Hearts of Oak Podcast

Bill Walton - Meritocracy, Media, and American Values: A Critical Discussion

Welcome to "Hearts of Oak," where we engage with the titans of thought, the mavericks of media, and the architects of America's future. In today's episode, host Peter welcomes a guest whose life story reads like a blueprint for success in multiple arenas: from the stages of New York to the boardrooms of finance, and now to the forefront of media and political discourse. 
Our guest transitioned from a budding theater enthusiast to a titan in finance, steering a company from $600 million to a colossal $9 billion in assets. But it's his latest venture into the world of media that has us captivated. With a platform dedicated to fostering in-depth, unfiltered conversations with leading thinkers, he's not just another voice in the crowded media landscape; he's a clarion call for a return to meritocratic values and a deeper dive into the issues that shape our society.
In this episode, we'll explore how a background in finance fuels a passion for media, why he believes alternative voices are crucial for democracy, and how he's tackling the elephant in the room—divisiveness in American politics. From the implications of recent books like "The Israel Test" to the very real fears about electoral integrity, this conversation promises to be as enlightening as it is engaging.
Join us as we delve into the mind of a man who not only watches the world turn but actively shapes its discourse, aiming to bridge the gap between the political elite and the everyday American. This is not just an interview; it's a window into understanding the complexities of our times through the lens of one who's been there, done that, and is now determined to change the narrative. 
Tune in for "The Maverick's Microphone," where every dialogue is a journey towards a clearer, more united future for America.Connect with Bill Walton
 The Bill Walton Show | Money Culture PowerThe Bill Walton Show | SubstackThe Bill Walton Show Podcast Series – Apple PodcastsThe Bill Walton Show - YouTubeConnect with Hearts of Oak...𝕏                         x.com/HeartsofOakUKWEBSITE            heartsofoak.org/PODCASTS        heartsofoak.podbean.com/SOCIAL MEDIA  heartsofoak.org/connect/SHOP                  heartsofoak.org/shop/
 
Transcript
(Hearts of Oak)
And hello, Hearts of Oak.
Thank you so much for joining us with a brand new guest stateside, and that is Bill Walton. Bill, thank you so much for your time today.
Great to be here.
I've thoroughly enjoyed the Bill Walton Show and everything that you've put out over maybe the last six or so years, and we'll delve into that.
But just for a UK audience, I know the war room posse, the US audience will know you well, but delving into your background, you serve as chairman of Allied Capital Corporation, and you built that from 600 million in assets to 9 billion.
And by the time you left in 2009, you founded Rush River Entertainment.
You've been leader and board member of many organizations, including Heritage Foundation, CPAC, CNP.
And you were very involved in the Trump transition team heading up the economic, I think, agenda, the federal economic agencies looking at that.
You've got phenomenal and that doesn't do justice.
But I see you as a media figure, and I think many of your viewers may also, your extensive background in leadership, executive, investor, entrepreneur, and now media. Maybe I can ask you about that step from your background where I guess the world was your oyster.
You could pick anything in those different sectors that you were involved in. But what led you to start the Bill Walton Show?
Well, it's a combination of things you know as you mentioned.
I've got a background in in in theater the arts and film and I not not me people many people know this, but I was I tried to be an actor in New York when I was 22, 23 years old and after about a year of doing that I'd done well on my on my business my business test.
Maybe I guess what they call it, I don't remember what they call it now, but anyway.
I decided that maybe after several auditions where I wasn't quite right for the part, maybe I should try something else.
I went into finance at about age 24 and then ended up on Wall Street and ended up knowing a lot about investments, finance, and ended up leading Allied Capital Corporation, which was, you mentioned, $9, $10 billion of private equity investments and commercial real estate and small business lending.
Along the way, I got to know a lot of people, a lot of smart, interesting people.
As you mentioned, I served on many boards. I thought, gee, wouldn't it be great to create a show where I could just talk with these smart people, bring out things in an extended conversation where people could hear things that they may not hear, and certainly on cable.
Now, since I started out, there are a lot more podcasts that are going for, you know, longer durations.
None of us are quite a Joe Rogan length, but anyway, so anyway, that was the spark, and it's been a boutique effort for a while, and just in this last, I took the summer off, and I'm just back and have hired a PR firm, AJ Rice, who's an amazing young man.
I think you You also work with him as well.
Now we're beginning to get the word out about the show.
This just this past Monday, we put out a show with George Gilder, the famous futurist, economist, and social thinker. And we talked about his book, The Israel Test, which is...
He wrote it 25 years ago, but he extensively updated it, and it bears just uncannily on what's going on with the Middle East now.
And his theory, and I quite agree with it, is it's not just anti-Semitism that's at the heart of the hatred of Israel, but it's the hate of talent, of meritocracy, of high achievement.
And if you look at Jews as a race or a class and you look at Israel as a country, they punch way above their weight.
I mean, something like half of the top 10 market cap companies now were formed by Jews.
And then just pulling the camera back a little bit, looking at a wider lens, there's a war on meritocracy throughout society now, in the West in particular.
And with the obsession with DEI or equity, you know, we're really taking talent.
We're really undervaluing talent in America and in Europe.
And long term, it's the high talent people that make everything happen.
And we ought to be celebrating that rather than denigrating it.
So anyway, Peter, that's kind of my winding path to why I started the show.
But, you know, how often do you get to talk with George Gilter one-on-one about one of his books?
And that's rewarding in and of itself.
And I've gotten a lot of positive feedback about it.
And I think he provides a point of view other people don't get. So, that's why I'm in the podcast business. I don't recommend doing this for money, though.
Okay.
I would have a private conversation with you to say, absolutely, this is not going to fill your bank account.
I've learned.
My wife tells me that regularly.
Yeah.
But can I, I mean, you've got, with such a background in, and varied in finance and business, engaging the political activism, and then in the media, it's, in one way, it's hard to assess who to bring on.
There's so many issues.
Do you see it as issue-based?
Do you see it as individuals that you follow to have on?
I mean, where do you go to decide, I guess, the topics that should be covered?
Because people will look to you as a leader and what they hear you bring, they will take that on board and as a responsibility.
So how do you kind of assess what you cover and who to bring on?
Boy, that is the question.
And you have the same issue in your show, I'm sure.
How do you figure out what's going to be really interesting?
You know, the fact of the matter is we're also an entertainment business.
So you have to come up with, you know, it's great to have a charismatic guest.
It's great to have a topic that's interesting, but also entertaining.
It's great to have somebody on that's talking about you know the big issues we face right now and what we have to do about it.
And I aim the show at whenever I can in a line of action so that we don't just complain about things, but we we think about what we can what we can actually make happen as regular people, and you know, us regular people and all I've had, I guess a career that would put me you know kind of in the the establishment.
I'm a far from it I grew up you know I should say like Kamala I grew up in a middle-class family did
Did you have a nice lawn.
In Indianapolis and we had a very nice lawn but we had a lot of oak trees and acorns and my father was an army captain and he made me pick up the acorns out of the gravel driveway every fall.
So anyway, that's the background.
You know, I'm firmly rooted in sort of middle-class Indiana. And, you know, that's the class of people that seems to be most under attack, both here in America and in the UK and in Europe.
With so many guests on, you get a perspective on a range of issues.
And I want to ask you for your thoughts on the current political climate with only weeks to go.
Three weeks out from the presidential election there stateside, but what do you see as the big threats you get an insight into people's minds on a range of issues that all feed into the the climate and the culture issues that the U.S. and worldwide face.
Kind of how, with talking to different people and assessing the different issues, if you could put your finger on a number of them or a single one that is a threat to the U.S., to the American dream, to the freedoms, what would that be?
Well, I think the first thing is that America has never been more divided since the Civil War, and maybe even it's more toxic than even during the Civil War, because that was almost a single issue conflict.
And what we have now in the United States are two sides, two opposing groups who really hate each other. And it's quite emotional, runs quite deep.
And I guess the biggest concern I have with this election coming up is I think whoever wins, the other side is not going to accept the outcome.
And we've got Jamie Raskin here in Maryland, who's a Democrat congressman.
I think he was on the J6 committee who said, look, if Trump wins the election, we're not going to let him take his seat on Inauguration Day.
And when you've got sitting Democrat congressmen, presumably responsible statesmen, if I can use that word, saying things like that, you know you've got a big problem.
And I think on the other side, most of us have been with Trump for a long time.
I worked for him, as you mentioned, in the 2016 transition team.
I headed up all the financial related agencies, writing the plans for those agencies when he became president.
Just as a sidebar, I'd like to say he used every one of them, but Donald's not really a plan guy, so it didn't exactly happen.
But the point is, those of us who've been with Trump are deeply suspicious.
That's putting it mildly of what happened in 2020.
I mean, what did we have, 15, 20 million more votes that came in? At the time, the whole country was shut down, and 50%, 60% of the ballots were mail-in, and we've discovered massive amounts of issues with those.
And put the voting machines aside, and whether they're hooked up to the internet, there are just plenty, and I know plenty of people that have gone into these individual states, Nevada, Georgia, whatever, to take a look at it.
And they're all convinced that there were, if not fraud, at least manipulation of the outcome.
And so we're looking at that and we're all worried that, gee, even if Donald Trump has 55, 60 percent of American voters, and I think the numbers are that high, we still may not win.
And so we're approaching, what are we, 25 days out from the election?
And so that's big issue, number one.
And, you know, I think the world hinges on the outcome of this election because if Kamala Harris ends up as president, God help what's going on in Israel and the Middle East.
You know, the Ukraine thing has got to resolve itself, I think, through some sort of satisfactory negotiation.
but there's no indication that Biden-Harris would have any inclination to try to bring this thing to an end.
So the election is number one, and people have never felt more hatred towards the other side.
And I don't know quite how we get out of this toxic mess, but nevertheless, we have to.
I mean, you look at, I've had the privilege of being at three Trump rallies and having a picture with a man himself as well.
And my background in politics, I've never seen at a political event like a Trump rally.
The enthusiasm, the passion, there is something there.
It's great.
It is.
But then the media are beginning to wake up.
They're beginning to recognize that Kamala is not the great leader that they all want.
They're mocking her for being a drunk, for her performance in media.
I mean, how does that play, how you see the media?
Because the media on the left, it is Trump derangement syndrome, but they're realizing we don't want Kamala either.
And it's a weird situation they find themselves in.
Well, the more Kamala, remember, she was roundly criticized for not getting out and letting herself be interviewed or being seen by the voters.
Well, she is now getting out, and the more she shows up on a Howard Stern or, you know, the other talk shows, I think it was Colbert was the other night, the worse she does. Her numbers go down the more people see her, and, you know, people notice that she fails in answer any of the questions substantively.
I can't remember, and I try not to watch her too much.
It's too painful, but I can't remember a substantive policy answer that she's given Americans about why she would be any different from Joe Biden, and she can't even explain why what Joe Biden did was successful.
I mean, the thing we need to keep in mind is that the Democrats never had an economic growth agenda.
They started at a day one climate change.
They wanted to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels, gasoline.
They loved high gasoline prices because people would drive less.
The regulatory regime has kicked in with all the climate-related regulations.
And then they had a government-wide approach towards diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And I don't think it would be interesting to do an AI search of Joe Biden's speeches of the last three and a half years to see before the election season how often he mentioned economic growth.
I doubt if he did at all.
That's just not where they've been.
Now they're trying to pivot, show that they've been doing something for the American people, and they can't do it.
There's no evidence.
Then the other thing is true is that people still are worried to talk to pollsters about saying there are for Donald Trump.
And one of the polls I find kind of interesting is, I can't remember who does it.
It's probably worth promoting it.
I'll try to come up with that. But he asks people not who they're going to vote for, but he says, well, I know you may not want to tell me how you're going to vote, but how's your neighbor going to vote?
And when people start talking about how their neighbors are voting, Trump is of the overwhelming favorite when people are talking about the sentiment of people around them.
And, you know, I'm in the D.C. area, and you can feel the Democrats getting nervous. And, you know, I have a very interesting insight into this.
My dentist, who's on our side, we talk about politics all the time, is dentist to all of the leading Democrat operatives in Northwest Washington.
And they're all sitting in the dentist chair, and they're talking about having to leave the country if Trump wins.
They're getting very scared, and that's just in the last month or so.
So they're worried.
Both sides are worried, and I can't remember a political time that it was more fraught.
You're very brave talking to your dentist about politics.
I wouldn't even dare go there.
Well, that's, well, yeah, we.
Very dangerous topic for someone with a drill in your mind.
And he's a volatile, he's a volatile Italian.
And he starts talking to me and making these points.
And I say, Vince, Vince, okay.
I'm with you.
Is it that, I mean you look at what policies and you talk about a dearth of economic policies but kamala basically is putting forward that Trump is really dangerous so vote for her it's not that she's anything it's that she's not the other person, but it's the economy and the the border it's mass immigration that's a mass immigration affected the UK in the last election it affected Europe in the parliamentary elections.
European part across Europe and is the number one or number two issue in America for this election and the democrats don't seem to be addressing either of those and to me they can't win if they don't address the two biggest topics that people have.
I completely agree and they're not addressing it because the great replacement theory is the great replacement fact and it's very obvious now that this immigration that's been, I won't even call it immigration, the flood of people that have been allowed to come into the United States.
And we're also seeing a lot of people coming across the Canadian border.
That's up something like 50 times the number that came across just a few years ago.
So it's both borders.
They're wide open.
And we're ending up with towns that have 4,000 people in them pre-invasion.
Now they have 2,000 additional Haitians in the mix.
And whether they're illegal or they've just been imported, it doesn't really matter.
The point is it's a massive cultural change.
They're dependent on government services.
They come here for government services, and they vote for that. And so it's interesting.
They're trying to move a lot of these people into the red states to maybe hope to tip the balance there.
And, you know, you can tell you, you see what's happened in Europe.
I mean, what's happened with the, with the Islamic immigration and the way Brussels is absolutely turned the other, a blind eye to how much it's changing their culture.
You know, forget the economy, but the culture of, of these countries is precious. And, and you degrade your culture at great risk.
And I think we're seeing that we've already seen it in Europe and we're seeing it in the United States, same issue.
And Brussels, 30% Islamic.
Paris, 15%. London, 12%, 13%. So we are seeing massive changes in our major cities.
And a part of it is because Europe doesn't know what it stands for. It's lost sense of national identity and chipped away at the nation state.
America seems to have a unified understanding of what it means to be American, which is under attack.
And you see people when they become an American citizen, there is pride in taking on that new identity, that new role.
And that's been a thread throughout the US history.
It still seems to be there. Is that a fair assessment?
You may not think it's as strong and that's fair enough, but you still do have that understanding of what it means to be an American citizen.
I think it's become even stronger among the people that would be voting for Donald Trump and want to preserve American exceptionalism.
And remember, the exceptionalism isn't based on military might or the size of the economy.
It's based on the fact we're rooted in our constitution and all the rights and protections that it provides.
And, you know, the American idea is alive and well, and I think people have become even more aware of how valuable it is and how we need to save it.
So in one sense, in terms of making people aware of how special America is, it's more true than ever.
We can't take it for granted.
And the other thing, I'm vice chairman of CPAC. Matt Schlapps, our chairman.
And we had Matt on a couple of weeks ago.
Yeah, Matt is – yeah, I had Matt on my show a couple of weeks ago with Mercedes.
And Mercedes and Matt, that's the – I highly recommend you get them both on together.
They're really good.
Anyway, we do – we have our CPAC conferences, not just here in the United States, but we have them in Japan, Brazil, I'm trying to think – Italy. You know, we're trying to think of the number.
We've had Hungary.
And what we're seeing is people are saying, they come up to us and say, you know, it's important that America stays America.
We're counting on America to preserve all the ideals and, and you know, virtues that make life worth living.
And so that you've got, you've got to win in America because we're counting on you.
And so that, you know, brings us back to our conversation about this election.
It's not important just to the United States.
It's important to the free world.
And a CPAC exceptional job over in Mexico as well.
And we talked earlier on about our mutual friend, Robert Malone, and seems to be traveling all over to different CPAC events.
But that's exciting because my fear is that America may withdraw in presenting the freedoms that are the American dream.
And in CPAC, I see that still burning brightly and willing to take it to the world.
And sometimes my concern is America may be inward focused.
But actually, that is an outward evangelism of the truths and dreams and freedoms that America have.
And I think that is vital to continue.
Well, I don't think we'll become inward focused in all those things that matter in terms of exporting or sharing our values and wanting to make that crystal clear about what we stand for.
I do think we'll be more inward focused when it comes to military adventurism.
I mean, I can't think of a war America has successfully executed since World War II.
And then at World War II, we had an awful lot of help even then to win that one.
So we're not very good at this going into countries and trying to bring about regime change. In fact, we've been a catastrophe.
And I think we've got a new modesty among a lot of us that say, well, gee, we want to be engaged in the world, but not that way.
And I think that would be a very good thing and not have us, you know, the defense contract.
The military-industrial complex is real, and it is very much alive and well when you look at the way the Ukraine war has been prosecuted.
And, you know, I think we'll probably see that dialed back when Trump becomes president.
And you talk the military industrial complex the other two big other players in terms of, I guess, lobbying or big pharma and food and of course with the Maha announcement with Bobby Kennedy which was a genius announcement and I kind of think you want a campaign you want to make the public aware, but you don't want to let the cat out the bag with these lobbying groups because they're going to fear that focusing on what they do. I mean, how do you see that?
Because to me, it's phenomenal that Trump is willing to go after those industries that are causing damage to American health and American outlook.
But I wonder if he's, for want of a better word, pissed them off too much.
That's a very tough one.
You know, I think the campaign has been smart to underplay a lot of that there.
And in particular with this idea, I mean, most of the Democrats here are terrified that the Republicans are going to do to them what they did to the Republicans with the lawfare.
You know, I can think of hundreds, if not a couple thousand people who worked in the Trump administration that have been victims of lawfare.
We've got to be careful not to emphasize that.
And I, in fact, don't think Trump will pursue that as president.
But the food industry has created an obesity epidemic in the United States, which is just shameful.
And the pharmaceutical industry, same thing.
I mean, the dependence on pharmaceutical drugs is overwhelming, and I think Kennedy coming in, we might have something that focuses on health instead of expensive drug treatments and get back to a food supply that is stable.
You know, the food system, I don't know if you've had Brooke Miller on your show, American Cattlemen.
Yeah, we've had Brooke,
Brooke's great, yes.
You know, that's a real phenomena.
And there's a cartel of four beef processors in the United States that are controlling this.
And that's alarming.
That's a problem.
And that's something else we need to wear of.
But you're right.
You can't.
I think Trump's already got every single lobbyist in Washington lining up against him because their self-interest depends on him losing.
So he's got that to fight.
But I still think we're going to push through and win.
I believe that there's no alternative but Trump, that patriotism, and wanting the best for Americans, which seems to be a bad issue from the left.
But in terms of media, kind of finishing off on this, that we had 2016, which Fox was the driver with the big name behind Trump.
And then 2020 that changed you know the rise of alternative media and you obviously were in the mix in that very much part of that and then Newsmax away in on tv and 2024 that's just built where the alternative media is this juggernaut.
How do you how do you see that working because for the first time it's not necessarily just cable news it's actually a plethora of many, podcasts and organizations that are putting the information out, which is uncontrollable, I guess, to the left, which scares them so much.
But how do you see that the role of media playing in terms of getting the message out to the voters?
Well, there's still, I mean, the problem we have is that the alternative media that we're part of and many others, we're doing a fantastic job.
And also not just the podcast world, but the print world. Apps like Substack have got very, very interesting writing going on and lots of research and lots of analysis about what is true.
The problem is that I think Rasmussen And one of them, I know one of the pollsters I know said that, you know, the problem is that only 8% of Americans talk about politics in any given week.
And so for getting the word out to the people like us who are passionately engaged in this, you know, it's a war, I think we're doing a fabulous job.
But it's the casual, it's what Rush Limbaugh called the low information voter that we have to, I still think we have to worry about.
And the media, the view, people like that still have a real impact on culture.
Interestingly, the Taylor Swift endorsement didn't seem to help.
The only thing that seemed to hurt was her own sales, which cheered me up a bit.
But I think we still got to fight because the casual voter is still getting information from the usual sources.
I believe.
And I've seen Trump on many small, not smaller podcasts, actually, but podcasts more for the Gen Z, for a different audience.
And it's been, he said it was his son that got him onto a number of podcasts.
And you kind of see an individual in Trump that's willing to go and change.
Did you see him with Patrick Bet David?
No, I haven't seen that one. No, no.
Oh, it's great.
I mean, this is Trump's element.
He's on fire.
I mean, he does great with these guys.
And yeah, I'm really happy he's doing that.
And as I said, for those of us that are engaged and maybe even just people casually, he might be getting the word out that way.
But I think that was a very smart move.
And whoever told him to do it gave him the right advice.
I've enjoyed that.
Bill, I love having you on.
I have huge, respect for the work that you're doing in your name synonymous with, with media now and getting the message out.
So, it is a real honor having you on and appreciate you sharing with our audience your thoughts on a range of issues.
Well, I'm thrilled To be on your show.
I mean, you're doing a very good job getting the truth out.
And so I'm happy to do a, maybe we'll do a home and away.
And when you, I'd love to get you in studio here sometime when you're next in the States and we can get into the other side, because you asked about my podcast.
I've got a lot of curiosity.
I want to find out where you think Europe is going to end up, and I think that bears, it's a tremendous problem, and I'm worried about America going the way of Europe.
I think with many Americans, I've tried to be a warning to certainly the issue of demographics of mass immigration and abandoning the nation state and abandoning Christianity and what that will mean the transition stuff with ketamine?
It goes on and on so, but no, I hope that we can be a warning to the US and change our ways or else we will end up like Europe.
But thank you for your time Bill.
Okay.
Thank you.

The Week According To . . . Laurence Fox

We are delighted to have on Laurence Fox this week where we discuss critical challenges of our time, from the disconcerting lack of clarity in our political leadership to the encroaching threats on free speech, the evolving cultural fabric of our society, and the controversial aspects of immigration and mental health policies. Expect an unflinching dialogue that seeks not only to address these issues but to galvanize a movement towards preserving our democratic essence and cultural heritage.
Laurence Fox is an English actor, musician, broadcaster, and leader of The Reclaim Party. Laurence graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 2001. He debuted as a screen actor in 2001’s The Hole, directed by Nick Hamm. He is likely best known in the entertainment world for his 10 year stint as James Hathaway in the TV show Lewis. In 2020, Fox criticized both the George Floyd riots, and the COVID vaccine mandates, coming from the Conservative point of view. He then founded the Reclaim Party, from which he unsuccessfully ran for mayor. Since this, he has been ever-present in the media, denouncing political correctness. 
Connect with Laurence and Reclaim Party...𝕏                  x.com/LozzaFox    @LozzaFox                     x.com/TheReclaimParty   @TheReclaimParty                     reclaimparty.co.uk
Interview recorded  11.10.24
Connect with Hearts of Oak...𝕏                         x.com/HeartsofOakUKWEBSITE            heartsofoak.org/PODCASTS        heartsofoak.podbean.com/SOCIAL MEDIA  heartsofoak.org/connect/SHOP                  heartsofoak.org/shop/
Links to topics...less coherent Kamalahttps://x.com/LozzaFox/status/1844643655463624888 it is this simple.https://x.com/LozzaFox/status/1842836756950827228two tierhttps://x.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1844416001657668033uniparty  https://x.com/LozzaFox/status/1844360684966199686tommyhttps://x.com/LozzaFox/status/1843689900429746375climate change https://x.com/BBCSport/status/1844428462418809209disgracehttps://x.com/AFpost/status/1844431411979354202meanwhile https://x.com/KidRock/status/1844508598950559807civilised societies https://x.com/LozzaFox/status/1844126566613410288 preacher burning dollarshttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/10/10/sadiq-khan-tfl-advert-tube-islamic-preacher-burning-dollar/drug dealing quacks https://x.com/LozzaFox/status/1843636190525972507treasonhttps://x.com/LozzaFox/status/1843272005308870759

Major (Ret) Russ Cooper - The Patriot Pilot: Charting a Course for Canada's Future through C3RF

Welcome to Hearts of Oak, where we explore the stories of individuals who embody the spirit of resilience and advocacy. Today, we're privileged to have on the show Major (Ret.) Russ Cooper, a man whose life has soared through the skies as a fighter pilot and now navigates the contentious terrain of civil liberties in Canada. From his distinguished service in the Persian Gulf War to his subsequent career at Air Canada, Major Cooper's perspective from the cockpit offered him unique insights into the world. But it was upon retiring that he found himself drawn into a different kind of battle—one for the soul and freedom of his country. Join us as we delve into Major Cooper's journey from the air to activism, sparked by his concerns over Motion M-103 and the perceived threats to Canadian values of unity and free speech. His fight has led him to co-found the Canadian Citizens for Charter Rights and Freedoms, an organization championing individual rights amidst what he sees as a growing tide of restrictive legislation. Today's episode is not just about one man's fight; it's about understanding the challenges to our freedoms and the call to action for every citizen to stand up for the principles that define us. Stay tuned for an enlightening conversation that touches on the heart of what it means to be Canadian.
Interview recorded 9.10.2024
Connect with Russ and C3RF...Major (Ret.) Russ Cooper:https://www.canadiancitizens.org/
Canadian Citizens For Charter Rights And Freedoms (C3RF) is a group of Canadians whose mission is to educate Canadians about threats to their Charter Rights, advocate to protect Charter Rights and Freedoms, and propose countering legislation and regulatory frameworks especially focused on freedom of expression.
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Transcript
(Hearts of Oak)
And hello, Hearts of Oak.
Thank you so much for joining us once again with a brand new guest over in Canada, and that is Major Retired Russ Cooper.
Russ, thank you so much for giving us your time today.
Oh, thank you, Peter.
It's a real honour to join you, today.
Great to have you on, and thanks to the one and only Valerie Price for connecting us, as she does with many, many people.
And it's always good to have someone like that working in the background, isn't it?
Well, I tell you, it's amazing what she does.
She gets a lot of people started in the area of civil liberties, and she's responsible for my start.
I started, I guess, popping off writing this and writing that, and it was her and her website that gave me a public profile and got me going way back in, what was it, 2016.
And that probably story could be retold by many, many people that we have all bumped into worldwide.
But before we get in, CanadianCitizens.org is the website, and that is the organization you founded and are present of, Canadian Citizens for Charter Rights and Freedoms, or C3RF.
All the links will be in the description.
And we want to talk about the work that really came together, I think, on the Islamophobia bill back in 2017.
So, we'll get into all of that. But your background is fascinating to me as a private pilot, as someone I look at your career with a little bit of envy.
Your background, fighter pilot in the Canadian Air Force, retired commercial pilot.
Maybe tell us a little bit about that background, which I could do a whole podcast on, but we won't.
Tell me a little bit about that background before we get on to how you got involved in activism.
Well the civil aviation background was it flowed out of my military background flying.
My last fighter tour was on cf-18s.
Oh f-18s
Yes, modern era fighter and I had the opportunity, the honor really to fight for Canada in combat during the first Persian gulf war.
I was there with our 439 tiger squadron a squadron of cf-18s that participated in that that particular conflict and out of that I came back home from Germany, went into a ground job and then in 1997 retired from the military after about 29 years of service and then began looking for a job.
I was still fairly young at the time, I was 45, and wound up in civil aviation initially flying training business jet pilots and and flying business jets from Bombardier Aerospace.
From there, I spent a couple of years there, three, four years, and then applied to Air Canada and got picked up by Air Canada at the salty age of 48.
I remember going into my first meeting with my class, and everybody was coming up to me asking if I was the instructor.
So, I was kind of a late start, a late bloomer when it came to Air Canada.
I proceeded to fly for Air Canada and started out with DC-9s, the old DC-9. Loved that airplane.
Then Airbus A320s and then wound up on the 777, which was just a magnificent aircraft that we took all over the world.
Take a trip, Toronto to Beijing, Toronto, Hong Kong.
Toronto, San Diego, our Asian destinations would go over the polar, over the north pole on the other side down through Siberia and Mongolia and to into china.
It was just an amazing amazing job very glad I had the opportunity to do it, but things being as they were we had 2002, 2003, the company went bankrupt on me and I had to drop out of Air Canada.
I took a leave of absence for about five years.
And then as I was on leave of absence, I picked up an engineering billet for an avionics firm in Montreal.
And basically from there, with my flying background, I got into a position as an engineering flight test pilot.
And so that's where I wound up my flying career, my aviation.
I spent about 40 years, 40 years plus in aviation.
I always think there must be no greater office than a flight deck at 40,000 feet.
How beautiful.
The view is, yeah, the view is wonderful up there, yeah.
Yeah, I've seen a lot of interesting sites up in the concrete, particularly at 777.
Wow.
Well, I would love to delve deeper into that. But I want to get on to the current fight that we have across the Western world for the right to criticize, the right to offend, the right to disagree, which seems to be fast disappearing.
So you're in aviation 40 years.
Then, Probably politics wasn't really something you're engaged in.
How did you end up starting an organization that would pull people together to fight the government on Islamophobia legislation, in effect?
Well, it was kind of a sidestep.
But when I look back on it, not really.
It was kind of a natural progression there.
I was, when I was a fighter pilot, an officer in the Air Force, I guess there's no other way to describe me, but as a true patriot, I love my country.
And when I went into a combat tour, I did so gladly.
I stepped up because I really felt that Canada was a country worth fighting for.
It had values that were not only worth protecting, but projecting.
And in that particular case, we're involved with kicking a tyrant out of a country that didn't want him.
And I thought, yeah, this is a good place for me to be.
So I'm a bit of a bit of a patriot that way.
And then there's another tyrant in Trudeau.
Well, I tell you, we can talk about that for for the whole show, too.
I mean, getting back to my sojourn into civil liberties, it wasn't that much of a step, as I say, because when I – back in 2016, 2017, I was fully retired.
I was going to kick back and enjoy the grandkids. You know, it was time for me to enjoy my golden years.
But all of a sudden, we had these funny narratives coming out of Ottawa.
And all of a sudden, 2016, 2017, they came up with a motion, M103.
And the motion, its underlying premise was the fact that Canadians are systemically racist.
The Canadians are religious discriminators, especially when it comes to Islam and Muslims.
The narrative was, I found extremely insulting, and it is not, they were describing a Canada that I knew did not exist, because over the course of my 40 years, I've been across the country.
I've been around the world, I've seen Canadians of all sorts and stripes work together to do great things.
This is a great country, and we've got great people, and I took offense to, you know, our own leaders telling us that there was, we were debased.
We were, and then that narrative just kept going.
And we were, we were a post-national state.
We had no core values.
Then we were genocidal, you know, with the way that we treated our indigenous populations.
It just went on and on and on.
And I, just could not, as a patriot, I just could not sit back and tolerate that.
I felt compelled.
I was compelled.
I had to sit down and start writing.
What I did was I started writing letters to all the MPs, the members of parliament in Canada, telling them that this is my take.
This is my evidence.
You know, this M103 is wrong.
All it's going to do is show favor to one religion over others. others, it's going to shield that religion from criticism and fair debate and comment.
I said, this is not fair at all.
I mean, if you want to have put something in place that says you can't discriminate against Muslims, fine, I'm all for that.
We shouldn't discriminate against anybody.
But when you start homing in on one religion and creating favor to that religion, all it's going to do is divide.
And that's exactly what it's done.
So that's where it started.
I started writing a few.
When we talk about Valerie, Valerie Price, I don't know how she got a hold of me, but she got a hold of me, and I needed someplace to publish the stuff that I was writing, because I was just writing nonstop, and she gave me her website, and I started posting on her website, and that attracted a couple of folks.
We had less than a dozen got together, and we formed C3RF, Canadian Citizens for Charter Rights and Freedoms, And I think it's a pretty good name because we represent Canadian citizens.
We're not politicians.
We're not lawyers.
We're not this race or that religion or anything.
We are Canadian citizens.
And I think that that's the secret of Canada is that everyone unites under the banner of civic nationalism.
We don't unite under a banner of this tribe or that clan.
No, we all believe we have a common belief.
Not like Trudeau said, we have no core values. We have no beliefs.
We do have common beliefs, and they include things like respect for individual rights and freedoms and basically what the Canadian citizen sees in the Charter.
And I say that specifically because Canadian citizens see a certain intent in that Charter.
They see fundamental rights and freedoms that are supposed to be protected by Canadians, by their representatives, and it's that intent that somehow over the years since the Charter was formed in 1982 has evaporated.
Our politicians, our judges, our legal class, they all seem to forget about the intent.
If anything, they take that intent and ignore it, that intent that there are certain fundamental freedoms, that's Section 2 of the Charter, free speech, freedom of religion, and freedom to assemble and associate.
There are fundamental freedoms that are called fundamental for a reason because the intent was to protect and preserve them.
And that intent has been ignored.
And I think that's a travesty.
So us Canadian citizens, I think we have to do something about that.
Do you think those freedoms are being taken for granted?
Do the people think that, well, previous generations have had certain freedoms therefore it's automatically assumed they will continue.
Do you think that's part of the reason why not just Canada but many nations in the west have got ourselves into the predicament, because we've just sat back and assumed it will continue?
Well, yes I think that's a very valid point.
I think you know you go back in time a little bit I grew up in the 50s and 60s as a kid and I remember back then how things were and you know things changed a lot starting in the 60s when we started having the sexual revolution we had the whole the whole thing the whole kind of culture that underpinned, you know, our our western liberal democracies kind of faded away.
People let it go and um and and I think as as a result, we left ourselves open to be taken advantage of by other narratives, other ideologies that we are told are equivalent.
Now we're told that there's no one culture that's better than another.
There's equivalency across the board.
And there is no real truth, this whole thing about objective reality being an imaginary thing.
And everything under the sun is just as good as everything else under the sun.
So we lost that, I guess, that Judeo-Christian ethic, I guess you could call it.
We let that slip away.
And as that slipped away, the vacuum was filled by other ideologies, other ideas that basically took us away from the strength that we did have and the belief we had in a strong and free Canada, in my case.
And we let that slide. So I think that's a valid point.
There's another side to this, and the other side is that actually certain people, certain individuals who have these other ideas or have stepped into the vacuum and purposely and deliberately confused and confounded Canadians and Canadian society with a lot of ideas that don't really belong in a Western liberal democracy.
And we see those ideas thriving now, and they're crazy.
Some of them are just so off the wall that I go, we go back to motion M103 where this Islamophobia came up and the damage that caused in dividing the nation.
But we also have other things that came across the board.
In about the same timeframe, in 2016, we had Bill C-16 in Canada, which was the gender identity and expression bill all of a sudden our our legislators actually told us that if we didn't identify people the way they wanted to be identified as instead of a male or a female they had to be identified as I don't know a puppy dog or a kitten or something like that.
We you know then we could be taken to task we could be taken to a human rights tribunal.
We could be put under the under the the microscope we could be examined we could be punished if we didn't allow our speech to be compelled.
Certainly this was totally, totally against, you know, our right to free speech as per Section 2 of the Charter.
When you're telling people they have to speak a certain way and think a certain way, you are out of bounds.
And we still have that bill, and it's still thriving.
It's now impacted our school system where our children are being taught thought that, you know, they weren't born a boy or a girl.
God may have made a mistake, and you're not really a boy.
You're not really a girl.
How confusing is that for a little kid?
And that drives me around a bit because I got six grandkids, five girls.
And I look at that kind of influence on their upbringing, and, you know, that's not going to smirk.
And I think the majority of Canadians feel like I do.
And I think a lot are just a little bit scared to pop their head above the parapet and say, this is wrong.
No, this is not going to stand. It's wrong.
Well, that compelled speech, I guess that was where Jordan Peterson came to fame over his pushback.
And we're now seeing compelled speech everywhere, having teacher in Ireland recently and on and on.
And he's been one of the biggest figures highlighting this.
But I want to talk to you about kind of the political engagement and also the engagement of the public.
But the issue on the Islamophobia, it's a toxic, dangerous term, as dangerous as the term racism is.
Whenever you use Islamophobic or racist, then immediately it shuts down debate.
And the argument is one because no one wants to think of themselves as someone who hates someone else.
Immediately you pull back, but it's also a huge topic to wade into the issue of engaging on Islam and Islam's position and the freedoms we have to critique any ideology or religion.
So tell me about that because I think maybe when you look back you might think could have picked an easier one, a less inflammatory one, but this is a big issue.
But tell me how that came together, how people came together, how you engaged with the political process in trying to stop that.
Well, it was kind of amazing because it came from nowhere.
And I started writing my letters, my website postings, and I started, we started a petition and that kind of cranked along slowly.
And then all of a sudden, things just changed gear.
I mean, it was like shifting gears in a car.
It was just all of a sudden we were in high speed mode, because people started to pick up on the conversation that was coming out of the press as they covered the Conservative Party who came forward and said, no, we don't think this is a good idea.
We'd like to change the motion to read instead of concentrating on Islamophobia.
They wanted to concentrate on discrimination against Muslims, Jews, Christians, basically everybody, all the religions.
They wanted to make it across the board an equal thing.
That caught the attention of the public, and from that point on, we saw our petition numbers just crank over, you know, just accelerated.
And there were other petitions on board.
In total, I think there were over 200,000 signatures on two or three petitions, ours included, that they just couldn't ignore.
But they went for it anyway.
This was a slam dunk.
You know, the Liberals, they came out with this.
It was a slam dunk deal for them, and they were going to put this through come hell or high water.
And they did, but there was a lot, a lot of people caught, or it caught the attention of a lot of people. So, much so that one member of Parliament, Trost was his name.
He was a conservative.
He reported on his Facebook page that in the few days prior to the actual vote in 2017, he reported that the parliamentary offices had received over 800,000 emails, most of which were against the motion.
They had never seen anything like that.
Over almost 900,000 emails, people saying, no, this is nuts.
Don't do it.
And they did it anyway.
But because there was always, I think, the plan to introduce this motion and open up this Islamophobia gateway.
That eventually there were various funds that were put in place behind it.
They said it was a non-binding motion.
It wouldn't make any differences, but it opened up the doors for a lot of millions and millions of dollars of funding for things like fighting Islamophobia, racism, and everything else.
It became an industry.
It did, and that, what you described, reflects where a lot of us are in or the public servants are no longer servants they have become masters and they simply take in public consultation to tick a box.
It used to be there would be dialogue now it seems to be politicians always know better and we must submit or comply.
Is that how you've kind of seen us in Canada on this issue and the wider issue of free speech?
Well, yes.
And I think the proof is in the pudding.
And we saw that, I think, in spades with the advent of the COVID pandemic.
Because here you saw, there were a lot of questions.
People were wondering just what the heck is going on here?
You know, we've got to stay six feet apart.
We've got to, you know, some poor soul would pop their head above the parapet and say, why six feet?
And then they would immediately get slammed back down into their pod where they belonged.
And you couldn't even ask questions about, you know, like this is an experimental vaccine.
Are there any long-term studies?
Well, you can't ask that question.
I mean, who are you and how do you deserve the right to ask such a question?
So, yes, there was a, I call it an untethering.
Our public service, our politicians, our judiciary, Sherry, they became untethered.
Or maybe the better way to explain it is they had become untethered quite a while ago, but this whole COVID pandemic made everything so crystal clear that they had no intention, no intention of doing what was best for the population.
As a matter of fact, they purposely and deliberately told us we had a safe and effective vaccine when they knew when they were told by their contracts with organizations like Pfizer that it's not, we don't know if it's safe and effective.
We've got no long-term studies.
It's right in the contract.
So we can't guarantee anything down the road that there won't be adverse events that, you know, that might come aboard.
They knew it wasn't safe and effective, and they lied to us, and they were totally untethered with their responsibility to serve the public that they were sworn to serve.
Yeah.
And then, again, I guess the other proof in the pudding there is we talk about Canadian citizens taking notice and finally having enough.
We had Freedom Convoy 2022.
That was a seminal Canadian event that no one wants to admit it in the political class, but that protest was a one-off in Canadian history.
And it went on to spark similar protests around the world, New Zealand, Australia. Basically, all the Western world picked up on it.
They're still driving tractors down highways in Holland and Ireland.
And again, people, I guess we should thank our politicians and our judiciary for doing such a poor job and representing us because it's so poor that we can see it.
And it's crystal clear that we've got a problem.
And one other thing we talk about, you know, this worldwide event, you know, people standing up across the world, right?
They are standing up, I think, against – when we look at the restrictions that are being placed upon people in Canada, we're seeing the same thing happen in Ireland, in Britain, and across the West, in the United States. It's as though our Western leadership is in lockstep.
I'll give you an example.
In the UK in 2021, your government came up with something called the Countering Disinformation Act, or the Countering Disinformation Unit.
Unit, I think.
Countering Disinformation Unit or something, yes.
It was the Disinformation Unit.
When they did that, they coordinated those activities with Canada, Australia, United States, and 20 other.
They had bi-laterals with 20 other nations to do the same thing.
And basically what this disinformation unit was all about was taking a look at any information that they could determine, misinformation, disinformation, and quash it, find it, get it off the Internet.
And you had your legislation come forward as a result. So we are dealing with legislation that comes out of that initiative in 2024 now called the Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act.
Basically it's all the same. So across the board we're seeing all these nations.
I think it started with Germany in 2016, 2017 with their internet bill in Germany. And now you see all the Western nations basically replicating that legislation.
People may be standing up in unison against this oppression that we're facing when it comes to our speech, but I think they're doing so because they are going up against a unified oppressor in the form of our Western liberal, so-called liberal governments.
Oh, yeah.
And we'll get on this now, the online harms bill, because we have the online safety bill in the UK. Europe has the DSA, Digital Services Act.
I think Switzerland have similar legislation.
I think the US have COSA, Kids Online Safety, which I think that will be used in this way.
But we see it and you realize how clever the other side is.
They talk about protecting children.
They talk about safety, stopping harm.
These are terms that keep coming up and no one can argue against that and that's the difficulty.
What has been the pushback like in Canada because in the UK parliament collapsed completely in adoration of this bill.
There were maybe might have been a dozen politicians who were against it, but everyone got sucked into this mantra that we must protect children online and this is the way to do it.
What political pushback has there been on this legislation in Canada?
Initially, none.
And it was very much the same case as your experience in Europe.
But what happened was this whole bit about, you know, protecting children online, non-consensual postings online, that was the Trojan horse that was rolled out and presented to the public.
And, you know, this is how they presented it back in February when when our Justice Minister Virani presented it to the Canadian public, this is going to address these very evil things that were happening on the internet.
And no one can argue with that.
But the fact is, is that these are issues that are either already out of bounds in our criminal code or can be addressed through current laws, criminal codes, with modifications here and there.
So, having an online harms act to deal with these things is not really even the best way to go.
Because what they've done is they've included all these other add-ons to the bill. For example, they've constructed a whole new bureaucracy in the form of a digital safety commission. And this commission has powers that are unbelievable.
They can actually, they're not constrained by rules of evidence.
They're not constrained by rules of reasonable search and seizure.
They can walk into an organization, into a company, into a social media place and start collecting files and data without due process.
They can take an anonymous complaint against an individual and with that anonymous anonymous complaint.
They can they can investigate the the the evil wrongdoer the other the person who who said something hurtful or get this might say something hurtful in the future.
This is this is really a pre-crime bill it's It's Orwellian. It's 1984.
It's even worse than 1984.
George Orwell couldn't have envisaged such an oppressive bill.
It's incredible.
And it just goes on and on.
I mean, they just take the charter and they shred it.
They shred Section 1 Limitations Clause to show evidence, to have proof of the need to relieve someone of the rights.
They do away totally with a section two freedom of speech. It's gone you can't even think about anything that might be hurtful.
Gone is section seven and uh section eight search and seizure due process.
I mean the whole chart all the fundamental freedoms are stripped and this is a good thing.
So, I think you talk about you know what's the reaction initially we had a couple of folks, Michael Geist, is is one we have some communications experts that commented on it a few articles here and there with the national post a favorite of ours is is Barbara K.
She stood up and she said this to quote her she said this bill must be stopped.
It's in no uncertain terms she's a iconic Canadian author and a very famous national post columnist she She came forward and said that. So there has been some pushback.
I think we're starting to get to recognition across the board.
I saw this thing happening with Motion M-103.
We've kicked off our own petition in this, but this time we're doing a House of Commons petition.
You have the same thing in the UK where your parliamentary house, a member of it can sponsor a petition.
And if it gets over a certain number of signatures, they have to deal with it.
That's what we've done.
And we've had the good fortune of having the member of parliament, Cathay Wagantall, from the Conservative Party, sponsor our petition.
It's out there now as petition 5160. If you want to take a look at it, just Google petition 5160. And you'll see a pop-up as the number one choice and go ahead and sign it.
And so we are very fortunate to have a miss Wagantall sponsor our petition has just kicked off a few days ago and I got a feeling that this is going to be another another motion demo or three thing where people once they once they start catching on to just what this bill entails and how many any rights they lose, they're going to be furious, absolutely furious.
The politic, because you look at Trudeau when he had a very bad, not disastrous enough general election, and he was weakened, and yet this seems to be continually pushed through.
You've got the Conservatives seemingly with a Conservative leader now in Pierre Paul, I can't pronounce his surname. Paul-Yves.
Paul-Yves. Forgive my French. in Pierre.
So that seems to be, and Maxime Bernier has been pushing many issues extremely well, but hasn't had that political traction electorally.
So there are things happening, and I've certainly seen a number of Pierre's speeches doing very well.
How does that all fit together with a weakened Trudeau and possibly an actual conservative Conservative Party?
Well, I think we're seeing it now.
I think we're seeing the Liberal Party is really on the ropes, not only with this particular issue and the stripping of our Canadian Charter of Freedoms and Rights. He's in the locking stock. He's for scandal.
I mentioned earlier in this discussion how the Liberal Party; they put these funds together to fight Islamophobia, fight racism, but they put other funds together that basically are in the budget, but they don't have any particular thing assigned to them to be spent on.
They're just for Islamophobia.
They're for racism.
They have big ones for capital infrastructure, $35 billion fund for capital infrastructure.
It could be anything, LRTs or whatever, you know, just whatever you want to go in there and request.
They also have huge funds for greening, the greening of the new green deal type thing.
And the latest, I guess, scandal is the fact that 330 million of these green fund dollars have gone have slipped off the have slipped into the ethosphere and and wound up in in companies that are headed by by liberals or friends of liberals and so it's kind of embarrassing.
And so we see a weakened liberal party a weakened Trudeau and uh at the same time I don't think coincidentally you're seeing a rising Pierre polio he is becoming now.
He's becoming more forceful as he garners more public opinion on his side.
As his polling numbers go up, he is becoming more and more brave in asserting conservative values that have been kind of, you know, kept under the covers for many, many years now.
So he is being emboldened.
And that is a very good thing to see.
Up until now, I think the only politician who's really been pushing these issues, these attacks on our freedoms and our rights, is, as you say, Maxime Bernier.
But he's a voice in the wind.
He's got a lot of good ideas, but he does not get a lot of press play.
He is not popular with the press.
If anything, they denigrate him.
They insult him.
They say he's far right, he's extreme, he's a white nationalist, Christian nationalist.
You know, anybody that's kind of just to the right of – you know, Marx in Canada, it's a tell of a hundred these days, you know, like there is no, there is no right left.
It's just, you got your right thinkers, and you got your wrong thinkers in Canada.
And if you're a conservative who believes in conservative values, family values, well, you're, you're, you're on the wrong end of the narrative there, but it is starting to change.
I love having Maxime on a great interview with him and love following him from afar, complete common sense, able to put forward a position and doesn't give up and engaging.
But I mean, you look at the political landscape, you think of Canada as more to the left.
You kind of, it seems to be it's kind of 60-40 or two-thirds, one-third. So it does seem as though any conservative leader has an uphill battle.
I don't know whether that kind of mix is in the population or whether it's more media pushed or whether it's kind of just traditionally being politically the stronger party has been the left.
I don't know kind of where all that fits together because it does seem worldwide on the left there is a lack of patriotism a self-loathing of the nation state of history and that's why we've got to the position we are in.
I think you hit the nail on the head there.
It is true that Canada is very much a left-leaning nation.
We've kind of lost that whole concentration on that Judaeo-Christian ethic is evaporated and the vacuum has been filled by people I wouldn't say you know people are necessarily of left persuasion.
I think a lot of people get uh they just fall into line i mean Canada is a country that
Has that kind of tendency to lean to the left. I mean, it's kind of baked into our history.
It's the old Garrison mentality, you know, like Canada is the great white north.
You know, we're always cold here.
It's freezing.
It's like the Arctic. You know, you've got to band together, help each other out, you know, to get to the winter side thing.
And that, you know, you end up with this Garrison mentality that can really take hold of the national fabric.
There's another aspect to this, though, and that, you know, along with having that Garrison mentality, you know, that we also have this pioneering spirit.
You know, we have the Voyageur that, you know, launched off from Upper and Lower Canada into the hinterland and canoes to trap and trade with the indigenous population, to build up the nation on the basis of going out and exploring, then we have that.
Actually, you see that very much so in the West. And the West is kind of that, was built on that, with that pioneering spirit in mind.
And you can see that divide in Canada.
You know, you've got your Laurentian folk who basically, Central Canada, who basically have the power, have the political power, run the country,
The Western folk, the more pioneering type, I guess, who provide all the resources, work, and money for Central Canada to use as they see fit. It's an arrangement that is wearing thin.
And this recent last nine years under the Liberal government with all the division that has been brought on board, I'd say Canada's in for a rough time when it comes to keeping itself together and keeping itself unified.
And we're seeing, especially when you have this east-west divide, you're looking at the central Canadians wanting to quash fossil fuels, and you look at the west who need fossil fuels.
It's the basis of their prosperity.
It's in everything that they do and they build.
Fossil fuels are a big part of that.
So you're creating a divide here that is ultimately capable of splitting the nation.
We used to say French-English, but I think the East-West, that divide is much more pronounced.
So it's an interesting time.
No, it is.
And I know that the diversity, inclusion, the multiculturalism, that is a battle we're all facing.
But it seems like Canada is, and there is a fight for identity and what it means for the nation state.
And Canada seems to be maybe even a little bit more than the UK.
I could be wrong, but seems to be in a state of confusion of what it means to be itself.
Mass immigration changed Canada a lot.
Toronto is a complete melting pot. Well, as is London.
So this is not on Canada, not on the UK.
We're in the same boat.
But is that a fair assessment that there is a struggle at the moment for Canada as a nation to understand what it means to be Canadian? Because that seemed to be chipped away.
And there's a struggle to understand what those values mean.
Yes, that's very true.
And what we're seeing now is we're importing, we're bringing people in at record rates.
It's our population kind of jumped 2 million in a couple of years there, just over the past couple of years, it's incredible.
It's to the point where we can't handle the infrastructure, can't handle this, the newcomers that are coming at us.
So we're having housing crises, we're having inflation, we're having all these problems as a result of basically it's self-inflicted immigration policies that are really killing us that we could change tomorrow, we could change overnight.
But our betters, our political betters don't seem to want to do that.
They have another agenda in mind and it is wreaking havoc on our unity as well because the problem on the unity side is the fact that we're bringing these people in and we're encouraging them to maintain their old cultures.
We're bending over backwards to let them do things the way they want to do them. And as a result, we're basically importing a whole bunch of tribes with no unifying message to unite them that underpins their presence in Canada.
The only thing that can unify people like this of diverse backgrounds is to have a common understanding that everybody signs up to.
And up until now, that common understanding in a Western liberal democracy has always been individual rights and freedoms.
You know, if you concentrate on giving on servicing individual rights and freedoms, well, then all of a sudden all the tribes go away.
Because okay you can have your tribe you can you can worship the way you want to worship but
Underlying all that is an understanding and a respect for individual rights and freedoms so that you respect what the other person wants to worship or do with his life.
And this whole aspect of allowing people to, as much as possible, live their own lives the way they want and realize their own life dreams.
In the States, I think they do that when they say in their constitution that they talk about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
In Canada, we have life, liberty, and the security of the person.
I think that's a mistake on our part, because I think the pursuit of happiness really homes in on that whole idea of people being unencumbered to live their lives without being bothered by governments and being told what to do, which is the case in Canada right now.
We've let that unifying philosophy slip out of our fingers and it's playing havoc right now is what it's doing.
So we here at C3RF, we like to think that we are in the business of educating, of letting people know that, you know, there's a history to Canada.
And it does really concentrate on individual rights and freedoms.
And we really need to get back there because it's the only way we're going to unify a nation and all these various tribes that are landing on our shores.
It's, you know, it's the way we have to go if we're going to survive as a nation, I think.
Okay, so just to finish off with, there'll be Canadians watching, there'll be individuals watching, and they want to know what part they can play.
They go to the website canadiancitizens.org, they're on the screen.
What part are you asking citizens to play as you fight back against this online harms bill?
Well, we'd really love for Canadians to take a look at our House of Commons petition and sign up.
They can go to our website at www.canadiancitizens.org in the take action heading in the banner up top.
You can click on that. It'll drop down. You'll see say no to Bill C-63.
Click on that and you'll have the whole explanation and the bill at your disposal.
Or you could go to, you know, Google petition 5160 with a space between petition and 5160.
Petition 5160, you'll see petition pop up as one of the top choices.
Click on that and go ahead and sign the petition. We really have to get this. We really have to let our members of parliament know that we're taking this very, very seriously. obviously, because from what I can see, this is the final nail in the coffin that they're burying free speech in.
This is the final nail.
If they bring this bill on board, then basically, speech in Canada is going to be chilled like it is going to be the Arctic of the Great White North. It's going to be unbelievably hard to have an opinion that doesn't meet muster with our betters.
So please take a look at our website, canadiancitizens.org, petition 5160, and sign it.
Well, thank you so much for your time, Major Russ Cooper.
It's fantastic to talk to you, to meet you, and to hear of the work that Canadian Citizens for Charter Rights and Freedoms are doing, the vital work and the fight back for free speech.
So thank you so much for your time today in sharing what you're doing.
And the viewers and listeners can be part of that by going to the website, sign up and see by signing the petition, and what else you can do. So, thank you so much for your time today.
Well, thank you.
It's been an honor, Peter and thanks very much for the opportunity.
It's been great.

Chris Farrell - Challenging the System: Judicial Watch's Role in Combatting Corruption Across Administrations

Show Notes and Transcript
Welcome to Hearts of Oak, where today we're diving into the intricate world of government oversight with none other than Chris Farrell, the head of investigations at Judicial Watch. Join us as we explore Chris's remarkable 25-year journey at the helm of this influential watchdog organization, and his relentless pursuit of transparency and accountability.Chris Farrell isn't just a name; he's a force in the quest to keep government operations open and honest. With a background in military intelligence, his transition to Judicial Watch marked the beginning of an era where the Freedom of Information Act became a sword against corruption. In this episode, Chris will unpack how Judicial Watch has evolved, facing both the consistencies and the ever-changing landscape of political oversight. We'll touch on the legal battles fought, the costs associated with seeking truth, and the organization's unwavering commitment to debunking misleading narratives.From election integrity to the media's portrayal of Judicial Watch's efforts, Chris will shed light on how these battles are fought on multiple fronts. We'll also delve into his view on the ideological divide concerning election accountability and why issues like economic stability and immigration are at the forefront of the upcoming election.
 Judicial Watch is a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation, which promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law. Through its educational endeavours, Judicial Watch advocates high standards of ethics and morality in our nation’s public life and seeks to ensure that political and judicial officials do not abuse the powers entrusted to them by the American people. Judicial Watch fulfils its educational mission through litigation, investigations, and public outreach
Connect with Judicial Watch...WEBSITE            judicialwatch.org𝕏                        x.com/JudicialWatch @JudicialWatch
Interview recorded 03.10.24
Connect with Hearts of Oak...𝕏                         x.com/HeartsofOakUKWEBSITE            heartsofoak.orgPODCASTS        heartsofoak.podbean.comSOCIAL MEDIA  heartsofoak.org/connectSHOP                  heartsofoak.org/shop
*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.
Check out his art theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com and follow him on 𝕏 x.com/TheBoschFawstin
Transcript
(Hearts of Oak)
Hearts of Oak, thank you so much for joining us once again.
I'm delighted to have Chris Farrell, who I think I met maybe two years ago when I was stateside and I had the privilege of being on his show, on Watch.
Obviously, Chris has been with Judicial Watch as their head of investigations for 99.
So it's your 25th anniversary, Chris.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
(Chris Farrell)
That's right.
25 years.
And thank you for having me on.
I appreciate it.
Folks at No Judicial Watch, we're a government watchdog group.
We try to uncover the operations of government and then inform and educate the public about what their government is or is not doing to them or for them.
We try to uncover corruption and we try to hold public officials accountable. That's our mission.
And so I've been here for 25 years.
Before that, in my misspent youth, I was an army intelligence officer focusing mostly on counter espionage investigations, some double agent operations, and also commanding the Army's surveillance team, which we used to do physical, technical, and aerial surveillance for counter-espionage investigations and also for human intelligence collection work.
And so we won the Cold War.
This is all many, many moons ago.
And I decided to leave the intelligence world.
I was a contractor for a while to defense and intelligence agencies, but then in 99 I came to judicial watch and as the saying goes the rest is history.
Well, I guess and people obviously if they're not following half our audiences UK if you're not watching judicial watch you need to watch them.
The freedom of information or foyer as you call them.
We we know them in both countries well, that seek to hold government to account and seek to get answers to those questions they do not want to answer.
But people can obviously get on judicialwatch.org and at Judicial Watch on Twitter and X.
I mean, what led you to Judicial Watch?
Because I guess someone in the military background, it is staying in the private sector, contracting, maybe being in pundit work, so on the media. What led you to actually become part of Judicial Watch?
Back in 98, 99, I was watching the work they were doing.
So, I was just an ordinary private citizen looking at what was going on.
This was sort of the crest of the Clinton scandals.
And then the Clintons had made an art of monetizing their government service.
So, there was a lot of corruption going on.
I looked at the organization, thought they were doing great work, and I used my intelligence skills, my background as a case officer, to identify and approach and pitch the leadership and say, hey, you need me.
And it worked. And here I am.
Were you politically attuned back then?
I was.
I was really a committed conservative, not so much partisan in the sense of being rabidly a party operative or faithful.
I really, in general, frankly, I kind of loathe political parties.
I find them to be probably half of whatever problem we have is the party structure and the party activities and the party egos.
So, I was more philosophically conservative and small C conservative and decided that, you know, there had to be some kind of reform.
We could not continue doing what was going on in our government.
And I was going to try to fight for some accountability and some transparency.
And as my colleague, Paul Orfanides, who's our director of litigation here, likes to say, you know, let's sue the bastards.
And so that appealed to me, and it made sense.
No, I've kind of followed Paul's work, and we've had Tom Fitton on before, and giving the overview of what Judicial Watch do.
Now, I get the work that Judicial Watch do, it doesn't come for free.
I mean, when you get in the legal sphere, in the UK it's expensive, in America it's horrendously expensive and ruinously expensive.
I mean, tell us about that and actually using the system, the legal system, against the system, the government or politics.
Right.
Well, we're very fortunate that our Freedom of Information Act law allows anyone, and I mean that literally anyone, to file a request with any of the executive, agencies of the government and ask questions about public policy matters, decisions.
The commitment of funds.
And so we've really refined that to a science.
We have it down in a way that allows us to make very aggressive use of those laws to get records and documents. Because as you well know, particularly when it comes to politicians.
People lie and records don't.
So we can get records and documents and create a record, get the history of what has occurred.
And then we can have an argument about policy and you can have your opinion and I can have mine.
But in the end, if I pull out the records and documents and show them to you and say, well, here's where the money went or here's where the approval to do something or to decide something.
Here's the documentation of it. it kind of deflates a lot of the hyperbolic rhetoric and the hysterical claims, because you have the record, you have the document.
And so we do that a lot. And we sue the government a lot to compel them to answer our requests.
We also file constitutional claims where there's been some grievous wrong or where some government official has been just out of control with their behavior and actions.
They've abused their office. And then we'll sue those officials as well.
There's a crazy example. Just the other day, we had an argument in the Supreme Court of the state of Minnesota, where all of the teachers, the teachers union and the state had entered into a contract.
And for whatever crazy reason, they had agreed to make the contract racist.
I mean that literally.
So under their definition, if you were a person of color and you were a teacher, you couldn't be fired.
If there were layoffs, you could not be laid off.
If you were, I guess, a person not of color, whatever that means, according to their lexicon, well, then you were the first to be fired or the first to be laid off.
And this to me is just blatant racism.
You're making hiring and firing decisions based on skin pigmentation.
It's insanity.
We fought a civil war over this.
Anyway, so that's an example of lunacy that we feel compelled to challenge and we have in Minnesota.
Again, just an argument in the Supreme Court of Minnesota just this past Tuesday.
Wow.
I want to get on to the current political climate in the US.
But I mean, how have you seen your work change over 25 years with all different administrations, all different government officials, some better than others?
How have you seen your work?
Is it you're focused on actually highlighting injustice and exposing corruption and showing wrongdoing?
Or does it change with different administrations?
Well, there's sort of a core set of things that we always look at.
So, we're always looking for reckless expenditures of money and abuse of power or authority or position.
Those things sort of never change. It doesn't matter whether you're a Republican or Democrat.
You sometimes compare it to, you know, a couple of eight-year-olds fighting over the controls of the Xbox.
You know, they each want to play the game and who's ever in charge.
So there's a certain level of bad behavior, regardless of what your party affiliation is.
But there are some things that are really just crazed, right?
Just really abuses. I think the big lesson, though, over time is that the government has become more and more ingenious on how to obfuscate, hide, lie, mislead the public.
And then on the other side of that same coin, we now see really radical moves to censor people.
And I know that you have your own very sad experiences in the UK with respect to thought control and psychological conditioning of people and what you can or cannot say, which you, in fact, I know I've seen video where a person standing quietly on a street has been arrested because they were silently praying, which I thought was insane.
Orwell's warning in 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual. And that's what we see, obviously, here in the United States, also you in the UK.
But the government going around dictating what can and cannot be said or posted or put on social media.
There's a guy who put up a funny meme, a joke about Hillary Clinton and the election in In 2016, he's sitting in prison.
Wow.
Well, it's crazy. And we have our online safety bill.
Europe have the same legislation and it will come to the US because this seems to be a worldwide desire to control any speech that doesn't fit into whatever current government of the day.
So, and I know on with you, Chris, discussing that in the UK and yeah, it's the free speech restrictions are not just a UK issue.
And I mean, because when you look at your first and second amendments, when you look at the protection that gives you the right to defend yourself, I guess those only work if you have the political will, but even more the judicial will.
Actually, if the courts actually back you up, because if the courts don't back you up, then you're left holding a bit of paper, which is the Constitution, which gives you the right, but if it's not backed up.
And America's walking a very fine line on this issue.
Indeed, yeah. Yeah, the presumption was that the persons in authority or in power would act and behave honestly, and that judges would uphold the rule of law, even if they didn't like it, even if their personal opinion was one way or the other.
They would look at what the law said, or they would look at what the founders intended in the Constitution.
And we could have a discussion about how that isn't what they really meant, or, you know, when it comes to the Second Amendment, they were talking about muskets.
They weren't talking about AR-15s or I've heard all the arguments, right?
But there is a remedy, a lawful remedy to that, which is rather than running to the courts and having a government attorney in a black robe issue an edict, the real solution is go into the legislature and craft a law, get it passed from a bill into a law, and then have the executive sign off on it and exercise the legislative process in order to create a law and not just get frustrated, because you don't like it and then dream up some lawsuit and drop it in front of a friendly judge and get them to sign off on it and issue an edict that affects the entire country.
Well, more and more and more, or we've seen that sort of judicial activism in the United States where, again, lawyers in black robes, government attorneys in black robes, they all draw their paycheck from the U.S. Treasury.
They're not some, you know, they're not up on Mount Olympus, up on high, you know, making decisions.
They're right in the middle of the game.
And three quarters of them are government bureaucrats who come out of one government agency or another.
So they're all sort of political operatives.
And this practice is really corrosive.
It is undermining the public's faith in government.
And it's had a very negative net effect, particularly over the last, I'd say, decade.
12 to 16 years it's it's really been it was bad but now it's crazy.
See that from far away from across the pond.
What is it like, I mean your high profile figure judicial watch is a very well-known organization.
I can imagine government officials getting information from judicial watch and thinking, oh no they're just a pain in the ass.
And that doggedness that I think judicial watch have shown in not walking away from a fight, but always up for it.
That I mean that puts you in the crosshairs of a whole range media, judicial, political, I guess you have had to face attacks from all different angles.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So what's interesting is that, you know, I proudly say that we're equal opportunity offenders.
We have upset everyone, left, right, and center, because we're going to be intellectually honest.
If we're going to ask for travel records about what a president is spending flying around the country or around the world, we're going to ask it of Republicans and Democrats alike.
Not everybody likes that.
Well, tough, right?
We have to be even-handed.
We have to be faithful and truthful to what our mission is.
I once was giving a talk to a group of Francophone African delegates who would come here to the United States.
It's all the former French colonies, obviously. I was explaining what we did.
One gentleman burst out in laughter.
And he said, I apologize.
I'm not laughing at you.
I'm just laughing Because if I tried this in my home country, they would throw me in jail And they probably would.
So, yeah, there are challenges.
There are people who don't want to hear what we have to say.
We have social media, like, you know, TikTok, I think, banned us.
Because we say things, here's the irony.
This isn't just our opinion.
We've sued.
We've used the federal court process to get government records and documents.
These aren't our records.
This is what the United States government or some state government has said.
This is their material.
And they try to run away from it and pretend it isn't their work.
Or they're stenographers in the press.
They're not even reporters.
They're just taking dictation.
You know, they say, well, you know, that just simply can't be true.
I mean, we found 113 illegal aliens that voted in the District of Columbia, here in the nation's capital, voted in the last election.
And we have the registrar of the elections telling us this.
So we promote it.
And we have an entire army of fact checkers running around saying, oh, it isn't true. It's not our work.
The election people told us that the 113 illegals voted.
So, I mean, this is just a small example.
I could go on for literally hours.
I love it the way you use government information against them.
That's what's so beautiful about the work the Judicial Watch do.
Right, right.
This is all their own stuff, you know.
It's so good.
Can I, so we are a month out from the election.
We've just had the VP debate with Jerry Vance and Tim Waltz on, was it CNN it was on, I think?
I mean, looking at that and then the wider election, what are your thoughts on this?
And we'll pick up on a couple of the separate issues, I think.
But yeah, what are your general thoughts just days after that debate?
Well, of course, CBS humiliated themselves yet again.
They promised not to fact check.
And right out of the box, what did they do?
Oh, no, Mr. Vance, what you said isn't true. So, I mean, it shows them for what they are, right?
It's a very unpleasant, but I think revelatory example of them exposing their inner bias.
They can't help themselves.
They're so far off the charts in their manic hatred of Trump and all things on the conservative side of the spectrum that they just, they go on and on.
So that just reveals itself.
What I'm most interested in, of course, is the conduct of the election.
Our Constitution says we have an election day, period, not an election week or an election season or an election month.
And we, the country, the United States, when they go to bed on Tuesday night, the 5th of November, or perhaps into the wee hours, maybe by 2 a.m. On Wednesday, the American public needs to know who the president is.
Period.
This routine where we all are going to count votes for the next week because they may have been postmarked and then somebody else, they didn't sign the mail-in ballot and all this double talk and rigmarole.
Nobody doesn't know when the election is. Nobody doesn't know what they're supposed to do if they're interested in casting their vote.
To play this ridiculous game where there's this never-ending opportunity, I want to be very careful.
So the F word, fraud, has a very specific legal meaning.
It's not just that word.
It's also more euphemistically irregularities, right?
Where all the normal procedures and processes are not followed.
And so you have judges in Pennsylvania saying, well, if the ballot is mailed in and it's not dated and they didn't sign it, well, we can still count it even though it's a week late.
That's craziness.
So we need to have an answer on election night or the wee hours of the next morning.
Judicial Watch has been successful at removing 4 million false and inaccurate registrations from the voting rolls in several different states.
In Los Angeles County, county alone, there were 1.5 million false, inaccurate registrations on the voting rolls.
When you have that level of voting rolls being essentially dirty, It's an invitation for mischief.
It's an invitation for manipulation and gamesmanship.
We can't have it. And so we've been very successful at forcing people to do their jobs and make sure that the voting rolls are true, accurate, and correct.
And if you've died, if you've moved away, if you're a felon, those are reasons not to be on the voting roll.
And the registrars have an obligation to make sure that that is correct.
Yeah, in the UK we don't usually let dead people vote, but I know in the U.S it is...
We have a special voodoo you know kind of undead voting patterns which is very, very troubling.
I've seen that. Well I'm praying looking forward to Trump winning his third term so that in that phrase you get where I sit on on this issue, but we I mean you look at it.
I've been involved in all different elections in the UK, European, parliamentary, local, and it's a rush to get the votes in.
There are what we call paper.
I could hold up a bit of paper for the US viewers.
You put an X with a pen, with a black pen.
But it's, I mean, at what point has it been a long slide in the U.S. In terms of actually this integrity of elections slipping, slipping, because it just didn't start in 2020. It's been happening before then.
Yeah.
So way back in 2000, I'd been at Judicial Watch for about a year, there was a 2000 election that was hotly contested between Al Gore, you'll remember, and Bush the Younger.
Was that the Florida votes they were counting or something?
Right.
And you know the people that caused all that castronation in Florida?
Listen, watch.
We're the ones who did it.
We knew that it was hotly debated.
Yeah.
My colleague, Paul Orfanides, and I, we filed 67 Florida Sunshine Act requests.
So Florida has a state-level open records law that they call the Sunshine Act.
And Paul Orfanides did some research and realized that a ballot in the state of Florida is counted as a public record.
And so we, there's 67 counties in Florida.
So we filed 67 requests since really counties administer the election.
And we asked for access to all the ballots.
And you may remember people were looking at hanging chads and dimpled ballots.
There was much controversy over the actual ballots themselves and whether they were accurate and truthful or whether it was a shenanigans.
So we hired an auditing firm, accountants, and we audited the entire election.
We did sample auditing and we got access to all those ballots.
Now, when all the big news media companies saw what we were doing, I think they were a little jealous.
They jumped in behind us.
And so when the New York Times and ABC and CBS and CNN all show up and suddenly say, me too, we want to see the ballots, we kind of got pushed out of the way just by the weight of the media interests.
But that entire thing was actually created by Judicial Watch because we wanted to know what was going on with those ballots and were they being accurately counted and what is a hanging chad and what is a dimpled ballot and how could that happen? And so our audit said that Bush won by about 800 popular votes. And sure enough, when everything was said and done, the official government tally
Confirmed what we had concluded that bush had won by a very very narrow margin maybe eight or nine hundred votes that's it.
I mean and it is the issues that are important but the issues mean nothing if you're doing the election integrity to back that up.
Right
Look at it and in the UK as in the vast majority of European countries and I know you've done a lot of work in in Hungary so you'll have a an idea of some of the election issues and political issues across Europe, but it is a single country decides and you will have some variations but by and large single country in America it's not just at the federal level.
It's not just the state level, it's the county level, and it means there's so many moving parts to it.
Yeah.
Which actually is a beautiful thing.
It makes stealing an election more difficult, unless you have activist judges and crazed governors like Gavin Newsom, who mailed out ballots to every street address in California.
Talk about asking for irregularities and manipulations of the voting process.
But if people are honest and they stick by the written law and they don't do weird things like like in Wisconsin, where the people administering the election had a meeting.
They're all wearing their little COVID masks sitting there. And they say, we know that we're violating the law, but this is an emergency.
We have to do it anyway.
They flaunted it.
They bragged how they were, they knew that everything that they were doing was not within the scope of the law, and they just didn't give a damn.
They're going to do it anyway.
And was any of that overturned or reject it? No. It was accepted as, oh, well, you know, it's COVID.
So, you know, we don't have to pay attention to the laws and the constitution anymore.
We have to have an exception to everything and we're going to keep counting ballots until we get a number that beats Trump.
I mean, that's really the unspoken part of the irregularities that were going on.
I mean, is it Trump Contrangement syndrome that's just turbocharged this left lunacy, really.
Yeah, just yesterday, the prosecutor, and he's a disgraced prosecutor, I want to be clear. Jack Smith is a clown.
He went after the governor of Virginia.
A few years back, maybe it's 10 or 12 years ago, he went after the governor of Virginia on sort of his own political jihad and ended up removing the sitting governor of Virginia.
And then when the case was appealed, Jack Smith was reversed nine to nothing.
A unanimous Supreme Court said that his entire case was a fraud.
It was a lie.
And he had already removed the Governor of Virginia.
Where does he go to get his reputation back?
Where does he go to get his life back?
But Jack Smith, I mean, you would think that an attorney who had a nine to nothing Supreme Court reject everything he was doing, you would think he'd go move on to do something else in life.
But he's a hatchet man. He's a political operative who's called in to do this kind of dirty work.
And now he's doing it against Trump.
So 30 days before an election, what does he do?
He releases another set of pleadings with all kinds of wild, reckless claims.
And of course, look, just because he puts it in a pleading doesn't mean it's true.
This is not evidence, right?
It's just a claim before a court with with no foundation, with no proof. It's simply, we did interviews and we think this is true.
And he dumps this into the public record a month before the election. If that's that election interference, if that isn't the Department of Justice putting its thumb on the scale and trying to unduly, unlawfully influence an election, I don't know what is.
I mean, how did this become a left-right issue?
Because you would think that you sit and talk to a citizen whatever political persuasion they are and they want to know their vote counts and yet we have this crazy situation in the States where election integrity is called into question.
And it's the left that seem to want to have as many dead people or immigrants vote where it's those in the.
Right that seem to want a fair election.
So only those who are able to vote can vote.
How has this become a left-right issue?
So the left, the people on the left, they are, this is my view, sort of a political philosophy here, but they are, the left are creatures of the state.
They love big government, big programs, big tax dollar, you know, supplements, entitlement payments.
They never saw a program or a project or a government initiative or a government agency that they didn't love.
That's their ecosystem.
They swim around in this environment where they love to use and manipulate the levers of state.
Right.
All the organs of the state, a good Soviet term, they love utilizing that to maximum effect.
That's where they're coming from. On the right, you find a lot of people who are small government people.
They're strict constitutionalists.
They don't believe in never-ending government programs and subsidies and all those sorts of things.
A lot of people on the right will show up to do their government service, whether they're members of Congress or they serve on some county commission, and they do their bit, and then they go home.
They go back to running their business or being part of their community in some way. They don't stay in the statist ecosystem.
And so they're just not oriented.
They don't think and believe and act in the way that folks on the left do.
So of course, The left knows how to use all the different levers of the state, all the agencies, all the tactics and techniques of big government to achieve their ends.
And folks on the right, they're not thinking about it that way.
I've gone out and talked to people who are interested in voting.
And I've said, look, I've got about 24 years of voting, you know, verification and certification experience.
You guys, speaking to people on the right, you guys are great at having your rally a day or two after the election's been lost and protesting.
Right.
All your equal opposite numbers on the left, they've gone and studied all the rules and regulations, all the laws.
They know every single official in the voting chain.
They've met with them.
They've lobbied them. If there's something that goes wrong with the election, they know exactly what paragraph to cite to file their claim, to challenge a vote.
That's their ecosystem.
That's where they live.
And the folks on the right just kind of show up to complain.
It's a very different mentality, and it needs to be addressed directly.
I mean, is it naivety?
Because I guess if you go back a generation, you had a strong church that was vocal, that actually believed what the Bible taught, which is very different today.
You had a legal system that did understand right and wrong. You had individuals engaged maybe at the at the local level, at the community level.
You had an education system that that worked a heck of a lot better than it does the moment, so maybe conservatives just sat back and it's that false sense of security on the left have been realizing they need to burn this down or maybe conservatives have thought actually it's fairly good, and I think it will just continue.
I mean, is that just naivety that's meant conservatives have been asleep on watch?
They have.
And the other thing that's very disturbing is that there's been various polling done that shows the number of committed Christians, self-identifying believers, who do not vote.
They just don't show up.
It's something like 40%. So if 40% of the committed Christians in the country bothered to show up and just vote, what a difference that would make.
There's also, this is unpleasant to say, but it's truthful, so you kind of have to, you got to admit it, is that there's a lot of cowardly pastors as well.
They're afraid, oh, I'm going to lose my nonprofit status as a church if I express a political opinion.
That's a lot of garbage. That isn't true.
You can comment on things that objectively, that morally are objectively right or wrong and let people draw their own conclusion.
Killing children is bad.
It is wrong, objectively, period.
Now, you have a candidate that supports killing children, and then you have one that doesn't.
Pick.
This is not tough stuff, right?
It really isn't.
But there's some pastors who are kind of afraid of their own shadow or they don't want to get out of their comfort zone.
And that's an enormous disservice, really.
And I don't mean that just politically.
I mean that spiritually.
It's a horrible disservice.
They have an obligation to shepherd their flock and to educate and inform and enlighten.
And if they're not doing that, something's very, very wrong.
We see exactly the same in the UK.
I've had numerous conversations with pastors who will agree with you behind closed doors, but publicly it's a fear of man more than the fear of God.
And that puts the church in a dangerous situation.
What has it been like with Judicial Watch?
Camping on these issues and you personally heading up those investigations and campaigns, how does that fit in with the church?
Because in a way, you're highlighting injustices that the church should really be doing.
It should be their job.
And yet you're having to do it as a private organization as opposed to the body of Christ doing it.
Yeah, I mean, so we have a role, and it is a decidedly nonpartisan, nonsectarian, you know, the organization Judicial Watch politically is nonpartisan.
We're philosophically conservative and unapologetic about that.
And likewise, you know, persons of faith or persons who decide no, that they're not, we don't even go there, right?
But we do talk about things that are objectively disordered and things that you can prove to be morally true or false.
And I've done this innumerable times with people.
I don't care what they believe or don't believe, but you can't materially cooperate with evil.
And you can get there in a secular way or you can get there through faith.
Personally, for me, it's through faith.
But I'm willing to engage with anyone and discuss the morals of this.
Years ago, I taught a journalism law class at a university here.
And there's a lot of moral relativism and a lot of, well, you know, that's just how they feel or what they think.
So the way I would try to break through and explain that there is objectively right or wrong is, and a couple of students in particular would be very vociferous in their objection to me talking about right and wrong and good and evil.
And I'd say, well, okay, tell me how rape is good.
Go ahead.
You have the floor.
It shuts down.
No one in their right mind is going to defend that or explain that somehow it is good.
And so there are ways to demonstrate to people that we really do have to make a choice and we have to stand on what we believe.
And if you're a person of faith, frankly, it should be very easy.
We have a wonderful instruction book.
It's called the Bible.
I recommend it to people.
But let's say you reject that and you say, no, no, no. I don't believe all that.
That's just mythology, et cetera, et cetera.
Okay. Well, there's still ways to prove things.
The example I gave you about asking a question on rape or the people that are wrapped up in this crazed, radical gender ideology, you know, they can say whatever they want to say.
And if they say that they believe in science, okay, well, there's chromosomes, right?
It's either XX or XY.
That's it.
You can talk about it endlessly.
You can discuss your dysphoria or whatever other psychological condition you may or may not have.
But the science says the chromosomes show up as XX or XY. And that is it.
So we are able to give examples.
We are able to prove things.
We are able to, and I don't mean that in a demeaning way.
What I'm trying to do is give people encouragement, right?
I want your viewers and listeners to say, wait a minute, maybe there is something I can do.
Maybe I can share my faith or my beliefs with people.
Maybe I can engage with my neighbor, or I can do something with a family member.
I don't know.
Each of us has a way to go forward positively.
What I'm saying and what we've been talking about, my goal and objective is to provide, encouragement and courage to people to go make a difference you don't have to go off and lead you know some big movement you can do it in your very own community.
Everyone can play their part and it's interesting what some of the issues the pro-life issue you can say we're all made in the image of God therefore every life has value or you can look at some of the the scientific background ground of the repercussions of abortion or what actually is life. And so there are all different ways of tackling this issue.
But Chris, I 100% agree that if you look at the Gospels, you see how Jesus lived.
You pick up the Bible, look at the Psalms or Proverbs, and you can see guidelines live.
And the Bible is packed full of that from Genesis to Revelation.
You can't get a better manual in the current chaos than picking up a Bible.
Can I just finish with the issues in this election? It seems that, well, it's the economy, stupid, but that's always been a bread and butter, what people are feeling in their pocket with the paycheck, with the cost.
And And that's had a dramatic change in terms of inflation and chipping away. And the other side is an open border.
I mean, a government's one of their primary duties has to be to protect the citizens.
And you can't protect if you don't control who comes in.
Are those issues still immigration and the economy?
Are those still the two main issues that you think will decide this election?
Absolutely.
Undoubtedly.
They are dominant above all else, I think.
There's also, I think, a third issue that people are sensitive to.
They may not be sort of dissecting it down to specific policies, but there's, generally speaking, there is great unease with wars around the world.
And so obviously Israel is under attack.
Israel is under attack from every angle and is in a precarious position. They're fighting back, and I applaud them for fighting back.
They should.
I have no criticism whatsoever of how Israel has defended itself since October 7th.
I know there's all sorts of people lined up ready to call them names.
You know, don't start wars you can't win, right?
You're going to start a war, you're going to get a reaction from it.
And so just because you're losing doesn't mean you can now, you know, scream, oh, you're being mean to me.
Well, you know, they didn't need to come across that fence on October 7th.
So, now Now they're going to get the reaction from that and all that comes from that. And the other thing is Ukraine.
So we have a wide open southern border with, who knows, 16, 18, 20 million people come in in the last three and a half, almost four years.
So, we're going to spend $180 billion to support Ukraine's border, and we're not going to do a damn thing about our own southern border?
People have a hard time trying to balance that out.
They don't get that.
And I think, you know, without being too controversial, Ukraine is an incredibly corrupt environment.
And Mr. Zelensky is not Churchill, right?
So, again, unpleasant things to talk about, but that's what we have to wrestle with. These are the big questions in front of the American public.
And do you think that.
I mean, the voters seem looking at even polling over the last couple of days and obviously Kamala Hyena Harris had her bounce whenever she got stuck in.
That seems to be dropping away.
I just, I mean, well, she was the border czar, so everything that's happened is on her.
People will see through that inability to understand.
Was it Trump that said about it? He said, oh, Biden has become this way. Harris was born this way, looking this way.
You get those one-liners, you think, oh, genius.
But I think the public will see through them.
And I've even seen quite a lot of clips on CNN and MSNBC see and commentators beginning to call Harris out for what she is, which is just completely out of her depth.
She has not held an actual real press conference since she was anointed by the general secretariat of the central committee.
Since the party decided, without a single vote being cast, the leadership of the party decided that she's the new candidate, right?
So that goes back to the summer.
Now we're getting into the fall now and a month out. And she has not sat in a room with 50 or 100 reporters and said, OK, what do you got?
Let's go. Let me answer some questions for you.
Trump does it every day. And she's hiding and people know that people know, or they have reason to believe that she's not, well-equipped.
That's a good word to use. And even Putin finds her laugh fascinating.
That was so good.
But Chris, she does have to practice her accent.
So come on, she's busy doing that.
She has every, every couple of days, depending upon who she's talking to, she develops a a new dialect, a new accent for the listening audience.
It's quite remarkable.
It really is.
Chris, we find ourselves in strange times, one month out from not only one of the most important elections in the US, but I think for Europe, for the UK, and worldwide, because since the Second World War, we've relied on America being a strong country that speaks truth and has military might to actually back that up.
And at the moment, maybe the US military have got more rainbow laces than actually weapons to fight back.
So it is a key election.
I think it is so important even for the U.K audience to hear what is happening.
So, thank you for giving us your overview of that and touching upon some areas that Judicial Watch is involved.
So, I appreciate your time Chris, so thank you very much
Peter, Thank you very much, it's a pleasure being on with you.

The Week According To . . . Jennifer Arcuri

Welcome back as we dive into another episode filled with riveting discussion and critical analysis. Today, we're thrilled to have Jennifer Arcuri return once again, bringing her sharp insights into the myriad of challenges facing the US and UK. From the aftermath of devastating hurricanes in the States to the contentious political manoeuvres across the pond, Jennifer will shed light on how these events reflect deeper issues of governance, accountability, and the tug-of-war between citizen rights and government overreach. Stay tuned as we unpack these urgent topics, challenge the mainstream narratives, and explore what it all means for the sovereignty and spirit of the people.
California based, American tech entrepreneur Jennifer Arcuri is the founder of the Innotech Network, Hacker House, Pinksheet Database, and Proxsey London.She founded the Infotech Summit to encourage entrepreneurs, policymakers and investors to discuss and shape tech policy.A former film student who started in digital distribution and film production, In 2008, Jennifer produced the short film, "La Valise", which was part of the Short Film Showcase at the Cannes Film Festival.She started her career at the Walt Disney Company as Radio Disney DJ Razzle Dazz, operating under the ABC Company and ESPN Broadcasting, and she has also worked as assistant PA under Bravo's "Inside the Actors Studio" with James Lipton.Jennifer has previously run a video streaming platform and is a cyber security expert, tech geek, producer, adventure seeker, is hot on video content, data visualization and is always looking for game changing technology to rock the world with.She loves to laugh and enjoys anyone with a good story to show and tell.
Connect with Jennifer...𝕏                         x.com/Jennifer_Arcuri  @Jennifer_ArcuriTELEGRAM        t.me/RealJenniferArcuriPODCAST          jenniferarcurichannel.podbean.com
Interview recorded  4.10.24
Connect with Hearts of Oak...𝕏                         x.com/HeartsofOakUKWEBSITE            heartsofoak.org/PODCASTS        heartsofoak.podbean.com/SOCIAL MEDIA  heartsofoak.org/connect/SHOP                  heartsofoak.org/shop/

Dr Brian of London - Israel's Fight for Survival or the Beginning of WWIII?

Join us as we dive back into the heart of the Middle East with Brian of London, who brings us up to speed on the year that has passed since the pivotal events of October 7th. In this gripping episode, we explore the intricate dynamics between Israel, Hamas, and the formidable Hezbollah. Brian sheds light on the strategic warfare, the psychological toll on Israeli society, and the pervasive influence of Iran in this enduring conflict. Listen to first-hand accounts of military innovation, the erosion of trust, and the relentless spirit of a nation under siege. Don't miss this compelling conversation that goes beyond headlines to deliver a nuanced understanding of a region in turmoil.
Dr Brian of London is an Indigenous Jewish Rights Activist & re-settler living in Tel Aviv.He completed a PhD in Computational Fluid Dynamics just as the Web was emerging.But then he left academia to do management consulting and eventually moved to Israel to do business.Brian's working on the cutting edge of the new Podcasting 2.0 to make sure this relic of the early web, stays free from capture by the centralising forces of Web 2.0 and their dangerous desire to turn us all into dairy cows.Brian was also the admin on Tommy Robinson's Facebook account that had over a million followers before it was nuked!
Interview recorded 3.10.24
Connect with Brian...𝕏                        x.com/brianoflondon  @brianoflondon
Connect with Hearts of Oak...𝕏                         x.com/HeartsofOakUK @HeartsofOakUKWEBSITE            heartsofoak.orgPODCASTS        heartsofoak.podbean.comSOCIAL MEDIA  heartsofoak.org/connectSHOP                  heartsofoak.org/shop
*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.
Check out his art theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com and follow him on 𝕏 x.com/TheBoschFawstin

Jeff Younger - A Father's Fight: Navigating the Transgender Debate in Custody Battles

Shownotes and Transcript
Join us for an emotionally charged and revealing episode on Hearts of Oak, where we delve into the life of Jeff Younger, a man whose personal battle has become a public spectacle at the heart of the transgender debate. From his roots in Silicon Valley to a contentious family court saga in Texas, Younger shares his journey through advocacy, legal battles, and his unwavering fight for his child's future. This episode not only explores his fight against child gender transition but also touches on the systemic issues within family law, the political divide within America, and how his faith has guided him through chaos. Tune in for an episode that promises to challenge your views on family, identity, and the essence of parental rights.
Jeff Younger, a Texan, has been embroiled in a high-profile legal fight to prevent his son, James, from undergoing transgender medical treatments advocated by his ex-wife, Anne Georgulas. After a move to California, known for its transgender sanctuary laws, Younger faced new challenges when the case was sealed from the public by Judge Michelle Kazadi, sparking outrage over transparency and rights. Despite losing a political bid in Texas, Younger's case continues to draw national attention, highlighting the clash over transgender issues, parental rights, and medical ethics in the U.S.
Connect with Jeff...𝕏                        x.com/JeffYoungerShow  @JeffYoungerShowSUBSTACK        jeffyounger.substack.com
Interview recorded  27.9.24
Connect with Hearts of Oak...𝕏                         x.com/HeartsofOakUKWEBSITE            heartsofoak.org/PODCASTS        heartsofoak.podbean.com/SOCIAL MEDIA  heartsofoak.org/connect/SHOP                  heartsofoak.org/shop/
*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.
Check out his art theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com and follow him on 𝕏 x.com/TheBoschFawstin
Transcript
(Hearts of Oak)
Thank you so much for joining us once again with a brand new guest, and that is Jeff Younger from across the pond.
Jeff, thank you so much for joining us today.
Pleasure to be here, Peter.
Great to have you. And any recommendation from Sam Sorbo is always worth having.
She's the best.
Call out to Sam Sorbo and thank you for making the connection.
I wasn't aware of the work you've done, Jeff, and delving into the fantastic work you've done in campaigning against the trans push, especially, and we'll get on to that.
But people can follow you at Jeff Younger Show on Twitter or X and, of course, jeffyounger.substack.com. Make sure and check that out.
And if you like Jeff by the edge, you may even want to become a paid subscriber.
So, I will leave that to you to make that judgment.
Now, maybe your background, Jeff, before we get on to the topic.
You're there over in Texas.
What's your background?
Well, I have what I would call a typical Silicon Valley sort of career trajectory.
You know, it's funny when you ask an American, tell me your background, we always start with our work.
It's one of the big differences between us and Europeans.
But I think my friends in the UK do the same thing.
It must be an Anglo thing.
I went into the Marine Corps when I was a young man. When I came out of the Marine Corps, I knew how to program because I had done programming in the Marine Corps.
And I began to work with mathematicians in the oil industry doing optimization systems for oil refineries.
And pipeline networks and things like that.
And I got highly involved in operations research, and that led me into applied mathematics, which I did for years until I was 35.
I was living in Hong Kong when I was 35.
My father had two heart attacks, and I had to return to the United States.
And I came to Dallas, Texas to take care of him to the end of his life.
I got a letter from the Marine Corps when I was in Dallas saying that I was going to lose all my educational benefits because they expire.
So, I went to school at the University of Dallas where I began studying linguistics and philosophy.
Linguistics took me into the study of mathematical logic and back into mathematics.
And from there, I had a kind of spiritual journey.
I went from being an atheist to being an Orthodox Christian.
And that was an important part of a shift in my worldview.
And I married in 2010 and had two children about a little bit before my son was two years old.
My then wife began to try to transition one of my twin boys to a girl.
And that set up a huge controversy in the state of Texas.
Eventually I was able to, it took me six years and hundreds of thousands of my own dollars of my own money.
I was finally able to get a law passed in Texas banning these barbaric procedures on children.
But my ex-wife has the courts backing her and the big donor class in America backing her. She was able to move my child to California.
And I'm now in a court in California where I will go to trial on the 28th.
If I lose that trial, my son will be castrated in November.
Wow.
It's a huge issue and one that no parent expects.
And we've had a number of people on talking about the trans agenda.
And, of course, we have had the Tavistock Clinic and the UK and the Netherlands have been the world leaders in some crazy way of pushing this.
But tell me, this happens and then you go public.
What were the first steps?
Obviously, you try and reason with someone.
You try and reason with your wife and try and work this out. And then there became a point, I guess, where you realized, actually reason wasn't getting you anywhere.
Well, what I discovered was massive institutional corruption in the court systems and in the legislature of Texas and all the way up to the governor of Texas.
What I fundamentally find, let me just describe it simply.
It took me almost a decade to figure this out.
So the Republican Party, which is largely thought of as the conservative party in America, has a kind of civil war that's going on inside of it.
The Republican Party donor class are Northeastern liberals.
They're New York, you know, in Texas, we would call them Yankees.
And we would say it exactly in that tone.
So, they're Northeastern Yankees who fund the entire Republican Party.
And they're far left liberals.
They're liberals and they're far left.
They're woke.
And then you have the voting base of the Republican Party, which is, well, in the UK would be probably considered far right.
I mean, you know, center right, you know, center right in the United States is basically a Democrat here.
So, you have a far right elector, you know, a voting base and a far left donor class.
And so there's a war that goes on between them.
And what happened is the case of my son in Texas family courts, kind of like in a rugby match.
You have the offsides rules in rugby, unlike American football, so that all the action funnels towards the guy with the ball because of the offsides rule.
Since I was one of the first cases in America, the donor class zeroed in on my case to make legal precedent, and the conservative electorate zeroed in on my case as one that had to be won. And in the case of my son, the liberal donor class clearly has won.
So when, what date was this and was, why was your case high profile?
Was this something fairly new?
I mean, what kind of dates were these?
So it's 2010.
You know, in 2012, when my son was two, she began to transition him to a girl.
My ex-wife is a pediatrician, a physician, and she used her connections with, you know, psychologists and to push me out of my own home.
I lived a mile from my children.
And the difference between me and some of these other cases is really just simply this. In family court, and I think it's true in the UK as well, parents are put under gag orders, so they can't speak about their case.
Well, I live in the state of Texas, and the state of Texas has better protections for free speech than even America's First Amendment.
So, I was put under an incredibly unconstitutional gag order, which actually makes this very podcast illegal in the state of Texas.
It bans me from speaking on political topics for life.
So, I'm not allowed to speak about transgenderism, cisgender, gender dysphoria, any of this stuff.
And I'm banned permanently from all social media.
I'm not allowed to write newspaper articles.
I'm not allowed to do interviews.
It's completely unconstitutional.
So I'm just the kind of guy that I decided in my life as a young man that I'm never going to follow illegal mandates from the government.
So, I was willing to speak out where I think other parents were not willing to do so.
Also, uh, I had connections with the Texas government and was able to lobby for laws, which a lot of people don't have the time or the money to do.
I've talked to, I mean, there are a whole load of areas I want to unpack here and understand.
I think your story is a warning to many individuals and many parents.
But the family court system, certainly in the UK, you're right, it is a closed box.
There's very little access to what happens.
And I've talked to many who have custody issues and they go through the family courts.
And it is the most horrendous experience that I've ever heard of.
Is it the same in the States where it's a closed system and there's very little understanding of what happens behind those closed doors?
Yes, and it's amazing that the electorate doesn't know more about family court.
It is the it is really the nexus for the reason that we don't have family formation anymore.
It's family courts and the laws that that they interpret and govern marriage under.
So yeah, they're closed in my case they've taken the unprecedented step of actually sealing my case which there is no constitutional precedent for.
But they they are terrified of the facts.
If the general public knew what happened in family courts in the UK and the United States, there really would be since, because it is a system predicated on the abuse of children.
It is the institutional abuse of children. It is also, in many ways, the enslavement of fathers.
For example, one of the issues in my case is I'm required to pay medical child support.
So if my child has a medical procedure, I have to pay for half of it.
Well, I'm an Orthodox Christian.
I can't pay for any amount of money towards the castration of my son.
I can't do that.
So, my future lies in a Texas prison.
I will be going to prison eventually for non-payment of child support.
Okay, I want to pick up on on the spiritual side on you as a Christian, but first of all the political side, again this is an issue in the UK that the conservatives are so afraid of and they don't want to get engaged.
And of course you've got a massive trans lobby and full-on LGBT lobby and so which is well funded and forces the agenda and the media you slot into assisting that side.
But what is the situation then politically?
Whenever you begun to engage with lawmakers, what was the response that you had?
So, the first legislative session that I attended, they threw me out of the legislature.
They were scared of the issue and literally had me thrown out of the legislature, which is illegal in Texas.
The second session, I went armed.
So in Texas, you can carry guns in the Texas legislature.
They were not able to throw me out.
They weren't able to risk it.
So, one of the advantages of having a Second Amendment is that the government fears you as much as you fear the government.
So the second session, a huge full court press from the Texas House especially came into play and they tanked the bill.
They didn't consider it in committee.
It didn't make it out.
And a tremendous amount of money was spent on that.
At that time, a big demonization campaign began against me in the media.
The third session, we made it through committee.
And the reason we made it through committee.
I'm just going to tell you is I gave donations to key people.
I mean, that's how the world works. And we got it through committee.
The other thing I did is I went public and embarrassed a number of public officials.
And I name names.
I don't have a problem naming people's names.
We don't have the libel laws that you have there.
Truth is an absolute defense against libel in America.
And I name names if it's true. And I have a legislative record.
I will name names and I'll take it everywhere.
I also created a huge movement in the rural parts of Texas.
The basic idea was.
If I can get, these are small counties where if I can just move 300 votes, I can switch a, you know, a House seat in the Texas legislature.
And I organized those people.
They actually had to put in a new phone trunk into the Texas Capitol because they kept shutting down their phones.
At one point, the Speaker of the House was recording over 300 lobbyists a day on my bill.
But that's what it took to finally get it passed in the fourth session.
So it took me that long to get this done.
And what is the origin of this resistance?
You would think, my goodness, these are conservative Christian Republicans in the House.
What's going on?
And what it amounts to is the liberal donor class in the Northeast, these New York liberals, particularly Paul Singer, just doesn't want these transgender bills passed.
People don't realize the transgender movement in the United States was started and founded by Republicans, not by Democrats.
It was founded by the Republican donor class.
The human rights campaign, you know, the yellow equal sign, it's the most powerful LGBT lobby group in the world.
That guy is the largest donor to the Republican Party.
And he controls much of the media.
He has what I would call an actual propaganda network in the media, in America at least.
And so that's what I was actually fighting.
And eventually I realized once I got to California, there was an email in my, I have a federal case as well as a state case.
There was an email that was sent to me where they, they accidentally put some of the lawyers names in the CC field instead of the BCC field.
And it was links to lawyers in a number of Paul Singer funded foundations.
So, what I've actually been fighting is a a coalition of well-funded foundations that have been run by large republican donors and that's why republicans are loath to pass these bills and it's why conservatives in the UK are loath to pass these bills their donors are fundamentally left-wing.
I mean, people would think Texas, red state, all good.
And I know it's very different when you break it down to the local level, and I get that.
But that's the prevailing understanding.
But what you're saying is, initially, you could not find Republican legislatures who were ideologically aligned to the issue that you raised.
Impossible.
Even today, I can't.
So, for example, the bill that I authored and I was pushing actually classified these procedures on children as felony child sexual abuse, which in the state of Texas could get you, would get you life in prison and under laws that are being proposed now would get you the death penalty.
So, that would completely prevent parents from taking their children outside of the state to get these procedures done.
Because, you know, you can't take your child to Thailand and abuse them and then come back to Texas.
If you do that, Texas is going to put you in jail for the rest of your life.
It's just that simple.
But they, the Republicans pulled those three sentences that classified it as felony child sexual abuse out of the bill specifically to introduce a loophole.
And so this is basically how it works in the Republican party.
And I'm pretty sure this is how it works in the UK.
You have a liberal donor class.
You have a fairly right-wing electorate.
How does an electorate official split this difference?
What they do is they pass bills that seem conservative.
In Texas, they seem conservative.
They pass the transgender bill, but they put loopholes in it. In this case, you can take your kid to Colorado and castrate your kid and bring him back to Texas.
So, then they can go to the electorate and say, you see how conservative I am?
I've passed this conservative bill.
Vote for me again.
And they can go to their donors and say, do you see those awesome loopholes I left?
You can give me millions of dollars.
That's how the game is played by so-called conservatives in our so-called democratic systems.
Explain to me the federal state response to this.
Because obviously we've seen Roe versus Wade being put back to the state level by the Supreme Court.
Yes.
Because there's nothing in the Constitution that gives you the right to take the life of a child.
So, what about the trans issue that's been rolled out?
Whose responsibility, is there a clash between the federal level and the state level?
There actually isn't.
So, I finally got one of our members of our legislature to request a formal legal opinion from the Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton.
Ken Paxton is the most successful attorney general in United States history.
He's won more lawsuits against the federal government and has restricted the federal government's encroachment on state rights more than anybody else in American history.
He's an amazing person.
And he's an incredibly humble person when you meet him.
You understand exactly why he's so successful.
This opinion, it took him six months to write it.
It's the longest opinion that's ever been issued from the Texas attorney general.
And what it shows is that in both federal law and Texas state law, it has always been illegal to do this to children.
And the reason is under the United States Constitution, there is a fundamental liberty interest.
That means there's a that is the highest level of protection of rights in our law.
There is a fundamental liberty interest in procreation.
You cannot take a child's ability to procreate any more than you can take a child's ability to speak.
To see, to hear, or to eat.
So it is a fundamental right of children to procreate.
If they become adults, they can make decisions.
It could be construed as legal, but it is never legal to sterilize children in the United States or in Texas.
They went so far as to even go back.
We trace our history in Texas through Spain rather than through England.
We fought three wars of independence here.
So, they went back through Spanish juridical law.
I mean I don't it doesn't matter which side you go to you know Anglo common law or you go through Spanish juridical law.
All the way back to the earliest days it's always been illegal to sterilize children.
So the fact that it's being done is a massive human rights scam.
That I can't believe that Americans at Stokemore.
Is one of the issues that no one's ever thought that actually this would become an issue?
Because I can't imagine 50 years ago, 40 years ago, 30 years ago, people sitting, we must pass legislation to protect children from this evil.
It wasn't on anyone's radar. Is that part of the problem?
Yeah, I mean, who could have contemplated that it would have become, that we would have so-called medical experts saying that we can remove the testicles, healthy testicles from young children.
I mean, this is just crazy stuff, right?
This is the stuff that, you know, you read of in the most gruesome, like child murder type stuff. There was no social consensus for this.
So, that's one of the things that I really learned in this, well, if you call it a journey.
It's, you know, it's been more like a war, is that our opponents, on the left, the secular left.
And they're not necessarily far left.
This is a secular left thing.
They have mastered the art of entryism.
Your audience can Google that.
They can subvert any democratically run social process.
And one of the things that they've perfected is how to manufacture scientific facts.
The transgender issue is one of the best illustrations of that.
It started with open source journals where like-minded people got together and they began to look around for marginalized groups.
They chose cross-dressers, probably the smallest and most insignificant marginalized group you can imagine.
They picked cross-dressers.
And then what they do is they began to develop fake scholarship in their open source journal. And what they do is they construct new meta theories in their own discipline.
In this case psychology and they they develop a fairly sizable little open source journal then they eventually convert it to a normal journal in el sevier one of the big publishers, and then all of a sudden they can claim that they have tons of peer-reviewed research to back up their points of view.
Then they go into courts as expert witnesses and they make law in courts.
Because as you know, under the English common law system that we both inhabit, judges make law through precedent.
Through the interpretation of law, it becomes binding on other courts.
And they know this.
So, they go into the family courts, and they use this fake expertise from these fake journals, and they create law from that.
So, they've really perfected.
It's a little bit more complicated than that, but it's a six-step process. and they've perfected the manufacturing of scientific facts.
It makes perfect sense.
If you think about it, science is a social process, and the left has perfected hacking social processes.
Now, you talk about your wife moving to California.
There may be some of the audience who aren't aware why and the reasons why that would be.
Do you want to just open that up and explain a little bit which shows the huge disparity and clash between different states?
Yeah.
What you're seeing here is part of American federalism, where we actually have states, we don't have provinces.
This was understood in the original design of our government to be a bulwark of liberty, because the idea was that you would have people with such different geographical interests that none of them could come together to create a faction to take over the government.
That was the idea.
We're going to see just how wrong that design has turned out to be here.
So California passed a bill.
I call it the transgender kidnapping bill.
They call it the transgender rights bill, child transgender rights bill.
What it amounts to is any child that enters the borders of California; if they are from a state that has outlawed transgender procedures, California will never return that child to that other state.
So, that is the basis on which I went up to the Texas Supreme Court.
To prevent my ex-wife from moving my children to California and my argument was very simple.
It's illegal in Texas.
It's a felony in Texas to perform these procedures, in California it's a right to perform this procedure.
Children can actually consent to these procedures at 12 years old in California.
Okay, without their parents consent. So I argued at the Texas Supreme Court that That this would essentially remove the protections of Texas law for my child and put him into a state that will never return him to the jurisdiction of Texas should the court orders be violated.
The Supreme Court of Texas, under the influence of the big donor class, absurdly claimed that my son was under no more danger in California, where this is an affirmative right of being chemically castrated, than he would be in Texas, where it's totally illegal.
It's a completely ridiculous ruling.
The justice's name that authored the ruling is Justice Blacklock, and the co-author was Justice Young.
And these are the leftist morons that we're basically ruled by.
So, we have a clash in America of values.
Now, what's different between California and Texas is this.
California is perfectly willing to pass a transgender sanctuary law for kids, right?
Texas is completely unwilling to become a sanctuary for children fleeing states where they castrate children.
I have tried to push for a law here in Texas to become a sanctuary state for any parent that can bring their that brings their child within the borders of Texas.
We will never repatriate that child to a state that castrates kids.
Texas will not pass that law because of the liberal donor class in the Republican Party.
So, if a law was passed like that, you would go from the United States to states at war, because if the Texas passed that, then really they would have a duty to go and rescue a child who was going to experience that.
This would turn the whole concept of the United States on its head, wouldn't it?
Well, you know, I'm a Texan, so my concept of what american governance is is very different than the mainstream concept in America.
Let me describe the mainstream concept and then I'll describe what I think is the correct way which is of course always the lone star state way.
In the mainstream american way of thinking the federal government has supremacy over the states, and federal law is always supreme over the states.
So, what would happen is the case would go into a federal court.
Under the full faith and credit doctrine, they would order Texas to return the child, because you have to follow the court order.
You have to honor the court orders of other states, right?
However, under the Texas point of view, there can be no lawful order from the federal government to violate the human rights of any citizen of the United States, in fact, of any person in the United States.
So in Texas, we believe in something called nullification.
The federal government can tell us what to do all they want, but we don't have to do it.
And our question to the federal government is very simple.
How many divisions do you have?
And you don't have enough divisions to make us do it.
And the federal government knows this. So because of that, the federal government has put probably the largest deep state presence in Texas.
The largest fusion center in the world is in San Antonio, Texas.
It's the largest intelligence fusion center.
They control, the federal deep state controls elections all the way down to the county level here.
They put money into them and make sure that they don't get people elected that want to nullify these federal laws.
But there's a huge movement to nullify federal laws in Texas again and to revive the spirit of that.
Polls show that over 80% of Texans would support seceding from, from the United States.
And that's no joke.
The federal government takes that very seriously because Texas is completely independent. You may not know this, but Texas is on its own power grid.
We are not on the American national power grid.
We have our own power grid.
We have our, we have our own army.
We have the Texas has its own air force, its own army. It even has its own coast guard. So we actually could go independent, and they well know that.
So, yeah, there is ultimately going to be a reckoning in the United States.
You know, Europe has typically solved problems like this through expulsion, if you look at its history.
You look at the warring periods, you know, in the 17th century.
America has typically solved its problems by partition.
And that's one of the reasons we have states, not provinces.
So, I think ultimately the peaceful way forward for America on these social issues is going to be something like this.
We're going to have to return to radical federalism.
Where in Texas, we're just going to have to accept that they're going to castrate children in California.
And California is going to have to accept that if you do that in Texas, we're going to give you a lethal injection and execute you.
With the, well after the Roe versus Wade, and then with this extreme, crazy individual called Gavin Newsom in California.
I wonder where it goes because if we get President Trump back in the White House and I've been to three different Trump rallies and and always one of the largest cheers has been for the simple phrase that we will not let men into women's bathrooms and that's a big cheer, but that's simply that issue is such a tiny, tiny part.
That's maybe easier to discuss because what you're discussing is so much deeper and darker.
It's darker.
It's difficult to go at.
But where kind of is it moving? Because I've seen a lot of campaigners being much, much more vocal. And I've got to know Billboard Chris, and he was in London recently, children cannot consent to puberty blockers.
And that phrase is regarded as extremist.
But where do you kind of see this going with more and more campaigners individuals, maybe you've been one of the first or beginning to highlight this.
The message really does have to get through and this has to be an election issue.
Yeah, it definitely is it at the state level.
The reason the bathroom issue resonates, it's not that it's not just the bathroom issue.
It's an emblem of a larger problem in which our elites, our leftist elites, that inhabit the agencies of the united states federal government, similar to to your tab of stock have intentionally undermined traditional social norms and have altered the relationship of parents to their children. I mean think about that.
You, you know, you sire children and nothing is more important to you than your posterity.
And the federal government is using the school system and psychologists and all these things to modify your relationship with your children.
So it's really emblematic of that thing.
And what I, what I think is really happening with Trump.
Look, America has been controlled by financial oligarchs for a long time.
I mean, you can go back into the early part of the 20th century.
I would argue back to the Gilded Age in the late 1800s.
America is completely controlled by plutocrats.
So that's not unsurprising.
I think everybody would probably see a way to find something to agree with there.
What I think has happened is on the west coast of the United States, surprisingly in California, in Silicon Valley, a new plutocratic class has arisen.
And this class doesn't have left-wing ambitions.
It's much more what in America we'd call libertarian ambitions.
And it foresees an economy that isn't run by a federal reserve, but by peer-to-peer blockchains, and where there's private banking and things like this.
So these new elites are, have realized that they can't achieve any of their commercial vision under the social systems that the left has created for them.
And so you see guys like Mark Andreessen, who's a lifelong Democrat is now supporting Trump.
Peter Thiel is supporting Trump.
Elon Musk is supporting Trump.
And so I think one way to interpret what's happening in America is you have a new class of oligarchs who are rising up to take their place and argue for their interests against the existing oligarchy class.
So, if I had to sum it up simply, it would be Silicon Valley oligarchs versus Wall Street oligarchs.
The Wall Street oligarchs have typically been aligned with America's deep state.
And we know that election intelligence services in both of our countries interfere in domestic elections all the time.
Well, the problem is the West Coast elites in Silicon Valley have quite wisely embedded themselves into the deep state.
So Peter Thiel, for example, runs Palantir. And the deep state needs that software for their terrorist and human targeting systems.
And I think this was done intentionally by the West Coast elites in order to make themselves indispensable to the state, so they can't be brushed aside.
And now that they've gained that power, they're going to begin to exercise it.
And I think that's why you saw Trump make a big move to Bitcoin.
He used to talk, talk it down all the time.
And now he doesn't because he's siding with those West Coast oligarchs.
What's happening in America, I think, is essentially you have a war between two social and economic visions among the plutocratic elite.
Can I ask you about, you've obviously, through no choice of your own, been thrown into this dark world of the transgender industry and lobbyists.
Where have you seen the catalyst for this? Because there are only a few that will be absolutely ideologically aligned to think actually this is normal to do to children.
The vast majority won't.
But sadly, just as during COVID, many people do follow blindly to orders and nudging.
But is this also an industry that's beginning to build up, that there is money in this?
Where kind of have you seen the main catalyst for something which is really madness?
Well, one of the ways you can see that this was planned, that the open source journals I talked about earlier were created around 2008.
You see the Obama administration long before anybody even knew what this stuff was.
And even before gender it used to be called gender identity disorder and they reclassified it in the dsm-5 which is our diagnostic manual for psychology as gender dysphoria.
A dysphoria is when you have a perfectly natural human variation but because of your culture you it causes you psychological difficulty, so it's not a disorder.
The Obama administration, before that even happened, forced insurance companies in America to fund transgender surgery, even before it was classified as gender dysphoria.
And this created the opportunity for the financial elites in New York, the Wall Street elites that run these insurance companies, to basically financialize this medical procedure.
In America, all medicine is financialized and securitized even.
In America, if you refuse to take a drug that a doctor prescribes, the doctor will very often fire you as a patient.
They will not treat you, because the insurance companies set specific statistical requirements for how many people have to take this drug given this condition.
And the reason is it's securitized.
The insurance company is making financial bets with the drug company.
So, everything here is a security, a financial security.
So, whenever a child walks into a gender clinic in the United States, they become about a four and a half million lifetime income stream to that gender clinic.
Because once they go on cross-sex hormones, they can't get off of it.
Lupron, the drug that is mainly used to castrate these children, is the most expensive drug sold in the United States.
And the reason is very simple.
The demand for it has skyrocketed.
It's only made in one place in the world.
So, they're making enormous profits.
So, what they've done is essentially, and this won't be surprised to my friends in the UK who have been even remotely politically aware for the last 20 years, they have essentially commoditized human misery.
And then they, once it's made a commodity, they securitize it and they make millions of dollars off it.
Which I've seen even in diabetes drugs, looking at Ozempic, I think the diabetes industry, health industry is worth over 300 billion.
And I only read that this morning, it blew my mind.
But can I ask you, we've seen, I think, six European countries begin to push back on the puberty blockers.
And the issue is zero long-term studies.
And of course, these clinics have been operating on zero data.
There doesn't seem to be the pushback in the States despite there being no data and then how is any medical procedure carried out if there is no data to back it up.
Is that still the case in the US that this has been pushed forward and the wakening up in terms of puberty blockers with no data that hasn't happened yet in the US?
It hasn't happened, it's not going to happen.
There there's a couple of reasons for it, first of all these uses of for example the drug Lupron for puberty blocking these uses are considered experimental uses.
You're not, no physician in America is allowed to prescribe an experimental use of a drug to a child, because experimental uses require informed consent.
That's the first thing.
The FDA issued a letter giving special privileges for the use of these puberty blocking drugs for kids, so that they can use experimental uses on children.
My representatives at the federal level sent a letter to the FDA asking them why they changed their own ethical guidelines for this one use of a drug.
And the FDA wrote a letter back saying that they were going to refuse to respond.
So, one of the problems we have in the United States, and I think it's because, honestly, because we copied the UK in the early part of the 20th century, Wilson and FDR wanted an English-style civil service.
And we have agencies that run the government.
And what I've discovered the hard way with my son, fighting for my son, is that elected officials are not in control of the government.
The government is completely run by unelected bureaucrats who are largely captured by the industries that they regulate.
So in other words, the government is essentially controlled by the Wall Street plutocrats.
And so what you have here is a situation where a big propaganda campaign was initiated by the Paul Singer wing of the plutocracy to make transgender children a kind of liberal shibboleth.
A proposition that defines you as a liberal.
And liberals are uniquely vulnerable in America to this kind of propaganda.
Leftists, the characteristic of the leftist is basically this.
They take their opinions not based on facts or reasoning.
They take their opinions based on what they think other people will think of them if they have that opinion.
And it's what Paul Gerard you know when he diagnoses the results of envy and what he calls mimesis where people copy the desires of other people.
Leftists are uniquely vulnerable to this it's a psychological disposition in the leftist mind and it's exploited heavily in the United States.
So, it's gone so far at this point that California for example has made these transgender procedures enshrined as a right.
Let me say that again, enshrined as a right in their state.
It's been made a formal public policy of the state by the legislature, meaning no court can ever overturn it.
So, it's not going away anytime soon in the United States, no matter what the facts show.
And you're right, there have never been facts that show that these procedures are effective.
In my 2019 trial, where I won 50-50 custody and no child support.
And a check on all medical procedures, and the Texas judges got together and then systematically stripped me of all parental rights instead of giving me 50-50, I brought in a guy named Dr. Levine, who ran the first gender clinic in the 1970s at Johns Hopkins University.
And what he testified to is they shut their own clinic down after four years, because all their data showed they were harming patients.
They knew that this stuff was not only not efficacious, they knew that it was harmful back in the seventies.
This was done as a specifically for social purposes.
This is, this movement is not being run for the benefit of children or some kind of human right.
It's being run because it destroys the traditional family and our traditional notions of sexuality.
No, 100%.
Has the response from media changed?
Have you seen a change in terms of media outlets being willing to engage this or not really?
Not really.
There's a blackout on my case in mainstream media.
It's really showed me the importance of independent media like yourself.
You have the ability, it's kind of like small theaters.
I like live theater.
A small theater can take risks that big theaters just can't take, and you'll get the best and most interesting theater at the small theater houses.
It's similar with independent media.
You can say what you want, you'll be holding to no one, and you can address any issue the way you like.
That is unfortunately not the case in the mainstream media, even mainstream conservative media.
So remember, the big donors are liberal, and they fund Fox News.
They fund all these people.
So there's a blackout on my case, and there always will be.
Can we finish on, you mentioned you're a Christian, and can you let us know kind of how that has affected you?
Because I think if an individual goes through this, and if they have no belief in God actually with them through the process, it could be very difficult, not just on this issue, but any issue.
How has your faith been important to you, essential to you in this fight?
Well, look, I think that, and I spent most of my life as an atheist, so I'm a convert to Christianity.
So for me, this has been a conscious thing.
And I think in some sense, it's easier for converts to talk about it because for us, it was a conscious process that we were not born into it.
When did you become a Christian?
How long ago?
2004.
Okay.
Yeah.
And it creates a way that you can articulate things, maybe, that people who are born into a Christian culture don't understand.
And I also think converts value this because they once didn't have it, and they know what life was.
But I think this is very simple.
Human suffering has no meaning without God.
There is no meaning to human suffering.
You know, if I had to describe it so that secular liberals in the UK could grasp this, I would say imagine a trial, a criminal trial, and let's say Mr Smith is accused of shooting Mr Jones and the prosecutor puts Mr Smith on the stand he's in the dock and he asks him why did you shoot Mr Jones.
And Mr Smith says something like this: well, you know it all It all started with pig farmers up in the north of England.
And I had bangers and mash, and I had a breakfast.
And this, through a long, complicated chemical process, resulted in my brain producing certain kinds of amino acids, which led to electrical connections in my brain, which ultimately culminated in a twitch of my right finger, which again initiated a complex chain of chemical reactions, which led to a piece of metal being expelled from a tube.
Which then entered Mr. Jones's body and interrupted his life processes.
Like that is not what we mean when we say, why did you shoot Mr. Jones?
But that is the secular answer.
That you're just a bundle of chemicals and, you know, vibrating molecules, and that's the only answer you can give.
What we want to know is your motive.
Your end.
Your purpose.
And ends and purposes are dependent on a transcendent God.
There really aren't, without a God, all you're left with is our artificial causes.
And you can't ask questions about human motives, right?
So similarly with human suffering, if I didn't have a belief in God, if I wasn't a Christian, I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't have been able to endure this peacefully.
I remember sitting in a deposition and a carefully crafted series of questions were being used that were actually developed.
I later learned were developed by a psychologist to cause me to act out violently in the deposition.
This is the kind of stuff that's been deployed against me.
And I'm sitting there calmly reciting the Jesus prayer.
And I was able to suffer it simply because I know that there's a transcendent purpose beyond this suffering.
My future is probably in a prison because, as I told you, I'm not going to use any of my resources to fund these medical procedures on my children.
Well, in the United States, medical expenses are considered child support.
And if you don't pay child support, they'll put you in prison.
In Texas, it's a state jail felony.
So my future is in prison, because I'm not going to use any of my resources to hurt my son.
How could someone endure suffering like that or look forward, even look forward to witnessing that they will stand against injustice like that without a belief in a transcendent purpose?
Religion is not some optional thing.
I actually think it further that the propaganda.
That has so destroyed Western countries, this leftist propaganda, is only made possible, because of a lack of a transcendent worldview.
When you strip people of a morality, it turns out that morality, a moral system, is necessary for understanding the physical world.
It's because, it's very simple, you can't understand human motives without reference to a transcendent purpose.
Now they try to use evolution as a transcendent purpose, right?
But that's, that's a purpose which recognizes all sorts of evil things that we all know are wrong.
So, it doesn't work as a transcendent purpose.
And the, the stripping away of the traditional religious cultures in Europe and America have become the basis for the destruction of everything we see.
And the reason I can, I will be able to endure sitting in a prison so that I don't have to harm my son is, because I have prayer.
I can fast. I can still do good works even in prison.
And in the future, I have a future beyond this life that is more important than the one I'm living now.
Jeff, I really do appreciate you sharing your story.
And I wholeheartedly agree with you that the West have rejected any concept of truth. And truth is a person.
His name is Jesus. And when you reject truth, absolute truth, you reject Christ and into that vacuum comes anything and everything.
And that's why we've seen the collapse of societies all across the West.
Jeff, thank you so much.
I'd encourage people to go and sign up.
There was a little quote from one of your sections on your sub stack, and it was, Don't stand on the train tracks of history yelling, stop at the rushing locomotive and modernity.
Hijack the damn thing and take over, subscribe.
and I'll leave that with our viewers that I know them they will have been really interested in your story.
And I know the people will want to go and look at your Substack, Jeff younger.substack.com.
Make sure and click on it follow, Jeff if you aren't already doing.
So, and do you consider subscribing?
So Jeff, thank you for giving me your time today.
Thank you.
Peter has been wonderful talking to you.

The Week According To . . . Leilani Dowding

Dive into this week's episode of our weekly news review where we're joined by the audacious Leilani Dowding, whose X account has become a beacon for candid commentary on today's hottest issues. Today, we're peeling back the layers on some of the most contentious topics straight from Leilani's recent posts. From the spiralling costs of asylum seeker accommodations in the UK to the controversial use of Ozempic for weight loss, Leilani doesn't shy away from the tough questions. We'll also find out if Alex Jones was right, as we venture into the eerie world of genetic engineering with "spider goats" and tackle the shifting sands of UK politics under Two Tier Keir's Labour. Don't miss out on Leilani's sharp insights and our deep dive into the stories that are setting X abuzz. Join us for a session that promises to enlighten, provoke, and challenge your views on the news that shapes our world.
Half-Filipina, half-English, Leilani Dowding is a former Page Three Girl and was crowned Miss Great Britain in 1998, going on to represent her country in the Miss Universe pageant.Leilani had a starring role in The Real Housewives of Cheshire and has appeared on The Big Breakfast, This Morning, Celebrity Wrestling and in numerous national newspapers.She is a proud 'Freedom Fighting Refusnik' and an unmissable commentator on world affairs, with her stance against tyranny and wokeness, Leilani has found a whole new army of fans.
Follow Leilani on 𝕏   x.com/LeilaniDowding @LeilaniDowding
Interview recorded  27.9.24
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Links to topics...Cost of housing asylum seekers in Britainhttps://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1839421052470083809I’m a Celeb get me Ozempic in here https://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1839417103197352284Ozempic https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2024/09/24/novo-nordisk-ceo-defends-ozempic-price-in-senate-testimony/Baroness Warsi https://metro.co.uk/2024/09/26/baroness-warsi-quits-tories-claiming-party-too-far-right-21681202/Alex Jones Spider Goats https://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1839115242237771872  VIDEO https://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1839195561427096043Phillip Scholfield  https://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1838960561389801842Migrant hiding in van https://web.archive.org/web/20240927131613/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/25/bbc-antiques-bidding-room-migrant-fined-border-force/#Echobox=1727273247-1 The state will take back control https://web.archive.org/web/20240924201332/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/09/24/state-will-take-back-control-of-peoples-lives-says-starmer/ Alexis (Lexi) Lorenzehttps://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1838648944462827955The old days when Labourhttps://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1839359182317003039https://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1838908706999636387Return of the sausages https://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1838597112595972241