489. Musk's AI Deepfake Disgrace & JD Vance's Minnesota Lies (Question Time)

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21:45Welcome back to The Rest of the Polls.

21:47Rory Stewart:It's Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. Now, Alastair, you wanted a bit of class warfare, so here's an opportunity. No, I didn't. It comes from Melbourne, Melbourne, where there's a little bit of class warfare going on. Now, Alistair and Rory, what do you make of one Cambridge College's new policy to specifically target elite private schools for recruitment? Is it really about academic quality or is it to ensure the next generation of deep pocketed alumni remain firmly within their walls? So, Alistair, that's a trifecta. That's Australia, that's Cambridge and that's posh private school people at Cambridge, which was your dominant experience at Cambridge.

22:23Rory Stewart:Go on, tell us about this. Well, you say I want class war. I don't want class war. I want an end to class war. And the class war that is revealed in this policy at Trinity Hall College is the class war that says that if you are from one of these very expensive private schools full of very privileged people with parents who expect their children to be every bit as successful as they have been, that is the real class war. The reason I was so angry about this, and this is a letter from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, saying they wanted more applications from these sorts of schools in languages, music, classics, art, history, and theology.

23:00And they actually said that they worried that children from private schools were being ignored and marginalised because of reverse discrimination. The idea that you can say that private school kids are ignored and marginalised within our Oxbridge system is utterly, totally ridiculous. 7 % of kids go to private school and 29 % of Cambridge's 2024 intake was private school. Trinity Hall, 26%, down from 32 % in 2022. So I just think this whole thing is basically about saying we want to keep the broad social, cultural class system as it is. And we're fed up of these working class oics being foisted upon us from comprehensive schools.

23:48Rory Stewart:I mean, does that make sense really for the kind of Trinity Hall's admissions tutor? And I can't imagine the Trinity Hall admissions tutor saying what I really want to do is keep the working class oics in their place. No, they don't necessarily think like that. But I think that's where the thinking comes from, that if you come from a very privileged background, you are of necessity going to be a better student, cleverer, more intelligent. And I think the opposite is the case. I think the fact of schools, some Cambridge colleges and Oxford colleges having gone out and admitted, we talked earlier about admitting when you're wrong, admitted that they've just relied too much on this sense of, well, there's the posh rich kids, get more of them in year after year after year.

24:35Hold on a minute, why don't we go and try and find some really clever kids in schools that don't even apply? I think that's been good for the schools and it's been good for Oxford.

24:41Rory Stewart:To defend Cambridge a bit, I suspect that when you were at Cambridge, the vast majority of people have been to private school. And by the time I was at that age, I think it was probably 50 % of the Cambridge intake was private school. They've now dropped it down to just over a quarter. So I think you've got to admit things are going the right direction, aren't they? And that's because exactly as you say, they've been out there doing really good jobs, reaching out. That's why I think this is worrying, because he's trying to take us back. He's trying to take us back in the old direction. That's why I don't like this.

25:13Rory Stewart:I assume I'm trying to make up a defense. I have no idea what they think they're doing. It seems a bit weird to me because I'm not sure that Ethan or Winchester or St. Paul's needs much help in being encouraged to apply to Oxford. Exactly. Exactly. So I don't know what's going on. One possibility is that the cut of funding for languages and classics and art in schools, in state schools, means that they're struggling to bring in people in those specific fields. So they need people to study Latin and Greek. They need people to study languages. They need people to study art. And maybe what's happening here is they're struggling now to find people coming in who have done any Latin at all.

25:57When I read it, I felt that is the one argument I could have bought, is if they said that because of state cuts, state funding being cut in some of these areas, because there is this dearth of kids now learning languages in the way that they used to, which is I've admitted, back to admitting when you get things wrong, I think was one of the mistakes we made. It was no longer compulsory to have to learn a foreign language. I think that was a mistake. So they may be saying that, but they don't say that. They say that going to these schools, they're more aligned with what we're trying to do with our education.

26:31They're more aligned to me, means basically saying they want more people like us. Social mobility should mean something in Britain. As soon as I saw this, I thought this is an attempt to reverse progress in social mobility. And by the way, Rory, there isn't, you know, you talk about the old boys club, right? And we all know what that means. That's the 7%. People should join something called the 93 % club. I'm a member. I recommend everybody who went to state school joins the 93 % club.

27:01Rory Stewart:It also seems from the outside sort of slightly insane. I mean, whatever this individual thinks privately, I cannot imagine why he thought it was a wise thing to write this because the reaction that you're giving was completely predictable. Hold on a minute. Back to your point about the sort of the right wing media attacks on you. The right wing came out and completely supported it. You know, the spectator was full of stuff. What did they say? What was their defense? Well, they basically said that the reverse discrimination, as they call it, makes private school pupils feel unwanted. Bursary students, they're likely to be discouraged from applying.

27:41Trinity Hall has been falling in the league tables as if that's got something to do with the fact that they've got, they've only got one in four private school kids as opposed to other colleges, which may have more. I mean, the thing is a complete nonsense. Anyway, I hope I've not been too unkind to Trinity Hall. But the problem with this country, Rory, let me tell you the problem with this country. We've never actually tried comprehensive education. We've never actually done fully comprehensive education. That is the problem with this country.

28:08Rory Stewart:Isn't that what the left always says? The problem is we've never really tried communism. We've never done it properly. Okay, here we go. Oh, God. Well, you want to leave this with me being a communist. I am not a communist. I'm going to move on to Vance and Minnesota. I'll rant even more on that, I'll tell you. As an old Etonian Oxford graduate, I'm obviously finding this a very uncomfortable conversation. So I'm going to change the subject massively. James Coughlin, does the reaction to the ICE murder, so this is the horrible killing of this woman in Minnesota by an ICE agent, show we are in a misinformation age?

28:47Rory Stewart:Just quickly, I mean, I didn't think, again, with an issue like this, hardly anyone in the world will have missed it. Yes, he's right. It's a misinformation age because of the awful way in which Vance and Trump and others responded, which we can get into. But it's also an information age because the reason we know they're all lying is that we have this incredible depth of cell phone footage showing the killing from different angles and clearly demonstrating that here is a 37-year-old mother in a car reversing in order to drive off while an ICE officer tries to pull up the handle. and apparently because she went well certainly every angle demonstrates she's not running over the ice agent an ice agent steps forward and shoots her through the window the car then crashes because she's been killed over the well jamie cloughlin's question does it show that we're in a misinformation age absolutely it does because roy you just said something very interesting you said that the when you look at all the videos from every angle it's perfectly obvious that she was trying to get away and not threatening, etc, etc, etc.

29:52I've just watched a video put out by the Department of Homeland Security where a young woman in a blue dress is standing there speaking on behalf of the American government, explaining the exact opposite of what you've said, where she says these videos clearly show that this guy was under attack from a domestic terrorist. So yes, we're in a misinformation age, and we're in a misinformation age where the misinformation is led by the elected president of the United States. And by the way, Roy, I mentioned earlier about the sort of difference between crime and the use of guns in America compared to here.

30:30Do you know that every year in the USA, law enforcement authorities kill somewhere between 1 ,300 and 1 ,400 people. In Britain, it is two per year. Three a day in America, two per year here. So on one level, we look at it, and because there's such a focus on ICE, there's such a focus on Trump, we maybe think this is kind of truly shocking, which it is, but actually it happens there more than we realize. But what this showed was that because ICE are identified as Trump's thing, although they were created by a previous president, but Trump has massively invested in them. He's made immigration his big thing.

31:13And they were obviously longer. When you first saw the first footage of this guy just shooting at the car, and then it emerged that she was white, she was middle class, you know, she sort of went against the agenda. Then I made the mistake of turning on to see what Fox News were making of it. I mean, they were finding anything to attack So one of them was out there saying, you know, really, you know, she had pronouns in her bio. It's not just that we're in a misinformation age. We're in an age where every single thing by this American government is twisted in its favour for the narrative it's trying to promote at that time.

31:50Rory Stewart:It's worth maybe just taking a little time to remind people what Vance said. So most people now, I think, will have seen this video. And what quite clearly happens in this video is a woman is rather slowly backing her car back in order to drive off. And this is Vance's statement. He gets very, very angry. He says that the ICE officer who shot her nearly died six months ago after being dragged by a car. And then he goes, so you think maybe he's a little bit sensitive about somebody ramming him with an automobile? Good was part of a broader left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault, and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job.

32:29Rory Stewart:You have a woman who was trying to obstruct a legitimate law enforcement operation. Nobody debates that. You have a woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator. Nobody debates that. The reason this woman is dead is because she tried to ram somebody with her car. and the guy acted in self-defense. You've got to be a little brainwashed to get to the point where you're willing to get to the point of throwing your vehicle in front of legitimate law enforcement officers and driving your car into them. What I'm certain of is the officer had every reason to think that he was under very serious threat of injury or in fact his life.

33:08Rory Stewart:What I'm certain of is that she accelerated in a way where she ran into the guy. I mean, my Rory, my son, he sent me a message after watching that. I said, why is it every time I hear J.D. Vance, I want to take a shower? I mean, J.D. Vance, I think it was Scaramucci who said this, J.D. Vance lives to say what he thinks Donald Trump is going to watch him saying on television. And I think that's what we had there. Tom Homan, the Homeland Security guy, he actually came out and his very first words were, this has just happened. Let's take time. Let's try to investigate what the facts are. Okay. within no time at all he'd clearly been bollocked and he went out and said it's quite clear she did this she did that she did the other and this goes to the heart of something we talked about with Baroness Hale once you don't have an acceptance that law enforcement authorities work within the law and you have an acceptance that we should be entitled to know who they are and why they're asking us to cooperate with them in their duties of law enforcement and once you don't have a place where we can all accept this is a fact rather than that is something that's happened and I will express as a fact my opinion of what it means, which is what Vance was doing.

34:23Eventually, we don't have a democracy. And I think that's the road that they're on in America.

34:27Rory Stewart:It's also the total lack of separation between the executive, the president, the vice president, and these ICE officers. I mean, if you think about it, if it had happened in the United Kingdom, a police officer had shot a woman in her car, you would not have had the entire cabinet, doesn't matter whether Conservative or Labour, immediately going out on the air saying, this woman is a vile terrorist who is accelerating and ramming an officer. I'm absolutely certain that everything the officer did was entirely legitimate. It's a sign of a sickness that's got into the system. It's not just the lies.

35:02Rory Stewart:It's the fact that they're not even taking that second that Tom Homan is trying to take to say, well, the thing that you know, and all of us know. I mean, if I came to you and said, Alistair, look, there's been a story about this. What do we say? Your immediate reaction, presumably in Downing Street, would be to say, well, we don't know very much. Let's wait and try to find out what the facts are. You know, presumably what you normally say is, this sounds like an absolute tragedy. We're looking very carefully at the situation. A full police investigation will be conducted, etc. Well, what happens in Britain, I think by law, is that as soon as an incident like this happens, it is automatically referred to those who investigate the police conduct.

35:39It's the opposite of what's happened in the state, where they have decided. Go back to my point about Musk. They decide the game. They decide the rules. They decide the good guys and the bad guys. And they've decided based on the opposite of what they see with their eyes. They've decided she's the bad guy. The guy who killed her is the good guy. Vance even said at the end of that shower-inducing speech that you refer to. He even said, we should thank him for his service and we should pray for him. I think pray for the kids of the woman, pray for the family that's just lost their mother. You used the word sick, it is sick.

36:18And I'll tell you, I think, what the sickness is. Trump goes on about Venezuela being a narco state. The real narco state is the United States, and the real narc is the narcissism that he represents and that all these people around him feed at every level. They feed it rather than ever challenge it.

36:36Rory Stewart:We did an episode on ICE, but part of the problem is that these guys have been deliberately recruited with extremely unpleasant, frequently pseudo-racist images. They're encouraged to swagger around masked. They're bringing in very, very rapidly. It's a massively expanding budget, so they're recruiting far too many people without proper checks. They're encouraging this incredibly aggressive culture and they're signaling that they're exempt from the law they're signaling that the department of justice won't prosecute them if they do stuff they're telling them they don't have to reveal their faces or say they are and imagine the kind of person who wants to join that kind of organization so you've got the wrong culture right from the beginning i've decided by the way i'm not going to the world cup i've made a decision on that rory i just don't want to go no really yeah i have no you've got this is scotland's qualified also you've got to go lots of people will go and there'll be lots of scots in america will go but i don't want to go and sort of you know i just don't want to i just feels like it's not a place to go right now i mean i got a curiosity but not i don't want to go to have a good time and i and we were with some american friends last night and they were saying it's just it's just horrible living there at the moment they all know people who think like this and they say it's becoming impossible to sort of to live alongside each other have you followed that he's now announced the prosecution of the chair of the federal reserve jay powell exactly exactly that that's a classic there's a guy you know this is a guy whose job is to try and keep inflation low keep the economy on on an even keel and he and trump tells him that he's he's a dunderhead he's an idiot he's stupid and he should be cutting interest rates because that's what trump would do so they're they're pretending that he's sort of broken the law in relation to the funding of refurbishment of the headquarters as if he gives a damn and he's being subpoenaed and he's absolutely come out and called it for what it is this is them basically saying unless you do in an independent job what the president tells you to then they will find a way of prosecuting you well i mean that is I don't care what anybody says.

38:44That is a major seed of fascism. 100%.

38:48Rory Stewart:Final question, Alistair. And I'm going to, because we've been quite serious, I'm going to go not that serious for you, Alistair. I was slightly distressed here. You're not going to go and watch Scotland and the World Cup because I know how much you love your football. Anyway, here we are. Jacob Turner, given the cold spell here in the UK, what temperature do you like your house? Do you get into thermostat battles with anyone at home? Well, Rory, it will not surprise you to know I don't have to work the thermostat. We have a very interesting relationship with the cold and the warm because Fiona and I start each day in the winter going into very, very cold water.

39:28And so when we come back, we like the house to be quite warm, but then we don't actually like being hot. Otherwise, we wouldn't be jumping in cold water every morning. so i i i hate i hate going into hotels where it's really really warm hate that so i'm a cold

39:43Rory Stewart:cold temperature person i'm a big sleep with a window open person too i love fresh air at night even if it's cold even if it's cold i don't know what the evidence is on that but i'm sure it's good for you this this book i mentioned polar war there are some amazing descriptions of just what the cold does to you you've got this whole thing about when people get if they put on too many layers and then you start to sweat yeah and then the sweat turns to ice on your skin you've got to be really really careful about that stuff somehow we've gone from a fun question about thermostats to me talking about getting hypothermia and dying in the arctic quite gloomy it's a sign of the way in which things are going we trust our listeners and viewers a lot maybe we should do one of our one of our instant polls about whether i should go to the world cup or not good idea but at the moment i'm very settled i'm very settled against it it would have to be a landslide in favor for me to change my mind can i can i just remind listeners that your massively puritanical instincts where you're going to lecture alistair try to think about yourself and his situation if you really really loved football and scotland had finally qualified for the world cup that he begins the same advice you go to my shoulder you'll see a picture of scott mcthominy's goal against denmark well we've gone a lot of directions we've done grok ai we've done uh me being attacked for being dodgy and bad at predicting things.

41:04Rory Stewart:Wrong. Wrong. Wrong and posh. Wrong, posh and bedwetting. We've done posh people at Cambridge. We've done Minnesota and J.D. Vance and his attitude to ice and we've finished with temperatures and your trip to the United States. So let's get the answers from the poll. I'm in favour of you travelling. Right. Bye bye. See you next week. Have a nice time in Syria. Bye bye. Take care. Bye.

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