Captain America And Political Temperament

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. We're in Bloomsbury and everybody's called Bunny, darling. So please put your hands, well manicured hands, together for the men who explain politics. Somebody has to it's Ian Dunce and Dorian Linsky and it's Origin Story Live Welcome to London's fabulous Bloomsbury Theatre. It's very large, but not as large as our heads. Yes, I don't think either of us are feeling very comfortable about that right now. I feel like some kind of sort of early civilization sort of built these giant stone heads of us. Oh I mean I I'm Ian Dunce. I'm that one over there. The one that sort of look- I mean I look, it's been ten years, so five years, so I should probably get over it, but I just still think that you came out of this a lot better than I did . The beard, I just it's like, it's a beard, it's not like I've been smeared in shit . You've been laughing about it for half a decade now. No, as a treat, we're gonna we're gonna let him get another one at some point. So thanks for coming to Origin Story Live. Our biggest ever . And uh but but um there are some people here who are from not London, um including I think John from Edinburgh, uh who's getting sleeper home, which is uh fantastic. commitment Um so we have to apologize to all of those people because we thought that Bloomsbury would be cool because it's the old stomping grounds of great minds, you know, John Maynard Keynes, uh Virginia Woolf, Lennon, Dickens, Ricky Gerva ise , and the venue for Adele's first solo concert. Okay. So the sky's the look. Have you been on Wikipedia? Hello. I have very much been caning the Wikipedia. But I have just read Matt Goodwin's book , Suicide of a Nation. And I have some bad news because he reveals that London has f allen . London is no longer just a city. It is living proof of what happens when elites in the grip of suicidal empathy take control . We had no idea when we booked. It's it's very embarrassing. But thank you for coming and get home safely. It's my risk. So that was a little spoiler because the first half of the show will be an exploration of the mind of Matt Goodwin. We like to keep these as speakers and his white nationalist bookie work . And what it all says about the absolute state of the British right. That will be about an hour. Then we'll have a break for 20 minutes for drink and psychological recovery. We've got some exclusive Bloomsbury themed merchandise uh on sale. Then after the break, for about half an hour, we'll each choose five movies that we think say something about the themes that we discuss in Origin Story. Now Ian wanted all five of them to be Oliver Stone's JFK. But I I said said everybody knows that you love JFK. Like try just something different. Then that should leave us a good half hour for audience questions because it's a bigger audience and we'd like to have more of your questions. And you can of course ask us the usual questions like how this podcast specifically can reverse global fascism. But if you've got any like light-hearted ones, that would also be good. Because we haven't finalized the plan of how we're gonna do that yet. Ian? Yeah. So it was that you okay. Just still there. Right, yeah. No, I mean okay, so look, this is what I've got this is this is why it's not fair what's happening here. Because we're gonna cut this first half in two. I'm doing the life and times and psychological defects of Matt Goodwin . You're just doing the book. Not just I mean you haven't read the book. Don't say just well about reading. I mean I feel like there's less to cover it. It's very hard to get all of this into half an hour. It's a lot of psychological defects here. Well we should talk about the cycle because basically uh what keeps coming up right this comes up in sometimes on the show and definitely on social media which is like why did somebody go from there to there? Like how were they radicalized? And in this case, I suppose it's three th theories, right? One is that he was ideologically radicalized by writing about the far right and then sort of getting, you know, brainwashed. The other one is he was radicalized by resentment and ambition and things like that . And then the other one is that it's just for money, power and attention. And actually deep down, he's just like a chill multicultural liberal. No, but some people will say that. They will just go, oh, they're just doing follow the money. They're just doing it for money. And it's like, I don't know, man. Like he's there's a certain conviction there. Oh totally. But also why ever just follow the money? Because money tends to flow with other things. This is what we find over and over. Generally speaking, it's actually quite hard to get someone to go against their financial interests. But when their financial interests point in a certain way and their disposition points in a certain way, there's really no point figuring out like what is cynicism, what is, you know, what is their genuinely held conviction. Because if the m if the money's flowing that way, then why not just go along with it? Also, by the way, there's a fourth theory, certainly, about him, which is that he's just always been a c I mean no that I mean that was just to be clear that's basically my thesis is that was that was that Freud or Jung that you got that always been yes. Well I can tell from your dreams that perhaps you have always been like this. It's a piece of shit. Um incredible impersonation. It was incredible, it was quite weird. It was like the ghost Freud slash Jung was here. There is definitely a morality to the story, and it's pretty good timing for it. Because I mean there's a lot of people eating shit right now. A lot of the worst people in the world are eating shit. And he's one of them. Like I mean over the course of the last sort of the last two weeks really, like you know, to see populace around the world just getting found out. At the cut like terrible fucking cost to our society and to lives and to the economy, but they're getting found out. So you've had no plan, you don't know what you're doing, you've basically been having us on the whole time. You're deeply ineffective and incompetent at what you do. Now, here's probably not as important as what's been going on in Iran. But nevertheless , I accept that we're not grappling with the major issue right here. Do we want an hour on the war in Iran? Well exactly. There we are. Exactly. We're all here to have fun. So you know . But what he does do is he kind of like he is a kind of microcosm of loads of the personality defaults of popul ism. And then his failures that we've seen over the last week are also the natural consequences of those defects. So it's quite satisfying in a way, I think, especially after having so many years of just pure morbid horror at the state of the world, to just watch these guys just fuck up really badly and get found out. And that's what's happening with him. And it just it couldn't have happened to a nicer man. Cool. Well let let's begin cradle we're gonna do cradle well not to grave obviously. Jesus. Cradle to reputational grave. Let's just leave graves out of it. But yeah, let's begin at the beginning. Yes, indeed. Well Matthew, Thomas, James, Goodwin. I hate it when people's middle names are just made up of more Christian names. Where it's just like an endless list of fucking Christian names. Matthew Thomas James Goodwin is born in St. Albans in Hertfordshire in December 198 1. In a 2020 Daily Mail article, he said he was quote, raised in a single-parent, workings-c famillasy where money was always a problem. In reality, his mother worked for the local NHS Health Board. His father, who had an MBA and a PhD, was the chief executive of the Greater Manchester Strategic Health Authority. So when he later said my dad worked for the NHS, what actually meant was his dad ran a bit of the NHS, actually a sort of upper middle class family. Graduates from the University of Salford, does an MA in Policalit science,ity Univers of Western Ontario. Does a PhD on the BMP in the University of Bath that he completes in 2007. Actually supposed to be quite good. Well, um I'll tell you who did give it a positive review um B and P activist Eddie Butler oh dear uh one of the people that he uh kind of went undercover with Donnie Brascoed with um and Eddie Butler writes I suspect he has an element of empathy with the aims, if not the means, by which organized nationalism has gone about realizing these aims. Perhaps the hours of interviews he has undertaken has had a Stockholm syndrome effect. And I in no way want to hand it to BMP activist Eddie Butler. But he noticed this in however I mean a long time ago when it's Okay, interesting. I mean like I have to say like for most academics who have read it and came in contact with him in these early years. They sort of think like he was hardworking. The PhD was good. The PhD is really the start of the ideas that he will talk about for it's sort of like the last time he had an original thought, to be honest. But nevertheless, they they have quite high credibility. So I sp I spoke to four people, none of whom will be named for for what we're about to go through, all of whom have worked with him very closely. Um and I don't think I've ever had an easier time trying to get people to speak to me. Like, you know, as soon as you contacted, they're like, yeah, I'll talk, I'll talk, and then you pick it up and they're like, I can tell you what. Like, you know, and off it goes. It was just an absolute piece of piss. So extremely ambitious from the very beginning, that just like you know, he's an extremely ambitious guy, defined by the ambition, would kind of do anything to raise his status and his profile . His behavior is twofold, and this is where I think the moral lesson comes in. It's sort of neediness and victimhood. And this is from the very earliest days. We're talking about the start of his academic career. The neediness sort of showing that this desperate need to get on and then attaching himself to more senior academics, usually with expertise in a particular area that he lacks, specifically statistics. And he will tend to co-author with them , raises himself through association, but then the victimhood is, every time he 's criticized, he takes it as a personal slight. Every time he's not given a job, he takes it as evidence of an academic cabal that's trying to hold him back and of some terrible conspiracy to do with a rejection of his politics, which at this point are just sort of like Well do you know that he claimed that he used to walk around the campus at university, University of Manchester, in a Che Guevara t-shirt? Why? Which just sounds improbable. I think he's going, well, I used to be left wing and he's just like, what is what do left-wing people do? Like I can't I can't believe he actually did that in when this had been like in the 2000s. Jesus. Can you imagine a worse combination of things happen ing. Matt Goodwin and Che Govardo. You'd just be like, you've got it so wrong in so many different ways right now. So he co-authors with a bunch of people. And it does tend to have the desired effect. 2008 to 2010 he's a research fellow at the Institute for Political and Economic Governance at the University of Manchester. 2010 to 2015 he's associate professor of politics at the University of Nottingham. And it tends to work for him throughout higher and higher positions. One of the people we partners with is Rob Ford, now professor of political science at the University of Manchester, and he writes in 2014 with him, Revolt on the Right, Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Brita in. And this is like a very, very well-received book. Its central proposition is that UKIP draws support from older, less educated, economically vulnerable, people who feel left behind by modern society , that this is a distinct group. It's not the dying out of older voters. It's a distinct group that is growing and will wield considerable political influence. In other words, the book, as much as it may not have been fun to read at the time or now, has been completely vindicated by events. He contributed basically nothing to that book. He organized the interviews. That is the one thing that he is credited with doing. He contributed nothing to the intellectual ideas and he contributed absolutely nothing to the deep statistical analysis that went into it. Well that's surprising. Yes. Who would have thought ? I asked the people that I talked to about his abilities with statistical analysis. Remember this is the thing, this is why he gets professor in his name when he goes on the BBC. This is how he sort of dresses himself. This is how he gave himself credibility when he started his own polling company whose polls during a general election were widely reported, despite the fact that they were consistently shown to be the most inaccurate of any polling company. This is what they said about his ability with statistics. Quote, he does not have any clue what he is doing with these numbers. Quote, he was always sketchy on the data . But what he realizes is that the numbers denote seriousness. Like not he doesn't really give that much of a shit about academia. They denote seriousness in the med If you can be the numbers guy, the prof, then that earns you a place in the media. And what he's been noticing during writing this book, they've been talking to an awful lot of UKIP guys, including Nigel Farage, including former leaders , and he is soaking it up like a sponge. He is watching the way that UKIP operated. And UKIP operated in a really impressive way back then that I wish left wingers would pay more attention to. And it was just the basics of there is a booker on eight each program. It doesn't matter whether it's the news, whether it could be like BBC News 24, it could be a regional radio program, whatever. There's a booker there. And your job is basically to be there on the other side of the phone, pick up the phone when you're called, be comp elling, be confident, have someone that will go in, shake hands, not be a nightmare to deal with, deliver your message and go off. I remember working as a journalist at this point, like super junior journalist. If you called up, there was just a number they gave, if you called it up, Nigel Farage would answer and instantly you just have quotes from Nigel Farage. It was that easy. It was not that easy for the Greens, you know what I mean, or another party. That was part of the reason UKIP did so well. He soaked that up. And I think what he learnt then from Farage and from those guys. We always tend to see it as this kind of political change. But it wasn't, I don't I'm not so sure that it was this sort of thing of you know going native on racism. I think it was more like he thought Nigel Farage is very good at channeling people's discontent. I would like to do that too. I think it was the demagogue intuition he saw. It turns out he's absolutely fucking shit at it. But that doesn't matter, right? The intent, I think, was there and I think that's what he got from this period. But there there was that weird bit before though, when he was working with Sayyida Wasi on a working group in Islamophobia, and she said he seemed to care. What's this quote? He cared as passionately as he now talks about Muslims he taught then about Islamophobia. So certainly a lot of people thought that he was a kind of an anti-fash guy. And two people said to me that if the world had turned out differently and it was still Blairites in charge, he would just be a Blair right now. You know what I mean? That it was reading where the room was. But that ultimately the motive was social advancement and social status rather than any kind of political principle. So then for the- they get to the book launch bit. Rob Ford has done most of the work, most of the statistical work, all of the statistical work in fact they get to the launch and uh he convinces Nigel Farage Goodwin convinces Nigel Farage to come to the launch and to speak at it. He gets he's got a link with Chatham House, the most sort of respected think tank in in Britain probably and he gets the largest venue in Chatham House to do it. He invites all the media, there's loads of cameras, there's loads of journalists, the Westminster pack is there. And then just before he goes on, he calls up Rob Ford and says there's no space for you on the stage . And so that launch goes on. There is more. There's literally space, there's certainly space for four chairs. There was another person, the third person there from UGO. If we were like there's no space on the stage. Yeah, I know. Well it basically is this setup. I mean that's exactly how it would have looked. It's like, you know, it wouldn't be beyond someone recognizing what he was doing. And so after not having done the work on the book, he then presents himself to the press as basically basically the the author, if you know, maybe the lead author, but certainly the most important person behind it. He later attaches himself to a variety of academics. You know, writes books with them, writes reports with them, looks at polling with them. I mean it won't surprise you to learn that there are several WhatsApp support groups of these people who've worked with with him . However, he gets to ride the Brexite wave. It's 2016, Brexit happens, obviously like the thesis of that book is like the most compelling story that we're telling at that time. He can coast on it. Huge period of success from 2015 to 2024. He's a professor of politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent. He goes, he's an associate fellow at Chatham House. He's a senior fellow at UK Interchanging Europe. He's a founding director at the Center of UK Prosperity within the Legatum Institute, Legatum. Legatum Instant. Yeah, yeah. I I mean uh they're absolute fucking shoddy bunch of nobodies, but I should pronounce them correctly. Um he does a lot of TV and radio, he does a lot of after dinner speaking. Uh his writing style, however, stays the same. It's just this unbelievably lump and dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-sort of a canter through the most deadened cliches and stock phrases that you can possibly imagine. I mean, I would say that this is something you've gone through recently, but for all we fucking know, it was all written by ChatGPT. Well, I'm going to address this controversy, but I I definitely believe that he had it in him to produce a terrible book. Yeah, fair enough. With his human brain . Don't rule that out. Yeah, yeah. No. Steady on. Yeah. No real original ideas, a pathological aversion to clarity or concision . And this this habit, this perpetual habit, because of you know this this statistical reputation he claims to have of making predictions in the media. Someone told me that the best way to find his his predictions is to Google Matthew Goodwin and then the phrase entirely plausible, likely even. Because every time he says something unbelievably stupid about the future, he says, it's entirely plausible. Likely even. The X. Yeah And of the many things that are entirely plausible, likely even, are that UKIP would get six seats in the 2015 general election. They didn't. That well, he says later that he predicted Brexit, he didn't he predicted Romaine. He says he predicted a Trump victory, he didn't he predicted a Hillary Clinton victory. He says in 2020 that he predicted Trump would win the 2020 election, he lost, although Trump obviously disagrees with that. And in 2024, of course you, and I were reading books about he how he was saying the political realignment had changed everything just before Labour won the general election. At one point, that actually gets so severe that Rob Ford, his former co-author, had sort of attacks him on Twitter after that prediction of the UKIP seats and tweets, definitely not definite, probably not probable, to which he gets a DM from Goodwin um in all caps saying how, dare you undermine my credibility . Obviously what he's doing with these numbers and with these predictions is he's just projecting his views onto what he claims is the British white working class. So it doesn't really matter what people think. All it tells you about is the content of his mind. You know, he likes these things, therefore it is the view of the white working class, the authentic view and political party potential. He hates these things, therefore it is the product of international elites. And so his personality now just resembles a populist one, regardless of the political content. That is what populists do. They project their vision onto, oh, this is just what the people think. It isn't it's what you think as a leader and what you want to do. And you get the same with that combination of neediness and victimhood. You know, when you're like, what is Brexit really, psychologically, a combination of neediness and fake victimhood? What is Trumpism? Combination of neediness and fake victimhood. So his personality is kind of perfect for the politics even before it became useful for him to slip into it. He starts very quickly to believe his own hype. You know, he's it you can see quite clearly at this point. He's lost any sense of humor at all, any kind of humility. He really does think he's the bee's knees. He's losing loads of his friends , his marriage is falling apart. He goes for various jobs that he doesn't get because he's manifestly not qualified for them and decides that the reason for that is that you know there's a cabal in universities, a woke cabal that stands up against people like him who speak the truth and his life basically becomes a series of inquiries as to why everybody hates him. You would think, somebody might think, right, is it what's the common denominator? Yes. Is it me? Yeah. And clearly he decided no . It's all these different people, many of whom don't know each other , have conspired to hate me. Isn't he proof as well? Like you could just see in his face that like you just like one of the worst things you can do if you have any place in public life is to lose contact with the people that will still call you a c You know you know you can see it when you're just like you haven't been called a c recently like you can see it in them you know and they just it does not do any good for the soul you just become rigid and inflexible I'll I'll be that guy I know you will. If he needs help. I know you are. Oh I thought you even need help. I'll do it all day long. No, for him. I will happily tell him that . Like every day I'll just call him up every morning and tell him. And whisisper. Whper. Lovingly. Whisper in his thing. Yeah, but I'm willing to do that. The relationship with Rob Ford finally breaks down shortly after this, but all of the other academic relationships fall away in that kind of scenario until really he's very very isolated. So you get to summer 2024 and he just leaves academia. Basically there's he's not got any more job prospects. I mean it's not quite clear what happens. Like he he removes the university of Kent from his social media account. University of Kent says that he left the university of his own accord. We don't really know exactly what happened. What we know is that once he's out of academia, he gets to make a lot more money because he just s sort of soars into the right-wing ecosystem. And that's where like the story I think becomes really pernicious. Because like there'll always be people like him around. The thing is what does your society do about it? What does your media ecosystem do about it? Do you encourage it? Do you block them? Do you try to find some way of i incentivizing their better instincts? Well, not in our society., no So he starts working for GB News. He does three days a week on doing presenting duties on Jacob Rees Mogg's State of the Nation program. Who does the duck is watching this? Has anyone seen Mog's program State of the Nation? Oh I bet one of you dirty fuckers. Come on, one of you I bet you were just feeling a bit naughty and you were just like, listen , little bit of mug? Little bit of mug? No. No. No. So we don't know if it's good or bad. Yes, who knows? It'll be a mystery to all of us. So he lands in this, I mean that suddenly the money is fantastic, right? Like I mean to give you just a brief impression of how the money works when you give up trying to have any kind of academic rigor and decide that you're just going to say the most appalling right-wing shit you can imagine. Well there's loads of it around. I mean one of the key nodes in this is the hedge fund manager Paul Marshall. He owns GB News. He owns Unheard. He owns the spectator. Why? Certainly not for financial reasons. The spectator was valued at 40 million. It generated 2.9 million in 2022. He pays 100 million for it. GB News made losses of 30.7 million in 2021 to 2022, 4.2 million in 2022 to 2023, just pumps money into it. Just pumping the money in. Another key figure, as the reporting of Peter Gogan has been showing recently, was Victor Orban, who recently got handed his fucking ass . Yes, that was rather good, wasn't it? I hope everybody else had a really quite wonderful Sunday night drinking champagne and watching BBC News. Um Public money in Hungary, an extraordinary amount of public money in Hungary is funneled into think tanks that then reach out into the UK. I mean you look at one one of them's got one percent of Hungary's GDP in it. It's the value of the amount of money which what uh the MCC the I don't want to say it because I'll fuck it. The Matthias Corvinus Collegium. Well what a unbelievably pon cy name in any language. Yeah it's unacceptable. Yeah because they give half a million got hit to the The Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation. Yeah, so that's the organization that funds the Roger Scruton run, right? And then the Roger Scruton one, of course, on the board, who sits on it, Michael Cove, the editor of The Spectator. It's not like it's not like a conspiracy, it's just like swirling pots of infinite money. James Orr, exactly. And they have organized events that Goodwin has attended, paid a salary of up to 10,000 euros a month. Now up to can mean a lot. And I don't think many of us from the people I've spoken to, there's not a lot of belief that it is that amount of money. But there is some money there. And that is indeed why he found himself in Budapest waiting and hoping for an Auburn victory on Sunday night when Auburn got his ass handed to him However, he is having considerable success. So full-page features in the mail, uh his own TV program, tens of thousands of subscribers on Substack, thousands, hundreds of thousands of followers on X, best-selling books, all of the incentives are pointing one way , and he is able to misuse statistics in a just an extraordinary fucking way. So now that complete inability to understand numbers, which I think you'll probably talk about a little more in a moment, it just becomes absolutely poisonous to the public debate more broadly. And he misuses a statistic on census data. This is from this is not from the book, this is from previously. I think he did it in 2024. Census data showed that 3,000 and 76,000 376,000 tenants, the lead tenants in social housing in London were born overseas. He reports this as it quote on GB News, more than 50% of social housing in London is occupied by people who are not British. This is not acceptable. Now I'm not a fucking statistical expert, but born overseas and not British are different things. And that is a very clear attempt to create this kind of racial dimension towards the subject of council housing. It is just taken up. It's all over Facebook. It's reported in the telegraph. It's spoken by Robert Jenrick. It now just won't die. It's just part of the discussion. It's complete and utter nonsense. Invented by him and spread by his employers. You know, you you're criticizing academia, you pull away from academia, academia is the site of this you know conspiracy against you. Yet now you're out of it. Well you're just completely fucking exposed. You know these, numbers suddenly you're just you're primed to be taken apart out there because all the people whose expertise you are hiding behind and able to build a reputation on the basis of are nowhere to be seen. He runs and very briefly he runs in the Gordon and Denton by-election. Someone else who got his ass handed to him. But when he loses, I mean, terrible person to pick, by the way. Because you're like the last thing you, the last person you want to pick in any kind of election is someone who's like been a pundit because they'd have just said all sorts of shit. And as soon as a party's running against you, especially in a by-election web, they can just dedicate everything to it, they're just going to start reading your substacks and listening to your podcast. And that's what Labour did. And that's where they found all the stuff, where he basically said people that don't have children should be taxed as a punishment. You know, and so they just like it was basically just Christmas every day for the Labour research team. You know, well here's this and we'll use it against him, give it to a journalist, and it pretty much dismantles him on the campaign trail. But of course, when he's out, he does not accept that this is his fault. He insists that it is part of a conspiracy by immigrants, specifically Muslim immigrants. The reason the Greens have won here, let's be honest, family voting, otherwise known as sectarianism. Now we can have a conversation in this country to talk about sectarianism and what it's doing to our democracy, or we can pretend that it's not happening. It's clearly happening. If we do not sort this out, what I'm worried about, I'm sure he is very worried about this, given the ongoing demographic changes in our country, high levels of immigration, high levels of demographic change, our democracy will start to look like some kind of corrupt political system closer to Leban on or Sierra Leone than Western liberal democracy. That's what I'm concerned about. A, I don't think he is concerned about Western liberal democracy. B, he needs to get the word liberalism out of his mouth. And see he is a very, very, very sore loser. And that brings us to the I mean we should briefly say his books have been obviously just decomposing in value since he leaves academia. You and I read values, Voice and Virtue. He then wrote Bad Education, Why Our Universities Are Broken and How We Can Fix Them, which you know we did not get fantastic reviews. So that's hilarious book to write. It's like basically during a divorce writing a book called Why Marriage is Broken and Women Don't Understand Men. Like It's like you have to do that before you leave, otherwise it just looks bad. Yeah, well that's it. I've got nothing else here. I don't really ever want to have to do this again. Okay. Well on the on the resentment thing, right, the resentment theory. And I think this is key, what you've described about his personality, is this the Su poppemsose thing in October 2023 he had a debate with David Aronovich, mediated by Alan Rusbridge, and they went off for dinner and they didn't invite him. Right? It's very sensible. And he complained about this on on X and you know it was the sour grapes. Anyway, so the Times did a profile of him and they contacted him and said, there's this theory that you constantly feel like you're being left out, right? And you're quite bitter about this. And he says, yes, yes, I really desperately want to be a professor at an Oxford College in a backwater having zero influence over anything. I really want to go to dinner with those people. Which is weird because in his book he says the elites of Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge control everything. So do they have no influence or like what I don't play that? And he goes, most of these people criticizing me are nerds . I mean it's it's that it's the first accurate statistical thing he said. I thought of that and then I actually came across uh I realized there was this profile that James Budworth had written uh in Prospect, I think, where where maybe I had subconsciously clocked it months ago and and used it. You know Dorothy Thompson's essay Who Goes Nazi? Oh yeah. You love this. This is your favorite dinner party game. It's my favourite. If you go for dinner with Dorian, instead of doing the normal things that people do, he'll be like sometimes, you know, I just love this book where you'd sit around and wonder which of your friends would have gone Nazi in the war. Really isn't. Sometimes the person next to you ask a few searching questions . Do you think parliamentary democracy is incapable of solving the big problems of today? So anyway, she identifies certain types, right? And this is this is, you know, this is not precise, right? It's fake, but it's close, right? The saturnine man over there is already a Nazi. Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. Matt Goodwin is not brilliant, but he is embittered. He was a poor white trash Southern boy, uh no, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. He despises the men about him because he knows that he has had to achieve by relentless work they have won by knowing the right people. He feels this. This isn't true, right? But he certainly feels this. Uh what's the best bit? Pity he is utterly erased from his nature and joy he has never known. He has an ambition bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Oh wow. Unless he invites someone to humiliate him on his own GB News show , she adds . So it's not obviously an exact match for this person she's imagining in the 1930s, but that feeling of like where it's all wrapped up in ambition and resentment and massive chips on the shoulder. That writing was beautiful. Yeah. It's very badly read, obviously. But well done, Dorothy Thompson. A Urad campaign's lighting up a dashboard, but not the pipeline. That's ball spend. And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions. My boss asked for results. So I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had. Impressions. Cut the ball spend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spent of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend 200 pounds on your first campaign and get a 200 pound credit. Go to LinkedIn.com slash lead. Terms and conditions apply. Back in the 80s, one record label conquered the charts and turned outsiders into household names. In the 90s, that label turned rave culture into Smash Hits and owned the dance floor. Discover it all on the brand new podcast. Hit that perfect beat, the London Records Story. Out now, wherever you get your podcast. Right, um so look , I'm gonna talk about the book now. Um it's a book club . Suicide of a nation. Immigration, Islam, identity, which is no relationship 's 2017 book, The Strange Death of Europe, Immigration, Identity, Islam . They're in a different order . So in his boring nerdy old life as an academic, Matt was published by Random House, but he is now with North Star , which uh even though it does literally sound like some kind of Nordic fascist group, is a self-publishing operation whose website has an enticing offer. Picture yourself holding a book with your name on it and thoughts that were once locked just in your he ad . So certainly he's taking the opportunity to unlock his thoughts. So this seems like a downgrade for him with respect to to anyone uh on North Star, but considering he was coming from Penguin, you know. He explains this. I did not write this book for the ruling class, for my former colleagues in the universities. It is not for the BBC or the media commentators who sneer at the people who pay their salaries and refuse to accept their concerns are legitimate, right? He actually names these people at some point . These are the people he'd decided to single out. Keir Starmer, Sadiq Khan, Tony Blair, Emily Maitless, Alastair Campbell, James O'Brien, and the rest . These are the people it's not for, so who is it for? Well, on the dedication page it says this book is dedicated to the forgotten majority, is the majority who forgot to vote for him in Courton and Denton . People who work hard pay their taxes and obey the law unless they were rioting uh outside asylum hotels in summer of 2024, in which case they're just expressing their views. The elites will attack me because I wrote this for you. Well, jokes on him, because I read the book, and I am an elite who will attack him . So I was pretending to be one of his Do you think that your purchase was the moment that it clocked up a little bit further on the charts? Do you feel plagued by this fact? I mean it's not my proudest purchase. And because of various recent things we've been doing, my Amazon algorithm is now just like a disaster. People in the Amazon warehouse who obviously think very deeply about this are just like why I'm dedorian . It's all fucked up. So look when you're writing for the forgotten majority you don't have to bother with boring stuff like research and citations and and so on.. Right It's a 208-page book. Guess how many end notes there are showing his sources? Right. No, there are a whopping twelve, five five of which linked to his own sub stack . He explains, well he's it doesn't matter, it's for a mass audience. Um and his argument is that they don't really care what's true and what isn't. Which is true, because it is basically his book is basically rivers of blood for dummies. Wow. Those are the arguments. So you may have read that the book is full of fake quotations, misinterpreted data, distorted statistics. And I searched a few quotations at random on Google in the Internet Archive where they've got these books for stuff that doesn't necessarily appear on Google. None of them appeared outside of the book. It's like Jesus Christ. Hayek didn't say that. Cicero didn't say that. This political scientist, you know, Walker Connor didn't say that. So you just thought he would get one right just by averages. Well no, because the reason you do well the reason you do end notes, obviously, is because the process is you find out whether you've made some mistakes, right? It's not just, you know, to look thorough, right? You're trying to do it. So journalist and D12s exposed a lot of these errors and guessed that many of them had come from AI hallucin ations, uh which would make sen se. And among the end notes, two of the URLs include ChatGBT. So Goodwin. We're not doing a fantastic job of covering his tracks there. Well he acquired the writing unkind nickname MattGBT and so he invited Andy Twells to humiliate him on his own show um to show otherwise. So look like I said earlier, you know, AI writing is usually blander and sort of nicer, less unpleasant. It's almost like eager to please, isn't it, AI writing? Yeah, yeah. It doesn't have that kind of authentic asshole tang that this writing has. And the writer John Merrick points out, it's really the language of X. It's hysterical, repetitive, hyperbolic cliches, you know. Tim Montgomery, not very left-wing, called for an investigation into this book, and he had actually hired Matt Goodwin to uh an anti-BMP thing back in the day. Um journeys all round with these guys. Goodwin immediately accused him of being a Tory wet infiltrating reform. So that's Harry Tate's criticism. So anyway, look, you might think from the coverage that AI is the issue and it's not, and there are quality writing is not bad. The issue is that it is white nationalism and you know he capitalizes white in a bad way. And it's all the sort of thing that Stephen Miller would write. It's Stephen Miller. It's it's that kind of thing. So I'm just gonna I'm gonna run you through it, focusing on things that I can make fun of. But also telling you, you know, the the the argument which is not going to take very long. So anyway on the cover, if you look at the cover, there's the good old Union Jack. But hold on, it's on fire. Uh-oh . Who would do such a thing to the Union Jack? Well, we're gonna find out . And immediately in the preface he frames it in this paranoid way that people are out to silence him and you can fight back by buying his book. Again, jokes on him because I bought his book. So the in the introduction, right, he basically frames this, the elites are committing national suicide. Britain will no longer be Britain, England will no longer be England or whatever. And you just think it's a bold claim. He's ahead of you. This claim will strike many as controversial, even in century . But if you look with clear eyes at what is now unfolding at blistering speed, it is the only logical conclusion that is le And he says this a lot. Anytime he says he says his claims are undeniable, the only conclusion an honest person can draw, et cetera, et cetera. He said, again, I don't know whether AI does that. There's something very like humanly devious about that. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So basically AI hedges his bets a little bit. Yeah. His. I don't know why I just made AI a guy. But like I know it's AI is a lady . But it does. It's actually quite rare that it would just be like this is definitely that. So really I mean this does sound like his own peculiar brand of deadened prose. Who's hectoring? It's that Stephen Miller thing, isn't it? That kind of like angry hectoring thing. So he paraphrases this horrible word of Roger Scruton's. It's this oikophilia that James Orr was really into as well, love of home. And it's sort of this vague, shared national identity, culture, collective memory, way of life. And you go this is a bit vague. What does it mean? It means being white. Basically . So the phrase demographic replacement appears 26 times in the book. Fucking hell. And it's about how white Britons will become a minority. How does he define white British? You must have two white parents born in the UK. Oof. So really quite stern. Not me, not you. No, we're off. Not many people. Yes. That we know. And and just as an idea, he doesn't see this in the book, but just as an idea of kind of like the I did what is it called a dog, it's not a dog whistle everyone can hear? A whistle whistle. In one of his substats he refers to Kemi Bade Nockers, Olu Kemi Olofunto Adagoki Baidnock. Oh I think we know we know what he's doing there. Anyway, so he says this will change the nature of the country, quote, that gave the world liberty, reason, science, the industrial revolution, the English language, and Shakespeare. Now a lot of people know that the British invented sci ence. Because in ancient Greece, Egypt, China, people they walk around just going, I wonder why that's happening. Guess we'll never know. So it was only the British that made up science . So anyway, it's going to like it become more like Sierra Leone and Lebanon because sectarian politics has never happened in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This will lead many people to leave the country, thus becoming immigrants somewhere else. But that's fine. So anyway, there's lots of block cap sections. So there is one, the truth we cannot say . So he says people are scared of saying this because they'd be called racist. It must be said in that respect he is a fearless writer that he he doesn't mind coming across as racist. So then there is the question they will not ask. I love doing this with a block cap. Yes. Second by second, and I'm quite concerned about it. He says, because again, you might, oh, this is a conspiracy theory. No, it's not. It's an undeniable fact. That the governments of both parties and the rest of the new elite have conspired for 30 years to demographically replace white British people. This is no he keeps saying this is no accident. None of this is happening by chance. It is all part of the plan. But not a conspiracy theory. I mean is there even an attempt to demonstrate that this is the case or just a repeated assertion that it is? There's a lot of kind of I've said it net, I'll say it again. He also says, and this is the sort of early ploy, he says, he's got nothing against immigrants. Nothing against immigrants. It's the people who bring them here that are the problem. And he goes, this is not an invasion, it's a surrender. Although later he does say it should be called what it is, an invasion. So um preface Matt . Obviously didn't hook up with conclusion, Matt. Okay, uh so yeah, so just trotting through this, right? Chapter one, the quiet replacement, this is the greatest. Jesus Christ, are we only just doing the preface so far? That's not it's repetitive, so I will not be going into great depth, right? So there's a lot again, well like shared memories, ancestral core, et cetera, et cetera. The first bad statistics on on pupils who can't speak English and he's counted everyone who can speak in language other as well as English. Yeah, again, like and I don't want to really cast too many aspersions on his statistical abilities. But if you can't tell the difference between can't speak English and speaks multiple languages, I would be concerned about a range of findings. He also uh so he takes this this district uh it's called St. Matthew's in Leicester, which he thinks is too what's cultural. Apparently this is known locally as Little Somil Somalia, Hell City or Mashtown . And I was like, is it? And I looked it up with the source is one daily mail article. Like nowhere else on the internet is anyone referring to it as any of those things. So then he moves on to pronatalism and how to make more specifically white babies. Because the the average white British person is 45, they're very into Facebook AI nostalgia memes. He doesn't say that. That's just my my I'm just making up some data as well . So he supports the two sharp benefit cat because the wrong kind of people are having more babies. It's quite eugenics. Quite eugenics a little bit . It's in Bloomsbury. There's a history of eugenics in Bloomsbury, isn't it? And then he just sort of throws in stuff like, oh, why aren't tal weking about this always why aren't we talking about this? You know and they go what do you want to do and he goes just want to talk about it. So he goes in Hungary and Korea, South Korea they're talking about, you know, this. But the policies don't work. That's the problem. They're obsessed with trying to get more babies and it's not working. But of course that doesn't matter. Just talk about it. And if we don't do this, we will vanish into dust. That's a quote. Like the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, and the Jutes . Okay. R.I.P. the Jutes. I don't know what happened to the Jutes. No, I mean I have no idea, but I'm still that was actually like quite an evocative sentence, so it took me by surprise. Hey jut es. This is chapter two, right? This is the big idea, which is obviously not his. Suicidal empathy. He describes this idea as a deadly new virus, and you can tell someone is very serious about free and respectful debate when they call uh another idea a virus. He mentions this phrase 74 times. Suicidal empire. Are you aware what this is? No. It sounds fucking horrible. Like a hardcore band, isn't it? It's coined by Gad Sad, a or Gad Sad , a Canadian professor of marketing, friend of Jordan Peterson, inventor of the phrase woke mind virus, and frequent visitor, until recently, to Budapest . So you can get the idea. Popular this idea was popularized by Elon Musk . Suicidal empathy is a civilizational risk. So basically it's the latest pseudoscientific way, we've talked about these before, right? To stigmatize progressive politics, the whole project of left -wing liberal center politics has to be given like a new label. Like woke was one, right? And it's anotherwise often associated obviously with the Great Replacement Theory. The idea here is that we care as a nation about vulnerable people so much that we can't make rational decisions about our own survival. Which is certainly what you think of when you think of UK home secretaries. Just this sort of just insane excess of compassion for the underdog. So this isn't really a thing. It's just, it's like one guy's idea. It's one guy's name for something, which which Matt Goodwin treats as like, oh, this is definitely a thing that happens. Do you remember when Donald Trump used to quote that song The Snake about the woman that takes in the snake and then the snake bites her and she goes, why'd you do that? And he goes, ah the snake. It's basically that. It's basically that turned into a pseudo-theory. So anyway, Goodwin blames suicide empathy for net zero, foreign aid, trans rights, hate speech laws, the human rights racket, Ule z, and the national debt . So yes. So basically it's you found your bogeyman and you blame him for anything, right? Okay, so these the next chapters speech themselves, obviously chapter three, mass uncontrolled immigration, uh includes the obligatory fleeting reference to gramshi. Oh good you love that anyone who's heard our socialism season just knows that there's like one thing that the right wing know about Gramsci which is a kind of conspiracy theory. Then the references to virtue signaling and dinner par ties that he doesn't get invited to. Weirdly, he says all this starts with Tony Blair in 1997, right? You can sort of understand why someone on the right might think that. But it peaks with the wokest of them all, Boris Johnson and Priti Patel . most empathetic politicians . Needless to say, like he doesn't clarify different kinds of immigration, he doesn't talk about economics of immigration except to say that it costs us, you know, you know, just to misrepresent them. What he does say though is look, people voted Brexit to lower immigration. Which of course he spent quite a while insisting that was not what it was about. And now it's just like, yeah, that was, that was it, actually. So that's that's cleared up. Then four is broken borders, more of that, a little bit of a conspiracy theory business there. Chapter 5, 2, two-tier multiculturalism. We're all still here by the way. Anyway, so two-tier multiculturalism is basically a list of crimes committed by people who aren't white British in that traditional just saying kind of way. What I do like here, where he says he can't be patriotic anymore, he lists some British things that have been called racist. I enjoyed this. The English countryside, cricket , geology, being nice to others, rolling your eyes dog s , Alice in Wonderland and the royal family. Now obviously I wanted to know who had called dogs and geology racist . But there aren't any sources . So and I didn't want to start googling why are dogs rac ists ? Because you're a you know you're a dog owner and I just I don't think they are racist. I mean that I think that's probably correct. Geology I can't be confident about. I'm not I'm not a geologist, so who knows . Chapter six, the censorship industrial complex. Right, so uh he says poses all restrictions on on sort of uh hate speech and disinformation and so on. Concepts like anti-racism and inclusion are actually ways to silence people, he says. And he refers to a book. And the concept double speak, the concept derived from George Orwell's 198 4. Now by derived, I think maybe he's hinting that he knows that it's not in 1984 and that the word is double think and the double speak is just a different word. Well maybe not. Oh wow. But you know derived from it's a bit like attributed to. You know when at AI, when you're searching for a quote, I found this by searching the quote, it's always just goes attributed to. And I'm like, yeah but did they say it, motherfucker? Like, I know it's attributed to them, and AI is just like, who knows ? People be saying things like. So the victims of this include uh Lucy Connolly, who tweeted about burning down asylum hotels, which even Goodwin admits is highly offensive. Oh well, can you imagine? She shouldn't have gone to jail. Um, and Donald Trump's claim that Europe is facing civilizational erasure due to immigration. And Goodwin goes, even this would be considered right-wing and extremist. Jesus. Even something the president of America said. That's crazy. Chapter 7, as we already know, London has fallen . Do you remember that one? You blog you actually you blogged about it. Did I? Because his substack is paywalls, so we couldn't, so I had to read you making fun of it. He took a trip into London. Yes. There was a security tag on the coffee and he decided the world was over. It was a pint p pints are eight pounds. There was a Q. Yes. It was really weird because it wasn't really about like, you know, multiculturalism or something like that was it it was just like he got really free he I think he tried to offer his seat to someone on the train and some something happened and then he thought London is falling. And I think what must have happened is just that he acted like a fre ak and they they reacted accordingly. You know, and he just decided this is awful. I just love the idea of him looking at this coffee with uh uh with the tag on it and just going, oh London has fallen. Like I think maybe you should just do this regularly. Every time there's some like minor irritation in the uh in the street. So wait, is this in the book? Does he put that trip in the book No, he do?esn't. No, I'm just mentioning it. But just to let you know what how what it takes for him to say that London is over, right? In London, all the poisons I have described in the book, porous borders, identity politics, elite self-hat red, and a total disrespect for the majority have could uh combined in one place, possibly this theatre. Um I hope the rest of the country doesn't go the same way. Um in the world's best cities report, London by the way, it's just been ranked the best city in the world for the 11 th year running. So you know , potato potato . My favorite bit in this is is a little subsection called Block Caps, Death of the Cockney Which is a which is a concept album by madness I think and he basically says it's ethnic cleansing of cockneys . Who basically moved out to mostly moved out to Essex a long time ago. I've got relatives who were like used to be East End and then they moved out to Essex. That's ethnic cleansing Matt. Anyway, chapter eight, we're almost, don't worry. Chapter eight is how to save the country, uh, which is redundant because Liz Truss actually wrote a book called How to Save the West. So that includes the country. And she's very efficient. So presumably that's been done by now. Matt tells us that Britain stands at a fork in the road and we cannot kick it into the long grass. Oh no . You must on no account must you try and kick a fork in the road into the long grass . You can't do it . Uh down one road, fragmentation, sectarianism, segregation, instability, division, and relentless chaos, if not the eventual collapse of our country. Presumably that's the what was it? Probable Probable if not that you definitely not definite probably not probable. Yeah. Could be the eventual collapse of the entire country. Down the other, he says patriotism, duty, and faith, but it's ethnonationalism. And since apocalyptic declinism, it's like Britain is not yet dead, but it is in mortal danger. There's so many books, I've read, as you can imagine, with the End of the World book, I read so many books where people would push a particular political message just going, time is running out, but it's not too late if we act. So how do we get out of this pickle, Matt? A full moratorium on immigration, and he cites that bill Calvin Coolidge signed, the Immigration Act of America in the 1920s, no one, Stephen Miller's obsessed with, which is the reason why uh many Jewish refugees from Europe uh died. Um so he likes that. Leave the ACECHR, repeal the Human Rights Act, obviously, enforced assimilation. Jesus, what does that mean? Do you have to have babies with him? Things like like Burke . But it's like no, but you know, just grim financi ally stuff. N D E I, which in Britain is called EDI, but obviously he's America brain now. Deny benefits to anybody who was born abroad. End all foreign aid. And then he never says it. It's unspoken. But it's basically for reform. Like it's so like, well we've got to get the right people in charge. And he never actually says, I am standing for reform. Because he wrote this before his political adventures. So anyway, I found a really good critique of this argument. Because it's it's all basic, it is, as you can see, almost note by note rivers of blood but without you know right although you know you know power didn't use chat gpt to get the Virgil quote so you know it's got that going for him. See, I was gonna say rivers of Bodlo is better written, but I just think I just don't need to offer offer that much to power really. I might just say they're all bastards. I mean it is better, but you don't want to be going. See what you like about in a when When it's quite right. When you've read the kind of grubby, shrill, X-brained version of it, y you know, you do you do kind of think, well, well this is like when we did the book on fascism and I spent like about a month being like, you're so lucky that you got Mussolini . And you really were. For that month, I was genuinely like, God, I wish I was really. It's all context, isn't it? It is, very much so. So anyway, good critique of this argument and this way of thinking. The writer says, mainstream parties are lumped into a single corrupt and out-of-touch elite and are all the same. Whereas populist right parties portray themselves as outsiders, underdog parties that represent the true voice of a silent majority and the only organizations willing to address sensitive issues such as immigration and the integration of Muslims. The writer goes on. Few serious commentators cling to the bankrupt idea that Islamophobia is not an issue, and the more we stoke public anger and distrust on immigration, the more we threaten the stability of our political system . So that was uh Matt Goodwin in the early 2010s , uh ripping apart future Matt Goodwin. Like in the movie like Looper or something like that. So you know the whole kind of if he was always like this, that was not what he was saying. He seemed to be attacking the kind of people that I mean it does feel like this was a real turning point the last sort of three, four weeks for him. Like the guys that are turning against who's there's one person that backed him up, hold on. Yeah, it's Alison Pearson . It's like the the absolute like emperor of nonsense is the only one that was still like, no, I think this guy's fine. But outside of that, the thing is I think that they really wanted him for that professorial role. I think that they thought it was valuable. It's not like populism's got like a lot of intellectual titans just ready to go off the shelf. You know what I mean? Like they needed someone who had some kind of credibility, who could go on the BBC, who had that professor in front of his name. And he just sort of got sloppy and lazy and was the victim of his own detachment from academia. The effect of like his sweet spot. The truth is the more cynical he was, them when I really despised him was actually before he came out from the other side of the mask. You know, is when it was all hidden behind the data, or it's not me, I'm just a objective poster. You know, this is just what the people are saying or what the parties need to do. He was much more dangerous then than when he took the mask off. You know once he takes the mask off you're just like, oh you're just another nutter. Well also he's deeply I mean that goes without saying but he's deeply unpleasant and that is you know that is part of the the right that you're seeing um the far right you're seeing like in America where being horrible is the thing and it's quite interesting someone like James Orr whose views are not too similar to Matt Goodwin's but he just wouldn't say it like this and he's got this very kind of swung of posh charming manner, you know. Whereas with Matt Goodwin, you just think he's not one of those people where you just go, oh but he's nice when you Yeah, I bet he's nice if you go for lunch with him. Like I bet he's not. But it's almost like unpleasantness has become his thing and he's done that that which is always the danger with sort of demagogues where they're meant to be kind of on your side. I'm on your side. But if he just comes across as like really sort of gloomy and apocalyptic and horrible, that does work for some people, but it's limit it's you know its reach is limited. Yeah and even like Donald Trump sorry again hand it to Donald Trump people you gotta hand it to Enoch Powell, the guy for the BMP and Donald Trump. Who knew it was going to go this way? All better than Matt Goodwin. No, but you know, Donald Donald Trump obviously it, you know, there is all that incredibly obnoxious thing, but there is that there was that kind of humor that appealed to some people, that he had a sense of humor. There is no humor here. There are no jok es in this book. All those jokes I had to add . And in fact, if he'd have let me do comedic footnotes , I think that would have improved the book quite a lot. But yeah, so he's just this kind of gloomy, hectoring , you know, like Stephen Miller, just a kid who projects unpleasantness and doesn't wrap the ethnonationalism in anything else. It's just here it is. Be more white. Yeah. There's a test here right now. I mean we we'll see it. Like the initial signs are actually pr surprisingly good on some kind of like line being held within that part of the right on the base like just are you getting even the basics of intellectual inquiry correct? Like are you just doing the most rudimentary process? But if it isn't held, and I don't think it will be, I mean he's can he is a completely a man without shame. You can see that by virtue of his response to these questions. The fact that he would even put out a I mean you know you would just do at least some cursory checking of your book before you release it to the world. There's no shame there. And so when people aren't held up on shame, when they're not challenged, standards just degrade and degrade and degrade. So this is an opportunity here, and it doesn't really matter what sort of liberals and lefties and everyone else thinks about him. It just makes no difference. What matters is how is this kind of process perceived within the right. And the fact that there's been some kind of kickback, the fact that he just he was just too shit at it to not turn into a joke. The glee, and this is part of the thing of just like not being a good bloke ultimately, that the glee with which his colleagues on GB News turned against him and set up pro like segments within his own channel to mock him on the basis of it indicates that they're all sat around being like oh it's about time you know he got a bit of trouble there so on that basis you think well maybe you know maybe this could be a moment that actually some kind of minimal standard is maintained on that side of things. That is unlikely. I accept that. It's the most optimistic thought I've had for six years and I can see that it's not very convincing. Could he be home secretary at one point? Now I just think actually no, I don't think he actually has those political chops at all . Which is not to say bad things can't happen. Sometimes bad things do happen in in the world of old politics. But yeah, there is some I you know what, yeah, like I said, it feels like the sort of wheels have come off a And this book is so mask off that there's really no denying it. And then the next time he runs, people will just be able to quote lines to him. And people will go, huh? You can't kick a fork in the road, it's a long gr ass . And he'll lose in a landslide. Because people don't like mixed metaphors. Right, should we leave it there? Let's do it. We'll see you in about 20 minutes after the break. Thanks, guys. Changes in sexual performance are more common than most people realize and support doesn't need to feel awkward. With Med Express, everything happens privately online. Start by completing a short consultation reviewed by UK registered clinicians. If eligible, treatment is delivered discreetly to your home with ongoing support whenever you need it. You're not alone in this. Visit MedExpress. .co uk slash podcast to learn more. Wanna know the real story of how Oasis made Britain mad for it? How friends turned us on to coffee culture and super layered hair? The secrets of nirvana, train spotting, gay hookups, Diana's revenge dress, and what it was really like to be a spice girl? Plunge back into the decade when the world fell for Cool Britannia, Bumster Jeans, and Lemon Hooch with Talk 90s to me. Listen now And if you use Spotify, you can watch the whole show too. That's Talk Nineties to Me out every Monday. The United States is the weirdest country in the world right now, and it doesn't make any sense to anyone. No, it doesn't, but wanna make it a bit less confusing. Oh, I do. Good. Well our podcast can help. It's called American Friction and it's out every Monday and Friday. We discuss all the big news from across the pond and explain it all with world leading experts. That's American Friction. Listen right now, wherever you get your podcasts, right now . American Friction Right. I love the sound of all of you opening your beer cans at the same time. So welcome back. Um I think we need a mind bath. After our immersion in the head of Matt Goodwin. Um I saw my daughter's here tonight and I was speaking to her in the in the break and she went, I didn't really know much about him. He's terrible. So job done, I think. What we're going to do now is we're just going to choose five movies that we think speak to the themes we explore on Origin Story. And I want to suppose these are not the best political movies, they're not our absolute favour ites, they're not even in order of preference, but they're ones that sort of tell us something about how politics work and the kind of bigger ideas we think about, we talk about. Because for example, I would like happily, if it was my favourite, I'd have like lots of 70s paranoid thrillers, but actually I think seventies paranoid thrillers are quite a bad influence on politics today. And the perhaps we don't need more people who think the parallax view is how the world works. God. I can't think of anything worse than be trapped in a room with you for an hour talking about seventies paranoid thrillers. Oh but actually maybe that's my eleventh favourite or yeah. Well I don't want to be trapped in a room talking about paranoid thrillers. I wanna I wanna know where the exits are. Ian, would you like to get us started? Yes. Number five in the list of uh incredibly resonant political films for this podcast is Star Wars The Empire Strikes back . Thanks. And the reason is that it turns out that our podcast is fundamentally about daddy issues. Oh that's good, yeah. You think it isn't, but it just is every single fucking episode. Like the amount I I started to go through the list and I got bored after a while, but it's Churchill, terrible dad, Mark's difficult relationship with the father. Well someone that I can't mention because we're gonna do them in the following season. Uh Elon Musk, not a great dad. Lasky had a difficult time with the father. Russell Brand that that was actually probably like the worst dad we'd come across the whole time. The only one who had I think it was was it Gorbachev who had like actually a decent relationship with the dad. Great dad, that was why he thought things would just work out. Yeah. So you don't want your dad to be too good. Well I was sort of thinking about that like with Churchill or something. I was like maybe if the parents had been nicer to him, he wouldn't have had that drive, you know, that would let him to perform when he needed to perform. So you'd be like, well, you know, people would always have that thing of like, should I go back in time and kill Hitler when he was a baby. It's like, no, but maybe you should go back and traumatize Churchill as a child to make sure that you get a good war leader when you really need it. Yeah no that's So like back to the future, but all Marty does is traumatize children . That sounds great. It is kind of incredible, right? Like when you get to it, you just think like it's amazing how many shit dads there are. And I think especially shit dads, it's not exclusively as you can tell by that list , but especially difficult relationships that fathers have with their sons. And it's just such a recurring theme. And you see it come up over and over again. And of course when it's politics, we never really talk about that stuff. Even in Origin Story, we talk about it for one or two lines and then move on. But you just sort of it's it's amazing how much m damage men do So who's the bad dad in this situation, this movie here? I don't like you saying the word bad dad and making eye contact with me, it turns out I find that quite annoying. Okay, there is a bad we're not gonna say who it is, but there is a bad father. Yeah. No, I'd say that that's a very poor father-son relationship in that film. I think I've got to the heart of it there. Yeah. So my one, my first one is gonna be uh Bob Roberts. Uh it's a Tim Robbins movie from 1992. Have you ever seen this? No, never. I was obsessed with it at the time. So Robbins plays a folk-singing businessman who runs for the Senate in Pennsylvania and his democratic rival Brickly Pace is played by Gore Vidal. And you've got Alan Rickman in it, Jack Black, it's it's uh it's very good. And his character is the it's sort of the idea is based on d on Bob Dylan. It's almost like a right-wing Bob Dylan. So he's almost like My Land, Wall Street Rap, Times Are Changing Back, that kind of thing. And partly based on the Dylan movie Don't Look Back, it's a mockument ary. And so there's obviously some spinal tap influence as well, but it's about this kind of British documentary maker tracking this guy and he captures some of the bigoted things that they say in private but not in public. And there's some weird shit like it ends with a failed assassination attempt that turns out to be a hoax to help him win the election. And obviously when Trump when Trump was shot Tom Tim Robbins had to get on, you know, X and go, please don't think this is a conspiracy theory because of a conspiracy because of Bob Roberts. So what I think it's really interesting is this is about right-wing populism. Um not one not the first film about right-wing populism, but quite an early one in the sort of early days of conservative talk radio, you know, Rush Limbaugh, paleo-conservatives like Pat Buchanan running for president. And it's about subverting the gestures of the left, like you po you're a rich guy who poses as a countercultural outsider who's going to shake up the system. It's also about the trivialization of campaign coverage and the truth getting drowned out and Gor, you know, Gore Vidal is sitting there just trying to talk about policy and stuff and it's completely, you know, left behind. So I think it's really pressing about Trump and Tucker Carlson. There's certain figures, quite a lot of figures that you can see in there. And I totally forgot on this until I looked it up. In the end he wins the election by 52%. Oh no. The curse number. The curse number. So even numerically it is a prescient movie. Hmm. Oh, this is going to be annoying, isn't it? Because now I'm going to have to watch. I don't really... Are any of the films that you're going to read out actually known by most people? Yes. I'm sorry it's not the Empire's Drive. Not everything's the Empire's Drive's I really feel that we're operating in a really different cultural space right now. Oh now I wish I'd gone more highbrow like the Battle of Algiers and Zed and things like that. There's a French film coming up, I promise. Oh good. Is it the French subtitle version of The Dark Knight The Chevalier Noir Okay Okay, so there is a line in Batman Miguel's that I think is like incredibly profound and beautiful and people don't give enough credit to, which is when he says, it's not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me. And then he fucking jumps off a building and flies above a bunch of people that are intoxicated by fear gas as a huge bat and scares the shit out of them for basically no reason at all. But consistency is not really what you're necessarily looking for. But what it's it's that thing that we keep on finding over and over again of trying to get in someone's head. Yeah. And I think people are sort of obsessed with it. They talk about it all the time. Is it cynicism or is it stupidity? I kind of find like I can't help that binary in my writing. And yet over and over we find that it's just not really one of those things. Or you couldn't ever safely say that it was one of those things. The only way of assessing someone, it' justs what they do. And you kind of it's quite a reassuring conclusion to come to in the end. You sort of like it just doesn't really matter. Like who really cares? We can judge them by what they do. And if they start writing the kind of things that you just read in that book, you're like, well we can judge you on that basis. Right. You know, and if they start behaving in a mendacious or a lying way, if they start beating on minorities, I am just past the point of caring whether they're cynics or whether they're ignorant . I just really urgently desire to judge them for their actions. And Batman taught me that. Well I'm glad you said Batman begins, because as we know from Origin Story, uh Morris Glassman likes The Dark Knight and Stephen Miller likes the Dark Knight Rises. So you chose the safe one. I think to be fair, I do think every single one of these films is deeply re actionary. It's just that they're very entertaining. And I have almost no moral standards once I'm entertained. I'm just like, oh, that's great. Let's just do more of this shit. Yeah. Beat up, you know, completely powerless, poverty-stricken people on the streets while doing nothing to deal with capitalist inequalities. That's absolutely fine. You don't I've got to say though, you do you want your comic books and your movies to be about somebody who's just like, well perhaps if I invested in more social housing . Like if Bruce Wayne were real, that's definitely what you want him to do. But in that format, would it be as good as when the big truck flips over. No. It wouldn't. Entirely correct. Okay, so I do have one in this vein later, but I'm going to save it for variety. So next one is Rustin, which is a movie from 2023. We talk quite a lot about these people who managed to combine idealism and pragmatism. Jean Monnet. Jean Monet, the kind of the father of European Union. And this is the story of Bayard Rustin, who organized the March on Washington in 1963, played by Coleman Domingo. It's written by the same guy who wrote the Harvey Milk biopic milk. It's also kind of about a an you know an idealist who gets things done. And it's really good. I prefer it to say Sel ma, because it's almost like the behind the scenes version. It's really about like the complexity of this movement. So it starts in 1960 with uh Roy Wilkins played by Chris Rock and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. played by Jeffrey Wright, you know, these senior uh black politicians, pressuring Martin Luther King to drop Rustin. Because he's too he's gay, he's kind of he's sort of too fiery they think he's kind of gonna get in the way of the movement um and Martin Luther King does drop him you know and feels really bad about it and then sort of brings him back in and he helps and he's the guy that puts the march together. He's the one that kind of really, you know, promotes it with Philip Randolph and gets King on board. And it's about the importance of the organizer behind the orator. A lot of the great people talk about, and that can be Martin Luther King or that can be uh Malcolm X or you know quite a lot of people we're really talking about the person who makes the wonderful speeches, who is the figurehead of the movement. Meanwhile, there's somebody else there in an office with loads of phones ringing, sorting out the logistics, and it's really good at basically showing this is how they put on the march and there's this lovely bit right at the end when everybody else goes off to the White House and Rustin uh stays behind to clean up with the volunteers. And it's just really unusual to have a a political biopic about the guy that you don't notice but that he was doing all this kind of essential work. And he was a mixture of pragmatism and idealism. You mean just by virtue of being an organizer basically Extremely principled, extremely kind of, you know, extremely passionate. But just very, very good at like, okay, right, so we're gonna need to sort out like hot dogs for everybody. Literally things like that. How we gonna how are we gonna get every crowd safety, things like that. And you people don't normally make films about like the organizers. It's just a strange distinction I find like in politics. People really break down quickly on it. And you usually get it when when you're the you despise the government and you're basically talking with colleagues and allies about how do you change it. And people that are of your disposition, you'll see them break down those, down that kind of division very, very cleanly indeed. Certain people that are just like, doesn't matter, doesn't really matter what the principles are. All that matters is that we can win. They're highly practically minded. They're really methodological. They're operational. They just want to activate and get on with it. And then there's a lot of people among activist groups in particular that are just very idealistic values-based people and they just can't really make any sort of sacrifices. They can't really make too many compromises. If they say one thing on one subject they don't like, they're unable to get behind it. And I just find that distinction so unbelievably tiresome because like most of the time you just think I want the values and I want someone who's going to pursue it and who's going to be able to actually activate it and do something about them. And you're always trying to chisel away that distinction. And so when we come across these guys, especially like that Keynes episode, I remember like each time he just comes up with this idealistic solution, really thought through, it gets knocked back by really quite deeply mediocre minds. And at that point he can help a lot of people prevent terrible outcomes from taking place. But instead of wallowing, he just sits there and comes up, okay, so how do I come up with solutions that are going to address those political sense? It's just such an attractive personality type. Next film. Oh right, yes. You want me to shut up. So uh Le Belle Époque, this is my this is my high class choice. Um this is uh it is a French film . It has subtitles . There's like one French person in the middle. It's like, yes, fuck yes. It's tremendously beautiful film and it's very strange. It's sort of about this um the 60-year-old Hagar guy he fucking hates like digital technology. Oh, this movie. Yes, yeah, I know this movie. We both saw it right. We discussed it once, yeah. And he's sort of dreaming of when he was in his twenties and the night that he first met his, I think, first wife. Um and there's a company that can put together almost like a stage version of a period and of a time for you to live in it. And they'll hire actors to play this person. And this they hire an actor to play the wife and he's sort of falling in love with her. But then it's it's very convalent. It's basically a sort of French farce really but it's deeply embedded in this idea of like nostalgia and what nostalgia is for some reason Paris really triggers the idea of nostalgia there's that um Woody Allen film about nostalgia that's also actually covers the period, the Bell Epoch, in it. Yeah. And it and it sort of plays in that idea of like what what how you can get trapped by the past, which is at the heart of like many of our political problems, like when nostalgia turns quite negative and reactionary. But then also like how you have to recognize how alien it is. And like in Origin Story, we're in this very weird relationship with the with the past that I think you specifically get as journalists looking at history . And like so lots of the time you'll when when you send something that you've written about history to a historian, one of the things they're gonna they're gonna need to tell you, which is the correct word of things, is like, well it's not a batten. You know it's not like there's just a coherent idea of like for instance what liberalism is or for instance what this or fascism is even you know and it just got passed through by people who are just like you and now the idea has reached you. These people are completely different. They're thinking in fundamentally different ways. You know, they're alien to you. And when you project backwards, you sort of fictionalize the way that history really was at the time. And that's true. And then it's also true that as you yourself have like said before I got the idea from you disastrously um there's this sort of mind virus yeah exactly yeah yeah there's this sort of temporal egotism to us of this well no one's ever gone through this before, no one's ever had it before no, one's ever faced these kind of situations. This is the first time. As if we're the first people inventing these issues every moment. When they're not, every time you go back, you just see the same discussions, the same personality types that you instantly connect with people around right now, the same sort of dynamics. And so you're always trapped in that very strange thing about the past of it feels very alien. And yet it is very much like where we are now. And that odd relationship we have with it is like very ably done in the story of this guy that's basically just trying to get laid. It's a it's a it's a very good movie. It is fantastic. It's a very beautiful movie. Okay, so my uh popcorn one is Captain America Civil War. 2016. So look, Marvel does give some of its villains like Killmanga and Thanos the best version of their argument. Like even Thanos is just like, there's just too many people . What if there were half as many people? You know, and you kind of you know and it I mean I wasn't just like oh he's got a point but you know there's some there's uh there is some sympathy to it. It's not just like I'm a crazy man who, you know, who loves evil. But obviously they have to lose because they're the villains. So I think this is the only both sides movie where the villain is actually the conflict. The fact that they can't get on. So uh you know the the this is plan the And so it splits the team between the conformists and the rebels, and the conformists are led by Iron Man and the rebels by Captain America. And some other stuff happens. But I think it's really good on how friends and allies can fall out over one issue and end up fighting each other. That does happen quite a lot in episodes where these politicians that were so tight, you know, they end up I mean I'm just at the moment I'm reading quite a lot about 1930s, 20s and 30s British politics. And it's kind of just mad how many alliances there are that you'd wouldn't expect. You know, Noe Bevan was a supporter of Oswald Mosley before he became a fascist. And then obviously , you know, few few years later it's like very much not on the same side at all. And yet all the different ways in which people can kind of be allies and then become opponents and and sort of vice versa. Sometimes you get enemies that get brought together. So I like that. I think it's got real sort of compassion for that and the fact they both have a strong case, but they are irrecon irreconcil able. And I think it's also good on how temperament and personal loyalties and class , you know, identity affect your political decisions. And I know that historians evade down on the great man, you know, theory of history. Now I wouldn't call it the great man theory of history. Call it the good good quite good man. No, but like the person alities, when we're telling these stories over and over again, it's just like, oh, if you had a different person here in this place in this time things would have been very very different. If you'd had different leader of this party, if you'd had different people um you know we came up doing partition wasn't it just that sort of that so I actually I I believe less in the that it was Donald Trump. Yeah, they're making a very good argument for agency. Yeah. And again, I wouldn't call him a great man. But you know, like a very important person without whom, you know, you wouldn't or Nigel Farage, you know, these right-wing movements, they often need the right person who can somehow charm a certain bunch of people. So yes, so that is why I commend to the House Latin America Civil War. I th I think you see this like in in organizations all the time, that the character of the people at the top has a real impact on the culture in the organization. If they're decent, if they're polite, if they're kind, if they're just basically trying to get away with like the laziest possible response and and the morally laziest response sometimes. Those values dribble down through the organization. It's inconceivable to me that the same doesn't happen to a country and I think that's one of the things you see in the US. And that actually you would say like, you know, e even you can be very disappointed by Starmer but moving from someone like Boris Johnson to Keir Starmer provides you with some kind of improvement just by virtue of the personality. The years like when I was a Marxist everything was a structural explanation. Yeah. You know, it was never, there was really no role for people in history. And then I remember, it was way after I got over that, but like I remember being like a journalist in um it was during the vote um for the Syria intervention the basically like Ed Miniban's team that just didn't really when they went in in the morning they really weren't intending to stop it. It was an amendment on the UN and it was all just that febrile commons sort of thing and I remember afterwards there's a sort of room just above the back end of the commons where the press huddle is and the government's press huddle was there once the defeat had happened and the Labour one was there. And the Labour guys look absolutely fucking stricken. They look like as broken as Michael Gove and Boris Johnson did the day after the Brexit vote when they thought, oh my God, what the fuck have I done? And I just thought, oh God, it's just fucking chaos. Like, you know, there's just no, like, no one's in control of this thing at all. Like, you know, that decision, that decision not to go to war in Syria led, I think gave Obama the excuse not to intervene in Syria. It knocked over a series of dynam of dynamos, of dominoes that were absolutely crucial. And it was basically happening by people who didn't even really think they were going to do it in the morning. It was down to their temperament and to chaotic things. And after that, when you see that kind of stuff up front, it's really hard to come up with this sort of great big structural explanation for what happens. It's a much more terrifying chaotic scenario than that. So Edmund I think is Steve Rogers and West West Streeting is Tony Stark. I think that's the best way to understand what's going on at the moment. That's good. Okay, uh penultimate choice is idioc racy. wrong in the future and is it through oppression or is it just through us being infantilised by pleasure? But the proposition in idiocracy is just like because we're basically just going to celebrate the stupidest possible thing at any given moment. It's a much more cynical vision of political dysfunction. And unfortunately it is by some distance the most accurate appraisal of where we're at. And what is extraordinary to me, and this is like the depressing side of Origin Story. It' likes almost as in any episode it could be anti-vax , it could be climate change denial, it could be Jordan Peterson, it could be Matthew Goodwin. It doesn't matter. It's like the point that they or the I or the movement start saying stuff that's really quite unbeliev ably stupid, its popularity just fucking soars. You know? And that's the it's suddenly it's as soon as they say something like that, something really venal and stupid, the next sentence is always, and then they started making 12 million a year on YouTube. You know, and you' justre just like it's like how? Like how is it the same despairing fucking story over again when you divide and when you give very, very rudimentary stupid explanations, you tend to succeed in a manner that you hadn't done before. Now that's I think that's like the most negative finding I have of this whole experience of doing the podcast. And it is basically tallies with pretty much the closing message and indeed the opening message of idiocracy. Yeah, because that's quite a controversial film now, though, because it Well because of the kind of uh because people it's it's uh eugenics because it's all about how the stupidest people have the babies. Too seriously. But as this is a part of London with a strong heritage of uh eugenics which seemed like a good idea at the time. Um you know maybe it's okay to to sort of bring that up. But no, it's weird how much it shows politics is is like like wrestling. And then you literally see the way that like Trump and Kashmir and Mark and Rubio they're literally at the wrestling and their whole thing is that. I felt really vindicated by that, by the way, that I always thought that UFC stuff just looked fucking horrible and like a bit wrong and I had mates that were kind of into it and I was like well I guess I I never liked boxing either so maybe this is just me being a kind of a feat metropolitan liberal and it was like no turns out that is just liked by all the worst filth in the fucking world. Like I thought I was wrong briefly, but it turns out I wasn't. It's it's the best feeling. I was right actually, my gut prejudice. Okay, uh my uh penultimate one, all the president's men, uh 1976, Alan J. Bakula , uh just an amazing director um also did parallax for you and actually Robert Redford kind of rules this right because there's the candidate three days at the condor captain america winter soldier which he's only in because of those earlier movies, you know, it's like this kind of in-joke. Um so obviously this is about Bob Woodward and Carl Burstin's Washington Post investigation into Watergate scandal. But you know, it actually ends, and I often forget this, it ends with Nixon's second inauguration. It's like 18 months before he and the main action ends and then it does a little kind of montage. But it's 18 months before he resigns. So I think it's relevant for a couple of reasons. One is it's it's a paranoid thriller which uses those skills, but the conspiracy is real . It's not a conspiracy theory. Yeah. And it's also about this sort of hard slow work of investigation and the importance of like patient, resolute journalism. You don't find the smoking gun and you bring down the bad guy overnight. And I do think obviously a lot of the best movies about journalism are all are very political . And it's that we do all have an urge for that sort of simplicity, the simple solution. You know, I dream of various very simple solutions to, you know, to Donald Trump. Something happening. I don't go. I don't want to go into details. But I mean the brain does go to shortcuts, right? And um no, and some of them, no, but some of them, and you've given up with that with Trump, but you still almost feel like, oh, there'd be a scandal and the scandal would be so bad that it would just destroy this person, which I think is how I grew up thinking with Nixon. It's like watergate and then he resigned. And it's like no. It took ages and person nobody was interested in the story and then they had to keep going and they had to keep going and then it was only because they managed to get the tapes because he was mad and paranoid enough to tape himself saying all of this shit. Um and he could quite easily uh you know, he could quite easily got away with it. Not being impeached, it would have been fine. So it kind of changes over the years when you realize that with today's Republican Party, I mean what's Watergate compared to what Trump does? Not exactly. Watergate's nothing. Watergate is like, you know , throwing a fag bite in the street by comparison. Yeah. And I think you can actually do you can do little seasons. You can what you can have spotlight as well and the post and things like that. Or you can have network, which is actually the sort of opposite about how TV journalism is so cynical and it's exploiting anger for ratings and it's actually stoking people's worst feelings. So there's a whole load of stuff going on in that in that area. I found it like do you remember that was it the post I think was the one that came out June Trump's first term. And I actually was quite depressed by it. I know it was supposed to make you encourage, oh you can take these guys on, but I was like, yeah, but this is operating in a world where it actually fucking matters what they write. You know? And like they they write it and in the end he has to resign. I mean it's long slow, you know, prove it here, prove it here, nib there. But like ultimately they write it and and and he resigns. That period isn't reassuring to me now. I was watching the first episode of The Boys the other day. Um that the Amazon program And what happens is no one gives a shit and everyone just assumes it's AI and it makes no difference. And to be honest, that feels like a much more resonant, although again extremely despairing view of like what's going on right now. Well three days of the condor has this great you know bit where Robert Redford uh again uncovers the truth and he goes I've sent it to the New York Times and this guy goes, do you think anyone will care. You know, which is again is again sort of very uh very prescient. And then look at what's happened to the Washington Post recently. Yeah no shit. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, onwards and upwards. Yes. Your last one. Yes. Uh Good Night and Good Luck. I I absolutely love this film. It's about McCarthy and so it's, you know, well it's actually about Edward Armara taking on McCarthy. So it harks back to our very first episode. It is a like a truly, truly very beautiful, elegantly made film . There's a couple of things to say before the the main thing I wanted to say, which is first of all that there's a there's a moment that comes down to that line that they say ultimately that destroys McCarthy which is have you no decency sir and i i think about that line i think almost every day because you just presented where you're just like oh what a world where someone saying, have you no decency sir,, would have the resonance, where there'd be a recognition of someone's lack of decency. So around I just see so few people prepared to stand up for those values and just letting themselves down over and over again. You sort of think like being able to grasp it and use it as a weapon, like as an ex pectation in society, feels like this profoundly like worthwhile thing. So the phrase just rings and rings and rings in my mind. It can still happen I think I suppose what you're saying about Goodwin, right, is that McCarthy was very, you know, could be could be weirdly charming, very charming with journalists. I mean, kind of a yeah, he was very convivial, he was an alcoholic, who drank himself to death. But that meant he was good for fun for journalist s. And what happens there is he chooses the wrong target. And obviously he's been nasty to to the people he's persecuted all the way through, but it's almost like everyone sees it. And that's that have you no decency, sir. It's almost like it shocks me just going, this guy's awful. And you do see that with a lot of the voters. I mean, you know, Trump is now underwater with white non-college voters, men , which is absolutely unbelievable because those are his people. And all of them just gone actually, you know, you can't keep being appalling without people noticing. Matt Goodwin, if he was just like a nicer guy, um, he would be in a better position. But people just think this guy seems to suck. And so that is actually interesting, that point where McCarthy turns from being this kind of, oh he's a bit of a wild card, to like people seeing him as a bully. And it's not that spee that finishes him. There's lots of other things going on behind the scenes. But it still is it does reflect that sense of like, oh actually there are, you do hit a wall, there are consequences. Because during McCarthyism a lot of people thought, oh well he can do whatever he likes. Nothing can stop him. Which is true for a bit. But it's not true indefinitely. Yes, quite right. Um there's a little bit of hope there. It found sounded fucking weird. I didn't even really understand what you were doing for a moment. Um there's a line in this film where the editors come up to them and say just try to cover this story, cover this McCarthy story, and basically just be completely critical in the news report. And they're like, well, are you sure you're being balanced? You know? And like the response is basically like, well, I just don't accept that there are two sides to every story. Like one of the things that we have in like origin stories is just trying to do a thing of like, hey, there will be no balance here, because there is no reason on God's earth that should there should only be two particular views on a particular thing. Instead, there could really be five or six or twelve views on a thing. Or there really could be one thing that happens to be the truth. Now that is like a like a commitment to an attempt to objectivity, but not balance. And that distinction between things, that sort of view that because of really because of the BBC and the institution that we both love very much, because of that, there's this sort of view of well, that's what it should be, it should be balance. No, things but just because it's not balanced doesn't mean that we have to be tribal and you know myop ic and unable to see any other point of view. We can be like alive to what is happening in someone's head, to their motivations, to their frailties and like to their weaknesses and to their advan tages while also keeping a firm eye on like what we think is actually going on in a situation. So I love that line in that film and I think it kind of sums up like what you often try to do in Germany. by uh by a listener who writes for Reason is it Reason or Compact or this sort of libert right-wing libertarian magazine. And he said they're they're obviously left-wing but fair . And I thought, okay, sure. It's just like that that's all you can aim for. It can't be just like, oh, we've got no political opinions. Some were expressed in part one. But I think you'll all agree that we were rigorously fair to Matt Goodwin. One second. One more bit. Sorry. Which is when McCarthy came after uh Murrow on the basis of like he'd found a quote about Moro. No, he'd found a book that had been given to him by Harold Lasky, one of our favourites and one of our patron saints. Yay. Good old Harold. Um and Murray's response to it, I never didn't even know that was Lasky at the time that I first saw that film or heard about this incident, um that he did on the sort of on the broadcast immediately afterwards was as follows, and I just love this, it's one of my favourite bits of journalistic writing. He's talking about Lasky and like why this doesn't necessarily indicate that he is a socialist, just because a socialist wrote an inscription to him. He was one of those civilized individuals who did not insist upon political agreement with his principles as a precondition for conversation or friendship . And you say, oh, well done. That's it. You've got it right there. That is exactly the correct way to live. And that's that humane, decent way of conducting yourself in political life. It's olutely, but they do it in a fantastic ally effective way in that film. And I just think it's just a profoundly beautiful line that kind of resonates with the kind of attitude and emotions that we try to have in the show. Um Okay, cool. So my my last one then is the is the death of Stalin, Amanda Yunichi, 2017, which we talked about, I think, in the book club, so not everyone will have heard it. So it is about the death of Stalin in March 1953 and the fight to succeed him. And there's lots of really good things about it. And actually we found when we were doing our research it was incredible how many real anecdotes and real events were in that movie that seemed like comedy, but that really we're founded in something. You know, the way that it's it's properly well researched, amazing cast, obviously, great jokes, that's a given. The reason I'm mentioning it here is that because in In the Loop, which is this previous film, right? There's all this petty squabbling and incompetence and kind of inept ambition. But then he applies that to the Politburo at this crucial point in Soviet history. And once some of it'ss become a real obession to me is that actually personalities often outweigh ideology. In the case of the Soviet Union, basically the ideology is just shaped by the personalities. It's like Lenin's like, well, here's what I think Marx ism is. That wasn't what it was before he got to it. You know? And then Stalin goes, well here's what I think Marxism-Leninism is. You know, and then Male comes, man, here's what I think, you know. And they all develop their own things. We talk so much about ideology, ideology. And it's about personalities. They don't talk about communism in that movie. It never comes out. They're not just like, well, what about the people? You know, how's the economy doing? It's about their grudges and their resentments and their neurosis and the worn-upmanship and it's almost like this sort of office comedy and these really consequential figures in history uh are shown to be in many ways quite small and I don't think obviously it's not flattering to them but it it is quite humanizing these people that just sort of loom large like you know these kind of blocks of stone and you just think yeah a lot of the time like you're saying earlier it's like well they they didn't didn't know what they were doing a lot of the time they didn't know what was going to happen next that is always that when you talk about the you know inserting yourself into thinking yourself back into history it's like they didn't know what was going to happen next and it's all And it's all very easy for us to go, ooh, wouldn't have done it that way. Like there were certain things that seem so obviously like they shouldn't have happened like that. But nobody knew. And then a lot of the time one person dies and everything changes. What was gonna win you know if Stalin hadn't died then? Well then there'd been another terror probably. That seemed to be what he was planning. And he dies and then you get you know, then that leads to kind of Khrushchev's secret speech, which is this seismic moment in the in the left when most people let go of, you know, s the idea that Stalin there's anything ever good about Stalin. And it breaks up the relationship between the Russians and the Chinese. Yeah, I mean it's just like it's it's all these all the contingency and I just love this kind of like sweaty, panicky mess uh that is that is portrayed in that movie. Very good. And we're going to put this together as like a film club that people should watch. That's going to be a really weird bill. Yeah. I think that'd be great. Yeah, you'd probably have to, you know, yeah, you'd probably have to choose the right sequence, wouldn't you ? I mean if someone came in when you were watching Catch America Civil War, Batman Begins, and Empire Strikes Back in a Row, would they think it's politics film club ? I don't know. Uh so anyway, that's the show, thank you. Um thanks for coming. And that's thanks to everybody at the Bloomsby Theatre, uh to everyone watching at home, to everyone listening on the podcast edition, uh, whenever that comes out, especially if you back us on Patreon, which enables us to do all of this stuff. We watch the films for free, but everything else is work. So thank you so much for your support. I also want to thank uh everyone at the Bloomsbury Theatre uh who helped us tonight and the podmasters team who uh made it happen as Andrew, Martin, Simon, Connor, and Jill. Thanks, guys. Are you breaking into podcasting and audio or are you ready to level up? Audio Train.co.uk is Audio UK's training platform. Built for every stage of your career. From your first ideas to bigger, better productions, you'll learn creative, business and technical skills that move you forward. And you'll hear directly from the people shaping the industry today. Real insight, real experience, real progress. From Audio UK and the BBC, go to audiochain.co.uk