Foucault was a real communist, whereas Jacques Derrida the theorist cared very little about anything political - and that, I think, isn't understood. The problem is his followers, those American activist universities. Derrida always said, 'I'm not interested in your activism, I'm a theorist.' Well, that's how we got started - so welcome to the Neuvottelija ('The Negotiator') channel. Jarkko Tontti started off talking about Derrida. So this could turn into a 'What's Wrong with Us'-style parody
of philosophy. But Jarkko, let's turn this into a kind of media criticism and review of America - we've got two main topics. We've got this BBC scandal, the leak of the Prescott memo, and then we've got this New York democratic socialist, Mamdani. And here in the Neuvottelija studio, once again, we also have Matti Virtanen.
Welcome. Thanks for having me.
Yeah. So let's get started - let's start with the BBC topic. Matti, why don't you say a few words about this scandal.
Yeah, this has been simmering for about two weeks now, ever since the Prescott memo leaked to the public. Was it the Express or the Telegraph - some rival outlet's deep throat? The Telegraph. The Telegraph. I'm still a bit mixed up on British media names, but anyway, I've read it - read this 19-page memo. Its author is this Mr. Prescott, who is this... Michael
Prescott, that's his first name - and he's an outside expert advising the BBC's editorial standards committee. There are two outside experts: this Prescott, and his senior colleague, Grossman. Both of them have long careers in media behind them. Prescott has been an editorial manager, or rather deputy editor, at The Times for ten
years. Their job is to advise this editorial standards committee on how BBC journalism should develop, and to flag problems there. Now, both of them have, over the years - Prescott's been at it for maybe three years - pointed out all sorts of problems, and Grossman in particular had already written about these problems to the committee before, in a
complaint letter, which wasn't taken into account at all. And in this Prescott memo, there are several references to this Grossman memo, which hasn't been made fully public, at least not yet. But we have quite enough information here about what the problems are. And he actually divides this into four main sections. The first problem relates to the coverage of the US presidential
election, at the BBC. The second problem had to do with promoting racial diversity ideology in BBC programming. The third had to do with conflating biological sex with so-called gender - social gender - and gender activism.
And that got downright ridiculous at points. And then the last section was the Israel-Hamas war, where the BBC has consistently relied more on Hamas sources than on Israeli sources, and has heavily pushed this genocide narrative against the objective facts.
But let's not get into all the details. I don't want to rant on and on here, but I noticed a really interesting observation: that BBC journalism, more broadly, has sunk into this anecdote-driven storytelling, where they pick out some single case that isn't actually
very well grounded statistically, and they turn it into a whole phenomenon - leaving the broader evidence and scientific data unaddressed, or if it is addressed, only cherry-picking the parts that support this anecdote-driven narrative.
I apologize for using words like 'anecdote' and 'narrative,' but let's just say individual cases are given more weight than research findings and broad, objective statistical data.
And that's outrageous, because most of these journalists are themselves academically educated. They ought to have some understanding of the principles of the scientific method, and also of handling statistical data. Well, that's a bit rich - as if you'd actually think that studying political science or gender studies gives you an understanding of statistical methods. Statistics 101 was still mandatory, at least back when I was at the social sciences faculty.
Yeah, there ought to be some understanding there. I believe that entirely - it's gone, it won't be there. But could we bring in here - I think agenda journalism is one thing, but let's call it goal-oriented journalism instead - actually, I think 'agenda' is too fancy a word for it, so let's say purposeful, goal-driven reporting. But what this leads to is that journalists and newsrooms no longer distinguish between press releases from interest groups, NGOs, and lobbying organizations
and an actual scientific research report. They're treated as equivalent.
Greenpeace says this, or some university, or Amnesty is invoked as if it were some human rights court - even though, and in Finland too it's cited constantly, as if it were some neutral organization of human rights experts. I'm actually a former Amnesty activist myself, and I resigned precisely because it's an NGO propping up red-green party politics, plus Syksy Räsänen is really heavy-handed about it - so, just, personally, these kinds of
figures. And that was, for me personally - I still remember, maybe it's changed since - a long time ago Amnesty really was about not doing politics, just human rights. And maybe with the Israel-Gaza coverage it's gone completely ridiculous. But is this also a kind of buddy journalism - the idea that an ally's press release counts as an equally valid source?
Well, I don't know about that, but generally - I've always wondered - the people driving this so-called societal debate, whether in Finland or Britain, it's a pretty small crowd. And often they're college friends from the same social science faculties, who then end up in NGOs, media, politics, or as some kind of press officer somewhere. It's a really small circle - or take the political-science economists who end up as 'cardigan economists' - dear old cardigans - but let me get back to this Prescott business: there were clearly some straightforward abuses here, you know
genuinely serious professional errors that really can't be disputed. But I still feel that the problem with journalism, both in Finland and in Britain, is more of a general bias. You can follow the Finnish journalists' code of ethics to the letter and still produce very skewed journalism - as you know as a professional journalist, it's always about choices. What do I write? What do I write, who do I interview, and what do
I stay silent about. And that's something I've long felt about the BBC even before this. What gets left unsaid and what gets reported - that's the fundamental thing that creates bias in journalism generally.
If we talk about what's gotten the most attention in this whole debate, it's specifically this edit in the Panorama documentary, where Trump's speech - back in January '21, during the Capitol riot, when Trump was pushing his propaganda disputing the election result - and the Panorama production team, an outside production company the BBC bought this documentary from, which was
a surprise to me - that the BBC doesn't actually make these itself anymore. Hasn't made these Panorama episodes in-house for years, even though it's been their flagship program for decades - it's actually outsourced now.
Anyway, they'd cut two clips from that speech, leaving out 50 minutes in between, and spliced the two together as if it were one continuous sentence - which is, I'd say, not entirely unheard of as an editing practice, but doing it in a way that gives a completely false impression of what the speaker meant. Yeah. And I know politicians - Finnish ones too - I know someone, was it some Centre Party guy, Mauri Pekkarinen or
someone, who once said he'd only agree to live broadcasts anymore, because journalists distort his words through editing.
Yeah, yeah. And Mauno Koivisto did the same thing back in his day, and I completely understand that irritation. And wasn't it also the case, since you read it thoroughly, that this Gaza documentary was also made by some outside production company, and it later came out that they'd interviewed some supposedly innocent child victim who turned out to be the son of a Hamas boss? Yeah, that was it - but it just reminded me that there's nothing new here. I noticed, ten years ago, back in 2015,
when there was last a war in Gaza, the BBC already got caught doing exactly the same thing it got caught doing again now. For example, how the narrative gets constructed - like you said. They interview Palestinians, who are always portrayed as victims, and therefore innocent. And then how their words got translated and subtitled into English - they'd say things like how the Jews are to blame for this and that, and the BBC would translate that as 'Israelis' and 'the Israeli'
'army' - as if to paper over the deep antisemitism that's pretty much everywhere in the Middle East. So could these be the underlying vectors here - in these somewhat selectively, admittedly one-sidedly chosen topics of Prescott's, since other topics could also have been analyzed and criticized - is there something universal and overarching in them? So we've got Trump and the Republicans. Then we've got Israel and the poor Palestinians. Then we've got this
gender identity thing - essentially the elevation of 'woke' issues. And then there were some smaller sins too, but yeah, those were the main ones - and those smaller sins were specifically these anecdote-based ones, like when a newsroom gets a good tip. For example, here's one example Prescott describes in fairly great detail: the claim that drivers in certain poorer neighborhoods are charged higher car insurance premiums than in wealthier areas.
Yeah. And that was based on statistics that were over five years old. A correct observation in itself, but it completely conflated correlation and causation. In other words, it was automatically claimed that this stems from racism - that more people of immigrant background live in these poorer areas, and that's why they're charged more, as if insurance companies were in some kind of conspiracy to deliberately charge these people higher premiums, which
already sounds pretty unbelievable as a claim, since that would obviously be illegal discrimination. And then, once the data was unpacked a bit in this report, it turned out there were several confounding factors that explained the gap. It was due, among other things, to the fact that more accidents happen in these poorer areas. There's much more unlicensed driving there. There are far more risks in
traffic there, which raises the premium level somewhat. Not by a lot, but somewhat. A second example of exactly the same thing - everyone's surely heard of George Floyd, whose death sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. And that got hammered home everywhere in the world - the BBC, Yle (Finland's public broadcaster), and Helsingin Sanomat (Finland's largest newspaper, popularly 'Hesari') - all the usual suspects - as if this were now full proof that the US police racistly murder Black people, or
kill using force. And a single case - exactly as you said - an anecdote: induction from the particular to the general. As philosophers know, that's not a valid form of inference - deduction can be. And then, when someone actually did proper criminological research using real statistical methods, it caused a huge stir in the US - I haven't seen anything about it in Finland. It turned out there is no such racist bias in policing, that
more Black suspects would die once you account for all the relevant factors - such as the fact that Black Americans commit half of all homicides in the US, despite being only 14% of the population. So they simply have more contact with, say, the police. But still, when you do rigorous research using scientific methods, you can isolate these contributing factors. And the end result was that there was a small bias - a small skew - in how much minor force police use against Black people, but none at all
when it comes to lethal force. And my question is: I haven't found a single BBC news story about this. I haven't found this story in any Finnish media outlet at all. And it was actually a huge deal in the US too, because the researcher himself was Black, and his hypothesis - a proper researcher forms a hypothesis and tests it - his hypothesis was that there's a racist bias in police use of force in the US, and it turned out not to be true. But when the single case is George
Floyd, the emotional gut punch is what sticks with the reader and the journalist. But I'd just say to that: this is collateral damage from freedom of expression - it is in line with journalistic guidelines to tell individual stories, to tell stories about something bad that happened to a person. But then one should always remember that sometimes the person is themselves partly responsible for what happens to them. And a believable story about a person
always includes that. You know this well as an author: the protagonist can't be flawless - that's not interesting. It should always reveal what the person themselves may have messed up, and how, as a member of the audience, things might have gone for you yourself in that same situation. Have you yourself lived a blameless life? Have you ever had bad luck that you yourself had some hand in? That's exactly the point - it's about how the story gets told, and that the media tells stories in a way that turns these
unfortunate, unlucky people into some kind of saints.
That, to me, is basically a crime. Yeah. We actually had a pretty good episode earlier with Matti - episode 11, I think - about this 'Tintin-style' journalist: the kind of narcissistic reporter who generalizes from the particular to the universal, observing the world and drawing general conclusions from their own personal observations.
Have I ranted about this before? No, no, no - but back then, it was about finding just the right hero-journalist, and some of these events turned out to be fabricated, because they simply fit the narrative. But maybe this comes down to journalists' incentives - in a sense, if they're in that left-wing bubble full of 'cardigan economists' and Sami's beloved political-science friends and left-wing politicians and admiring glances, then of course
it's given to you. But now, here's the thing - if you write something from the right-wing side of the fence, so to speak, you get cancelled, and those gigs and pieces dry up, and your column just stops appearing for no good reason, and Jari Andrutti doesn't seem to get to write his columns much anymore either. So, in a way, this kind of selectivity - your livelihood just goes away. And then, flipping it around, one could think: Jarkko, you had this 'long march of the left' theme going - well, from the right came
then this kind of lightning war - Trump slapped a billion-dollar 'lawfare' lawsuit on the BBC. So maybe journalist bros are starting to sweat a little now that there's actual punishment coming their way. This billion-dollar damages lawsuit against the BBC - we'll see if it goes anywhere, but it's a really interesting case. And this connects to Yle too, since Sweden's public broadcaster SVT and Norway's public broadcaster NRK have also used
a similarly edited clip of that Trump speech. But it's unclear now whether they got it from the BBC in some kind of exchange, or whether they made the same cut themselves. And I've now asked people at Yle whether they know if Yle used this too, because I've heard from quite reliable sources that Yle has used a similar clip of that speech, and I had a recollection that I'd seen this before as well, but I can't
prove it. But it would be really important for Yle to go through its own archives to check whether we made the same mistake, because a bill from Trump could well land in Stockholm and Oslo too. And if, on top of everything - after all the cuts and the misery and the cutbacks - a 200-million-dollar damages claim landed on Yle's Pasila headquarters as well, well, that would just tack on another six months of management bonus freezes.
If Yle's lawyers got to go to Florida for the damages case, that would truly be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for them. Yeah, but on those journalist incentives - I think it really comes down to admiration from your own crowd, and the fear of fading into obscurity as some right-wing scribbler, falling out of that spotlight of admiration. In a way, you've got a lot to gain and quite a hell of a lot to lose if you don't write within
the terms of this echo chamber. Well, my impression is that these clear, easily reportable problems and abuses are just the famous tip of the iceberg - the iceberg itself, most of it, is under water. It's simply about what kind of people journalists are on average: what their backgrounds are, what schools they went to, which parties they vote for, who their friend circle is - and it's quite a narrow spectrum, whether in Finland or Britain. And then they tell us their view of the world, and pick
out of that world the things that matter - and of course that's going to skew things relative to what most people actually think. Another interesting thing that came out of this report was that the BBC has apparently had, at least up until now, an organizational structure with these thematic desks - there's an environment unit, then there was a gender unit, i.e. an LGBTQIA+ unit, whose
job it was to take charge of story ideas from various newsrooms and send in a specialist reporter in that field to make sure it's done 'correctly.' If a newsroom doesn't get this thematic unit's sign-off, the program doesn't get made. And that's been one reason this ideological takeover has been so powerful. Sounds exactly like censorship - and this also sounds exactly like Yle's training programs.
Yle doesn't have quite enough staff to afford something like that. Well, but Yle did have these training sessions.
What was it called again? Right, DEI - there was this dark-skinned guy [unclear] who ended up getting the boot - a subcontractor, whose contract just wasn't renewed out of nowhere. Yeah, it's kind of funny - they had a unit for this. If we talk specifically about diversity, the idea is supposedly that you get a wider range of journalism, when in fact the whole point is the opposite: narrowing down which viewpoints are allowed. You still see the word 'diversity' being used to mean simply that there are people of different skin colors
involved - meaning for some people it still doesn't mean having a diversity of opinions represented, regardless of the skin color of the people expressing those opinions. Not to mention that the BBC and many other mainstream media outlets have hammered on about terrible things like fake news, anti-vaccine sentiment, and climate denialism being terrible threats to the world - and then they have this unit we just mentioned, the gender-ideology unit, which just keeps hammering the line that we should disregard what biological science says about sex, that you're not allowed to say
it's wrong, offensive, and discriminatory - it really can't get any more absurd than that, it can't. And this unit, in turn, takes its own guidelines from a British activist organization called Stonewall, which is roughly the equivalent of Seta (Finland's national LGBTI rights organization) here, and which issues guidance on, for instance, what terminology you're allowed to use - and then this unit inside the BBC makes sure every newsroom uses that 'correct' terminology. On top of that, the BBC hasn't reported - and not many people in Finland know this either - that both Seta and Stonewall have
splintered, precisely because a large share of lesbians and gay men consider this whole trans issue to be quite foreign, quite alien to them. Yeah. Alongside Seta, an LGB Alliance has sprung up - there's an LGB Alliance in Britain too - and neither the BBC nor, I'd say, Yle acts as if these organizations even exist. God forbid using that 'TERF' word - trans-exclusionary radical feminism - we'll see if anything changes on that front now, but, well, J.K. Rowling is this supposedly nasty 'granny feminist,' i.e., a TERF, and the only news stories about her have been
usually calling her the 'queen of the TERFs' - even though she has millions of fans worldwide, tens of millions, hundreds of thousands in Finland. The only news story Yle has run about her in years is interviewing some three-person activist organization who are 'disappointed.' How out of touch can you be, Yle reporters - Helsingin Sanomat too, same thing. But there's real learning to be done here for Yle, and we expect action from Yle's leadership - as your paying customers, note, note - I think those bonuses could
still be turned around - Matti Apunen, you could still fix this: you could actually earn bonuses by doing a study on the quality of your journalism. Poor Matti Apunen has had to keep his mouth shut on this issue too - Finland's own Michael Prescott, who could give them quite a scare. He probably keeps some private diary where Matti writes down what he really thinks - we'll probably get a book out of this about Yle someday, and then it'll come out publicly, defending Yle.
Let me add one more thing, as a former Yle employee: the criticism I've raised here isn't anchored in party politics in any way - I'm not specifically criticizing the left here. I think it's entirely possible that if a right-wing hegemony took control at Yle, it could be guilty of exactly the same thing. It's also worth remembering Hungary, where a right-wing government has taken control of the public broadcaster, and that produces journalism that's a good five times more ridiculous than anything the BBC has done. Yeah. People laugh at
it - half the population in Hungary laughs out loud at it every day.
Right, it's like in East Germany - the shortest unit of time was: 'Ulbricht starts talking, and the TVs switch off.' One more thing on the BBC: what's completely missing from this Prescott memo is any critique of BBC's climate journalism. Well, right. I won't go too deep into that, but I'll just say the BBC has also been, in international journalism, one of the worst instigators of climate panic, and they have this climate unit, this climate-and-environment unit, that oversees every newsroom. Nobody brings
any skeptical perspective forward. Unscientific of them, unfortunately, but it's such a hot potato that even in this Prescott report, nobody dared even use the word 'climate.' Yeah, yeah. For me, when I'm listening to BBC World on the car radio, my equivalent of the 'Ulbricht unit' is when the word 'climate' comes up on Yle Mondo from the BBC - that's my cue, my little time-unit, to switch it off, or a bit before that
and switch to Yle Ykkönen instead, for the kids. I don't know - have you read your climate book recently, Matti? But has your core thesis held up well - if we can jump around a bit here - that this whole climate crowd has gone a bit too far into religious territory? Yeah, well, the concern I had in that book was that all this media content being spread to us isn't actually grounded in science. And, well, I'm not some climate villain - on the contrary
I think nuclear power and zero-emission energy sources should be favored whenever possible. But the idea that poor countries shouldn't be allowed to prosper by using fossil fuels - that's a crime against them. Mm. And this kind of eco-imperialism is a phenomenon that could have been covered more in that book, and hopefully someone will cover it someday if I don't get around to it. Yeah, that's really a serious problem, I think - the media treating activists as experts, and I
myself - while you have the climate issue - as a lawyer, I've long had the same issue with human rights: activist organizations, and then researchers. Researchers aren't courts, they don't make rulings. They produce interpretations and opinions, and yet they get hammered home as if - say they claim some human rights treaty has been violated - they don't get to decide that. A court decides that.
Mm. Yeah.
All right, now for the second topic - Jarkko gets to introduce this one. So there's some strange news coming out of the state of New York. And actually, just to start off, I'm very happy, by the way, about that 'long march through the institutions' framing. So maybe an opening question: isn't the whole point of the left's 'long march through the institutions' that you take over institutions somewhat quietly, in secret? Because here, this is happening quite directly, taking Zohran
Mamdani's rise straight into the flagship, poster-boy position there in New York. Yeah, indeed, in case viewers and listeners aren't aware - though they probably are - New York has elected a socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim, of African descent - not a Middle Eastern Muslim. And he's quite openly - because when people talk about the US, they usually say it's Democrats versus Republicans, but it's more complicated than that, since within the Democratic Party there's also a large contingent well to the
left, so-called democratic socialists. The name sounds nice, and they have a bit of that GDR-style social-democratic feel, with rose symbolism a bit like Finland's and Sweden's social democrats, but they're actually notably more radical. In Finland you'd say the Left Alliance is the closest reference point. Now, where did Sanna Marin get her honorary doctorate? City University of New York - surprise, surprise. And yeah, Zohran was indeed elected right out of this crowd - you know, several of these famous American faces
among these politicians actually aren't properly Democrats at all, but specifically these democratic socialists. That gets forgotten.
They may formally join the Democratic Party for electoral-technical reasons - all these AOC types and so on. Anyway, he's genuinely a real leftist, and he won in fair Democratic-primary elections. You could say, well, that's it, fair enough - the people decide. But the people also - I'd say, once the consequences come, if they come, that's really the question here: are we going to test, once again, whether socialism works? Because he has
proposed things that might sound, in today's America, like a good idea - he's proposed things like city-run, bureaucrat-managed budget grocery stores. As if we Finns didn't already know - they tried that over there, and there was that one moldy loaf of bread on the shelf at the Moscow grocery store. Sure, go ahead and try it again, if you've forgotten.
But there have also been a lot of other genuine concerns raised about him - for instance, New York has a notably large Jewish minority, and they've quite rightly expressed concern that he hasn't, for example, clearly agreed to disavow and condemn various Islamist, anti-Jewish actors.
For example, he's posed for photos with a radical imam who has had clear ties to, for instance, supporting Hamas, and he's also expressed verbal support for them, and used this one slogan, 'Globalize the Intifada.' The intifada was, some years ago - and again over 30 years ago - a Palestinian uprising, which, as also happened in October 2023, meant attacks against Jewish, Israeli civilians -
suicide bombings, bus bombings, thousands upon thousands of deaths. And 'globalize the intifada' simply means: this needs to be brought everywhere in the world - meaning violence against Jews. And if the mayor of New York won't disavow that phrase, well, if I were a Jewish New Yorker, I might be a bit worried about that. But then there are still plenty of other issues - people talk nowadays about how 'woke' is supposedly on the way out, and there are some
signs of that, but Mamdani certainly hasn't abandoned that starting point either, and he rode that very wave into office on the votes of young, woke voters. Among other things, he's repeated these woke litanies.
'Defund the police.' He's said outright that the New York police are racist. Is there any statistical data behind that? Not that I know of. And maybe the strangest thing of all - I'd flat-out call this racism - is that he's said whiter neighborhoods should be taxed at a higher rate, and he literally uses the word 'whiter.' As if tax policy should be steered by some kind of ethnic race doctrine. That's a pretty strong thing to say, honestly. And again, if
we go back to the earlier topic - public broadcasters around the world - the same kind of bias might well be visible there too. And what does, say, Finland's Yle write about this? When Zohran Mamdani wins, Finland's public broadcaster runs the headline 'Sweet wins for Democrats across the United States' - clearly taking a side. Would they ever write, say, 'Sweet wins for the AfD in Germany'?
Have you seen headlines like this on Yle, since you follow it? And then they list out all these 'sweet wins' - top-notch journalism, that. And who's the writer? Yrjö Kokkonen. And who is Yrjö Kokkonen? Well, coincidentally - a card-carrying, coincidentally Green Party-affiliated Yle reporter celebrating 'sweet wins.' At times this is honestly just too funny. And yet I still have to help pay these people's salaries, just like
everyone else does. So there's really something unpleasant here, in that none of these genuinely concerning issues about Mamdani were dug up at all. But the bigger story, of course, with this kind of movement, is - in my view - the big dialectical, wave-like motion that always happens in politics. Maybe someone still remembers - at least you do, Matti, being a senior citizen. Do you remember what Occupy Wall Street was?
Oh yeah. 2011. Back in 2011 - not woke yet, but that old-left-style opposition to financial power. They camped out there, protested - but that was really, in my view, old Marxist stuff: take money from the rich, give it to the poor. And I think this Mamdani thing is a bit of a return to that - still woke, but rewinding back to that old-school leftism. And what happened to Occupy Wall Street? The young students camp out for a while, then they go get jobs and start living
real life. And that's often what happens to these Mamdani types and their supporters - when you rise to power on young activists' votes, then after a while you run into reality: there are budget constraints, resource limits, the money has to come from somewhere and can't just be spent, and so on.
But still, Occupy Wall Street got so much positive coverage that it, in a way, gave a boost to the 'woke' movement that rose over the following decade, which became institutionalized through, among other things, these kinds of special units and DEI, spreading into
organizations, universities, media, even businesses. Though I actually disagree a bit there - the revolution moved inside and got going, and then there was proper street rioting, like May Day-style stuff: smashing up a few McDonald's, throwing a few benches around. It was actually a lot of fun in those camps, a bit of an Antifa vibe. It's really no news at all that the Taistoists [Finland's hardline Stalinist communists] had the best parties - and Taistoism was born, in a way,
as a kind of bureaucratic counter-reaction here in the '60s to the hippie scene, and the same pattern played out. But I can also say, as a former - now reformed - Green, that the Greens have always had the best parties too. All the cool types from universities and art circles, of course they go to Green parties. And that's what it's about, I think, with the Mamdani phenomenon, with Occupy Wall Street, with lots of this kind of youth activism.
So could this be a kind of shifting of the left's Overton window?
So, if you throw out something like that - and people have also written that this is a kind of left-wing Trumpism, throwing out completely bullshit claims that are detached from reality, and thereby pushing the whole window of discourse further to the left. It's going to be really interesting to see what Mamdani actually turns out to be like as mayor in practice, because his victory speech was pretty concerning - it wasn't at all conciliatory, hug-everyone stuff, unlike his campaign, but rather it
said outright that now things in this city are going to get sorted out, and every minority's concerns will be taken care of. He mentioned Yemeni bodega owners, Senegalese cab drivers, Uzbek nurses, and Ethiopian home-care workers. Right. Wow. Yeah. That's how he kept repeating this foursome. For some reason he'd picked exactly these: Yemeni bodega owners,
Senegalese taxi drivers, Uzbek nurses, and Ethiopian nannies. Yeah. Yeah, well, but he probably didn't say much of anything at all about 'Americans' as such.
He didn't factor in white people at all there. He hadn't won this thanks to the European-background native population at all - he's specifically championing these small groups, which, taken together as a whole, now actually make up a majority of New York's population.
Whites are in the minority. Demographics are what's driving these changes. Demographic shifts lead to political shifts.
But what about the fact that people often don't vote purely along ethnic lines?
We know, for instance, that a large share of Latinos voted for Trump. So isn't it also a matter of age and quite a few other factors, not just ethnicity? And, well, women voted for Mamdani in fairly large numbers too. But as I understand it, Mamdani actually did quite a lot of outreach among Latinos, and of course he had ideological allies within the Latino community - probably the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez crowd - both he and she come from that same democratic-socialist wing. In a way, this is the Democratic Party's predicament -
right now it looks like it's actually going fairly well - like, whatever strategy they use, the Democrats have been winning recent elections. And in a way, this might just be a coincidence too, so it's not that big a deal - they can experiment a bit and court every group. And if he's now this kind of champion of minorities, maybe he's a counterweight to Trump's uglier, hate-driven side. So, in a way, it could actually be somewhat entertaining. It'd genuinely be fun to see
a Mamdani-versus-Trump debate, a bit in the vein of the Kamala Harris one. And that's exactly how it went - woke peaked during Trump's first term. Now it's his second term, and a new wave of leftist ferment is rising again. And this is how, in a way - the Democrats - I actually follow a fair amount of American YouTube content myself, and, in a way, they're worried that if the so-called corporate Democrats win out, and the boring types and
these really dull, boring Democrats win out, in a way, that just doesn't work - they'd rather have a Bernie Sanders-type figure. And, in a way, these AOC types and genuinely proper, full-blown communist types within the Democratic Party - they're worried that the right can quite easily use that against them. They're all like that. But hey, here's the interesting thing - here's the interesting thing from the horseshoe-theory angle -
the Democrats' left wing might pick up dropouts from the far right - people who are antisemitic and also opponents of Trump - and they'll drift over there and boost their vote count.
Yeah, that's entirely possible, actually. You can see this kind of phenomenon - take Luukas Kuru, cheering on the Left Alliance, exactly, precisely like the Rovaniemi, or actually the broader Northern Finland, controversy. By the way, Minja Koskela was never once asked to respond to this bold proposal from the Left Youth, that the means of production could somehow, mystically, be transferred from the capitalists over to them, and, in a way,
how, as a proud member myself of the Helsinki School of Economics student union, I've helped safeguard tens of millions of euros in assets for us - so I look at this HYY (the Student Union of the University of Helsinki) business with a bit of amusement. Somehow it feels like the left's - or rather the university intelligentsia's - ability to own anything at all is genuinely dreadful. Yeah, I believe the board chair there was this young left-wing lawyer I also happen to know,
Lauri Linna, whose radicalization I've followed on social media, becoming an ever more fervent, Mamdani-style young lawyer. And, well, you can clearly run headfirst into reality. HYY ran into it under Lauri's leadership, and I believe there was also a current Green city councilor mixed up in it too. But shouldn't we, in HYY's defense, note that HYY's board did actually consult real-estate professionals before diving into this risky gamble? Yeah. But, well, ages ago
we shifted that asset class from real estate into equity funds, and in America simply into a broad index fund. So it seems like this basic volatility-risk-return matrix was simply missing from these HYY types' thinking, because, honestly, I really do have to say the left doesn't understand ownership at all - and then, in a way, public ownership gets romanticized, as if it just happens on its own, and they genuinely seem to think
that owning something is just clipping coupons. But that HYY case is a perfect example that owning things is actually damn hard - you can end up with something like a 500-million loss.
Maybe the HYY board's mistake was that they had specifically brought in real-estate professionals as their special advisors.
They should have brought in investment professionals instead.
That's right. That's right. Just a boring old American-style portfolio - if they'd consulted investment people, they'd have gotten a proper bill for it.
Well, I don't know. I was actually a board member there myself, and we already made these allocation changes back in - sorry, not the early 2000s, in the '90s - Timo, whoever it was, and there was also a director there who fixed it up too - fixed it earlier. In my view, the Helsinki School of Economics Student Union's investment policy is, historically, a huge deal,
since, dating back to the 1800s, Finnish university students at the University of Helsinki - the land was apparently given to them as donations - have owned some of Finland's most expensive real estate. And now it just gets squandered by one small group at one particular moment - it's unbelievable. You remember what's written over the entrance of the Old Student House: 'To its hopefuls, the fatherland gave' - since that building was built with donation money that the people gave to the students of the University of Helsinki,
and now maybe they should put up a new plaque: 'the fatherland gave to its hopefuls, and the hopefuls ruined everything.' A better one - what's written on the wall of Humboldt University in Berlin, where I studied - is the Marx quote about changing the world: that up to now philosophers have only interpreted the world, when the point is to change it. There's no worse piece of advice than that - is it still up there? I don't know, but well - at least we have hope. Das Kapital, I believe, opens with something like 'a specter of socialism'
'is haunting Europe' - well, let's keep it as a ghost and not actually put it into practice. Sorry, but my view - continuing on Mamdani - is that you always have to test it out again every so often, so that people remember [unclear - 'the so-called deep ranks of the people'] for a three-year run.
Right, well, I think HYY already tried out a kind of leftist model of ownership. So now it could actually be healthy to just let New Yorkers run this all the way to the end, like that - let's see them running these communist kolkhoz-style shops, giving out rents for free, and doing free daycare and so on. Let's see where the money for all that actually comes from - remember the basic principle: nothing is free, someone always pays
for it. And Americans, in that sense, have learned this federal-system game - 'Texas rules' - so surely some crowd will end up moving away, maybe even to Silicon Valley, or over to Austin, Texas. But Mamdani has made the mistake of giving some overly concrete campaign promises, like this free public-transit thing.
Mm. Or, I don't actually know exactly what he's promised, but he'll have to deliver it somehow, since it was stated so clearly: free public transit. Did that mean just the subway? Did it mean buses too? What did it mean, and for how large an area - just Manhattan, or also the Bronx and Brooklyn? A surprising promise, to say the least. But it wouldn't be the world's first free public-transit system. In Tallinn,
for instance, local residents can ride for free, and the same is true in many European cities. And it's not a bad idea at all, because it's simply a social cost that these users then pay through their taxes anyway. Yeah. I had an episode - around when this was being filmed - about Vantaa city decision-makers voting on this tram line, and I myself have
this rail fetish - I like it like this: the subway comes first, then the tram, then my own car and Ubers, then maybe VR [Finland's national rail operator] - yeah, but even those somehow rattle along. And I lived in Britain for 13 years, and everything there rattles. It's honestly unbearable - Britain had an unbearably bad rail network, and that bothers me. And then come the buses, which
somehow feel to me like they can turn any which way, suddenly veer off wherever - there's none of that safe certainty that rails give you, none of that miniature-railway romance. And I think, based on that idea - which is really just a psychological bias - people are willing to throw hundreds of millions into what's basically a bottomless pot, which at the very least has to cover its running costs, and that money has to come from somewhere.
But hey, I said that deliberately, comparing New York City to Tallinn - isn't it kind of funny? If financing that in Tallinn is still doable, how many tens of billions is something like free public transit in New York actually going to cost?
Right, and then somehow you'd need to get the money from somewhere to run the operation - if there's essentially no revenue at all, and it's just some bureaucrat doling out cash, then the inefficiency is going to explode even worse than at Finland's Kela [the Social Insurance Institution], where apparently the employees themselves get to decide whether they feel like coming into work that day or not.
Hey, but isn't the 'One-Hour Train' decision also on the table today, in the Espoo city council? Give us your opinion on that. Well, you're a rail fetishist. Remember this, Espoo residents - I'll say I'm conflicted. I'm not saying anything.
If we went with European rail gauge there as an opening move, there could be some light security-of-supply angle to it - opening up the game with a new European rail gauge - but that costs 15 billion. Otherwise, though, there's nothing to it, really - I deny being conflicted, even though I was actually born in Tampere - but seriously, when we talk about security of supply, rail investment should prioritize the Oulu-to-Helsinki line with that European gauge, priority number one. Not from Helsinki - I mean, so that the government
can get out of Dodge in time. Well, it's a short stretch from Seinäjoki. Could we just get bullet trains from China, France, or Japan, and basically sidestep this whole issue by going straight to maglev? Right. But I'd think, sure, let's just build it with the European gauge. Does that go all the way to Oulu, or where?
Yeah. So maybe that should be the top priority. Boy, you National Coalition Party folks are stuck on one campaign promise. I actually heard on the radio this morning, on Ykkösaamu, they were talking about exactly this - Henrik Vuornos from the National Coalition Party said that if this rail-gauge-narrowing project starts, it would start on the Haaparanta-Oulu stretch. Yeah, that's the most likely option, but it should gradually be extended across all of Finland, and certainly from a defense standpoint that would make sense too - heading south from a Rovaniemi-war scenario. That's kind of funny,
this whole thing. Is it actually a security-policy problem that we have the same rail gauge as Russia? I mean, if a conflict broke out, it's not like they'd invade us by train - it's more the reverse: NATO supplies need to get quickly from Norwegian ports by train to Rovaniemi and Helsinki - along with some salad and macaroni from Norway too. Well, exactly. Yeah, of course, that's exactly right. Yeah, that these things gradually just crumble away - exactly these kinds of
mega-connections could be built that way. But I think maglev could actually work too - this kind of super-fast train, since Chinese cities have already been connected by these for quite a while now. Should we say, since we're letting the conversation wander a bit, that as far as I understand, they tried this in Germany, but the sonic boom it produces when it crosses some threshold speed was so terrible that they scrapped it. I don't know. Was I talking about... maglev trains? I don't know
or what you're talking about. Some super-fast train was tested in Germany, and the noise pollution was so bad that the whole project - in Japan, when I - no, wait, in Germany, they were supposed to build this Transrapid train between Berlin and Hamburg, and that project fell through. It had actually been well prepared - they'd spent billions on a test track, a kind of loop out there in a meadow - but it collapsed due to sheer NIMBYism, because there were these
local residents, or rather associations, that took it all the way to a higher court and got it stopped. Yeah. In Japan, actually, when I went from Tokyo to Kyoto on one of those fast trains, going over 300 km/h felt kind of anticlimactic, since it didn't feel all that different from, say, VR back home - you can get almost that fast from Paris to London anyway.
Yeah. Mm. It is the future, sure, but that future is pretty far off. Yeah.
So it seems there really aren't investment reserves like that anywhere.
Next up, let's dream about teleportation too.
Good point. Well, let's see whether these waves from America reach Finland too - whether we'll get the Left Alliance to start championing democratic socialism, or social democracy. This is my 'best parties' theory: every few decades, the 'best parties' crowd lifts the left somewhere in the world - Greece, Spain, take your pick. And greetings now to the Yle bunker - I'm sure this wave will hit you too, just like it hit the BBC, so...
And can I add one final wish here at the end: stop copying these concepts straight from America. Take the word 'progressive' - used specifically to refer to the Democratic Party's left wing. It doesn't carry the same meaning in Finland as it does in America. So it's misleading. Here, it's associated with how the term was used in the Soviet Union during the communist era. The Soviet Union was a 'progressive' country. Capitalist countries were
'reactionary.' I'll take this as a bit of an Orwellian Newspeak moment. This very Neuvottelija channel, too, is a progressive, anti-denialist, future-oriented force for change, advancing dialectically, Hegelian-style, toward its inevitable outcome. In this spirit, with these vibes, let's follow this Marxist reading of history here: inevitable progress, quasi-natural-law
progress. The wisdom of the Neuvottelija channel will conquer the whole of Finland, and by the iron laws of dialectics we shall reach utopia. The takeover of institutions spreads outward from here, from Pursimiehenkatu. Yes, the long march continues - Neuvottelija reaching every home - and the sunshine himself is sitting here on the other side of the table. Thank you, gentlemen, Jarkko Tontti and Matti Virtanen. I propose we move over to the members-only
section - and we've actually got quite a distinctive media force of our own in Teemu Keskisarja, and I propose we talk in the members-only section about his influence on Finland's media narrative and the Overton window - and maybe on the Finns Party too - over on the members-only side. And since you've watched and listened this far, thank you for helping us pass 30,000 YouTube subscribers, and I hope that keeps growing - there's no ceiling on it.
No ceiling at all. And on the audio side too, we're at 12,000 - so 42,000 total, the meaning of life times a thousand. Thank you. Thanks.