numbers and looks at the statistics will see that. Give us a bit more. Why do you say it's an obvious fiction? What would you be? What's your best argument against us for you? The main argument I would make is that the best estimates are that around 3% of the population in Gaza have been killed, which is unspeakably tragic. No one would deny that, which is why her mass should not have started this war. There are other wars in the past 10 or 15 years in which a higher percentage of the population has been killed than that. And we don't call them genocide. And then I think what's happening is, and then of course there is the whole question of what Israel's intention is, is it's intention to wipe out the Palestinian people or is it's intention to defeat a mass? I think it's intention is to defeat a mass. And I also think that's an honorable intention. So I find myself in the incredibly difficult position of thinking that the war in Gaza is not only not a genocide but is also a pretty heroic war. And the people who say that are infinitesimally small in number. But I think that in the sense that what we have here is a Jewish army, a largely Jewish army fighting against an army of anti-Semites and saying to them, listen, it's not 1492. It's not 1942. You can't kill Jews with impunity anymore. If you invade the Jewish nation in the 2020s and rape and murder more than a thousand Jews, there are consequences. I think it's incredibly positive. However awful the war in Gaza is and everyone knows it's awful. I think it's incredibly positive that there are now consequences for killing Jews. Because for most of human history, there wasn't. For most of human history, you could do that with impunity, the blood libel, for example, the idea that Jews killed children and used their blood to make bread, which was born in knowledge of all places. That led to the massacre of Jews with impunity. And then, of course, in the 1930s, 1940s, Jews were killed with impunity. It was only after the war that some people suffered for what they did. We now have a situation where if you kill Jews, you might yourself be killed. That's a positive, humanist, progressive development. But it's so difficult to look through the weeds of what people say about the Gaza war, what they say about that region of the world. It's difficult to untangle all of that and say, actually, there is something positive here, which is that for the first time ever, pretty much, human society now thinks, well, some of us do, that there should be quite severe consequences for raping and murdering Jewish people. And that's completely lost on exactly the kind of person you're describing, the wide-eyed, Western activists, things of herself is very progressive, where's a kefir is bombarded with this stuff every day? That's lost on them. And that's partly a failure of people like me, I guess, maybe people like us. We haven't convinced them sufficiently to see things in a broader scope. But it's true that there is something about the Gaza war in all its horror that also speaks to a positive turning point in human history, which is that when you kill Jews now, the consequences war. I assume selling the merch would be the hard part of running the trigonometry store. It isn't. Check out is, and Shopify had already solved that before we even launched, because the moment someone's actually ready to pay Shopify make sure they can. And if they've bought before their details are already saved, so it's one tap and done. That's time back to grow the business instead of running it. If you want to start the same way, that's Shopify.co.uk/trigger. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it one. Start your free trial at Shopify.co.uk/trigger. Well, it's interesting, because I think part of the reason it's so difficult to make the argument that you're making and be persuasive is actually the intellectual architecture on which that argument is based. There's been ripped out of the Western world entirely. So, for example, the victory, the painful victory in World War II is seen by many people as a set of war crimes. You know, the dropping of the nuclear bombs in Japan, which saved hundreds of thousands of lives, by the way. People don't understand this. And in fact, would argue the opposite. It's the greatest evil in human history. Well, all the historical evidences, the Japanese would fight the last man. They would starve their own people. And by the way, the Western allies estimates would take a million casualties to land on the mainland of Japan. But that is seen as a war crime. The bombing of Germany, which was terrific. But again, people have been taught not to ask the question. Why was it that the Western allies and the Soviet Union had to bomb Germany into the ground? Why was it? It's because Hitler refused to surrender. You know, the person we interviewed before you came in was Andrew Roberts, who were talking about Napoleon. And I asked him, why didn't they chop Napoleon's head off after the battle of Waterloo? And he said, because he surrendered. Hitler didn't surrender. And neither a Hamas. Hamas could have ended this one day one by handing over the hostages and the terrorists who took them. But of course, the terrorists who took them is Hamas. So they can't hand them over, because they're be handing themselves over. But the moral and intellectual architecture of, in order to destroy your enemy, You may have in the same way as you cut a cancer out, you're going to have to carve out some healthy tissue. And if the cancer is putting the healthy tissue in front of itself, then you really probably will end up doing a lot of damage. That's been entirely stripped of the Western mind. And then you're left with this. You're left with the phone in your face showing your baby being pulled out of rubble. I could not agree more. I think it was John Stuart Mill who said there's something uglier than war, which is the idea that nothing is worth fighting a war for. I completely agree with that. I'm generally an anti-war person. I come from an anti-imperialist background. I marched against wars for a very long time and I would march against future wars. I have no doubt. But an uglier thing than war is that deflated post moral cowardly idea that nothing is worth a war. Some things are worth a war, defeating the Nazis was worth a war. Hundreds of thousands, millions of people died in Britain's bombing of Germany. Let's not reliticate that because it's used by the new Hitler sympathizers to demonize Britain. But Britain's bombing of Germany, which I think was just, killed tens of thousands of civilians, hundreds of thousands of civilians, including children, exactly that if they had the same technology as we do now, you would have seen footage of children in the most barbarous. Tristan? Yeah, Tristan. But it's on there. But it's on there. And they flattened 80 cities. Yeah. They were dropping the conventional munitions to Hiroshima's a week onto Germany. Yeah. It sounds like a really horrible thing to say, but it used to be well understood that that was worth it to defeat Nazism and to defend Western civilization. That's what's lost now. I think there's something so arrogant about Western activists, often quite privileged, but that's by the by who live in peaceful, comfortable countries like Britain or France or Germany, looking down their nose at the Jewish state, being forced pretty much against its will to fight this horrible, urban, humid war, hand-to-hand combat with an army of Islamophashists. Well, bully for you that you don't have to do that, bully for you that you don't have to defend your people and your nation and your civilization against a bunch of barbarians, how lucky are you? But instead of recognizing their own privilege and recognizing the desperation of the Jewish nation in having to do this, they say, oh, you're scum, you shouldn't do this, let yourself be invaded, let yourself be killed, it's no big deal. There's such an arrogance there that I find it quite sickening, but I think you're absolutely right that we have no historical memory anymore, certainly the younger generations have no historical memory that every now and then you have to pick up arms and fight a bloody war. No one likes it, but it has to be done. They also have no understanding, and this is a broader problem, which you guys have been talking about for years, they have no problem understanding of the virtues and the values and the wonder of Western civilization. I think a lot of so-called Israelophobia or some people call anti-Semitism, anti-Israel sentiment, I think, is a cancerous outgrowth of anti-Westernism. Oh, yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah. A lot of people who just hate Israel because they think it's America or it's Britain, it's white, it's colonial, etc. That's. Israel has become the whipping boy of a Westernist elite that hates itself, which has turned its back on its own values, and Israel is seen to represent actually quite rightly in a way. It's seen to represent all the things that we used to represent. It believes in sovereignty, it believes in borders, it believes in standing up itself, it believes in training its young to be warriors rather than pathetic victims who need a self-care day because they were at a JK rolling tweet, and it believes that it's older people should be safe, should be looked after by its younger generation. It has a sense of peoplehood, a sense of nationhood, a sense of national integrity, we've lost all of that. And I often think that if we spent less time badgering Zionists for being the worst people who ever existed, we might actually recognize that Zionism has a lot to teach us. Zionism has a lot to teach us in the sense of valuing national integrity, valuing the warrior ethos, valuing this sense that a nation should be independent, should be free. Because people should be safe, it should ward off foreign combatants, foreign threats. All of those things, which really is what Zionism is, Zionism is not fascism, as they say, it is just a nationalism that takes itself seriously. If we spent less time demonizing the Jewish state and more time learning it from it, we would recognize that Britain could do with some of that. We've got illegal immigrants crossing our border every single day of the week. We've got people coming into our country who hate our country. We've completely have this lost sense of nationhood, this lost sense of peoplehood. Apparently, the British people don't really exist. We're just kind of a mongrel race and all the rest of that, let's not get into that right now. But there is this incredibly dilapidated sense of Britishness, this kind of demoralized sense of nationhood, this idea that we're just this hotel for anyone around the world. And that's causing us lots of problems. We could actually learn from Israel if we could just stop demonizing it for five minutes. And I think that's an important thing to do. Let's come back to Ireland for a second because it seems to me that a lot of people get their identity from others. And so if there is no greater unifying force than being against another group of people or against another country, which is what Ireland has had for a very long time, until very recently, all of a sudden that doesn't really exist anymore. And then you can have the golden years, how's the end period where it's peace and love. But eventually, if you don't have that, you see fractures and what people then start looking for is another enemy. And if it's not going to be each other, then it's going to be something else. And that's something else must be Israel. Yes, the Irish define themselves against Britain for a very long time, historically speaking. Some of them still can't let go of that. I go to Dublin, I go to Cork, I go to Galway, and I hear, I still hear Irish people slagging off the Brits. And I'm like, get over it, man, that was a long, long time ago. The irony, of course, is that they bow down like a sequest idiot to the European Union, which actively undercuts Irish sovereignty. And more so than it did British sovereignty. The European Union, for example, about 10, 15 years ago, sent literal bankers to take over the Irish economy, to run the Irish economy because it thought the Irish economy wasn't going very well. And a staggering intrusion into Irish sovereignty, of the kind that we hadn't seen since it won independence in 1923. So there's a great irony there that they kind of, they still try to maintain that anti-British nationalists, even though they bow down to a new empire, as I see, which is the Brussels oligarchy. But yeah, you're right. When you feel that you're losing that, when you feel it doesn't really have the cache that it used to, because Britain left Ireland a hundred years ago. And even in Northern Ireland, which is a much more disputed territory, there haven't been British soldiers there for a very long time in blah, blah, blah. So you lose that sense of identity, where you define yourself against the other, against the foreign invader as they saw it. You look for something else. You look for another figure, another demon against which you might define yourself and some Irish activist, the activist class, has landed upon Israel. That's really genuinely how they define themselves. And I'm afraid to say, it does genuinely pain me to say this, the Irish, or really the Irish catering classes, I suppose, have become the most sanctimonious people in Europe. They are insufferable. They really are insufferable. I say this, I go to Ireland all the time, three or four times a year at least. And I encounter people like this, and they are insufferable. They are so cock-sure about their moralism, even though their facts are very thin on the ground. They are incredibly arrogant. They think they're right about everything. They spout facts about 1948 and the Balfour Declaration, which are just completely untrue. They have no, they don't factor in the Holocaust whatsoever in terms of why Jewish revolutionaries might have wanted to fight for the reinstatement of the Kingdom of Israel. They talk about the NAPCA as a Holocaust-like event when in fact it was just the fallout from a war between the Jewish nation and the Arab states, a terrible fallout, but that's what it was. They are so ignorant. They have this child-like understanding of history because, and the reason they have that is precisely because they are looking not for a better way of understanding the world, they're looking for a moral narrative that they might wrap themselves in. And I think that actually goes for, not just for Ireland, but for the entire so-called pro-Palestine movement, this really has become a way for time-rich activists, leftists and even sections of the political establishment to find a comfort blanket they might wrap around themselves, a way in which they can define themselves as good and everyone else as bad. The problem, I mean there are many problems with that, it's child-like and immature and a bit dumb, but the bigger problem is that the people in the West who are most slightly to identify with a Jewish state and most likely to identify themselves as Zionists are Jewish people, around 80% of Jews in the Western world identify as Zionists. So if you identify yourself as an anti-Zionist, as someone devoted to the removal of this one nation from the family of nations, whether you intend to or not, you are going to come into conflict with Jewish people. And that, I think, is the situation we find ourselves in now, whether wittingly or unwittingly, the Western Left is in open conflict against Jews and that's a really scary thing. Because one of the things that it also does is you get obsessed with this particular issue. But then Ireland has got some very real problems closer to home and let's talk about that because that is very important. And you just look at Irish people and their politicians, you're going, "Hey, mate, why are you banging on about a conflict in the Middle East when Ireland is going through really significant challenges that nobody seems to be paying attention to?" Let me give you an example of exactly what you're talking about. My parents are from the West of Ireland. They come from this beautiful town called Clifton. It's stunning. I highly recommend it to your listeners to visit. I go there all the time and I was there a few months ago. When I cycled into town to buy a loaf of bread, that's what you do in the West of Ireland. And everyone was whispering and chattering and I listened into the conversations and met up with a friend of mine. It turned out that the night before a woman had been murdered, virtually decapitated and her body had been dumped in a local river. And as soon as I heard that, people may say, "I'm racist for thinking this." As soon as I heard that, I thought that will be one of the migrant hotels and it was. An Iranian man murdered and virtually decapitated a woman and threw her body in a river. These kinds of things are happening more and more in Ireland. There is a severe migrant crisis in Ireland. There's a housing crisis. There's an energy crisis. There were protests this year by truckers and others against the kind of net zero taxes that have been added to energy bills and so on. There are so many interlocking crises in Ireland and yet all that the establishment talks about is Israel. They go on and on about it to such an extent. Let's not forget that the Israeli embassy in Dublin closed itself down last year because it was so horrified by the Irish elite's obsession with the Israel question. But you know, the interesting thing about Ireland in relation to all of those kinds of problems that your listeners will be very familiar with, Ireland has become almost like a laboratory for the kind of globalist experiment because it has this huge influx of immigrants, many of from parts of the world that don't speak English and have mind speaking Irish. They're not integrating very well. Hotels in the middle of nowhere have overnight been taken over by 400, 500 men from Africa or the Middle East. I know these parts of Ireland. It's surreal. We're talking about parts of Ireland where the population, I mean, forget Piddington in England. We're talking about parts of Ireland. Villages are 400 people. There's one pub, there's one shop. Often these are Irish speaking areas. There are still some Irish speaking errors. And suddenly overnight, there are 400 men from Africa. This is happening across Ireland. And it's really, really annoying people. And all the stuff that they say about Britain, they say, well, Britain was an old colonial nation. It's the old nation of empire. It was the nation of slavery. Therefore it deserves this influx of immigrants. What do you expect? You go over there. So we're coming over here. All that crap we hear about Britain, which by the way, I don't accept. You can't say anything like that about Ireland. Ireland never colonized anyone. In fact, Ireland was colonized. And yet the same thing is being done to Ireland. And we now have this situation where some activist immigrants in Ireland are openly saying that Ireland needs to change its culture, change its ideas in order to make them feel more welcome. So there's an activist in Ireland called Ebon Joseph. She's this kind of African-born woman. She's very influential in Dublin circles. She went viral recently because she said primary schools in Ireland should stop making it a requirement that teachers should be able to speak Irish because that excludes African-born, Indian-born teachers who don't speak Irish. But there's a very good reason that primary school teachers in Ireland have to speak Irish, which is that primary school teachers, as you all know, are general teachers. They teach kids everything, a bit of science, a bit of art, a bit of writing, and whatever. And one of the demands in Ireland is that you have to teach children to speak Irish. So every primary school teacher in Ireland, up to the age of nine or ten, whatever it is, you have to be able to speak Irish because you have to teach children to speak Irish. That's a perfectly legitimate thing for Ireland to decide to do. You now have this pressure from external activists, people born outside of Ireland saying, "Well, that's not good enough. Grab that. You don't need that. Forget your culture. Forget your language. Our right to have a job in your primary schools overrides your right to defend your ancient culture." That kind of thing is creeping into Ireland in a way that I find incredibly creepy. And none of the bullshit justifications for that stuff in Britain stacked up in Ireland at all because Ireland is just a small form of colony, plucky little nation, and it doesn't deserve any of this. So when you talk about the problems in Ireland, they are huge. They feel almost insurmountable. And I think the Israel thing almost has become a distraction from that because they're so incapable of addressing those problems. They kind of wrap themselves in this easy question of Israel Palestine instead. And where is the, do you have a problem with illegal immigration in Ireland or is this legal immigration that we're talking about? It's a bit of both. I think the immigration thing is out of control. That's my view. And I say this is somewhat of my parents' immigrants. We're all pretty much immigrants here in one way or another or descended from them. I think immigration can be a great thing, but in Britain and Ireland it's out of control. And I mean both legal and illegal. The thing is that what's happening in Ireland, there's lots of illegal immigration, there's lots of legal immigration. But the broader question than even that is this growing idea that the role of immigrants is to change the nation to which they arrive. You see that openly discussed in Ireland. They will say the great thing, the Irish media and the Irish establishment will say the great thing about the arrival of all these exotic foreigners as they see them is that they will make us a bit less white, a bit less boring. They will bring in some interesting food, interesting culture. They will change us. And my view is that I'm sorry, it's not the role of immigrants to change a nation. We've got to move on from that. The role of immigrants is to keep your nose clean, work for a living, be self-sustaining, raise children who are good citizens rather than little shits and try to integrate. That's what my parents did when they moved to London in 1970. They worked their arses off. They didn't integrate particularly well. They just lived in an Irish community but they kept their nose as clean. They were good citizens and they raised six kids who have done pretty well. That's the role of an immigrant. Your role is not to go to another country and radically transform it. The arrogance of that I find quite extraordinary. The idea that I would go to France or Russia or China and try to change it is extraordinary to me but that's increasingly the discussion in Ireland as well as in Britain. This notion that the wonderful thing about the arrival of all these people from overseas, whether it's legal or illegal, is that it will shape Ireland out of its whiteness, out of its old-fashionedness, out of its attachment to the Irish language, its attachment to its ancient culture. No, Ireland doesn't want to do that. The Irish people don't want to do that. You create this real culture of animosity if you send immigrants almost like an army to try and chip away at the culture of Irishness. We're seeing that in Britain now. We're seeing this incredible culture of animus growing between native Britons and migrants. I think this incredibly regrettable that that's happening but it's a consequence of the establishment essentially sending immigrants as foot soldiers for radical transformation and saying we love you immigrants because you will stop us being so white and boring in middle of the road and no spice on our food blah blah blah. When you use immigrants to do that you are setting them up for a fall because the native inhabitants of that country will say well actually we don't want this. And what's interesting is even the sort of middle class-chattering class people who say that they're in favor of this turn out to be really not in favor of it if it's happening around the corner from them magically. And that's the fascinating thing to me as well because there's so much of this luxury belief thing going on that as long as your ideas don't have the impact that they have on other people and you then everything is fine but the moment they put them in the camp round yours, suddenly you stop voting for the greens and for the libdebs. all of a sudden. And suddenly you have a referendum to leave the country and so on and so forth. And it's fascinating to witness, really. And I kind of understand it. You know, I happen to live in a very leafy, fairly, still very English part of the country. And I look around at the people in my neighbours. I'm not speaking for them specifically. I don't know their opinions. Maybe they're all massively anti-immigration. I don't know. But I sort of think you live in this lovely neighbourhood, you're surrounded by other people like you. And then, you know, an Italian family moves in next door. And they're lovely and the kids are beautiful and they speak this beautiful. You go, why would these racists on TV, you know, cares so much about immigration when Alessandra and, you know, whatever, they're so wonderful. Because they literally don't know, they've never been to Bradford, they haven't never been to Birmingham. They don't see what happens to big cities in this country now where there's just a different city to what it was. You know, I remember coming into this country in 1995. I mean, the transformation is pretty incredible. And people call you names for pointing it out, but I've got eyes. I'm sorry. Let's be honest about modern life. For a second, process food, stress, not enough sleep. And whatever we're calling a good night out these days, your liver sits there quietly dealing with all of it while you carry on like nothing's happened. 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Ready to give your liver the support it deserves? Head to dose daily.co/trick or enter trick to get 35% off your first subscription. Your body does so much for you. Let's do something for it. That's D-O-S-E-D-A-I-L-Y. co/trick for 35% off your first month subscription. You've just hit on exactly what I've been thinking over recent months and in fact the past couple of years. I think people's attitudes to this question are determined to a very large extent by where they live. It really is and this is why you have media people, often very influential, quite wealthy media people who live in beautiful parts of London or beautiful parts of the country who say what's your problem. I'm in the fortunate position I guess where I divide myself at the moment. I'm dividing myself between two parts of London, apart in northwest London near to where I grew up, which is very working class and it's gone to shit and then East College where I know someone and I go there quite regularly. East College is beautiful beyond belief. It's like an English village but it's London. It's very English. There's bookshops. You hear English everywhere you go. It feels familiar. It feels comforting. Apparently it's racist to say that but everyone will know what I mean. The other place I'm thinking about is almost 100% non-white. Some people will say that's fine, whatever. You can walk through that part of the of the city and not hear a word of English. I've had that experience many, many times where you have a whole day in town. You go from one cafe to another. I'm usually writing an article here and then doing this over there. You don't hear a word of English. Now we're supposed to think that's wonderful and the great tapestry of diversity but I find it crushingly alienating to not be able to understand what my fellow inhabitants are saying. I find it so heartbreaking and dispiriting. Even in London, you talk about Bradford and other parts of the country where things are radically different but even in London you can go from one suburb to another and the difference is extraordinary. The expulsion of where I grew up, it was 90% English and then there was a smattering of Irish people which was me and my family and a few others. They've all gone. They've all gone. I'm not exaggerating when I say all. They've all gone. I'd love to know where they've gone but they've all gone and now it is Somalian, it's Romanian, it's and you know, I know what the middle class commentary will say. They'll say that's diversity. It's wonderful. Is it? Well, do we have to say that? Well, this is the thing is not to get into the whole issue soon and English. But he wrote an article in which he referenced comments that I made. I wrote a response blah blah blah. But the interesting thing he said is his entire premises, he says, we are the most successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy in the world. And I suspect that if you're Rishi Sunak, that is undoubtedly true. And by the way, it's probably even true if you're Constantine Kiss and living in a nicely fee part of the country. But if you live in some of the parts of London that you are describing, I don't think you feel that way. And I think the reason we're having these all these debates is a lot of people don't feel that this whole thing is entirely successful. Let's be honest. Yeah. Can we just acknowledge Yelifan in the room? Which is it's a class thing? Yeah, it's a class thing. It's no favorite subject. I leave you two working class lads. You bring me back to my living Marxism days, but it is a class thing. And this is touched on something you were saying earlier, Constantine, which is that it's suddenly become an issue you're allowed to talk about, like the people are pitting to and God bless them. Good luck to them. They want to succeed from Britain. I'm all for that. And I think it's outrageous that 1,300 blokes were going to be imported there. But working class communities have been saying that for 10 years. And they were called fascist scum. In fact, in Epping, which is kind of working class done, good. All these progressive activists turn up and literally call the women their Nazis. So I'm glad. Finally, we can talk about it. I'm slightly annoyed that we can only talk about it because the middle classes have decided it's actually a problem. That's slightly there is a class issue in relation to that. But you're right. Depending on where you live depends on how you see this issue. And you know, I was, Francis and I talked about this recently. We met each other at an event. And it's I try so hard not to despair about the state of Britain. I hate, I don't want to be a doomerist. I've never been a London doomerist. I love London. I think London will survive. London has survived plagues and fires and the Luftwaffe and all sorts of things. I think it will survive what's currently happening. But it's it's bad. Just to give you a taste of how bad it is for me. I've never phoned the police in my life. I have phoned the police twice over the past two months. One because I saw a ranting foreign bloke with no shirt on stealing a fork from a restaurant and jabbing it in the face of some young women at a bus stop. So I had to phoned the police and they came and they took him away. And I phoned the police recently because I saw in a Jewish area of northwest London, I saw a gang of young Muslim guys in the middle of the road about one AM. I was coming home slightly worse for work and they were shouting "Allow Akbar" and cars were stopping in front of them as saying "Screw you I guess they were Jewish drivers or whatever." So I phoned the police and said there's a bunch of men making a nuisance of themselves. Those are the only two times in my life I phoned the police and both of them were over the past few weeks. Also over the past few weeks I was walking through Warren Street. There's now an encampment in Warren Street. Some of your listeners may have seen it. I guess illegal immigrants. One of the I was walking past it and one of the men in that encampment showed me his anus, literally. Some upsides. I've seen people walk into a Costa coffee and take food. I've seen it. You see the videos on the internet but I've seen it with my own eyes on numerous occasions. And then of course I go back to my hometown. I go and visit old friends, old relatives and I don't hear a word of English. The convent I was educated at is now block of flats and most of them are inhabited by people who weren't born here. It's relentless. It's relentless. And the thing is that it's so frustrating because I'm not arguing that Britain should be a white nation. I mean I agree with you on the Englishness question by the way but we probably have a lot of times beginning on that. Yeah. I don't think of myself as English. No. My DNA is not even remotely English. It's 97% Irish and there's a tiny smacking. I know where you're going with this. I think though, which is that whatever you've used on that question, the reason we're having all these conversations is the mass immigration is so transformative. Yeah. That I actually resent having having these debates because the one thing I agree with Rishisunak on is I wish we could go back. Yeah. I wish we could go back to a time when no one thought about their identity and their ethnicity. and any of this bollocks. But I'm sorry, you did mass immigration and then you did identity politics and you put those two things together and we are where we are and now everyone has racialized everyone's and now white people are going hold on a second we're playing this racial identity game. Well what about me? It's supposed to be my country. I'm sorry to be frank but they fuck things up because I find myself getting increasingly not nostalgic for the 1990s. I know everyone's not nostalgic for the era in which they were teenagers and whatever but in the 1990s if you look back to it that was the kind of the golden era of racial peace because you'd gone through the 70s and the 80s in the American situation it was the 60s but you'd gone through all those struggles where black people said look please treat us equally we're not subhuman we're normal like you wonderful great victory anti-racism gets instituted bit by bit then you get the 90s and it's pretty relaxed and I remember it vividly you know immigration numbers to Britain were small there were a large number of Caribbean immigrants and Windrush descendants and loads of Irish immigrants uh Greek Italians loads of Indians who were incredibly well integrated Pakistani Muslims less well integrated but it was kind you were kind of getting there to a certain extent ninth the 90s was a relatively peaceful era in that sense and has gone to shit completely really has because now you fast forward 30 years and racial tensions are everywhere the immigration numbers are out of control you have all these little ethnic bubbles and it's apparently racist to say I wish everyone spoke English I wish these women would take off those burkas I wish people would stop praying in the streets like it was Saudi Arabia although in fact they're not allowed to do it in Saudi Arabia but the problem is I consider myself an anti-racist I know that's an old-fashioned term the problem is that the establishment anti-racism used to mean that you approached individuals as individuals you treated them as people rather than as representatives of their race now suddenly anti-racism means you have to accept infinity era trains you have to turn a blind eye to Muslim raping working class girls because you might cause um local disturbances uh you have to say uh white people are lame and boring and they're not very interesting anti-racism has come to encapsulate all these other weird ideologies which we never bought into and I just think we are witnessing a really serious fraying of the social contract because it was never part of the social contract in Britain that British people would go to work every day from nine to five in order to sustain people who were born overseas it was never part of the social contract that you would work your butt off in order to pay for the housing or the healthcare or the education of people who were who came here five minutes ago so the destruction of that social contract is the thing that annoys me I fully agree that Britain can be a pretty diverse place I agree that I completely agree that you can have a black Britain I know many of them all of that right yeah well that isn't just for clarity in case people yeah but it's the point is the point I'm making is I think now you've created this very multi-ethnic society we have to find a thing that we can all unite around and if you don't think you're English then clearly that identity does not work for us to all unite around and that's why it's got to be British that's why yes black Britain black it by the way for soon act the strike so it's a black not a black Asian that would be a bit with a British Asian yeah so all I'm saying is the British identity is the only way to save this country in my opinion I completely agree you know I grew up in a household in London where we weren't allowed to have the British flag my father was quite very very Irish so Brit Pop was a nightmare for us because we all had t-shirts with the flag on it is they get that out of this house so I grew up with this kind of instinctive anti-Britishness and lots of Irish people born in Britain had the same thing where they lived here they liked the country they loved the people they hung out with everyone but they had a residual anti-Britishness for me that's completely gone Brexit was a massive turning point for me Brexit was the moment in which I thought to myself hold on I've got infinitely more in common with English working class people than I do with these twats in Dublin who are trying to overthrow Brexit or try to stall Brexit which is what the Dublin government was doing that was for me was the moment in which I thought to myself right I am I'm a British person I'm proud to be a British person this is what it means to me it means defending sovereignty it means it means the history of fighting for liberty it means the levelers and the charters and George Orwell and John Stuart Mill and all those kind of wondrous figures of history who in my view define Britishness as a culture that loves freedom loves equality and aspires to peace that's how I understand Britishness now that's what we need to coalesce around but instead what we've got and you guys will be well aware of this is this intentional fragmentation of the nation through the ideology of multiculturalism and the problem with the ideology of multiculturalism is not only that it says Pakistanis live here and black people live here and you live here that's bad enough but it also it incites hostility towards British culture because what it says to various fragmented communities it says Britain is a racist country it was born from the sins of empire it's a history that's stews in the history of slavery it's a it's a country that is islamophobic so be wary of Britain it actively discourages integration and I can tell you from my own history and other people will have a similar history integrations hard enough even when it is the value of the nation because an often first generation immigrants just don't integrate you see greek old bloke sitting around in parts of London talking to each other in greek fine no one has problem with that my father's Irish accent is as thick as it is now as it was when he arrived more than 50 years ago because he only talks to Irish people no one really has a problem with that integration generally happens generationally so my generation of Irish people the second generation we're really well integrated the third generation are brilliantly integrated they've all got high-flying jobs and whatever same is true of the Indian community fantastically integrated generationally it gets better and better but then there are some communities where generationally it's not happening so you will meet third or fourth generation muslims who technically speaking are more british than me who wear this these ridiculous nikkabs these bin bags from desert states cover their faces and they got cockney accents but they embrace this kind of hostile culture this culture which is basically a fuck you to Britain because when you walk around the streets with your face covered you are making a statement against the nation you are in my view insulting the people of Britain by saying i'm not going to show you my face i'm not going to be part of your community i'm not going to be part of your everyday life um so people are incited to embrace ways of life that are actively hostile to the mainstream of Britain that's the real sin of multiculturalism is not only that it is separatist and vulcanizing but it actively encourages hatred for Britain and i think we're living with the consequences of that now can i i think everything you said is relevant i also think there's a slight danger of over-intellectualization and i'll say what and i'll go back to class what a surprise but you know you're saying you know they hate Britain or you know they i don't think they really do i think they hate working class people we saw with Emily Thornbury on question time you know that was the sneering contempt yeah and i think the middle class now the the the left now it's so middle class and they've always hated working class people was prepared to represent them but now the mask has really slipped and you look at things like the grooming games would they have cared if that had happened in barns or if that had happened in a nice part woman absolutely they would have done and it would have been sorted but because it happened in white working class communities like Bradford they didn't care they didn't care that cities would completely change demographically because it was white working class they're never going to go there and frankly let's be honest they fucking hate them yeah that's actually true yeah and then when you meet a lot of these MPs and you talk to them you go you may even represent some of these communities how much time do you actually spend there and how much empathy well let's use the word that the left light using and it's not just left it's right as well how much genuine empathy and understanding do you have for these communities you don't you don't i mean some would do some may do but there's a lot of times i go this is a fundamental disconnect and you hang around and you go to the bars or the restaurants or you go to a meeting here or a dinner there it has nothing to do with the lives of ordinary people who have had their entire worlds and cultures and let's be honest about it destroy it and explode it well citizen foster i completely agree with you 100% i've often thought that the culture war is really a class war in drag because what it is is um influential sections of society telling the red the plebs how they should think how they should live how they should shut their bloody mouths about immigration and all rape gangs or what everything else and what you say about the rape gangs is so true because i'm not going to name this person but there was a very middle class journalist quite a posh journalist who you may remember that she alleged that a Tory MP had put his hand on her knee and asked her out for a drink. And it became this huge scandal. It was on News Night, it was on in the Guardian, it was all over the place, all over Twitter. That was at the exact same time that the rate gang stuff was happening and starting to come out. You had a situation where the Boschwell media to use an old fashioned term, it spent more time talking about this one Bosch woman who had allegedly been touched by Tory MP, then they did about the hundreds of thousands of working-class girls who had been raped by Muslim gangs. So this is what we're talking about. And I think you're absolutely right that there is a very clear class element to this. And you see it in the venom that is spat at working-class communities who reject work-ness in its entirety, so they're suspicious of the European Union. We know that the more working-classer community is, that more likely it was to have voted leave. These working-class communities are often very angry about things like rape gangs, their angry about illegal immigration, their angry about our suicidal destruction of our own sovereignty. And they're looked upon as fascists, they're literally called fascists. We have a situation now in this country where the ruling class is I think quite suicidally destroying everything that makes Britain great, which includes sovereignty, the ideals of liberty, the ideals of democracy, the ideals of fair play, the ideals of equality before the law that's been sacrificed at the altar of racialism. The establishment is burning everything that made this country great. And it is largely speaking, working-class communities and sensible voices like you guys who are trying to hold onto it as much as possible. That's why I think the protest in places like Gospur and Portsmouth and other parts of the country where we now have working-class communities actively trying to push back boats. They are so important. Now, people can agree or disagree with these protests. They can say they were a good thing or a bad thing. All of us can acknowledge that some of them are far right and some of them are just little old ladies who went down to the sea and said, fuck off back to France. There's a mix of people, but it's undeniable in my view that we now have a situation where the state is devoting its resources to bringing people into the country, whether it wants to or not that's what it's doing. And ordinary people who have very few resources and no power whatsoever are trying to stop that from happening. This is an unprecedented situation in the history of this country where the state has so savagely neglected its first duty, which is to protect the territory and the people of the kingdom. The ordinary people are having to step up and do it in its stead. And when you see people wading, literally wading into the sea in the south of England and saying to these people on boats, go away, I think people haven't clocked how extraordinary that is and how it speaks to the unbelievable failures of the state. You know, Britain used to rule the waves. Now we can't even stop a dinghy from coming from France. And I think the tensions in the conflict in this country, I'm not one of those people who think we're on the cusp of civil war, but the tensions in this conflict in this country are spinning out of control. And we now have a kind of post-state vigilantism devoted to the protection of British sovereignty where that goes next is anyone's guess. Brendan, always good to have you back on the show. Before we go to questions from our supporters, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be? Oh, wow. God, I always forget that you guys are stepping on the show. You've been on the show for a long time, do you really should remember this? What's the one thing? A few weeks ago, I might have said AI, but now everyone's talking about it. Still not enough, in my opinion. Not enough. I need to get my head around AI, I don't quite understand it. I use it, but I don't quite understand whether it's as scary as people say. What are people not talking about? The trans issue is slightly faded from the headlines. And the reason I'm saying that is only Cassandre Peggy who is a heroine of modern Britain. She's the nurse who was forced by the NHS to undress in front of a man. Her case is ongoing. And I saw a tiny little subheading in the middle of a newspaper the other day, talking about the fact that her case is ongoing. And I thought to myself, we slightly lost sight of this question because we've got so many other things to talk about, like the fact that 800 men from God knows where, turn up on our shores every day and net zero, blah, blah, blah. We've lost sight of the fact that there are still work in class women, in fact, fighting for the right to not have to see some bloke's shriveled knob. I mean, that's a brutal way to put it, but it's true. And I know that was a big issue for a long time and Perth Island, as Britain is often referred to, was pretty successful as kind of putting it to bed, but it's still there. And I don't think we should lose sight of that because it does weave into all the things we've been talking about, which is this idea that work in class communities should suck it up and accept all these people from overseas, and women should suck it up and accept bloke's in their changing rooms. There is this constant, and it all speaks to the erosion of borders. Borders have become so unfashionable, national borders, the borders between men and women, the borders between adult and children, so you now have adults behaving like children and children being expected to take on the responsibilities of adulthood. This kind of collapsing of borders in so many facets of life is something I think we need to broaden out and talk a bit more about and defend the right of nurses, not to have to see a knob when they go to work. Fundamental right. So we can't forget about that. Yeah, it's interesting. I think the borders thing I've thought for a long time, the problem, it actually speaks to the whole Rishisunak debate thing as well, because when you say the word "this ethnicity" means this, you are excluding people, and borders exclude people. And we are an inclusive society, and therefore you are never allowed to say, actually you can't come in here. Whether that's a person coming into a woman's changing room, whether that's a person coming into your country, whether that's a person claiming to be an ethnicity that actually you personally happen to think only includes people of a certain ancestry. That's all terrible because it's excluding people, because inclusion is the great value of our society. We'll talk about that next time, head on over to triggapod.co.uk where Brandon's going to answer your questions. Will Shimphane ever form a majority government in the Irish Republic, and when will a border poll for reunification take place? But they've screwed it up, and they've particularly screwed it up by becoming woke. Shimphane of woke? Yeah, Shimphane of woke. It's really.