Jack Symes

But when people are already setting fire to cars, mosques, hotels, dragging people out of taxis and beating them up, if you go online and say, everyone come to this hotel, let's burn it down, I sort of feel like that's pretty much as close as you can get. That's inciting violence. That's illegal. So in that case, I think... But people... People aren't saying that, right?

We're stuck in these sweeping, snappy statements which are, it's like Orwell's 1984. It's either anti-free speech. It's like, no, tell me what kind of free speech you want to defend and why you want to defend it, or else we're going to carry on being stuck in this.

Yeah, you can't do things that are illegal.

I haven't found that might well be a more fringe example. I think it's like 20, maybe Jamie, you can live fact check me here. Maybe up to about 30-ish people have been prosecuted for stuff they've put online in the UK recently.

Have they?

You know, we've got the, the right wing fag in our country. Uh, he's not in our country. I think he's in a, in a luxury holiday in Cyprus at the moment. Uh, Tommy Robinson, he's doing the rounds again in the light of all of this violence.

saying, like, we should shun people. He tweeted something along the lines recently. I'm going to paraphrase it. And Jamie, I'd be really grateful if you could fact check this one, because I might be liable if I get it wrong. He essentially said that people in Palestine are or the majority of people in Palestine are terrorists, inbreds and parasites.

And given what's going on there right now, I don't know anyone on the right who uses such obviously degrading language. And that person's not being shown. He's having more attention than ever. He's got his record outreach right now. So that's not illegal, what he said? I'm not sure if it's illegal.

He said it on a tweet. Oh, he said it on a tweet? Yeah, he put it on a tweet replying to somebody at some point. Again, as far as my knowledge, that's roughly what was said. I should say that.

Well, what's going on? This is an interesting, you know, I'm pretty liberal when it comes to platforming and speaking to people who we disagree with. I think it's a real shame we get really polarized when we stop talking to people we disagree with.

And there's very, very, very few people I won't have a conversation with. But when we're continually platforming someone like him in a moment like this, that does raise questions. And Peterson's had him on once. I think he's having him on again recently. That sort of thing.

Yeah. I'd be surprised if he... You should tell him and see what he says about it. I mean, a quick... When Tommy Robinson says something like the UK grooming gangs are out of control for a certain demographic and saying that they're responsible for all this crime in our country...

A quick Google would reveal to Jordan that that's not true in terms of the big government study done in 2021 that found they're no more likely culturally to be doing these things. Rutger Bregman.

Well, take Rutger Bregman. Did you know the Utopia for Realists guy? He's a big proponent of universal basic income.

I can see if I can dig it at the same time. Okay, go ahead.

See if you can find that tweet. I'm just turning this on now as we're going. The big point here, though, when we're looking at... This is something Steven Pinker's always emphasizing, right? The idea that we shouldn't just be looking at anecdotal evidence, which is stuff like he does, and cherry-picking our examples to fit our political and ideological agendas. Right.

We should look at the big data. Rutger Bregman points out wonderfully in his book, Utopia for Realists, that... People that come to the U.S., for example, first-generation migrants, are less likely to commit crimes than the native population. The same is true for their children as well in the U.S. and the same stories in the U.K.

They're less likely to be filling up our prisons than people who live there.

It might be lumped in together. Again, we're fact-checking.

Right? Yeah.