Why internashional fashists are so interested in Ireland

A meandering mentally ill thesis on current online infrastructure Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:46Speaker 00

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• 1:00Speaker 01

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• 1:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  Hover your anus over Patrick Swayze's facelift, you ancient Ramons. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. And if you're a regular listener, a steaming quiva, a pin-pricked Vincent, then you know the crack. We're nearly 500 episodes deep now. On this podcast, I don't even know if I'm comfortable calling that, what the fuck is a podcast? Like, what's a podcast in 2026? First off, the word itself doesn't mean anything anymore. Podcasts came about 23 years ago because people owned devices.

• 2:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  Little MP3 players called iPods, the Apple iPod. And the podcast was a way of going, you don't just have to listen to music on this. You can physically download a show called a podcast. And then you listen to that once you've downloaded it. Because this iPod doesn't have any fucking internet on it. It's an MP3 player. iPods were discontinued in 2022. So podcast is meaningless. It's like saying roll down the window in the car. When was the last time you rolled down a window? You press a button now. The physical act of rolling down the window no longer exists. Or hang up the phone. Hang it up fucking where? I don't even pick up the phone anymore.

• 2:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  I just go, hey Siri, call one of my friends. So I don't do it anymore. I don't see a friend in your contacts. What is your friend's first? Shut up!

• 3:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  My fucking god. She's ratting me out.

• 3:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh my god.

• 3:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Seriously, I don't, she's right. I don't have any fucking friends, but for fu-

• 3:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  What was I talking about?

• 3:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  So anyway, I can't say her fucking name.

• 3:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  I, I don't pick up the phone anymore. I scream it into the ether. And before you know it, I'm speaking to a human being. But I still say, I'm gonna hang up the phone when I'm speaking to that person. Or in Ireland, in Ireland, when we, when we, when we say goodbye to someone on the phone in Ireland, we, we don't just say goodbye. We go, alright, alright, I'll chat to you later. Alright, goodbye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, see you later, bye, bye, bye, bye. Which- We do that because when you're speaking to someone on the phone, you're not physically with them. So by going bye, ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba bye, by machine gunning a person with goodbyes, you're trying to recreate the experience of physically being beside them and walking away. Anyway, look, the word podcast is as

• 4:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  meaningless as hang up the phone because iPods don't exist anymore. I recently found that the actual article for the word podcasting was kind. It's a Guardian article from 2004. Click in it and at the top it says, this article is more than 22 years old. And you look at the opening paragraph and there it is. The word podcasting as it was written for the first time ever. It's an article called Audible Revolution. The first line is, online radio is booming thanks to iPods and cheap audio software. And then it says,

• 5:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  but what do we call it? Audio blogging? Gorilla media? Podcasting? And it's a weird feeling seeing it. It's like looking at a cave painting, an early hominids scribbles of a 2D horse or handprints spat in blood on a bit of sandstone. But yeah, the word podcasting means fuck all. It's vestigial. It's like my ma ringing me up for doing an interview on the radio and my ma goes, I heard you on the wireless. Cause she's old enough to remember people marveling at the fact that a radio could receive signals without any wires. Why am I talking about this? I've lost my train of thought. I'm still, I'm still embarrassed about Siri. Siri telling you all that I don't have any

• 5:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  fucking friends. Fuck me. But look, we're, we're almost 500 episodes deep into this thing that I've been doing every single week that I adore doing, which we call a podcast. But the word podcast doesn't mean anything anymore. And if you're to look at the most popular podcasts in the world today, they take the form of short video clips. Short video clips on TikTok or Instagram reels, 30, 40 second clips of two people having a chat. They're little clips of something longer. But for a lot of these podcasts that are huge. Listeners aren't actually tuning in to the full, long podcast.

• 6:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Instead, they're being consumed as these short video clips. I have no issue with that. Some of those are very entertaining, but it's the lack of criticality around a medium that's more than 20 years old. Short video clips and then a long form aural experience that you listen to. Those are two wildly different things, but yet they are called the same fucking name, a podcast. I mean, books are books, but we don't just call them all fucking books. A novel is very different to an atlas. What they have in common is they're physical objects full of pages that you read. So they're books. But if you walked into a bookshop looking for a book, you're going to be asked very quickly, what the fuck you mean?

• 7:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  And the big difference, of course, between short form video clips and an aural listening experience is the short form video clips exist on the doom scroll. You don't seek them out. You don't make a choice. They're fed to you via the algorithm. And if you interact with them and stay on them long enough, the algorithm will feed you more. And that's very different to, I'm going to go out for a walk now and listen, choose to listen to my favorite podcast. And a podcast to me is always something that can provide narrative transportation. When you read a novel, when you read a decent article, when you listen to an audiobook, when you listen to a podcast, a person is telling you a story using words and then

• 7:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  you have to visualize that using your mind's eye. And the participatory process of doing that will cause you to become immersed and enchanted, a type of flow state. And it feels lovely. It feels really, really nourishing when you get to do that. It's not draining or exhausting or overstimulating, like the Instagram reels doom scroll. Listening to another person tell a story or reading another person's story in whatever shape that takes, there's something very human about that. We are animals of language. We evolved to listen to stories and tell stories. Stories will regulate our emotions.

• 8:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  So this thing that we're nearly 500 episodes deep into, I'd die on the hill. This is a novel. It's a novel for the era of content. The era of content being.

• 8:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  We exist in a poly culture now. We don't have a monoculture anymore. We used to consume media via television, cinema, magazines, radio. You could walk into a pub and say to your friend, "What are you watching on TV?" The Sopranos, or even early streaming, Game of Thrones. "Ah, I haven't seen either of those things, but I know what you're talking about. I have a cursory awareness of them." Same with music. You know, there's loads of articles at the moment about how the song of the summer does not exist anymore. Festivals are the last thing left. Nightclubs are disappearing everywhere. People don't blare tunes out of their cars anymore. Music is becoming a private algorithm thing that you listen to on your AirPods.

• 9:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  And if there is a piece of music that you feel that you can't escape, that you hear it everywhere, it's because it's a trending audio on TikTok. But even that has disappeared in the past year. Our interests are being fed to us via the algorithm, so we're splitting off into the poly culture. And what that means, if you're an artist, if you're a professional artist, in whatever form that takes, you don't get to just make singular pieces of work anymore. If you're an author, you can't just put out a book, fuck off and disappear, write the next one and put another one out in three years and that sustains you. You can't do that anymore. People are getting book deals now. To write books, not to necessarily sell those books,

• 10:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  because bookshops are disappearing, retail space for books, physical books is disappearing. And you're competing with people's phones. People are getting book deals and writing books for the book tour. That's where they recoup their advances, ticketed events. I did it myself with my last book. Same with music. Instead, now you have to make content. Art is becoming process-based. What I mean by that is, do you see any painters on Instagram in your algorithm? Because Instagram used to be a great place if you were a visual artist. If you are seeing painters now, you're not seeing their paintings. You're seeing videos about how they paint their paintings. Because in the poly culture, in the content era, things move really fucking quickly.

• 11:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'll give you an example. It's Tuesday now, as I record this. On Saturday night, I posted an Instagram video, me messing around with my synthesizers, a little jungle track. Saturday night. Within 24 hours, that had gotten 300,000 views. So that's a lot of attention. And then it just disappeared. Gone. And now I just have to think of the next piece of content. I'm around a long time. I used to get what were called viral videos in 2007, 2010. In 2010, a video that had 300,000 views, you got a year out of it. You got one year out of that video. Now you get 24 hours.

• 11:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  What frustrates me about all of that is it's not led by people who want to consume art. And it's not led by artists. It is a, it's a very deliberate conspiracy by tech CEOs. They say it out loud. In 2020, the CEO of Spotify just said, if you're a musician, you just can't release an album every couple of years. Forget about it. You have to become a content creator. You need to continually engage with your fans consistently. Netflix is buying up video podcasts. Netflix is moving towards vertical content that you look at on your phone as opposed to long form TV shows and films. Why? Is it better art? Is it more entertaining?

• 12:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is it more enjoyable? Is it more for the person creating the art and the person consuming the art? No, it's for fucking data. It's, it's for data. Spotify, Netflix, TikTok, you name it, whatever the fuck it is. They're moving towards continuous feeds, the doom scroll, the continuous scroll, shorter content. So that they get more frequent user interaction, so that they can harvest more data from the person who is on the phone. And then artists have to exist within that ecosystem. It's not the first time shit like that has happened. I mean, in, in the 20th century, people didn't just decide that songs need to be three to four minutes long. Before recording technology, songs were as long as you, they needed to be.

• 13:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then after the 1970s, if you had a single, it had to be, this was up until the 2010s. Your song had to be under three minutes and 30 seconds long. Because if it was over that, it wouldn't get played on radio. Happened to writing in the 20th century. I mean, we generally agree that a short story is anything between 3,000 words and 8,000 words. And you start going beyond your 8,000 and into your 10 and 15s, now you're dealing with a novella. But the short story is between 3,000 and 8,000 words. And it's because of magazines in the early 20th century would publish those short stories. And that was the word limit that they could afford for printing. Journalism, now this, this is disappearing

• 13:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  now as journalism moves online. But journalists used to deliver information in a thing called the inverted pyramid. Very top is the headline, most important information. Underneath that then, you've got the subheading, important details. And then underneath that, at the bottom of the inverted pyramid, you've got general information. And that was because the invention of the telegraph in the 19th century. If it's 1890 and a journalist is in Egypt and they need to get a news story to London, they had to do with them the least amount of words possible over the telegraph. So this shit isn't new. So what would this podcast be 30 years ago? It'd be a sketchbook. It'd be a journal. It'd be my weekly writings

• 14:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  and musings and research and opinions that would go on, that no one would ever see. But it then goes on to inform a singular piece of work, like a short story collection or a novel. So I have to turn to the process based novel. I only call this a podcast because culture hasn't categorised this new wave of media yet. We're still rolling up the window. We're still hanging up the phone. We're still listening to the wireless. When you send an email, you're CC someone, you're carbon copying. What the fuck is that? It was carbon paper. If you were writing out a letter, you'd put a sheet of carbon paper underneath

• 15:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  and that would do a crude copy of the thing that you're writing. This is the 1960s I'm talking about. And photocopiers replaced that. So when we email someone, we're still carbon copying. Take out your phone to take a camera and you save it to your camera roll. Your literal role of physical film that doesn't exist anymore. Or you take a snapshot, which refers to the literal mechanical sound of instant cameras that used to make a snapping noise. Broadcasts used to be a way that you'd disperse seeds by hand. If you were planting a field, you'd have a fistful of seeds and you'd just broadcast them. And that was the best that people could do when they were trying to describe what the fuck television is or radio is.

• 16:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  You tune into your radio channel. Well, if radio is this big body of water, like a river, then to tune into one specific band of radio, that's your channel. A channel is a tributary that comes off a waterway. And then Spotify comes along and Netflix, the poly culture, and we're going, well, what the fuck is this? It's not a channel. Oh, is it a stream? Streaming, let's call it streaming. So the silliness of all that, the silliness of language and how we grasp meaning is why I'm just going, fuck that, this is a novel. I'm future-proofing it. And if all that information is daunting, if you're afraid of losing your favourite artists, nothing's really gonna change. It's gonna accelerate.

• 16:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  But what you can do, support your favourite fucking artist directly. Buy the painter's paintings if you like them. Purchase the musician's merch. Purchase their album on Bandcamp, their vinyl. Purchase your favourite author's physical book and support their Patreons if they have a Patreon. I've been leaving my Ocarina pauses way too late the past two months because I've been getting carried away with the storytelling and I don't like pausing it. But if you do listen to this podcast and you enjoy it and it's something you consume on a weekly basis and you can afford it, please consider supporting this directly on Patreon. Patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. The price of a pint or a cup of coffee. Because that shields me.

• 17:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's what allows me to put out long-form fucking audio podcasts and not to be thinking about short-form video clips. I don't mind doing the odd short-form video clip on Instagram. Usually it's me making music, but I don't want to. I don't want to write this podcast in such a way that I can neatly clip bits of it. I prefer the journey, the storytelling journey, than thinking about soundbites. Another casualty of this new doom scroll environment, this content era of.

• 18:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Short form hyper engagement. Another casualty is our attention spans, like I mentioned, and the quality of information that we have access to and journalism. Here's an example, last Tuesday, seven days ago, there were violent riots in Belfast last Tuesday night. A lot of people were annoyed with me because I didn't speak about it on last week's podcast. Got a lot of angry messages. But the thing is, my podcast comes out on Wednesday morning. So by the time my podcast was recorded, the riots were already in full swing. So I'd have needed a time machine.

• 18:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  But a lot of my own listeners, they didn't grasp that timeline because of our need for instant, instant commentary. So that's why I didn't speak about the riots in Belfast last, on last Wednesday's podcast. It would have been physically impossible. The riots in Belfast were global news, global. So it had slipped into the last remnants of the monoculture. It was being spoken about all around the world. Now, seven days have passed and we have all collectively moved on to the next thing. The next thing, the next thing right now, I suppose, is yesterday, Trump had a ceasefire with Iran.

• 19:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's the next thing. Or if we just, oh no. Okay, right, right now, it would appear that a Russian warship is after firing shots in the English Channel. That's what I'm looking at right now. So Russia has just fired shots at England in the fucking English Channel. And to the best of my memory, the last time that Russia and England had a direct military conflict was the...

• 20:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  British intervention in the Russian civil war, 1918. So that's what I'm talking about. We are living in an accelerated Palmer crisis, which is exacerbated by our algorithms, where we're not given space to process information. Like, this is what Twitter used to be. As hellish as it was, Twitter allowed us, at the very least, to have discourse. So when shit happened, people could chat about it in a legitimate town square fashion. Now, again, the terms of engagement and discussion were, those, those rules were set by fucking billionaires in a turn and response combat fashion. But at the very least, we got to have discourse.

• 20:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  People got to speak, people got to be hard, you got to see arguments. That's gone. Now you just get fed a bombardment of videos. You don't get to see discussion, you just get videos, videos of one person's opinion. Social media doesn't exist anymore, not, not the way we used to know social media. That's gone. We have a new thing now, happening on sites that used to be social media. So we still call it social media, but it's not social media anymore. When was the last time you saw an update from a friend on Instagram? We've lost a, a social media forums for discourse, which allowed us to process. So now, instead of processing, we're just continually bombarded and becoming desensitized, which was deliberate. Elon Musk purchased Twitter and turned it into what it is now.

• 21:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  And what it is now is a text-based doom scroll. There's no discourse happening. And loads of the money that Musk got to purchase Twitter, it wasn't all his money. You look at where some of that money came from, it came from like the Saudis. It came from regimes, institutions, billionaires who wanted discourse shut down. The Me Too movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. Those were two online movements that legitimately threatened powerful, wealthy people. So Musk purchased it to stop the woke mind virus, as he called it. Massive world events move on very quickly, to the point that everyone was asking me last Tuesday, "Speak about the Belfast riots."

• 22:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  And now, seven days later, to do so feels like old news. What it also means is, seven days is a short amount of time. So all of the, the decent, well-informed.

• 22:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  Critical, rigorous journalistic pieces that are based on evidence around the Belfast riots and its causes, they're only coming out now, but you're not seeing them in the algorithm. And I wonder how many of those stories are just getting killed because the algorithm is moving faster than the pace that decent journalism can operate at. And now it would appear that there's a Russian ship firing shots in the English fucking channel, which is 2014, that is the biggest story of the year. Like, remember the Navach poisonings, when Russian agents poisoned two people in the in the UK and that was two years worth of news?

• 23:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  Well, now a Russian warship is firing shots in the English Channel. I don't know how it's gonna unfold, but I predict you're not gonna be thinking about it on Thursday, something new will have happened, unless that escalates into wider conflict, which is unlikely. The G7 summit is happening right now and also just the other day, Trump, Trump removed a bunch of US warplanes and tanks from NATO in order to to pressure NATO countries into buying and spending more on an American military industrial complex to prop up the fucking US economy.

• 23:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  So that business, without even looking at it, because it's unfolding, that looks like a lot of bollocks. The G7 summit is happening, Russia just decided, I'm gonna take a giant shit on a coffee table in front of everyone, just to see what that does to the discussions. That's what that looks like to me. In fact, I'm gonna put on my conspiracy theory hat right now. Do you know what I think that is? So Russia fired a warning shot in the English Channel. Warning shot, wasn't aiming at anybody, wasn't intended to harm anyone, it's a warning shot. Very bad, but ultimately harmless. I reckon Russia did that with permission from the United States. Now, this is conspiracy theory hat on right now. What am I basing that gut feeling?

• 24:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  In April 2026, J D Vance, the Vice President of the United States, April 26, two months ago, he travelled to Hungary and openly campaigned for Viktor Orban for reelection in Hungary. Orban is a key ally of Vladimir Putin. So Vance is campaigning for a Putin ally. So the Trump administration is cosy with Putin. Russia firing a shot in the English Channel is the cheekiest shit in the world. Something they wouldn't think of. They just wouldn't think of it because that means NATO come on top of us. They wouldn't do

• 25:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  it. Russia did that today with Trump's blessing, possibly at Trump's request. Basically, fire a shot towards the Brits. We're not gonna do nothing. America doesn't give a fuck. Fire a shot at the Brits. Why? Because the G7 summit is happening right now. And what does Trump want from the G7? He wants all the NATO members to spend more money while he withdraws American equipment from NATO. When NATO countries spend more money, who are they fucking paying it to? The United States, whose entire economy is propped up by the military industrial complex. So that's my gut feeling autistic pattern recognition conspiracy theory vibe on what's just happening there. And in defence of my autistic pattern

• 26:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  recognition, this week it's emerging online that the video game Pokemon Go has actually been used to train killer drones. The data from the video game Pokemon Go is being used to train military robots. Who did a podcast on that in 2018? Eight years ago? Fucking me, Mr. Autistic Pattern Recognition. I did a podcast in 2018 where I looked at Pokemon Go, I investigated the companies that were behind it, and I traced it to the venture capital arm of the CIA. People called me mental. I am a bit mental, but people called me mental. I was right. This adds further sustenance to my theory that this podcast is a novel. That's a Chekhov's gun. That's a Chekhov's gun. That's what you'd, if you're

• 26:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  writing a novel, you're writing a story. You plant something in an early chapter that seems mad, and then it resolves in chapter eight.

• 26:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  So if you're one of these people that listens to the podcast from the start and you're on 2018, when it gets to chapter eight, eight years later, there's your, they're going, what the fuck's he talking about Pokemon Gopher? Get to chapter eight, 2026. There's the payoff. Bruce Willis is a ghost at the end. That's a reference to the film The Sixth Sense, a film from 1999, again, written by M. Night Shyamalan, who, that is a writer who loves his Chekhov's guns. Anton Chekhov was a playwright, okay, and he, he had this thing where if, if you have a gun, if, if there's a gun i- in the first

• 27:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  act, then when it gets to the third act, someone better shoot that gun. That gun better be important. But it's also, it's kind of a lazy technique. It's, it, you can use it as, if you're a writer, you can use that technique lazily. If you're writing a story and you've got your first draft and you're like, this fucking story is not making sense. On the second draft, you can go back to that story and say, fuck it, I'm gonna plant a gun. This story here, it's not making sense. I'm gonna throw a gun at the start and then at the end, someone's gonna fire that gun and that will make the whole story feel as if it has a much more profound meaning and narrative arc than it actually does. You

• 28:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  can use the Chekhov's gun to, to save a bad story and to use it lazily. The best example of that particular application of the Chekhov's gun would be Fight Club. So Fight Club the book doesn't have a Hollywood ending. It's much more open-ended. And when David Fincher was turning the book Fight Club into a film, he's like, this needs a fucking better ending. This is a 90-minute film here. So we, we, we don't do open-ended shit in Hollywood blockbusters. We need to have, it needs to make sense. So he threw in a fake Chekhov's gun. Fight Club the movie ends when buildings explode. They blow up skyscrapers. That's not in the book, but it's a brilliant Hollywood ending and they play that Pixies song, Where Is

• 29:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  Your Mind? So it's a fucking brilliant Hollywood visual payoff. But how, how Fincher wrote that was. Earlier on in the book, they're making soap from human fat. And the character of Tyler Darden casually mentions that you can also make this human fat into a bomb. In the book, it's just a throwaway comment, but Fincher went, there's my Chekhov's gun. Conti's talking about making bombs. So we're gonna leave it there. And then at the end, the buildings blow up. And then you're sitting in the theatre going, ah, they made the bomb out of the soap, out of the human fat. Oh, my God, genius. It's not, it's a fake Chekhov's gun.

• 29:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  Why am I talking about this? Both of those, both of those things illustrate the monoculture as well. If you're an elder millennial like me, I was able to talk about both the Sixth Sense and Fight Club there in detail. And if you're over thirty-three, everyone he is going, I know what he's talking about. Yeah, I've seen that, saw it fucking loads. I, I watched it on VHS multiple times because there was no fucking internet. So I know exactly, I know what he's talking about with the Sixth Sense and I know what he's talking about with Fight Club. Because that's the monoculture. That's what we grew up with, that narrow band of entertainment. That, that joke I made there, and I, I've used that joke a lot. Bruce Willis is a ghost at the end of the Sixth Sense.

• 30:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's even a little drawing in my first book. I say that joke because that's not even my joke. That is, that's the best piece of graffiti that I've ever seen. In about the year two thousand and three, there was a pub in Nimerick called The Highstool. And I was out one night and I went into the toilets there, probably having a panic attack. And when I sat down in the toilet and looked at the door, there was just one piece of graffiti and all it said was, Bruce Willis is a ghost at the end of the Sixth Sense. And I roared laughing because I lived in the monoculture.

• 31:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Everyone, fucking everyone, everyone, you had to watch The Sixth Sense. It was mandatory, everyone. If you, you'd either watched it or you hadn't seen it yet. But fucking everyone watched The Sixth Sense because it was the biggest film of nineteen ninety nine into two thousand and also two thousand and one. And the, the Sixth Sense is one of these M. Night Shyamalan, Chekhov's gun films. It's about a child and the child is mentally unwell. And the child claims that he can see ghosts all the time. And then Bruce Willis is a psychologist who is tasked with the job of helping this young boy who thinks he can see ghosts. And then at the very end, oh my God, Bruce Willis is a ghost.

• 31:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  He's not a psychologist at all. He's a fucking ghost and Bruce Willis doesn't even know it. Oh my God. And then you're forced to look back at the entire film and there's multiple Chekhov's guns. There's all these little clues throughout the entire film and you just go, my mind is blown. And Fight Club is the exact same. Fucking Brad Pitt's not real, he's a figment in Edward Norton's imagination. The fuck am I talking about this for? That was the monoculture. Everyone thirty five and, and over listening to this, they, you know exactly what the fuck I'm talking about. There were people who based their entire personalities around Whitnail and I quotes. The brilliant film Whitnail and I, incredible fucking film. And in the monoculture where there was no internet, there was nothing, there's narrow bands of attention.

• 32:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  You'd go to fucking house parties and someone plays Whitnail and I. And there was two people who knew every single quote in the film and that was their entire personalities. And it wasn't denying. That's just how things were. There were no algorithms, we had to sit with boredom. When I was seventeen, I, I knew two girls. And each of them had based their respective personalities on two separate fucking Nirvana albums. One of them was just In New Taro was the best album ever released. And then another one was Bleach. And that was their entire personality. They had to worship these albums like religious artefacts. And then one day they fought each other. Underneath Sarsfield Bridge, I watched it. Their self-esteem and identity was tied into these two respective Nirvana albums.

• 33:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  First time I ever saw a woman rub Vaseline on her face so her skin couldn't get scratched. Big, puffy, red face, full of tears, glistening in the sun. And just another Chekhov's gun. I remember it clearly there underneath Sarsfield Bridge because I remember the shadow, the shadow of the monument. There's a monument on Sarsfield Bridge and it was late evening. And that shadow of that monument was cast upon the two girls scrapping over the Nirvana albums. But you know what that monument is? It was a monument for the Battle of Balaclava. It's where the word balaclava, for the headgear, was kind. But on that monument, there used to be two old Russian cannons from the Crimean War, 1854, the second last time

• 34:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  that the Brits and the Russians had an armed conflict with each other. Now, it's no longer a monument to the Battle of Crimea. It's a monument to the IRA. Bitch didn't think I could tell you a story about two girls covered in Vaseline fighting about a Nirvana album back to the current unfolding conflict between Russia and the United Kingdom. But that's a fucking Chekhov's gun and I'm a writer. Britney Spears's sister actually took a photograph beside that bridge today. Unrelated, but Britney Spears's sister is currently holidaying in Limerick for some reason. And the reason I know about that is The Limerick Post, the local newspaper, posted a photograph of Britney Spears's sister pausing beside Sarsfield's Bridge. And it really upset my mother. She texted me and said,

• 34:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  "The Limerick Post will write an article about some Yanks standing in front of a bridge, but won't mention the first Limerickman to perform in the Sydney Opera House. Saint Munchen's Curse is alive and well." My mother was very upset that the local newspapers didn't report.

• 35:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  That the local newspapers didn't report on, on me performing at the Sydney Opera House. And the reason I knew she was upset is not because she told me she was upset, but because she rang me up during the week to chastise me over a a school report she found from when I was 11. She found a school report about me when I was 11 and the teacher, the teacher was basically saying I was gonna end up being a criminal. It was just like, this guy's bad. This is, I do not see a good future for this boy. Falsely accused me of vandalising a priest's greenhouse.

• 35:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  Which I didn't do. My ma is still convinced I smashed up a priest's greenhouse. I didn't, I didn't. That wasn't my thing. Setting fire to wheelie bins was my thing, but not smashing greenhouses. So my ma rang me up and I'm like, why are you giving out to me about a fucking school report from the 1990s? And then it turned out she was, she was actually disappointed that the Limerick Post hadn't done an article about me performing at the Sydney Opera House. Which again, I blame on the polyculture and monoculture. Why would they know that? If they're not listening to this podcast, if I'm not in their algorithms, why would they possibly have any idea that I'm gigging at the Sydney Opera House? That's another fucking thing. The Sydney Opera House is an iconic venue.

• 36:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  20 years ago, if a person was performing at the Sydney Opera House, chances are you could go to most people in Sydney and go, oh, this artist or this band is playing at the Opera House. And the people of Sydney would go, oh, I'm not a fan of their work. I haven't consumed anything that they make, but I have a cursory awareness of that person. I have a cursory awareness of them. Yeah, and they're gigging at the Opera House. When I, when I gig there next year.

• 37:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ninety-nine percent of the people in Sydney won't have a fucking clue who I am. Who's this Irish cunt with a bag on his head? I've never heard of this fellow. He's not in any newspapers, he's not on the tele- I don't know who the fuck this is, but he's the headline of the Opera House. And the only people who will know will be the people who are coming to the gig. To the point that I'm preemptively thinking of, of lies. When I'm in Sydney next April, I'll be sitting in a restaurant. As a human being, no plastic bag on my head. And the waiter or waitress is gonna hear my accent. And they're gonna say, "Oh, are you a tourist? You sound Irish. What are you doing here?" Maybe not, because there's a lot of Irish people there. But they, usually that happens. If I'm, if I'm in a different city, in a different country, and I'm in a restaurant,

• 37:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  and the people working at the restaurant hear that my accent is not from that country, they go, "Oh, what are you doing in this? What are you doing over here?" Do you think I'm gonna say to that person? "Well, actually, I'm, I'm, uh, gigging at the Sydney Opera House." No, because I look mad. I look insane. They won't have heard of someone called Blind Boy, and I, I look like a, a fantastic liar. And another situation that can only happen in the polyculture. I've said it before, but I, I frequently bump into, like in Limerick City, I'll bump into people who I knew from college or school or whatever. People who know me as a human being, first, and then Blind Boy, second. Some of them just think I'm unemployed.

• 38:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Their only awareness of Blind Boy was twenty-twelve, twenty-thirteen, back in the monoculture. But everything since then, the podcasts, they haven't a fucking clue. So if I bump into someone from college today, and they go, "What are you up to?" I'm not gonna say to them, "Oh, I'm off to Berlin to do a gig." Because they're gonna look at me like I've got twelve arses. They'd be like, "I haven't heard or seen anything about you since twenty-fourteen. The fuck you doing in Berlin? You still doing that plastic bag shit?" So I just lie and say I'm working in an office, which is half true. I think it's time now for an Ocarina Pause. And after the Ocarina Pause, I want to, I want to speak briefly

• 39:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  on the Belfast situation, because so many people had asked me. And I'm by no means a fucking expert, but I'll chat about it for, for those outside of Ireland who may be very uninformed. But first, here's the Ocarina Pause. And you're gonna hear a couple of adverts for something.

• 39:32Speaker 01

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• 41:36Speaker 04

  M O D dot com is changing the way people battle excessive fatigue. Ever hit a wall in the middle of the day and a third coffee just doesn't do it anymore? Here's what's actually happening. Coffee only briefly blocks adenosine, the chemical that tires you out. When it stops working, your system is flooded and you crash. Midafinil is a prescription treatment that works in a completely different way. Midafinil works by stimulating multiple receptors in the brain associated with wakefulness, including dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, histamine, glutamate, and orexin. It's a more complete solution that gives you 10 to 12 hours of steady focus and energy. To learn more, go to M O D dot com.

• 42:21Speaker 04

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• 42:36Speaker 05

  Welcome to 215 Maple Drive. We just put this property on the market.

• 42:42Speaker 06

  Love the crown molding.

• 42:43Speaker 05

  Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile.

• 42:47Speaker 06

  Does it have Verizon FiOS? You know, 100% fiber internet?

• 42:51Speaker 05

  No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen.

• 42:54Speaker 06

  No FiOS? Yeah, no thank you.

• 42:58Speaker 05

  Don't you want to see the rest? Okay, bye-bye.

• 43:01Speaker 07

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• 43:05Speaker 03

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• 43:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  That was the Ocarina Posse. And support for this podcast, as I mentioned, comes from the Patreon page. If you listen to this podcast regularly, if it brings you distraction, solace, entertainment, if it distracts you from some mind-numbing work that you're doing, then please consider supporting the podcast directly. This is a listener-funded podcast, fully independent. I'm not dependent on algorithms. This podcast is passed around via word of mouth. It's my full-time job. This is how I earn a living, how I pay for all my equipment, how I rent out my studio, how I pay all the bills. If you met me in real life, would you want to buy me a pint or a cup of coffee?

• 44:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Well, that's all I'm looking for, once a month, the price of a pint or a cup of coffee. And for that, you get four podcasts a month, and I then have the time and space to write and record those podcasts. And I show up each week and make sure that whatever I'm speaking about, it's something I'm genuinely passionate about and genuinely interested in. And that there is the podcast hug. The best part, if you can't afford that, that's no problem, just listen for free. You can listen to the podcast for free, because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. And if you're paying, it means that you're paying for someone who isn't paying to listen for free. So everybody gets the exact same podcast I get to earn a living.

• 45:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. Patreon.com forward slash theblindbypodcast. And support whatever independent artist that you, whose work you enjoy. If, if there's an artist out there, you see them online and you notice that they are pandering to the algorithm because they have to, then see how you can support that artist directly, so that we don't allow the entire creative infrastructure to be controlled by tech CEOs and the uncreative hopes that they make us fucking jump through. Similarly, I'm not beholden to advertisers. Advertisers can't come in here and tell me what to speak about, what not to speak about. They can't make me platform guests who I'm not interested in speaking to just because to

• 46:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  platform that guest would get a load of listens and give a fuck about any of that. My job is to show up with curiosity. That's all I wanna keep it. Upcoming gigs, Berlin this weekend. Both of them are sold out. There's a lot of people selling tickets. Just be very careful about scalpers because the gig is sold out and there's loads and loads of people selling tickets. I've reshared a couple of genuine people on my Instagram. I'm really looking forward to Berlin. I'm looking forward to the art museums. I'm gonna haunt and bother some art. I'll get stuck into a couple of history museums. It's gonna be a weekend of fucking museums for me. And then I'm gonna drink a quiet pint of Czech Lager, something you can't buy in Ireland. I'm specifically

• 46:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  looking for a draft pint of Pilsner Arc-Weil, which is something I've been reading about that you can't purchase in Ireland. It's very premium piss. Then I'm in Sheffield there on July. And the 7th of July is that the I can't read fucking dates. The 5th of July. July is the 7th month. The 5th of July in Sheffield. I'm gonna smoke cannabis outside Sheffield Cathedral and think about the Anglo-Saxons while listening to the music of Jodacy. I'll be doing a live podcast at the Crosswires Festival there in fucking Sheffield City Hall where I'll be speaking to the wonderful Professor Carl Chin. He's an expert on the history of the English working class. We'll have a chat about the

• 47:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Chartist Movement. I promise you it'll be tremendous fun. Carl is great fucking crack. One of the most fascinating individuals I've ever met. An Englishman with a deep knowledge of Irish revolutionary history. My next gigs after that then won't be till October 2026 when I'm doing my tour of England, Scotland and Wales. Kicking off there in fucking Brighton at the Brighton Dome, then to Cardiff, Coventry, Bristol, Guildford, London, sold out. Glasgow as good as sold out. Gateshead and Nottingham, there on October 26th. That tour, that tour is very nearly sold out, so do get your tickets.

• 48:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  If you're putting it off, get your tickets now because they're going quickly. Then it'll have an outcrack at Australia and New Zealand there in April 2027. Starting off in Aotearoa, Auckland Town Hall, New Zealand on the 9th. Palais Theatre, Melbourne on the 11th. Brisbane Powerhouse on the 14th. Astor Theatre in Perth. And finishing off nicely in the Sydney Opera House on the 22nd of April. And that Sydney Opera House gig, that's nearly 70% sold now. Thank you so much, you glorious cunts. But that is nearly a year away. So like I said, if you're coming to that, get your tickets now.

• 49:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because I think what I find with audiences on the southern hemisphere like that, a lot of acts don't travel down there. A lot of acts don't go down there because most of the budget is gone on simply getting there. So a lot of acts just don't go down to Australia and New Zealand, skip it completely. So when you do come, there's a lot of support and people get tickets quickly. So Belfast last week, there was a stabbing and then there were riots. And it was being covered, news media all around the world, deeply, deeply inaccurately. Whatever about America, even in, in England, some of the news reports,

• 49:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  they just do not have a clue about the complexities that exist in the north of Ireland. A man was stabbed. Some people say that it was an attempted beheading. I'm being careful about the wording that I'm using because it's a case that is about to go to trials. You have to be careful how you speak about these things. Assault, manslaughter, attempted murder. Public discourse can interfere with a trial. So I'm going to say a man was stabbed because that's what, that's what responsible journalists are saying. A Sudanese man, a man from Sudan, is alleged to have brutally assaulted another man in the street.

• 50:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  If anyone wants to have a go at my choice of words there, that's the description of events in most broadsheet newspapers because professional journalists know not to jeopardize trials. The propriety of language around the incident is also something that's causing the spread of disinformation. Because then you see some people online saying, quote unquote, "It was an attempted beheading." That type of chat can jeopardize trials and justice. So anyway, a video was shared of it online. The initial videos that were being shared online in WhatsApp groups were saying that the person was Somali and then it was reported that the man was from Sudan.

• 51:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  What ensued were riots, pogroms against immigrants. So that's racism, that's bigotry, racism, that's xenophobia. It's not, quote unquote, "legitimate concerns." The targeting of an entire group of people, simply because they're not born in the north of Ireland, the targeting of an entire group of people because of the actions of one person is always just wrong. It's morally wrong, it's horrible, it's a lack of critical thinking, it's a lack of imagination, it's a lack of empathy, it's misdirected anger. It is never, ever excusable for an entire group of people to be targeted because of the actions of one person. And it's bullshit.

• 51:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  The, quote unquote, "legitimate concerns" are people saying, well, first off, the person was wrongly identified as Somali and in the construct of race, Somalia is seen as the worst. Somalia is seen as, oh, that's lawless, that's a violent culture, that's uncivilized, they're savages. Somalia, Eritrea, Yemen currently seem to be at the bottom of the system when it comes to a racist view of Africa. That's why initially the disinformation was seen as Somali person because that, within the algorithm, had a stronger emotional reaction. And then above that, you'd have your Sudan, Cameroon, Nigeria, which under the arbitrary

• 52:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  social construct of racism would be seen as slightly more civilized. So the racist argument is... Ireland or England or wherever cannot let people in from these cultures because they are inherently violent, just to shut that down immediately. And this is for the Irish people listening. I'll always direct your attention. The thing is, the people listening, if you're listening to this podcast, you probably don't need to hear this, but I'm telling you because maybe there's someone in your life who does need to hear this. I always direct people's attention to a cartoon, an American anti-Irish cartoon from 1889, which isn't that long ago. It's a century ago, it's not that long ago.

• 53:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'll put the cartoon as the, the, the image on this podcast right now. So if you're listening to this podcast, you'll see this image on your phone for this episode. The name of the cartoon is called The Martyr of Assimilation and the One Element That Won't Mix. Get a look at that. It shows Lady Liberty, the Statue of Liberty, America, 1889, taking in a lot of immigrants. The Statue of Liberty, Lady Liberty, is, has got a bowl that says citizenship. This is the melting pot of America, all the different cultures. If you look in there, you see Italian people, Cossacks, all the people of Europe that are coming to America. And then smack bang in the middle of that, you've got Paddy, an Irishman, holding up a flag.

• 54:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's a Fenian flag and the Irish person looks like a monkey and he's holding a huge fucking butcher knife. And it's, it's basically, look, America's taking in all these immigrants. America is trying its best, but you've got this one fucking savage group of violent, horrible, dirty, stinking, poor people, these fucking patties, these Irish, and they're, they can't mix. They come from a violent culture. They're at war at home. He's holding up a Fenian flag. The, the, the, it's a destabilized country. They're smelly, they're dirty, they have disease, they kill people, they murder. I don't hate immigrants, I don't hate Irish people. I, I don't hate Irish people, okay? But they just, they're murderous, okay?

• 54:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  I've got legitimate concerns here about these fucking patties. And if you argue with, with, if you argue with the racist back then in 1899 in America. And say, look, they're not all like that. They'll find a way to pick out. But what about that Irish person who stabbed someone last week? What about that gang fight? What about this? What about that? And use it to justify. So that's a poster about your great grandfather. Your great, great grandfather. That's who that poster is about. Are you Irish American? Listening to this, it's about you. That's who that's fucking about. It's about your granddad. Do you have people who fled the fucking famine? And went to Liverpool or Manchester or New York or Boston? That's about your people. It's about you. That is about you.

• 55:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's not about the Irish person who was Athenian. It's not about the Irish person. It's about all Irish people. Every single, an entire group of people because of the actions of a few. So if you can, if you can see that and laugh at it and look at how absurd it is and feel hurt by it. They're talking about your poor, great, great grandfather, your poor, great, great grandmother. They're talking about your king, your aunts, your uncles. It's the same fucking shit. It's the same fucking shit. And look at that ball. What do I see? I see a bunch of working class people and wealthy magazine owners trying to sow division amongst, amongst the working classes. Who are unionizing and joining together. It's create fucking division amongst the pores. That's what the fuck it is. Make them pick out Paddy over there as the violent one.

• 56:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Make the Italians and Polish feel great about themselves because they're not carrying knives like all monkey Paddy over there. What it was really about is that, that particular magazine was against

• 56:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  the political machine known as Tammany Hall in America at the time, which would have been Irish and Catholic and became the foundation of what is now the Democratic Party in America. But anyway, same shit is happening today. You can't get an entire group of people and paint them all with the same brush and believe that they are deserving of expulsion and pogroms and to have their houses burnt down. You just like, no, that's always consistently wrong. It's a lack of critical thinking. It's a lack of empathy. It's just like. I hate even discussing it because it's so dumb. So the Republic of Ireland has a growing, a far right issue is growing and it's being astroturfed in here from the outside and I'm going to speak about that in a minute.

• 57:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  In the north of Ireland, what you saw last week, those pogroms happened in a fucking heartbeat because they were organised, very heavily organised, mostly by loyalists, people in the north of Ireland who identify as British. Now, a loyalist, loyalism is they are loyal to the king, they're, they're very, very fucking British. They're also unionist, but unionist doesn't necessarily mean loyalist. You can find usually middle-class, ulster Protestants. Not always, that's not fair, no. Doesn't have to be a Protestant. A unionist is anybody who is like, I, I don't want the United Ireland, I want to remain

• 57:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  union in the UK. There's a sectarian element and that belief will mostly be held by Protestant people in the north of Ireland, but you'll probably find a few Catholic unionists, they mightn't say it out loud. They, they might not be loyal and give a shit about the fucking king, but they'd be happy to stay within the UK. You'll find loads of unionists down south. If you call them unionists, they would get furious, how dare you call me a unionist. But if you're living in Dublin or Cork or Waterford and Limerick and you're like, no, the, the north of Ireland should stay in the UK, I'm not interested in it, I don't want their problems, I don't want to know what's happening up there. No, I'm not interested in that.

• 58:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  It'd be, it'd be too expensive, too expensive if they, if, if the north of Ireland became part of Ireland. How would we deal with all them loyalists? What would we do? I don't want any of that violent provisional IRA shit, that's the bad IRA, I don't want that. That's a really common argument you hear down south. Sometimes we call that partitionist. I call those people unionists, you're pro-union. The arguments that you're making are pro-union. That's, it's as simple as that. You, you want the north of Ireland to remain as part of the UK, that's pro-union. I love calling those people unionists because they get so, so upset because now they're confronted with their views. Partitionist doesn't do the same trick, it doesn't cause the same level of self-reflection.

• 59:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  The north of Ireland is colonised and the pogroms you saw last week are, that is, settler colonialism. The loyalists are descended from like literal colonisers, like quite literally the Ulster plantation. And settler colonialism begets certain organised collective behaviour, like in the illegal settlements of Israel. Violent confrontational performative. And settler colonialism is unique because it's a deliberate organised form of colonisation, where you have an incoming population, they're settling permanently on the land, they're

• 1:00:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  establishing a new order, a political order, and laws and rules. And the specific explicit fucking goal is to replace and dominate the existing population, not to assimilate into it, not to immigrate, to literally replace, dominate, eradicate, and ethnic cleansing genocide. That is settler colonialism. That happened in Ireland, it happened very, very successfully in the north of Ireland with the Ulster plantations, mostly of Scottish planters in the 1600s. Interestingly, the tenets of settler colonialism that I just laid out there are the specific

• 1:00:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  fears that you hear about immigrants, about people who are simply coming to a place to try and get a better quality of life. Pogroms and oppression and violence towards Catholics is unfortunately an organised part of some aspects of union, of loyalist culture. In a month's time, it's going to be the 12th of July. Protestant supremacist organisations like the Orange Order are going to try and march through Catholic areas. They can't do that anymore. But that's what they did for years as deliberate intimidation of the Catholic community.

• 1:01:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then they would follow it with pogroms on the Catholic community in the north of Ireland. And on the 12th of July, you're gonna see giant bonfires where they burn effigies of Catholic people. And they're gonna have a hierarchy on the... These bonfires are fucking huge, the size of skyscrapers. And before it goes on fire, they're gonna have a hierarchy of who they hate the most. And at the top is gonna be tigues, that's Catholics. And then underneath that is gonna be immigrants. And then at the very bottom of that will be members of their own communities, such as burglars. And the bonfires are a warning of death. They're giant, huge fires that can be seen all over the north of Ireland to intimidate the Catholics.

• 1:02:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  So the pogroms you saw last week, they were mobilized and organized within that. That's why it happened so quickly. That's what the news media in England hadn't a fucking clue about. They didn't even know the difference. That's the heartbreaker for the loyalists, is you've got the media in London just calling them Irish, and they're going, "We're British." And it's like, they don't give a fuck over there, you're a paddy. I'm sorry. You go to loyalist areas, you're gonna see your British flag hanging up, you're gonna see the flag of Israel hanging up. Sometimes they'll fly the SS flag, they'll have an Israeli flag alongside Nazi flags, South African flags.

• 1:02:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's deep-rooted historical ties between the loyalist paramilitaries and far-right groups around the world. So that's what you saw last week. The nationalist community in the north of Ireland, now I'm not saying there's not fucking racists in the... Of course there's fucking racists in the nationalist community. And you're gonna have people in the nationalist community who don't want immigrants. However, the community organization that happens in the nationalist communities, that's where you're gonna see your Palestine flags. That's where you're gonna see your murals of Black Panthers, Frederick Douglass. That's where you have a culture around solidarity with other oppressed peoples. You'll have murals about pogroms that happened in the Catholic community throughout the years.

• 1:03:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  So it's much more difficult, I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's gonna be much more difficult to get organized anti-immigrant pogroms happening within nationalist or Catholic communities up north. Down south, we have a different story. Things are being astroturfed from the outside. Ireland has a neoliberalism problem, okay? So years and years of deregulation, privatization of

• 1:04:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  resources that used to be public, the complete financialization of the housing market, which means that social housing doesn't exist anymore. People don't have a social net, greater economic security. And all of these things are being caused by very complex unseen forces. When that happens, the floodgates open for fascism. Wealthy interests who can control algorithms, who can put messaging out there, step into that space, that very insecure space, and are able to say, it's actually caused by those immigrants. They are the reason that over there, that's the target. And it works, that's a tale as old as time. There was so much outside interest in what was happening in Belfast,

• 1:04:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  or was what was happening in the Dublin riots of 2024. So much outside interest from people like Elon Musk, J D Vance, Tommy Robinson, Andrew Tate. The narrative, Ireland is waking up. Ireland is finally seeing the great replacement. And the outside forces are painting, they're trying to appeal to Irish nationalism and republicanism. They're trying to paint immigrants that are coming to Ireland as, these are the new planters. These are like Oliver Cromwell. Remember what happened to your ancestors under the British? Well, now it's happening on your watch, except it's people from Sudan, or Somalia, or Eritrea. And that's an outside message that's flourishing.

• 1:05:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  In the doom scroll era, in the polyculture, in algorithms controlled by fucking billionaires, controlled by Elon Musk, algorithms which will push and promote any message that triggers high arousal emotions such as anger and fear. And it pushes down rigorous fact-based messaging, empathic messaging, critical thinking. These things get pushed down and instead it's the fear and the anger that gets pushed to the front. So this shit is all part of that ecosystem that I began this podcast with. In 2024, a rigorous study was done on the amount of

• 1:06:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  The amount of far-right posts on X, formerly Twitter, the amount of far-right messaging, of accounts pretending to be Irish, in Ireland, it was 80%. So 80% of racist far-right messaging online in Ireland is coming from outside of Ireland. Loads of it from the UK, loads of it from the US, some of it from Russia, organised influence campaigns, 80% is massive. Why, so someone's paying for that? Why do other countries, why do other countries need Ireland to become more racist?

• 1:07:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Why, like, why? It just seems mad, doesn't it? There's a few reasons. One of them is that it suits the racist agenda. So there's, in America, for instance, there's this great fantasy, a fantasy that Ireland is the last bastion of whiteness. Little old Ireland, you get racist Irish Americans who think of the old country, and they have this imagined green, unspiled land full of white children with red hair. You see them coming over as tourists, and, and these are, these are Yanks, and they dress up like 1950s Irish people. You see them wearing paddy caps, and that they get out, out of fucking tourist shops,

• 1:07:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  paddy caps, and the women wear scarves. And it's almost like, it's like certain, some Irish Americans treat a visit to Ireland the way that Jewish Americans will do the birthright trip to Israel. It's very fucking strange. Some of the Americans, the racists are like, Ireland is a pure country, and it must not be diluted, so just straight up, flat-out racism. This fantasy that they have, this imagined land of Ireland. The other reason that outside actors are interested in Ireland is because we have a lot of soft power. Generally, we don't play ball the way that white people are supposed to play ball. We're not perfect.

• 1:08:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ireland is where international corporations can launder their money. We're not fucking perfect, but we didn't colonize. We're not colonizers. We're not France. We're not Belgium. We don't have that history of we are better than someone else that we're gonna take your shit. That's not ingrained in our history. Most European countries, that's their fucking history. Portugal, Spain, France, the whole shebang, they were colonizers. We were not colonizers. We were colonized. And now we're white people, English speaking white people, and we're the fucking odd one out. So we have a tradition of calling shit out when we see it. We have a tradition of going to the fucking UN. They don't like that we're goody two shoes.

• 1:09:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's inconvenient for America or for the wealthy Brits or whoever's doing some diabolical shit around the world to have this little group of white people who are seen as equal to them, eloquent, speaking English, going, hey, that's wrong. We're goody two shoes and they don't want us to be goody two shoes. And that's fucking part of our history. You go back to Roger Casement, seen as the father of fucking human rights. I mean, this is that thing a couple, again, the news feed moves so quickly, but I believe it was three weeks or a month ago. We had, I'm being very careful with language here again, because there could be a trial. A man from the Congo was died outside a shop called Arnotts in Dublin.

• 1:09:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  Security guards were involved and it is seen as our quote unquote George Floyd moment. And I'm being cautious with language there because of justice. You don't wanna fuck up any trials. And there was so much racism towards that man who died, that man from the Congo. A lack of empathy. I'm blaming him for his own death. Racism. And a connection I didn't see anyone fucking make was. Where that man died, this man from the Congo, two minutes around the fucking corner, less, a 90 second walk, is the GPO where 1916 happened, the 1916 Rising. And one of the organizers of the 1916 Rising was Roger Casement. And what did Roger Casement do?

• 1:10:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  Roger Casement is seen as the father of modern human rights because in around 1910, I think it was, he called out human rights abuses in the Congo. By Belgium, King Leopold, Casement stuck his big paddy head out and said, "Hold on a second, those people in the Congo, they're being exploited, they're being murdered by Belgium." And there was international justice. And that's our history, that's our culture, that's the shit I want to fucking identify with. People like Roger Casement. Other white people don't like that we do that. We can be deeply inconvenient for international power when our artists, when our writers, celebrities, fucking politicians, you know Catherine Connelly, who's the president at the moment,

• 1:11:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Michael D Higgins, who was the president before Catherine Connelly, when they call out international abuse, this creates, this is inconvenient for the other white people. They'd like an end to that, they wanted to see us a little bit more fascist. They want to see us in line with the colonial powers. They want to see us start acting like good white people, to be at the top of the system. Now, the big reason, this is why I think that there's, there's a clear international effort at disinformation campaigns in Ireland, there's a clear paid effort to make us more far right. And it comes down to a court case that happened in Ireland in 1986. The name of the court case was Crotty versus Antishock.

• 1:12:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  So in 1986, Ireland was in the European Union, right? And they brought about a treaty in the European Union. It was called the Single European Act, and it amended the founding agreements of the European Communities, right? And the Irish government, as a member state of the EU, was about to, to sign that fucking treaty. But then an economist called Raymond Crotty brought the government to court. And pointed out some shit about our constitution and said, hold on a second, Ireland can't do that without a referendum. And he won, and it became known as the Crotty Doctrine. So Ireland as an EU member, because of our constitution, it makes us unique. So the European Union has multiple member states.

• 1:12:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  But if the European Union wants to change anything in its treaty, most of the other countries in the EU, their governments just go, yeah, we sign off, but not Ireland. The Crotty Doctrine meant that the people own our own sovereignty. The government administers it. So the government can't sign on any changes to an EU treaty without us having a referendum. This happened with the Nice Treaty in 2001 and the Lisbon Treaty. So Ireland is now this big problem in the EU. The EU wants to change its treaty. Italy goes, okay, grand, not fucking Ireland. They have to go, shit, there's a referendum.

• 1:13:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Now everyone in the country has to vote. You might remember the Nice Treaty. I barely remember it. It was 2001. So the EU wanted to grow larger. It wanted to take in the Eastern European states that would have been in fucking the Soviet, the former Soviet states. So countries like Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, 25 countries. So the EU were like, great, we're bringing them all in. Because of that fucking 1987 Crotty Doctrine, it meant that it depended on Ireland having a public vote. And for whatever reason, Ireland voted no. And we had to do it twice. The government basically just came back and said, do it again and do it right. So within the infrastructure of the EU, Ireland has this unique power where.

• 1:14:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  Shit has to be run past the public. What does this have to do with the far right? Do you know what fucking billionaires hate? Regulation. Billionaires hate the EU because the European Union has heavy regulation. Regulation, it's laws, laws for business. American bleached chicken fucking discourse. Alright, the UK is gonna buy a bunch of Donald Trump's bleached chicken. Why? Because the UK isn't in the fucking EU. America can't sell its chlorine bleached chicken in the EU because it doesn't meet EU regulations. Neoliberalism is about deregulation. Big business want to get rid of laws so that they can put profit above all else.

• 1:15:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  Workers' rights are regulations. Full-time contracts are regulations. The right to a union, that's a regulation. Billionaires want to get rid of these things, that's deregulation. Just that, just this month, I don't know if you saw it, but Siri, who I can't fucking mention because I was chatting to her at the start, that's another Chekhov's gun. Siri, who I was chatting to at the start. The latest Siri update is not available in the EU because it uses AI and the EU has got fairly tight data regulation. So, Apple can't roll out the new Siri in the EU because of regulation. Now, that's gonna cost Apple a lot of fucking money.

• 1:15:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  Apple would like that deregulated so it can do whatever the fuck it wants with AI and our data, but it can't because the EU is regulated. The EU has enforced USB-C chargers. So now, all phones sold in the EU, they have to have USB-C chargers. Very expensive for Apple, very expensive for mobile phone companies. Elon Musk, JD fucking Vance, Peter Thiel. JD Vance is just Peter Thiel. Vance used to work for Peter Thiel, so anytime you hear JD Vance's name, it just means Peter Thiel. He's the head of fucking, billionaire head of Palantir, one of the most dangerous companies in the world. And Peter Thiel is the Vice President of the United States, pretty much, via JD Vance. That's what that is.

• 1:16:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Billionaires want deregulation. They don't want rules and regulation. Peter Thiel and them are, they're ultra fucking libertarians. They don't want any rules at all. They're trying to create freedom cities. They want areas that have no laws whatsoever, where billionaires can do whatever they want. There was talk about Gaza becoming a freedom city. There was talk of Greenland becoming a freedom city when Trump was interested in it. They want Ireland out of the EU. If the billionaires can corrupt and lobby the EU and say, change this treaty, change this rule, deregulate things in favour of us, the billionaires, and they do that through lobbying of politicians.

• 1:17:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  You've got this little pesky country called Ireland that has to have a fucking referendum anytime the EU treaty is changed. That's the problem. That's why the international far right is so interested in fucking Ireland. It's that little Ireland and our referendums. And that's why so much of the far right messaging that targets Ireland, it's Irexit. It's, this is being caused by your masters in Brussels. The same shit that happened with Brexit, the exact same shit. That's what we're being targeted with. They're playing the long ball. They have a lot of money and they're looking at this as a game that could last 50 fucking years. They're playing the long ball with the end goal, get Ireland the fuck out of the EU.

• 1:18:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  So division, so discord, destabilise it. Create a far right party. Find your Nigel Farage and spend billions on astroturfing, a movement that eventually will lead to Ireland leaving the EU. And then you don't have that pesky little problem of them and their referendums. And then the billionaires can do what they want. Like they already have, like Italy, Giorgio Maloney or whatever the fuck her name is. Italy is an EU member state that has a far right government. The far right, the far right go hand in hand with capitalism. The far right, they love billionaires, they love capitalism, they love deregulation. They're saying it out loud, listen to J D Vance's speeches.

• 1:18:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  Look at the hostility that America has towards Europe. Listen to how JD, I don't know where the fuck it was. I think he spoke in the EU Parliament about six months ago. But listen to the shit he's talking about. It's all culture war shit. And then they released that February 2025 JD Vance gave a speech in Munich, a security conference speech. And it was basically Europe's greatest threat. It's not Russia. It's not China. Europe's problem is Europe. Immigration, censorship and the exclusion of populist movements. And it basically criticised Europe saying, you have forgotten your roots and we need to teach you in America. And he flat out said, America was going to be explicitly supporting

• 1:19:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  far right political parties in Europe. So they want that, they want their, they already have fucking Italy. So they want that in France. They want that in Germany. They want, because America, it's now fully captured by billionaires, by the Epstein class. JD Vance is Peter Thiel. You'd fucking, Elon Musk was bollocks deep in Trump at the start of it. We're seized by billionaires. We're leaving democracy. They don't want fucking democracy. The billionaires want to infiltrate the EU by putting far right governments in all the EU states and then getting Ireland the fuck out of the EU because we have this crotty fucking shit. We have to have our referendums. They're playing the long ball. They have a lot of money and they're astroturfing.

• 1:20:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  And astroturfing is when, when you go into communities with a lot of money and you create issues, you, you, you walk into a community with, with a bunch of fucking Irish flags that you paid for. That's how you can tell if a fucking Irish flag is astroturfed. It's when, it's when the flag is brand new and you can see the creases on it. Spending a lot of money to stoke division from the fucking ground up. Astroturfing until eventually that astroturf, that fake grass becomes a grassroots movement. And then the astroturfers can walk away and they've just introduced division into a community. Eighty percent of far right messaging is coming from outside fucking Ireland. Like it's there. You can see it. It's been paid for. Climate regulation, environmental regulation.

• 1:21:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Regulation means here is a law and this law is more important than your capacity to earn mo-, your ability to earn money. And the billionaires say that this is very anti-business, anti-business laws. Regulations are there to protect consumers and workers and we need more of them. Unions, pensions, full-time contracts, the right to housing. So that's my, that's my autistic pattern recognition, hot take, opinion on why we're being targeted so much in Ireland. All right, that's all I have time for this week. What was that, 76 minutes? I genuinely love showing up each week and getting to do this. I adore every second of it and thank you so much for listening. One last point in the north of Ireland.

• 1:21:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  Couple of months ago, it was reported by the Belfast Telegraph that Erica Kirk, right, the wife of Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated, was going to be coming to Belfast to bring the organisation Turning Point to Belfast, to the north of Ireland specifically, to recruit people. I did a Charlie Kirk podcast around the time he was assassinated. Turning Point, it's, it's not about religion. It's, it's not a Christian thing. That's just the veil. It's the veil of Christianity and culture war issues. If you go deep into what Turning Point is, and they say it themselves, fucking Charlie Kirk before he died. He was, he founded an organisation called Fal Kirk with a preacher called Gerry Falwell Jr.

• 1:22:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  The explicit written goal of this organisation was to combat the idea that Jesus was a socialist. That, that's what this is. Erica Kirk, Turning Point.

• 1:22:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's about getting the foot in the door with Christianity, morality. But really, it's about promoting free market economics, prosperity theology. It's explicitly a, a way of promoting a, a version of Christianity that posits neoliberalism. Freedom, the freedom to be wealthy, that being wealthy is good. It means that you're blessed by God. They're using, they're funded by billionaires and they're using Christianity to astroturf neoliberal ideas. Because Christianity itself is very Christ. Christ is very dangerous to capture. Because if you fucking read the Bible, he wasn't a fan of capitalists.

• 1:23:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  He kicked the moneylenders out of the temple and said that the poor people get up to heaven before the rich man. They hate that. And that's why Charlie Kirk had an organisation called Fal Kirk before he died, funded by billionaires, with the explicit purpose of fighting the message that Jesus was a socialist. And that's why Erica Kirk is coming to fucking Belfast. Erica Kirk, by the way, confirmed, you can see her in CIA training videos from the early 2000s. She's in CIA training videos from the early 2000s. It's not fake news, it's not a deep fake. Just very weird videos that are, were trying to stoke the fear that America would be vulnerable to an EMP attack on its electrical grid back in the early 2000s.

• 1:24:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  And she said, "Oh, it was just a coincidence, my, my father had a business that had to do with electricity." You're in a fucking CIA training video in the early 2000s, come out of it. All shady business. In the meantime, wink at a swan. Genuflect to a snail. Salute a pigeon. Dog bless.