#0047 - Francis Foster & Konstantin Kisin [Triggernometry]

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On this episode, we cover the Joe Rogan Experience 2398 with guests Francis Foster and Constantin Kisson from Trigonometry.

The no Rogan experience starts now.

Welcome back to the show. It's a show where two podcasters, now with 134 hours of Rogan experience, get to know Joe Rogan.

Can I just say, Marsh, I appreciate that every week you put in the time to figure out how much we have tortured ourselves, and I genuinely appreciate it. Thank you so much.
It feels so much important.

It feels important that we document it, that we're here for our suffering. Yeah, thank you so much for doing that.

This is a show for those who are curious about Joe Rogan, his guests, and their claims, as well well as for anyone who wants to understand Joe's ever-growing media influence. I'm Cecil Cicerello.

I am joined as ever by Michael Marshall. And today, we're going to be covering Joe's October 2025 interview with Francis and Constantin from Trigonometry, the Trigonometry guys.

And how exactly did Joe introduce these guys in the show notes?

So according to the show notes, Francis Foster is a comic and author of Classroom Confidential, The Truth About Being a Teacher and Why You Should Never Become One.

And Konstantin Kissin is a political commentator and author of An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West. And together, they host the podcast, Trigonometry.
Okay, well,

is there anything else we should know about these guys? I think there's a bit of backstory that's worth knowing.

So Trigonometry, it likes to brand itself as honest conversations with fascinating people.

And the hosts very much pitch themselves as pragmatic truth seekers, people who are just willing to engage with difficult topics.

You know, just they're willing to have these conversations. But critics have pointed out that the interviewees on the show tend to have a pretty clear political perspective.

Those have included Nigel Farage, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Piers Morgan, even Tommy Robinson and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who have been on the show.

And that makes sense. That might make sense because both Kissin and Foster, I think it's fair to say, have what you'd call a pretty clear anti-woke stance on most of the issues here.

Kissin's written for publications on the right of the spectrum, like Quillette, The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph. He's appeared on GB News.
So we're all very much in the same media landscape there.

And he made headlines in 2023 after a speech that he gave at the Oxford Union Student Debating Society went viral, in which he argued that woke culture has gone too far.

Actually, earlier this year, he also made headlines again when he argued that the former British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, couldn't actually be considered English because, quote, he's a brown Hindu.

Come on now. Not ideal, I'd say.
And as for engaging with difficult topics.

Rather than holding the feet to the fire when they're talking to these controversial people like Tommy Robinson or Benjamin Netanyahu, trigonometry has basically been criticized for offering almost no fact-checking or context at all.

And if they get pushed on that, they'll kind of recede to this point of pointing out that, well, we're comedians, we're independent voices, we're not professional journalists.

And personally, I think that's a bit of an issue.

If you are going to be interviewing controversial, like political figures, especially at the height of conflicts and tensions, those interviews are inevitably going to get a lot of attention.

And that attention is going to come with a lot of revenue, but also it should come with the responsibility to your audience and the subject matter to ask those difficult questions that just don't get asked, in my opinion.

They're just comedians. I know I've heard somebody use that excuse before.

I just can't, I can't place it. Anyway, what did they talk about this episode? So they talked about just how bad things are for democracy in the UK right now.

They talked about the no kings protests in the US. They talked about how protests in both countries are being funded and orchestrated by shadowy groups.

They talked about how Michael Jackson's dad might have chemically castrated him with trans hormones.

They talked about how awesome AI music is, how great Piers Morgan is, why women can neither hunt nor play pool, but they can play darts.

They talked about how crop circles are actually a sign of secret military laser technology, and how them Christians, maybe they're onto something.

Also, Constantin will ask, Can I have a cigar? Pretty, please, please, Joel, please.

Sure does. All right, before we get to our main event, we want to say thanks to our Area 51, all access past patrons.
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So this show, this main event that we're going to be covering is mostly the anti-woke stuff that they had to talk about. Yep.

Centering a lot on protests and

on the sort of climate in the United Kingdom. And they start out really early in the show.

We're like a minute in, and Joe is asking about social media posts and how people are getting arrested for them. We've covered this kind of extensively.
We have.

So are they going to stop arresting people for social media posts then? What do you think, Joe? I think, no.

It's profitable.

It's probably a nice fine, right? What do you get? You get a fine? I don't think it's about that.

I think, you know, during the Uber woke era, they put all these laws on the statute book and the police have to enforce the law, right?

They have no choice because if a bunch of people complain and then they don't investigate the people that have been reported,

they get in trouble. Of course.

You know, police officers, right? Police officers don't like enforcing these dumb laws. Of course.
It's... put on them from above.

Yeah, I just didn't know that all that stuff was put in place in your country during the woke era. Yeah, it was.
it was. And the heavy rope.

When you hear him talk about this, he mentions in the very beginning that people are getting arrested. And Joe's immediate assumption is that it's profitable to do it.

Like, that's how the system works. You got to arrest someone, book them, charge them, have them in court.
They sentence them. How many people work for the system?

And how much do you get back on a single fine?

That worldview doesn't make any sense to me. Yeah, I agree.

And like, obviously, we've pointed out in several shows now, Joe has so little grasp of the facts here that he thinks 12,000 people are being arrested just for social media posts. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Including, you know, people who only viewed a post is what he said. That's not true.
So he has no idea how this system works at all.

But when it comes to the fine, let's look at the profitability angle of it.

So where there is a fine involved, that's going to be subject to the sentencing guidelines, which are complicated, but there are guidelines as to what you can sentence people to.

Now, I'm not an expert in that area.

Neither's Joe Rorgan, nor Constantine Kissing, I would say. But those sentencing guidelines for this particular offence, it used to have a cap of £5,000 maximum.

That cap was removed in 2015 as a sort of an overall cap, but the fines are actually still determined based on your income and what classification band your offence is in.

So a band A offence is capped at between 25 and 75% of your weekly income. That's how much you're allowed to

find at the lowest level. That goes all the way to a band F offense, which is up to seven times your weekly income.
So one week's worth of

income times seven. That's the upper band.
Now, that upper band, that's only going to apply to the worst offenses under the Malicious Communications Act.

And remember, that includes things like harassing phone calls as part of domestic violence. So it's very unlikely that you posting things to social media is going to even touch that upper level.

At most, we're talking five times or seven times your weekly income.

Unless you're very rich, that's unlikely to be worth all of the steps that you're talking about here in terms of getting money back to the government for how much they spend on sentencing people.

But also,

you've got to bear in mind, a lot of the people who were arrested under this,

these laws around social media were released without further action. In this interview, they'll even talk about Graeme Linehan being released without any action taken at all.

So yeah, it is costing the government money to do this. This is not a financial money maker for the UK government.
It's actually, yeah, it's the opposite. It's costing us money to do this.
Yeah.

When I see this thread, though, weave its way through Joe's arguments, especially the stuff that we're covering, we saw it when, you know, clearly we saw it when we were talking about climate change with the last guess.

There's a very cynical worldview he has that everything is money motivated. And don't get me wrong, we live in a capitalist society.
I recognize that a lot of things are money motivated.

A lot of things are, but it feels super cynical to just think, to always think that 100% this is what is motivating every single thing.

Or as much as anything, this is what's motivating everything I dislike. Because that's a great logic is never applied to the things that Joe Rogan likes at anyway.
Absolutely.

He never, when they talk about things like Tommy Robinson, they're not talking about how much money Tommy Robinson is making from

being a well-known figure in that kind of space or Nigel Farage or anything like that. Yeah, great point.

Also, he says, Constantine Kissing says that these laws were brought in during the Uber woke era and now the police have no, no, they have no choice but to enforce them.

These laws were brought in under the Tory governments of Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, and for one month, Liz Truss.

Even if we're talking about, as I mentioned in a previous show, this is the 1988 Military Communications Act that a lot of these offenses are under. 1988 was Thatcher.

So this was not the Uber woke era at all. That's amazing.
It's sloppy. It's either sloppy or deceitful that he would mention it, that you'd frame it in that kind of way, in my opinion.

But I think for me, this is the first example.

And there are multiple examples of where Constantin Kissing will bring up talking points that show he either doesn't understand what he's talking about, or he's willing to mischaracterize, misrepresent it in order to feed Joe what he wants to hear.

And it's very hard to see any third option in this, in how cut and dry this is. This was not the Uber walk era.

So if he's going to say that, either he doesn't know that it wasn't, or he does know and is willing to pretend just because that's what Joe wants to hear.

So Joe tries to put his hand on when this sort of thing started happening. When did things start changing? And he comes up with the year 2014.

Something happened around the Obama administration. Something happened specifically around his second term that really changed everything.
And if you looked at like internet

searches and use of certain words,

especially racism. Yes.
It flies. It just hits a giant 2014.
Yes. 2014.
Right around that.

And it's not just in America. It's literally everywhere in the world.
That's why I think it's social media that's caused that. 100%.
It's social media and it's

there's a bunch of factors, but the problem is now that the genie's out of the bottle, they know how easy we are to manipulate.

And I don't think people are learning. They're TikToking all day long and they're just like getting blasted with all this negativity and strife and global conflict and Colombian assassinations.

That's what I get.

A lot of these assassinations in like cafes. Someone pulls up on a scooter, bang, bang, and then they drive off and everybody screams.
I've seen a hundred and thousand of those.

I've seen, you know, it's like everybody's like completely ramped up. And at the same time, you've got people in the UK getting arrested for Facebook posts about immigration.

So a lot to unpack there.

Sure is. This is all, it all started around Obama and Obama's second term.
I wonder why the use of the term racism spiked during

the time that your only black president was in office. I wonder what was different about Obama's terms compared to previous presidencies.
It is hard to put your finger on, Marsh.

Maybe we could do a lineup of previous presidents and see if we could pick out exactly what it was that was different about Obama versus all the other presidents we've had since then.

I think if you also put them all in a lineup, it would be Obama that got picked out by anybody who was in front of that lineup every time yeah especially if it's a criminal lineup right yeah exactly

okay so one of the things i want to talk about though is a a veer off that they make uh where kisson says

it basically it's social media is to blame and then joe echoes that and says a hundred percent it's social media that caused the racism

and i don't think so i think social media helps spread it that's for for sure. But I think the fucking racist caused the racism.

You know, social media could have stopped it with moderation, but they all chose free speech and free speech bros. And those people

pressured the social media companies to not moderate things. And when they did, there was a huge uproar.

And the people who chose to attack people for moderating stuff are people like the guy sitting in front of Joe Rogan right now. Yeah, I think that's true.

Although I actually think what they're talking about, about the use of the word racism, I don't think it doesn't strike me that they're talking about examples of racism.

I think they're talking about uses of the word racism and calling things racist. I think that's what they're talking about.

That's what I think is that there's an explosion of people calling things racist at this time. That's worse than I thought.

Yeah, like as if people are throwing the word around, like divorced from its actual meaning, like anything's racist these days. Well, that's what I could be wrong, but that was my interpretation.

Thanks, Marsh. That's worse than I thought.
Great.

Yeah.

I was giving him a benefit of the doubt there for a second. Shame on me.
All right. Also, can we just stop for a second? Just really quickly, just me and you, Marsh.

Is this like the fifth or sixth time that Joe has mentioned that his social media diet includes multiple assassinations and murders a day? Yes, yeah.

His friend's constantly sending videos of people being killed, and he thinks and somehow he's got an opinion that the internet is bad for you.

It's bad for you specifically, Joe, because you keep seeing murder. I haven't seen anyone.
Yeah. I've rarely seen anyone be murdered online.

I'm very quick to click off videos that say not safe for life. I don't want to watch that.
I don't need that in my life. Why would you just subject?

This says, it definitely, it's not going to, I'm not going to say that this is something that I could say, you know, molds Joe Rogan, but I will say this is something that I would be concerned about if I was his friend.

Yeah, and it feels like it's kind of the extension of the rotten.com, the 4chan, the kind of edgelord internet of here is the most horrific stuff you could possibly imagine seeing.

And now we're going to be edgi than everybody else by watching it and sending it to everybody else.

It feels like that's the space that his friends are operating in terms of feeding him various videos and things. And I don't think that is a healthy place for him to be.

And at the end, there he mentions, meanwhile, in the UK, people are just being arrested for Facebook posts about immigration. And he's kind of juxtaposing that with that.

You can get, you can put murder videos up online, but if you say anything about immigration in the UK, you'll be arrested.

So it's worth just digging for a moment into what that means, because the arrests for Facebook posts in the UK that were just about immigration were actually people directly posting incitements to violence during the Southport riots or the riots that followed the murder of

some young girls in Southport.

Joe doesn't realize that, what the content of those posts are, because he has never really looked at that beyond what he saw on Twitter as tweets posted by End Wokeness and Libs of TikTok and the various other kind of accounts that we know make up his media diet.

But one particularly famous example was a lady called Lucy Connolly. She's the big cause celebre here when it comes to kind of these types of arrested just for

posting about immigration. But this is from the legal judgment.
So she did go to prison. She's released from prison now.
But this is from her legal judgment against her. Quote, at 8.30 p.m.

on the 29th of July of this year, you use the social media platform then known as Twitter to publish the following, and this is her tweet, mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care.

While you're at it, take the treacherous government and the politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure.
If that makes me racist, so be it.

And the judgment carries on to say, when you publish those words, you are well aware of how volatile the situation was. And I'll just step out of the judgments for a a second.

At the time that she published that, there were people trying to burn down hotels with migrants in them. And she is saying, set fire to the fucking hotels for all I care.

As everyone's aware, the volatility led to serious disorder in a number of areas of the country where mindless violence was used to cause injury and damage to wholly innocent members of the public and to their properties.

Your message was widely read. It was viewed 300,000 times with almost a thousand reposts.

So when Joe says you can be arrested just for posting my immigration, it's posting things like, just set fire to the hotels while people are trying to set fire to those hotels.

That's what we're talking about here. I wonder if he read the actual thing, if he would be moved.

I wonder if he dug even just a tiny bit underneath the surface of these platitudes that are spit out by these people who are promoting this stuff and trying to make it look like the government is after the right.

If he were to look at some of the underlying things like the sentencing document, I wonder if it would change his mind. I don't know.
I'm just curious.

Yeah, especially combined with the actual footage of people, like there's immigrants barricaded into a hotel while people are piling wood up outside the door and setting a light to it.

And there's kids at the windows, like children. This is show that to Joe Rorgan.
And I'd like to think he'd have enough empathy and compassion in his heart that he could see that that's a bad thing.

And encouraging it is also a bad thing.

Okay, so we're not skipping any tape. This is the continuation on.
They're still talking about social media.

So I think part of the problem is that people, when they go on these posts, they're not looking for to learn something, as you just said. What they actually want is an emotional reaction.

They want to feel something.

If you live in a society where it's comparatively the easiest it's ever been and your life is boring because all you do is get up you go to work you go to you have food you commute you come back it's essentially a treadmill where you don't feel any of the ups and downs of emotion Then what way would you get that, but by going online and seeing something fucking awful happening, you feel terror, you feel sadness, you feel rage.

At its most basic, you feel alive.

So I'm just going to point out this, I would argue, is an incredibly privileged view of the world, this society where it is the easiest it's ever been.

So, okay, on an overall scale, yeah, people living today have it easier than people living in the 1800s did, and they had it easier than people in the 1500s.

Like, sure, our lives are getting easier on that kind of geological timeline, but that's not the same thing as saying that life is easy for everyone or that it's boring for everyone.

Not everyone right now is able to feed themselves easily. Some people are working two jobs just to try and put food on the table.

That gap between the rich and the poor is bigger than it has been for a very long time.

And actually, I think when it comes to the riots that we saw, a lot of what we saw there wasn't an outpouring of my life is so easy that I'm bored and want to feel something.

It was a, I feel like I have nothing. I feel like every safety net has been taken away, that I'm scared about my future.

And then I'm seeing other people who are in a worse situation than me getting what is perceived to be handouts. And I feel that why aren't I getting the support and they're getting it?

I think a lot of the anger came from people who had nothing. who felt under threat, who felt vulnerable, and therefore lashed out at scapegoats.

I don't think this is an expression of people who are so cosseted in their lives that they're bored.

And I think for him to believe that it is or to express that this is easier than it's ever been is showing how maybe his life is easier than it's ever been, but he is not reflective of reality, I would say, of most of society.

Yeah.

All right. So we shift the tape a little bit ahead, a couple minutes, and they start talking about the Green Party in the UK.

And you're talking about like language as well. Like we have this, we have the leader of the Green Party in the UK, new guys coming through.
He's very popular with people on the left,

on that side of the left anyway.

And it's been, what, how long has it been since Charlie Kirk was assassinated like a month and yeah right and he's running around calling like not not far-right people just like nigel farage is a nazi is a fascist and you're just and you're going you and i and we've discussed this so many times with you man it's like when you call people these words like if you and i and francis thought the nazis were here to take over we'd all fight them so what do you expect people to do when you put you're putting the target on people's backs you are 100 and you're doing it in

just for political persuasion power. That's really all it is.
It's like no one really believes Nigel Farage is a fucking Nazi. He's kind of goofy, but he's not a Nazi.

What is a Nazi then? And here's the real problem. This is what nobody wants to admit.

If you're in Nazi Germany and you're a 20-year-old man and you're German and everyone in your town is a Nazi, you're probably a Nazi too.

Or you're a Jew and you're running.

You're running from these motherfuckers. So either you're a Jew or you're a Nazi.

You're either Jewish or you're you're a fucking evil part of history that everybody refers to as the worst people of all time.

Absolutely. And you know, we're talking about scary.
Yeah.

What do we talk about here in terms of the Green Party? This is Zach Polanski. So Zach Polanski said, reform are a fascist, these are his words.

Reform are a fascist party who sided when they were the Brexit Party when they were still in the EU before they changed their name. They sided with the Sweden Democrats.

And the Sweden Democrats is a party who, among the party's founders and early members, were several people who'd been active in white nationalist and neo-Nazi political parties and organizations.

So what Zach Polanski had said was reform are a fascist party who are partnering with neo-Nazis. That is not the same as saying that Nigel Farage is a Nazi.
Yeah, that's different.

Also, we can look up Farage's record and we can say, well, where are Farage's politics? Well, Farage marched with Oswald Molesley's groups when he was younger.

He was part of the, he was a part of the National Front. There's a picture of him marching with the National Front.

If you can't recognize that Nigel Farage's version of politics echoes fascism pretty closely, you're either not a competent political commentator or not an honest one, in my opinion.

Even during that Brexit referendum, Nigel Farage launched the very famous breaking point poster, which we'll actually show on the YouTube here, which showed migrants making their way into the EU along kind of a path.

And the poster was visually almost identical to footage from a literal Nazi propaganda film, a very famous Nazi propaganda film. Shoot the fuck up.
Yes, exactly. You see the similarities in here.

Now, maybe that was an accident, but if it was an accident, it still shows that Niza Farage is drawn to making the same visual arguments that the Nazis did. Now, Joe doesn't know that.

He just sees Farage as goofy. Kissing probably should know that because he was in the UK at the time.

So either he doesn't know it because he's not good at his job or he does know it and doesn't want you to know that he knows it because he's been deceitful. I can't think of a third

thing here. But the starkness of that comparison of the visuals is so clear.
This isn't cherry picking. This is a very famous

Nazi propaganda film.

And then at the end there, Joe's saying, well, the thing is, if you were in Germany at the time, you'd have been a Nazi.

You're either a Jew running away or you're a Nazi, which is apologism to everybody involved.

There is no way that you could look at any one person who did anything in the Nazi regime and say, well, this was because they had, you know, that they did this deliberately.

You can always put this as they had no choice.

They were just following, like, they were just going along with what everybody was saying. This is Darrell Cooper stuff.

This is what Daryl Cooper's whole show was all about, is that apologism for the Nazis. And pretty clearly, it's found fertile ground in Joe's mind.
Yeah, yeah. They're just following orders.

I mean, literally what he's saying here. So we're skipping ahead about 30 seconds and they're talking about the Green Party still.

And it's, you know, Zach Polanski, what he does is to me,

the Green Party. The Green Party guy is completely wrong.
But then there are people on the far left. So there's a member of parliament called Zara Sultana.
Yes, that is her real name. Zara Sultana.

And

yeah. She sounds like a boss in a video game.
Yeah.

Well, what's really interesting is she has she put a clip on her social media where she goes and she set up this new far left political party.

And she says, we've got to fight fascists in parliament we've got to fight them in the ballot box and you're going all right look I don't like the rhetoric and then she says something even more interesting and we've got to fight them in the streets

now you think to yourself right if you classify Nigel Farage and the people who vote reform in the UK which may well win the general election which may well be the biggest political party and already represents a sizable portion of the UK you're effectively advocating violence.

And it's incitement to violence as far as I'm concerned. But because she's on the far left, he's deemed to be a good person, that's somehow okay.

Whereas if Nigel said something like that along those lines, you know that people would be like, this is a fascist, this is evil, this is disgusting, you shouldn't say that.

I mean, first of all, just incredibly cheap to laugh at a person that they think has a funny, like, foreign-sounding name in Zara Sultana. That's so cheap.
Yeah. But his point here is, what?

You shouldn't oppose fascism in the street if the fascists have enough popularity?

Is that a standard you want to set that you think is acceptable throughout history?

If the fascist party is big enough, if the fascist party gets elected, you shouldn't oppose it because it's popular enough.

I don't think that's a standard that we'd be happy looking at throughout history.

And if you notice as well, he's skipping through the steps here to make it seem like Nigel Farage is the victim. So if you oppose, she's saying you should fight fascists in the street.

And he's saying, if you define that as meaning violence and then you define nigel frage as the fascist that she means she is saying you should be violent towards nigel frage is the steps that he's taking here yeah but and then at the end of that he's saying i think that's incitement to violence well he's now trying to weaponize this idea of incitement to violence that he was just decrying a moment ago when it was about how many people are getting arrested on social media so yeah which is it is it bad that people get arrested for making statements that are incitement to violence or not have some consistency in your worldview here and even then he has to kind of skip these steps to make out like Nigel Farage is the one who's the victim of all of this.

Well, then they have a sort of a double standard, especially when it comes to, you know, when you talk about Trump, Trump has used the words bloodbath in the past.

He had said it's going to be a bloodbath. And a bunch of people called him on it and said, hey, you shouldn't do that.
And everybody who defended him said he was talking about economics.

He wasn't talking about a real thing.

And you have to. You have to bring into context the fact that this is a man who literally incited an insurrection in our country where people died.
People actually died. So we can't be,

you have to look at past actions too and say, you know, is someone actually inciting violence or are they just, is it just something that you're trying to pin on them?

And when they say fight them in the streets, they're not saying kill anybody. They're saying fight them in the streets.
That's a very different thing than say, so

there's a huge double standard, I think. Yeah, exactly.
She said fight in the streets.

Now, had she said, for example, Don Kharkies, pick up a rifle and head to the front lines, that would have been pretty clear incitement to violence.

That is a direct quote from Nigel Farage during Theresa May's prime ministership when he was talking about

if Theresa May fails to deliver the Brexit that he wants, he said, I will Don Khakis, pick up a rifle and head for the front lines.

That apparently is not the kind of incitement to violence that Frances Foster is particularly worried about. That's Nigel Farage's words.
All right, we're not skipping any tape here.

They're talking about weaponizing mental illness.

You're also weaponizing mental mental illness.

Because one of the things that we know now very clearly because of all these YouTube videos, all these people that go to these protests and start interviewing folks, some of these people are clearly not well.

And this is the thing they've attached themselves to. This is their tribe.
This is whether it's No Kings or fuck Ice or whatever, whatever the tribe is, this is their tribe now.

And they're schizophrenic. or they're, you know, fill in the blank, whatever the mental illness is.

And you're weaponizing them by calling these people who just differ with you politically or more conservative. You're calling these people the enemy of humanity.

It's very scary. It is right.
And, you know, I'm one of the people that has gone along to a lot of protests. There's a lot of wild people there.
Oh, yeah.

You've done some great interviews at those protests. Yeah.
It's just when they're confronted with a person who's actually asking them questions, it's remarkable how few people know why they're there.

They don't know. Like, would you get into specifics?

Okay, yeah. I mean, let's talk about how many crazy people there are at left-wing protests.

I guess if they were dressed in buffalo hide or in head-to-toe, like merch of Donald Trump as Jesus, they'd get a total pass on this. It'd be totally fine.
Yeah, it's so funny that he says

he's talking about how these people are schizophrenic. And then he's like, well, now you're weaponizing them by calling these people who just differ from you politically more conservative.

You're basically saying that these people are inhuman. And you're like, dude, you're calling these people schizophrenic.
You're in the previous breath, literally doing the exact same thing. And

I went to the No Kings protest in Chicago.

I talked to like multiple people that day. It wasn't like it was just a cultural event that people were at.

I went to a thing and had a conversation with multiple people and they all knew why exactly they were there. They thought that the current presidency had massive overreach.

He was ignoring constitutional principles.

He was using the government as a weapon against the people. Those are all things kings do.
And so a bunch of people went to go protest that. They knew exactly why they were there.

Joe is very easily, I think, and very simply waiving all of those issues away by saying they don't even know why they're there. So I don't have to address it.

If they don't know, then I don't have to bring up any points to counteract it because I can just hand wave off all of their efforts because I don't have to address their efforts if I just say they didn't have any.

Yeah. And I went to some of the protests following the South Park riots last year.
I went to some of the counter protests against that.

And again, the people I were there with were pretty clear why they were there. They wanted to make it very clear that you don't have to be from here to be welcome here.

But the people who were on the other side of the police

blockade, the police barrier, who are on the ones protesting against immigrants, there were people yelling at us that we were paedophiles because we were enabling the rape of children directly, that anybody who's coming here is coming to rape children.

There were people here, people there yelling that we were there because we love Allah, because there are people, that these people are going to try and institute Sharia law across the entirety of the UK.

I would argue the people who were at the protests, the actual riots themselves, they're the ones who had no idea why they were there. They had this skewed view of what actually was going on.

So, yeah, again,

who in these protests doesn't know what's happening? I think all the counter-protesters that I was there around and with had a pretty clear idea of why they were there.

We cut it out of the show, but there's a whole portion of this, and he alludes to it in this particular bit of tape.

But there's a whole portion of this that where Joe is talking about how he was watching a video earlier that day, and someone was out asking questions of people who were at these No Queens protests.

And you could just see how stupid these people are, and how dumb they are, and how they won't interact with you, and how they don't want to answer a very simple question, et cetera, et cetera.

It was clearly a gotcha question. And this thing was clearly edited, right? They're only taking the things that make people look stupid on the other side and putting it into

an edited video. They're not taking somebody who actually had a good point because that would ruin their video.
So why would they keep that person?

But Joe thinks everybody there has the exact same opinion because Joe is easily tricked by editing. His media diet feeds him this stuff and he's easily tricked by it.

And so that's true, because Joe isn't going to those protests. Now, Constantin says he is.

So if he has this view, again, he either has this view because he isn't having honest or isn't able to see that the conversations that he's having in these spaces aren't reflective, or he's the one doing the editing and now presented that, presenting that edited view to Joe right now and in his shows.

And Joe is saying, you've done some great interviews from these protests.

I don't think Joe means some interviews that found people who had some really good points and some really good understandings of the nuances. What he means is you've done some great gotchas.

And that is an editing process. And Constantin is on the side of that editing where he knows what's being cut out.

All right, we're going to take a short break. We'll be back right after this.

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Okay, welcome back. Let's jump right back in.

Okay, they're uh skipping ahead just a little bit in this conversation. They're still talking about protests and NGOs.

But you know, we also have to take responsibility for this. The adults, the people, the colleges, all those people need to take responsibility.

So, I did, I went to a Palestine protest at UCLA last year in May time. And there were, I thought it was run by the kids.
There are a lot of adults there who weren't students at UCLA.

And the kids, when they saw, some of the kids, when they saw what I was doing and I was doing interviews, they were like, he doesn't go to my college. He doesn't go to my college.

He doesn't go to my college. That dude's in his early 50s.
He's not on the faculty staff. What is he doing here? Yeah, they're being paid.
They're part of an NGO. They're about of something.

They're part of something that's decided that this is a good idea to get these students to be engaged in these things. And it's funded.
That's what's weird.

Okay, UCLA has 47,335 students. How the fuck would any student know if someone else is a student or not? They would have literally no idea what he said, where somebody's coming up and pointing it out.

Either that person was lying to you or you are lying to us. There's no way someone knew every single person who goes to the school.

And look, I had a lot of students in my undergrad and graduate classes that ranged in age all the way up to 60 years old. People go back to school all the time.

You can't just look at somebody and be like, well, that's an old person. They don't belong here.
And it's a protest.

So if you happen to believe in it, you don't actually have to be in that area of like be a college student to know that there's a protest against some about something that you believe in to show up at a protest that happens to be on college ground.

That's weird gatekeeping that you have to say, well, it happened on a college. So we've got to make sure that only college students are

the people who are protesting. Like, what a weird gatekeeping thing to say.
And the only reason you're saying this is so that you can say,

none of those people are real. None of their concerns are real.
None of the things that they're fighting for are real. They're all paid protesters.
Yeah.

I hope someone asked Francis Foster for his student ID. Yeah.
Because he was at the protest

on campus. But he thought it's perfectly fine to go like, yeah, it's just a location.
Like there's a protest somewhere. If you care about a cause, you join the protest.

You're not going to be like, well, there's one at the university, but I'm not a university student. So I'm going to have to start my own separate protest at a separate time.

No, you sure kind of strengthen number by turning up to these things.

But no, anyone who's in your university grounds that you can't personally name has to be there because they're a plan from George Soros and there's no other way about it.

They have to be paid, according to Joe Morgan here. Look, the other thing, too, is he at the very end of this says, you know, that

they're part of an NGO. They're being paid.
He has no proof. And we've never seen this to be true a single time.
And Joe will say this.

20 times this episode, that all these people are paid, that it's an NGO, that they're getting money from the government, and that money from the government is being sent out to people who are protesting.

and that is said very specifically to dismiss the protest yeah and honestly I think so much of this is probably it feels like it's the result of having talked to people like Mike Benz and people like Elon Musk who've then lied to Joe about USAID funding NGOs and that money coming from dodgy places in order to discredit things like in fact Joe will even say so in a moment that this is all downstream of USAID so this is what the again the the um cumulative effect of absorbing that propaganda over the months that we've seen now, what that actually has is Joe responds in this knee-jerk way.

All right. We're not skipping any tape.
This next bit is talking about immigration and protest signs.

When I went to, we had protests that I'm sure you saw, which were about illegal immigration. People would protest outside of like illegal immigrant hotels where they're kept.

And you had protesters and counter-protests. One thing I noticed is like all the pro-immigration protesters, they all have like professionally made signs.
It's all organized.

No misspellings? No.

And

when you dig deep, it's organized by all these very well-named organizations, you know, stand up to racism or whatever.

And then you dig deeper, and it's the revolutionary socialist Workers' Party or whatever behind it. And this is all the stuff that Mike Benz covered.
A lot of that stuff is being funded by USAID.

Okay, so yeah, Constantin Kissing, you had protests outside of migrant hotels. You did, and some of them were attempted arson protests.
That's what those were. Not all of them, but that's

he's making it sound like it was perfectly reasonable the whole time. But some of those protests were violent riots, and there's no getting away from that, but he's not going to tell Joe that.

But as I say, I went to some of those counter-demonstrations, and some of them may well have been organized by stand-up to racism because groups like stand up to racism look out for where there are going to be racist protests and then say to people, hey, if you're not for racism and you want to stand up against it, we're organizing a counter-protest here.

So yeah, they might be organized there, but that doesn't mean that anyone who turns up is part of that organization, nor that they've been astroturfed, even if they've got professional signs.

And that's what Kissin is arguing here, that anyone who's holding one of those signs is being paid to be there, that they're astro-turfed, that they're not legitimate.

Sometimes that's just a case of people handing out those signs on the way in.

When he says, you know, he says that when you dig deep into it, you see it's all funded by the revolutionary socialist workers' party. He hasn't dug deep into it.

He's just made some assumptions and then accepted whatever weak arguments that agree, like can find, that like align with and agree with his feelings.

Protests like these aren't funded by the revolutionary socialist workers' party.

What will happen is the socialist workers' party will know there is a protest there and will print out their signs and will hand those out.

And maybe some people end up carrying the signs in Socialist Workers' Party that they didn't bring and don't really necessarily agree with just because it's got a thing on it that is like anti-racism there that's kind of the the pr tool of the of the swp there but it's not because they've organized anything or they're taking any funding for anything but also kiss and saying about how they all have these perfectly professional signs well when you look through the social media photos you might see a lot of protests a lot of photos online where people are holding printed signs but those are from very specific pockets of the of the protest most of the people who turn up don't have a sign so there's nothing to photograph, and it makes a less interesting photograph for getting images to sell in media coverage.

So the ones, if you aren't attending the protest, you're more likely to see the ones with professional signs because it's easy to make out what's being said there.

At best, it suggests he hasn't spent very much time at these protests at all.

Or, and at worst, it suggests that he's willing to pretend they all have professional signs in order to play into Joe's bias that this is all being funded by NGOs.

But we'll throw a couple of images up here on the YouTube. These are images from the Liverpool protest that I was at.
I didn't take these images, but I did find them online and I was in this crowd.

And when you look pretty clearly, these aren't all professional signs. You've got people holding up bits of cardboard, but you've got the majority of people not holding any signs at all.

And these are the ones that Kissing doesn't want Joe to think about existing because it all has to be this kind of manufactured protest because it's not real. It's not legitimate.

It's all funded by the revolutionary Socialist Workers' Party.

He just wants, Kissing is trying so hard to make those United States, those American talking points to apply to the UK about this astroturfing by big billionaires.

But the Revolutionary Socialist Workers' Party are not funding this whole protest, nor are they funded by George Soros, nor are either of those people in charge of any of this.

They're not in any way funded by USAID, despite what Joe introduces. This is just ignorance of the whole situation.
When I went to the No Kings protest, they had a giant paper constitution.

It was huge. And it said, we the people on the front, there was people holding it, had had to have two different people holding it.
And then that constitution worked its way down the street.

It was like 50 yards long. It was this huge long piece.
And it had all the constitution on it. And everybody, all the people around it signed it, right? So everybody's signing it.

It's this huge piece. That was made by people.

It's just, man, it was, and it was seriously the biggest photo that was sent out anywhere about the protest in Chicago was that we, the people sign marching its way down the street because it was like 50 people long and all these people were holding up the Constitution.

And it was huge. It was like, you know, eight feet wide.
It was just enormous. And that's the thing that got posted, but that will be conveniently misremembered as not anything.

And that's like literally a purpose-made sign by people who were crafty, not by kinkos. It's a totally different thing.

And the other thing, too, that I will point out is that Joe, the people who Joe had on his show, the president and JD Vance, they had at their rallies

printed up very, very specific, professionally printed signs that said mass deportation now.

And then they also have very,

very purposefully printed up signs that say make America great again, or Joe Biden, you're fired, or fire Joe Biden.

They literally have these signs that are made and then they're handed out to the crowd. Does that make their position less legitimate? Because they used a sign that someone handed out to them?

Of course it doesn't. Those people were all mad about something.
They went somewhere and they picked a sign up.

He is spending so much time this episode dismissing people's ideas because he doesn't feel like they are legitimate. They haven't reached his bar of legitimacy.
And it's really disgusting.

It's a protest, man. People are allowed to protest.
And you should, if you are somebody who you claim to be, you should care that someone cares enough to be out in the streets protesting this stuff.

You should find out why they're doing it. Yeah.

And what it feels pretty clearly is that Constantine Kissen here is dismissing these protests based on these trappings that he thinks, as you say, cause them to seem illegitimate, these very false trappings of illegitimacy, rather than debating their actual points.

You know, these people had no idea what they were doing there. All they were doing were carrying these

professionally printed banners. That's a way of saying that there are no good talking points that disagree with me without having to actually talk about the talking points that disagree with you.

Yeah.

All right. So they are going to talk about the No Kings protest in this next clip.

You know, rep Paulina Luna, you know,

you had her on recently,

fascinating.

Just her telling me about the book of Enoch and alien stuff. That's why I had her on.
She believes in angels. She had like a diagram of angels that she put up on her Twitter.

I'm like, this lady went to see us. This might be fun.
But she posted something on her Twitter yesterday that shows all the people that donated to the No Kings protest

and the number of corporations that donated and how much money is involved in it. It's bananas.
If she's accurate, if what she's saying is true, it's like, this is crazy.

And the leveraging deal now is so easy.

So yeah, if the aliens and angels diagram lady is accurate in her research, what she's found out is crazy. That's quite the if, if you ask me.
Yeah, it's bananas.

Well, Joe, clearly it's not bananas, and you've been easily manipulated by propaganda. I found an article.
I'll link it in the show notes. This is from Snopes.

Quote, as of this writing, No Kings has partnered with more than 200 organizations

to coordinate its protests. Some of these organizations have received grant funding and other forms of financial backing from charitable groups funded by billionaires such as George Soros.

However, the list circulating online misrepresents the protests' funding structure.

In truth, the 300 million amount that they're suggesting appears to represent the publicly available information about how much money the aforementioned charitable groups have given to organizations supporting No Kings.

These organizations, including the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and National LGBTQ Plus Task Force, have many more initiatives aside from No Kings.

Furthermore, the list counted grant funding given to these organizations years before Trump's second term.

Here's what a national spokesperson for No Kings, Eunuch Epstein Ortiz, said via email about the No Kings protest.

Quote, No Kings isn't not an organization nor a formal entity that can accept donations.

It is a coalition of 270 plus partners in a decentralized movement driven by volunteers and activists across the countries.

Organizations support the No Kings coalition by providing training, toolkits, and limited resources.

But the vast majority of events that are organized and promoted are funded locally by grassroots volunteers. End quote.

So they, they, to break this down, they took all the organizations that were associated with No Kings, they added up all their budgets, and they said that's what's funding No Kings.

Yeah. And the thing is, if you think about what's happening with this kind of argument, it's saying if you require organizational funding outside of your own resources, your access to protests and

the points you want to make aren't legitimate. If you can't fund it yourself, that's not legitimate.

Well, what that's saying is how much money you currently already have available to you determines how legitimate your point of view can be. That's essentially that, right?

There's a lot of people who don't have spare cash to spend on a protest, who've got some very legitimate grievances and legitimate opinions, and any functioning democracy should allow those opinions to be heard too.

They continue talking about protests. They're talking about one in the UK about Extinction Rebellion.

Don't actually need a lot. Like, for example, do you know a group called Extinction Rebellion? Are you familiar with this? No.
So this is in, we have this in Europe mostly.

You guys don't have it here because you're like, we're going to burn all the gas we want, right?

But in Europe, obviously climate is like a massive issue, net zero, et cetera, which is, I think, a terrible idea. But anyway, we have this movement called Extinction Rebellion.

I went to one of their protests. There was literally 40 people there.
But if you have a protest with 40 people and you film it and you put it on social media, no one can know it's 40 people. Right.

You just hear a lot of noise and see people and you go, oh my God, there's a protest. There's a protest.
They're outraged. Yeah, people are outraged.
This is a big movement.

You know, the public really, and all this other stuff. So the leverage you can get with a very, very small amount of money and a small number of young, impressionable people is powerful.

And then it goes on social media where it's stripped of the context and suddenly we all believe this thing is real

when it's 40 people.

So again, again, I think he's playing a bit fast and loose here, either because he doesn't realize or because he does realize.

I can't really put my finger on his motivations, but he's making out like Extinction Rebellion is just 40 people.

Now, maybe he's just talking about that one event that he went to, but certainly the way that he's talking about it to Joel makes it sound like that is the extent of Extinction Rebellion.

Well, if Extinction Rebellion is only about 40 people, how come in one week in October 2019, 2,700 Extinction Rebellion protesters were arrested?

Those are just the ones that were arrested in one week. This small group of young, impressionable people,

nearly 3,000 people. In fact, in London alone since 2019,

about 4,500 Extinction Rebellion protesters have been arrested. Now, those numbers have tailed off, but they've mostly tailed off because they've been replaced with other groups like Just Stop Oil.

who are doing a similar kind of thing of direct action and getting arrested for it. Are they all young, impressionable people?

Well, the people I've met who are in Just Stop Oil tend to be in their 60s and above. So like, it's not just young, impressionable people.

It's some pretty well-established people who have just recognized that actually the climate crisis is something they are passionate about and really want to do something to try and draw attention to.

But also notice I'm talking about how many Extinction Rebellion protesters have been arrested just in London in the last five, six years.

Joe doesn't seem to be aware that climate protesters are being arrested for protesting. Yeah.

And which is weird because he's really committed to the, you know, the free speech and the democratic right to protest of people in the uk that's what we've been talking about here is that you can get arrested for what you think you get arrested for protest in the uk but he doesn't seem to know about these arrests and it seems pretty clear that both he and constantian kissing they dislike extinction rebellion and what they stand for the climate change stuff they stand for that constantian kissing is well within his right to dislike extinction rebellion he's well within his right to dislike net zero and to dislike dislike uh climate change mitigation but what he's doing here is either showing showing that he knows nothing about Extinction Rebellion and the real size of them, or he's showing he's willing to lie about them in order to discredit them on the largest podcast platform in the world.

And either of those conclusions mean we shouldn't take his particular version of opposition to these ideas seriously.

If he has an issue with what Extinction Rebellion do and say, he should talk about that rather than portraying them as a handful of about 40 young, impressionable people who can be fooled into things.

Yeah, yeah.

All right. Next clip is talking about violence and non-violence at protests.

One, you got to give them credit. One thing about the geriatrics is they don't get violent.
Like, this other things protest with the people. Totally can't.
Totally.

Well, they kill each other every now and then, but there was no

violence in a lot of people, which is pretty good. That's great.
That's a good sign. That's great.
And look, people in a free country should be able to protest.

100%.

The problem is, if you're organizing a protest and paying people to protest, and if there's documentation that the metadata from the cell phones are the same from protest to protest and that they're traveling on buses that's paid for with tax dollars like

hold on what are you really doing what are you really doing this isn't really an organic protest you funneled money through an ngo and now you're hiring people to show up and wave signs to give the illusion look at this is what they did during the kamala harris campaign they filled up stadiums with people coming to see her her.

And the same people went from stadium to stay. It became a job.
It became a job, but it gave the illusion. So that's deception.
That's deception. And that should not be legal.

That should not be a legal thing to do. You're engaging in propaganda.
You know, you're openly manipulating people's perspective.

You know, you're paying.

Those aren't audience members. Those are clients.
Those are customers. You're paying them.
Yeah.

They're not customers. They're employees.
That's different. That's a different.
They're neither, in fact. Yeah.

But this is the thing, right? Joe is saying, look, you should be able to protest.

It's really important that you're able to protest unless someone can discredit your protest with misinformation, in which case, Joe will support making your protest illegal.

So it sounds like his support for protest is less than 100%

as he said it was. It certainly sounds like it's a little, it's a shade less than that 100%.
It certainly does.

Listen to all the things he asserts without evidence in this he says the problem is is that they're organizing a protest and paying people to protest that's not true i i couldn't find any evidence of that if they're the and if there's documentation that the metadata from their cell phones are the same from protest to protest again couldn't find any kind of information whatsoever that says that that's true uh and then he says they're traveling on buses paid with tax dollars to go from protest to protest again can't find anything that's that that's true there ngo money is hiring people to show up and wave signs again can't find any any truth to that that this is what they did during kamala harris again i couldn't find any truth to that at all and that they were traveling from stadium to stadium again none of this stuff is supported by evidence it's like literally something he saw on libs at tiktok or something all of that is just his

spitballing of what he thinks is happening So about this whole thing about the NGOs paying people to protest.

Well, if that was true, that would be a very dangerous strategy for that NGO if they're trying to subvert democracy by like paying people to protest in this shady way.

Because what you're doing is you're setting up literally thousands of people who now have a number that any media organization just has to beat.

And suddenly they're going to tell their story to that media organization.

So if you pay them $2,000, you're very prone to someone saying, I'll give you $2,500 to tell me the real story and show me the evidence.

Like you're setting yourself up a load of patsies who can turn on you in a moment. So where are all these people who were paid to protest? Why aren't they speaking out?

How are you keeping all of them silent?

All right. Moving on.
They're still talking about no kings.

And what is your take? What is it that they want when they say no kings?

What do they want? They think Donald Trump is behaving like a king. How so? Because, well, he ran on a platform and was elected and won every swing state and the popular vote.

And then once he got in, he did exactly what he said he was going to do, which is

a king.

And then he let them protest, which is also what a king does.

He didn't send the troops to stop the protests. In fact, he congratulated them on doing a great job.
And he said, I'm still your president.

Yeah, I saw that. Tweets fucking hilarious.
Yeah. It's very funny.
It's a very fun.

So, yeah, and constantly, why do you think they say no kings? And then Joe explains what it was. And you can see he's got this incredibly disingenuous take.

Clearly, he has either no understanding or no interest in what people are actually worried about, people are actually protesting about.

This is a way of dismissing something that he doesn't agree with without even having to engage with the arguments. And this is not a good way to go about things.
This is disingenuous to the extreme.

And I'd say the same thing is true of Konstantin Kissing, who I think ought to be smart enough to figure out for himself what people are worried about when they say no kings.

So he's coming with this like wide-eyed, innocent question.

But I think that's a loaded question in order to get a propagandist's answer rather than a genuine inquiry as to what's really going on with these protests.

Yeah, and Lee even listened to what he had to say.

He said, Well, he ran on a platform and got elected and won every swing state. And then once he got in, he did exactly what he said he was going to do.

Well, what if he said what he was going to do was against the Constitution? Or what if he said what he was going to do was weaponize the government against people?

That doesn't necessarily make it not an action of a king just because he got elected.

He can still be doing things that most American people disagree with, or that, in fact, our very rules, regulations, and history disagree with. And that can be what people are protesting against.

But he just says, well, he got elected and therefore he can do essentially whatever he wants. He also says, too.

He let them protest. That sure as shit sounds like what a king would say.
Let them protest? That's literally the, that's what our entire country is based on.

The whole country was started with the protest, Joe Rogan. We didn't like, like, this is enshrined in the, in the founding documents of our, of our constitution.

The right to protest is, is essential to us. And to say, well, he let them protest without sending in the military.
Therefore, he deserves some sort of accolade for that.

That's literally his job to let us protest. That's what he, that's what we hired him for.

And then they're talking about this, this tweet that he posted afterwards, which was essentially, oh, I was afraid a king was going to take my position. And now I'm, I guess a king didn't.

I'm still still your president. Great job.
He also, the next day, posted an image of him as an AI video shitting on the protesters from a jet.

And JD Vance posted a video of him handing a crown to Donald Trump.

So they were literally trolling the people who were out there who had very legitimate concerns about their overreach of power by saying, we don't give a shit about your concerns. Yeah.

And it feels like Joe, it feels like Joe has a lack of understanding of what the role of president actually is, like he thinks the president is

able to just decree anything, that the president has complete control, complete power. And therefore, when he says, you know, he let you protest.

What Joe doesn't seem to understand is that it isn't within Donald Trump's remit to let or not let a protest happen. That is not a power he has,

not a situation he has any power over. And I think the fact that Joe misunderstands that kind of explains just how far away he is from understanding kind of the real issues of the protests here.

All right. So, this is talking about somebody who we've actually covered on this show, Graham Linehan.

You know, the thing that we have in this country, I don't know if you have it in this country as much, is just the way the policing is biased.

The way that they will arrest Graham Linehan for three relatively innocuous tweets, one of them was a joke, and they will arrest him the moment he lands on British soil. Five police officers.

You get other people saying heinous things. Or you get, like I said, the example Zara Sultana saying, you know, we're going to fight them in the streets.
But that's fine. Right.

And nothing comes from that. That's ridiculous.
Well, no, there was a guy who was at a protest.

He was a member of a political party, I think. You could probably find an image of it because it was posted everywhere.
There was a guy called, I think his name was Ricky Jones.

He said at a protest, we need to slit the throats of the far right. Oh, great.
And he was found not guilty. Oh, great.

And Graham Lanahan gets arrested. Right.

So, okay. He's bringing up Ricky Jones here.
So he's not actually giving all of the facts on Ricky Jones. So it's worth us just doing that.

So this is last year at the height of the Southport riots, there were racists, racist mobs who were trying to burn down hotels where migrants were being housed. There were attacks on the street.

People who people of color in some cities were being pulled out of their car just for being of color.

People were stopping cars to see whether the driver was white or black or anything in order to intimidate them.

Well, we do that here. We do that here.
That's government sponsored. So we, yeah, so a little different.

So while all of that was happening, a guy called Ricky Jones gave a speech in Walsenstall in East London.

He was a local councillor and he talked about local trains being found covered in stickers for the National Front, which is a far-right, explicitly violent military group.

When people tried to remove those stickers, according to what Jones had been told, which may not have been true, they found razor blades behind those stickers that were designed to injure people.

Now, it may well be that those stickers weren't there, but this is what Johns believed at the time that it'd been said it.

This is kind of thing that gets passed around of these stickers with razor blades behind.

But while he believed that, Johns said, and he also believed that there were razor blades being found on the seats of the train, and this was during summer holidays, summer break, where kids would be using the train quite often.

That may not have been true, but it's what he believed and what he'd been told and what he was basing his speech on.

And in this footage, he relays that information and then says, now these people don't give a fuck about who they hurt. Children and women using these trains.
It's during the summer holidays.

They are disgusting Nazi fascists. We need to cut their throat.
At which point he flashes a finger across his throat. Okay.
And he says that on a loudspeaker in the middle of Walsinghall.

He went to court for that. He was arrested.
He went to court. And in August,

of August of this year, a jury found him not guilty of encouraging violent disorder. That was a jury of 12 random members of the public.
This wasn't just a judge.

This wasn't the police deciding to let him off. It went to a jury trial and the jury found him not guilty.

And their reasoning hasn't been made public, but it is worth pointing out that no violence occurred in the wake of his call for the National Front Razorbladers to have their throats cut.

Now, I actually think for him to be shouting about cutting people's throats on a microphone in the middle of the street at a hardly charged time is incredibly irresponsible.

And that's actually why he was arrested.

But his case became the whataboutry of the week, essentially, because it contrasted with Lucy Connolly, who I quoted earlier.

She's the one who tweeted about the migrants' mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards.

And she tweets that at a time there were mobs outside of the hotels trying to set them on fire.

And Kissing, I would argue, is misrepresenting this case here, because he's saying that Ricky Jones said you should cut the throat of anyone on the far right.

And in this conversation, they've already pointed, they've already made a point of painting such a broad picture of the far right that it's a category that could include almost anybody, even Nigel Farage and beyond, could be considered far right now.

So they're making it seem like Ricky Jones was calling for people like Nigel Farage to have their throats cut and anyone who agrees with him.

Now, Kissing's either painting it that way because he hasn't bothered looking into the story and finding out that he was talking very specifically about the people he believed were leaving razor blades in public transport in order to injure people.

Either he believed it because he just believed what appeared on his social media, or it's possible that Kissing knows the facts of this story and is deliberately misrepresenting them.

I can't tell which is true, but either way, we shouldn't take his particular version of opposition to what was said seriously here, because he's shown that he's not willing to engage properly with the facts.

And the key to all of this as well is Ricky Jones here was arrested.

Graeme Linehan, as they mentioned at the top of his interview, you know, Joe even says, like, this guy was found not guilty and yet Graeme Linehan was arrested. They were both arrested.

They were both found not guilty. Graham Linehan didn't even go to trial.
He was let go with no further action taken. They've said this in this same interview.

Linehan's treats didn't go as far as Jones's case did. Linehan faced less legal intervention than Ricky Jones did.
They've said as much in this interview, but Joe can't hear it.

He can't put those two pieces together because

he's too taken in with his ideology to even pay attention to the details. Even that one bit, this guy was found not guilty, and yet they arrested Graeme Linehan.

Well, you don't get found not guilty unless you arrested.

What are we doing here?

All right, last clip in the main event. This is uh the finishing sort of capstone of that conversation talking about how crazy Britain is.

Yes, what are they trying to do to England? It was always such a lovely place to visit. This is what I was going to ask you.

I wish more people in Britain recognized how fucking crazy this looks to the rest of the world. Like you guys must be looking at us going, What the fuck is this? We can't believe it.

We literally can't believe it. When I tell people that don't know that 12,000 people this year were arrested in Britain for posting posting things on social media, their jaw drops like, what?

I go, dude, they're going crazy over there. Like, you have to pay attention.
You have to pay attention because this kind of shit is contagious.

And if it gets into Germany and then it gets into Spain or it gets into other countries, like it can become a real fucking problem.

Like, then you have full-on military dictatorship in England because that's what it always leads to. It 100% leads to military dictatorship.

If you're telling people they can't do things and you're trying to install socialism and then you get it in place, there's only one way to keep it in place. You got to use the fucking army.

That's the only way. You got to get men with guns to tell people you can only make so much money.
You have to give away this. We're going to take that.
We're the only ones who grow food.

We're the only ones who do this. We're going to assign you a job.
Like, you fucked up.

You fell into the age-old trap that's been exposed by history over and over and over again. And people are like, we're going to do it right this time.
They got blue.

hair and a fucking mask on and a cat t-shirt and they're morbidly obese and they're just marching down the street and we're going to let them run the country like England that which used to run like most of the fucking world one island of savages ran most of the world and now you're getting overrun with nonsense and you're arresting people for saying hey maybe we shouldn't have rape gangs you know maybe maybe we shouldn't maybe we shouldn't tolerate lawlessness in the streets

Oh my god. So he says, you know, when I tell people this, they say, I can't believe it.
You shouldn't believe it. It's not true.
It's comprehensively not true.

Nobody's being arrested for saying, hey, maybe we shouldn't have rape gangs.

They're getting arrested for saying, you know, that house, that hotel full of migrants, how about we burn them all to death? That's what they're getting arrested for. Right.
Don't believe this.

Also, he's talking about installing a socialist government into the UK and then saying, and we are the, they'll say to you, we're the only ones who can make food and we will assign you a job.

Like, my man, you're thinking of communism. You don't know the difference between socialism and communism.

And I know that isn't the doctrine like the the kind of the doctrinal or ideological debate we should be having here but it is still quite annoying that you don't know the difference um

The other thing he doesn't know much about, the idea that there could be a military dictatorship in England, it shows how little he knows about Great Britain.

Like the British Army have like 73,800 troops. You could fit the entire British Army into old Trafford football stadium, Man United's home stadium.

I don't think that's enough to take like complete ownership of the entire country. And again, he keeps to talk about England.

I don't know if that's because he thinks that Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland are going to be free from the oncoming dictatorship.

It's just going to be the falls of England, that there'll be a little wall put back in, Hadrian's wall be reinstated and a new wall put in just to the west of Chester.

I'm pretty sure it's because he doesn't know the difference between Great Britain and England.

But I will say, I don't think Northern Ireland are about to accept the military rule of the British Army anytime soon.

Feels like a little contemptuous.

Yeah, they've been pretty clear on that in the past people, to be honest. Pretty clear.
Yeah.

I love to, at the very end, he's got to throw in that ad hominem about how somebody looks, how they're like blue hair and what they wear and how they're morbidly obese and they just so happen to be a woman, right?

He's got to throw that in at the very end to make it seem like these people are crazy. And I'm going to tell you, I'm going to make up a person in my mind to tell you how crazy they are.

All right, we're going to take a short break, and then we're going to move on to our undercard.

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And the undercards banging. The undercard's filled with fights.

So for the undercard this time, this is something that we've been hearing.

If you're in the Joe Rogan universe sphere, there's been talks from certain people who have conversations about Joe Rogan and his show about how he has sort of started taking a turn toward the religious.

Now, Joe has not necessarily come out, at least as near as I can tell from the things that we've listened to and said, I am an atheist, but he certainly has many times in the past and in shows we've covered, said things that seem to be

at the very least, pretty hard agnostic. That he seems

to be, I think he's called himself an atheist in the past. I think in some older shores we've heard him talk about being an atheist.
Yeah. All right.

So, so, so, atheist, hard agnostic, that seems to be, but now he seems to be taking a little bit of a turn. And so, now we're going to play a couple of clips where they're talking.

All the guys here are talking. They don't, they don't sort of come out as religious, but they certainly talk in glowing terms about religion.

And I'll let you guess which religion it is that they're glowing.

It's Islam.

All right. So the first one, talking about inner peace.
It also gives you like a lot of inner peace. It does.

If you don't have that, which I don't, and I've got a friend who's a devout Muslim and

he's going through tough times at the moment. And I say to him, How do you get through this? And he's like, bro, I've got my religion.
I've got God. And I know everything's going to be okay.

He's a great guy. And he goes, I pray five times a day.
It really helps me. And it makes me realize and understand that what I'm going through is part of his plan.
It's part of his plan.

Yeah, if you really do believe that, it definitely will help you.

So, I don't know. I think this is a pretty patronizing view of religion and religious people.

It's got that kind of sense of, well, look, I don't need it, but some people need to believe in something, even if it's not true. No, I don't need that, but I can see that some people might need that.

A lot of people find inner peace, they find meaning, they find calmness through lots of different ways.

Religion doesn't have a monopoly on that, it doesn't even have an an advantage on that particular thing. Yeah.
And

I'm just going to say, as the atheist in the room,

if it's part of his plan, didn't he give you all those problems to start with?

Yeah, that is true. He's gone through such a hard time, but his religion is helping.
Hey, man. Hey, like how'd those problems get there?

If that person could just like wave their hand or that thing, whatever. Anyway.
Well, that's it. I mean, you know, he's talking about inner peace.

There are a lot of religious people who don't have a lot of like peace, inner or otherwise. How many wars have been fought over doctrinal differences?

Peace isn't necessarily always flowing from religion. All right, so now they're going to talk about in this next clip about going to church.

I haven't got there, but I have started going to church every now and again. Yeah.
Yeah. Do you enjoy it? I love it.
Yeah.

It's about, I do too. It's a bunch of people that are going to try to make their lives better.
They're trying to be a better person.

And they're trying to, I mean, for me at least, the place that I go to, they, you know, they read and

analyze passages in the Bible. I'm really interested in what these people were trying to say because I don't think it's nothing.

There's a lot of like atheists and secular people that just like to dismiss Christianity as being foolish. You know, it's just fairy tales.
I hear that amongst self-professed intelligent people.

Like it's a fairy tale. I'm like,

I don't know if that's true.

I think there's more to it. I think it's history, but I think it's a confusing history.
It's a confusing history because it was a long time ago.

And it's people telling things in an oral tradition, then writing things down in a language that you don't understand, in the context of a culture that you don't understand.

And I think there's something to what they're saying.

So, yeah, Joe Rogan goes to church now.

And that's interesting because he came from what I could tell previously was a fairly atheistic position. Now he's at church.
That shift is something I'm really interested to understand a lot more of.

Now, I know Wesley Huff credits his interview with Rogan as having brought about this change in Rogan. So maybe next season, we need to go back and check out the Wesley Duff interview.

I also suspect having quite as much exposure to Jordan B. Peterson as Rogan has had has kind of helped with that as well.
Yeah, man. Yeah.

But yeah, he's saying he goes there because it's people trying to make their lives better. And again, a lot of people are trying to make their lives better.
Arguably, most people are trying that.

And religion has neither a monopoly nor an advantage on that.

It's actually easier to make your lives better if you aren't, first of all, you know, supplicating yourself to a system that isn't based in evidence and that makes specific claims and demands on you based on a Bible.

Yeah.

And the way Joe says it, it's almost like he's a researcher. I'm not really part of the religion.

I just go there to sort of research, to sort of figure this out, because I think they might be onto something, but they don't know enough to be onto it on their own.

I need to be the person who comes in and sort of puzzles this thing out.

Look, man, there's been a lot of really smart people who have written about the history of the Bible, what's, you know, happening contemporaneously, why those stories appear as they do in the Bible.

You don't need to go and sit and listen to this, Joe Rogan, without any of those other resources to try to puzzle this out. There's tons of people who do this.

It's not even all that useful if you don't know the history for you to try to do it. Because now you're just making shit up.

Yeah, or believing what somebody else is making up as they kind of go along. It's like trying to understand whether Jim Jones had a point.
And to do that, you go to Jonestown.

It's like, well, maybe you don't listen to the cult as to whether the cult is right. Maybe you do some external reading too.

And also, a lot of this is special pleading. You know, he's saying that the Bible is history, but it's confusing history.

So the parts of the Bible that he likes or that appear to be lining up with things that are true, well, those are history.

And the parts that either objectively make no sense or are actively bad ideas and bad suggestions, bad doctrines to live by, well, those are signs that it's so old and it's all about a language and a context that we don't fully understand.

Those are the confusing bits, but it's all true. We just need to put put it into context and things.
So yeah, it's special pleading. All right.
Next clips about Christianity.

I don't think it's nothing. No.
No. I think there's something to it, and there's a reason why it resonates with people.

And Christianity in particular is the most fascinating to me because there's this one person that everybody agrees existed that somehow or another had the best plan for how human beings should interact with each other and behave and was the best example of it and even even died in a non-violent way, like didn't even protest, died on the cross, supposedly for our sins.

Like it's a fascinating story. What does it represent though? That's the real thing.
What was that? Like what happened? Who was Jesus Christ if it was a human being? What was that? That's wild.

Well, Jordan's idea, as I understand it, is that the point of

the story, if you like, is it's about voluntary self-sacrifice. It's about the fact that to have a good society, people have to be willing to sacrifice something of themselves

for others. And that's what Jesus is and that story is supposed to inspire in all of us.

Yeah, again, I mean, he's talking about how, you know, if Christianity is the most fascinating to him, and I think that's because of not just the culture that he is kind of deeply seeped in and has always boiled in his entire life, the culture he's been cooked in, but he's hanging around with people like Jordan B.

Peterson and Wesley Hough. And so, yeah, that's why he's more likely to take Christianity as being fascinating.

If he was hanging around with a load of Buddhist scholars, he might be more inclined to think that Buddhism had a point because Job Rogan, Joe Rogan believed the things that people who are on his show talking if he believes what they're saying.

Yeah. Yeah.
And he says there's something to it. There's a reason why it resonates with people.
Yeah, it resonates with them because they were indoctrinated in a young age.

That's why it resonates with them. I mean, it resonates with them because they're part of a community.
That's why it resonates with them.

And even religious people don't all agree that Jesus was the most fascinating or that he's the one everyone agrees with.

Some people do put him high on their pantheon or whatever, but that's not necessarily something that maybe a Hindu might agree with.

A lot of religious people disagree with what Jesus or they don't think that Jesus is their savior or whatever. And Jesus' teaching basically boiled down to being nice to people.

That's not revolutionary or unique. Just talking, you know, you're just talking to people who think he's really important and they have you convinced that he was important.

Then it isn't, it doesn't say anything that's super revolutionary. All right.

Next clips about historical Jesus.

Right, but it's a historical human being, too, though.

It's a historically documented human being. That's where it gets weird because

there's a universal depiction of what this human being was like that doesn't seem to vary that much between all the people that knew him. That gets weird.

You know,

if you go to Jerusalem, you can go to the Garden of Gethsemane. And for those people who don't know, that's where Jesus was arrested by the Roman soldiers.
It still exists.

You can go there 2,000 years later

and you just literally walk around this place. You're just like, my God, like the connection to those stories, it's just, it's right there.
And also, I think

the lessons that you learn from going to church are incredibly profound. Something as simple as I was raised Catholic as, you know, they'd say, peace be upon you towards the end.

Let's show each other a sign of peace.

And you literally shake hands with the person next to you. You don't know this person.
You may have never met them, but you shake hands with the person behind, in front, front, and whatever else.

What an incredibly profound gesture that is. Just to shake hands with someone.

And all your anger and all your resentment and everything you feel, which is natural and jealousy, and you go, but you make a literal physical connection with another human being. That is so powerful.

Yeah.

So, yeah, this is, as you're saying, this is why you've got to do the reading around Cecil.

You can't just believe the believers because here's Joe saying there's a universal depiction, a historical record of Jesus. Well, no, there isn't.

There isn't a universal depiction of Jesus from the people who knew him. That's not what we have.

There's an agreement between one version of his story written decades after his died with other versions of his story that were also written long after he died.

Like three of the four gospels are basically the same story. And that's because Mark and Luke were copying Matthew's homework because Matthew had already out by then.
So, yeah,

the Gospels are copying each other. But Joel seems to think that they were all Jesus' buddies and they contemporaneously told anecdotes about the guy that they knew.
And what do you know?

Those anecdotes lined up perfectly and therefore constitute a historical record. That's because he's not done the reading.
He just believed what the believers say. As for that,

being growing up Catholic, you have such profound lessons. I also grew up Catholic.
I learned zero profound lessons from Catholicism that I didn't get better from elsewhere.

Loads of groups have a don't be addict to people theme and turning to shake hands with your mum and your neighbor in the middle of mass does nothing to encourage that over and above everything else.

No, right? You're normally at mass with people you know. This idea that you're like turning around and shaking the stranger's hand.
No, you're not.

You're shaking the person who you came with's hand because they're next to you.

And even if you are straight, like shaking the hand of someone you didn't come with, they're people who attend your mass.

They're still in the same village at the same area as you, which is why I love it.

That Francis says, all of your anger and your resentment and jealousy is still there, but you still make how angry and resented and

jealous were you when you were sat in mass shaking mr jones from down the street's hand

also like i've done icebreakers at non-profit conferences that are way better at getting to know someone than just shaking their hand at least you get to know more about them than their grip strength right yeah uh second to last clip this is talking about uh richard dawkins

And it's also as well, you know, when we look at the new atheist movement, and that's something that I really followed, you know, Dawkins and all these kind of people who pointed out the ridiculousness of certain religions etc etc and then we don't need religion I think that's fundamentally inaccurate I think human beings need religion I don't know if you need it but it definitely can help but I think societies need it yeah but I don't I just think it's silly to dismiss all these stories as being useless totally I just I think they were trying to say something.

Right. And I don't know what that something is, but the deeper you dive into it, the more interesting it gets.
Yeah.

Well, last time we had Richard on the show, if you remember, we kind of pushed him on this. Yeah.

And his answer, as far as we could get, is he was like, well, you know, maybe it's a story that's useful, but it's still not true.

And I'm going, well, if it's useful, maybe we should hang on to it for a little bit.

You know, do we want to throw away something that's useful because we're so fixated on literal truth when this is perhaps a metaphor for something, right? Perhaps. Yeah.
You know?

um so yeah i've kind of moved on on that

um

these guys to me martian i this is just a speculation i can't i don't know what's going through their heads but it really feels like they're giving a nod to the people who are religious in their audience it really feels like to me that this is the sort of recognize who your audience is and make sure you give the at least uh you know you're not outwardly attacking and you're sort of reinforcing a lot of their beliefs because i think a lot of people who listen to this show probably are religious.

Yeah, I think it could be that. I think it also could be less conscious than that.

It could be that audience capture thing of you start to train your responses even subconsciously based on the kind of things that get a response from your audience.

So you have Richard Dawkins on and if you've got a religious audience, they'll point out all the ways that they think he's wrong or mean and maybe you're

you're trying to placate and please your audience and you start to think like them.

I've even seen people who are, I think is it Cosmic Skeptic is now, he's Alex O'Connor who made his name as an atheist YouTuber is now saying, actually, maybe there is some plausibility to religion after all.

And I wonder if that's because if you pall around with Jordan Peterson for long enough and you have enough of his audience following you, maybe you start to find that his fans' arguments are persuasive to you, even if you don't realize you're being anchored in that kind of way.

Yeah.

I also, we also get Joe's email. We talked about this on a couple other shows.
And some of the email we get is from people who genuinely say, Joe, you're on a spiritual path.

Joe, God is trying to reach out to you. I imagine that we get that email, but so does Joe Rogan, or at least Joe hears it or sees the comments.

So I think this might be that that's a good observation and that maybe it's pushing him to a place that he wasn't before. Yeah, I think that's it.

I think it's also, you know, it's no surprise to me that they were interested in the new atheist movement because the new atheist movement,

a lot of good people attracted to it, but also a lot of fairly contrarian people were attracted to the movement at the time. And look where they are now.
People like James Lindsay, for example.

I imagine James Lindsay is someone will talk about his Rogan appearance at some point in the future. I'm certain.
But New Atheism was counterculture for a while.

And it attracted folks who like to be contrarian and counterculture. But if you are a contrarian or you're reactionary, you're never far away from the...

next bandwagon to jump on or I guess jump off and to swim up against.

So I don't know. It feels like maybe this is their contrarianism.

It was cool to be an atheist when everyone was religious, but now a lot of people are atheists it's cool to say well actually religion might have a point and yeah coincidentally that's where the money and the attention also is and he's and you're saying and i you know they were trying to say something and i don't know what they were trying to say i mean they were trying to say obey our rules be part of our in-group and give us your money that is basically the three lessons they were really trying to say the rest of it was wind addressing And they make a point to say, well, you know, these stories are good stories and they're reinforcing stories and they're helping people.

It's like, yeah,

the real problem is, you know, you're saying, don't throw those stories away. Sure, don't throw away metaphors that are good, reinforcing metaphors.

The problem is, is that that book also contains a lot of bad things. And people can manipulate these good, what we think might be good things to be bad things.

So often what they do is they'll take this book of very nice stories and then they'll take it and they'll somehow

misremember or not talk about the stories of authoritarianism, murder, genocide, slavery, patriarchy.

And what they'll do is they'll, they'll, they'll leave those out and talk about the good stuff, but all that stuff's still in there.

So anybody who believes in that book can then go and dig into those stories, or they might take these really nice stories that are metaphors about nice stuff and manipulate it so that they can bring up those other themes.

All right. Last clip.
This is talking about the new atheists.

I was, you know, I used to love all that new atheist stuff. Me too.
But a lot of those guys fell apart.

And all those guys get real persnickiny. They don't seem very enlightened.
They don't seem like they're at peace, which is interesting. You know, because that's the true Christians that I've met.

And I've met some like legitimate, like very charitable, kind Christians. They're some of the happiest and kindest people I've ever met.
And that's borne out in the statistics as well.

However, I will say this, though, right? And I think this is worth like the best people I've ever met are Christians, but also some of the worst people I've met. Oh, sure.
You know what I mean?

Well, there's a real issue in Texas where these are very wealthy guys that are trying to, they succeeded in getting the Ten Commandments put in every public school, but they essentially want Texas to be a theocracy.

They're nutters. Right.
They're out on the fringe. You know, they're firing brimstone type.
Jesus is coming. Like them folks.
Those folks are real too. That scares the shit out of me.
Because

I was talking to Ron White about that. Like Ron White's a southern guy.

I've been here his whole life like he's like be careful them fucking really crazy christians because don't think they're like regular christians he's right

so we have a no true christian argument here

the true christians behave in this kind of way um look and i i agree a lot of the new atheist types don't really seem at peace and don't seem like they're in a great position right now a lot of people who are quite prominent in that movement but i don't think that's for a want of religious grounding i don't think that's it.

Also, we can point to quite a lot of religious people who don't seem particularly at peace with the world or the people around them. So, it's got nothing to do with your religiosity.

There's something else driving how much inner peace you might find in things.

And even to Constantin's credit, he does say some of the some of the best people he've met are Christians, some of the worst people he's met are Christians. It's like, right.

So, it's almost as if it has absolutely no bearing on whether you're a good person or a bad person at all.

You might as well be talking about their hair color. It makes no difference to how good a person you are.
Yeah, but if they have blue hair though, that is a problem. I think it's a problem.

They're going to be socialist assigning you a job. Socialist military rules.

They're going to have a cat shirt on. I'm getting a cat shirt now.
Now I'm going to find a cat shirt.

Let's wrap it up with that.

Thank you, sir. Appreciate you very much.
You're a beautiful person.

Okay, Marsh. Here we are, end of the show.
Anything good in this?

Yeah, okay. I found a couple of things.

there's a part where they're talking about athletes and football players or soccer players for uh for any americans and how good even an average athlete is compared to a non-athletic standard and i think that's kind of nice you know i think people do underestimate how much dedication and talent there is

even the footballers that we think of being the worst how good they actually are if you try to compare yourself to them i think that's quite an interesting thing that they talk about i think that's a fair thing um also joe talks a bit about the joy of getting good at something as part of the same conversation like there is a genuine joy at mastering something, dedicating yourself to me.

I think that's fine.

And there's a part where Francis talks about how the comedy scene in the UK, particularly a little while ago, was competitive in an unhealthy way with panel shows where comedians would deliberately screw each other over in order to get in with a joke.

I think that's a fair observation of what the comedy scene was like at the time. I don't think it's an original one, but if I'm going to say something good, I think he's accurate there.
You know,

good points, Marsh. I think there are a few points in here that are okay.
Another thing that struck me is, you know, Americans often look to Brits to be very sophisticated.

And I think these guys shatter expectations, and that's solid. That's a good thing.
I like that.

All right. That's going to be it for the show this week.

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