Good afternoon and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Cetus.

Episode 1,300 on the 20th of November 2025.

I'm your host, Harry, joined today by part-timer Josh.

Hello.

And part-timer Firas.

Hello.

And today we're going to be talking about how calling people racist will backfire.

I'm going to be talking about Elon Musk's AI Tower of Babel and his utopian dreams,

which definitely are just memes and will stay that way.

And you're going to be telling us what socialists get right.

Yes.

It's going to be a very short segment.

It's going to be a bit of an involved segment, actually. It's about industrial policy. Okay. It should be interesting, what with a libertarian on the panel. I'm not that libertarian these days. When it comes to paying taxes... Age is catching up with you. When it comes to paying taxes, I become very libertarian. but when it comes to use of government power, I'm not.

That's the same with me these days. I did as little bit last week on the whole trad tax, and then it got me thinking about all of the taxes and the way that they're built to screw you over, income tax, national insurance, the way the student loan repayments work. And it really does make my blood boil. You rake me over the coals, but we broadly agree with each other on the last. Basically, but it's fun to poke fun at you, Josh. It is. It's fun. It's what bros do. It's what bros do. But outside of all of that, we might as well get into the news. Actually, I had an announcement before. Oh, all right. It's five years since I first joined Lotus Eaters today. I joined on the 25th November 2020, and that was five years ago. Happy Lotus Eater's a birthday. Thank you very much. It's such a shame you no longer employed by us. I know. It sort of takes the wind out of the sales limit, doesn't it? Although people will point out in the comments, he's back just as much. I'm like, no, I'm not. Definitely not. I'm doing a lot less work. It's great. Anyway, I should get on with what I'm actually here for, shall I? Must you? I can if you want. We can just have a chat. Sounds nice. Yeah, we can reminisce those. Well, I've known you for four years, but those past five years, no, we're not going to do that.

People are generally ignoring accusations of racism these days, and that's because it's pretty much an oversaturated word.

It's been used too much. It's like currency.

If you inflate it too much, then it becomes devalued, it doesn't hold any weight. It's not a social reputational weapon anymore. And amongst the right, the more someone is called racist,

the more we think they're our guy, which is a sort of backfire thing, because it's going

to backfire both for the left and the right. For the left,

by calling everything racist and saying caring about immigration is racist, they're going to

marginalise themselves because people are concerned about immigration and they're willing to put up

with being called racist because, as we can see from the US and both the UK and many of the European

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