The Week That Liz Truss and I Drove British Media Mad
How We Defeated Hope Not Hate | 27th May - 2nd June, 2024
On Tuesday the 21st of May, I interviewed former Prime Minister, Liz Truss.
We had a polite conversation, on-and-off-air, about her time in the Commons, in Cabinet, and her short stay in 10 Downing Street — before she was deposed after the markets bristled at her mini-budget.
No noise was made about it, besides a photograph of the interview in-progress taken by my producer, and posted that afternoon.
The following week, our team at LotusEaters.com announced that the interview would premiere live at 15:00 PM (UK time) on my weekly show, Tomlinson Talks.
That evening, Tuesday the 28th of June, lying communist outlet Hope Not Hate stumbled across that post in one of their routine stalking sessions of conservative social media feeds. They decided to advertise the interview, slandering the Lotus Eaters as a ‘far-right, conspiratorial platform’ — something my liberal colleagues Josh & Stelios will be shocked to discover.
(Jokes aside: the term “far-right” is meaningless. It is a smear that the user knows has no content, and hopes that listeners will interpret as meaning “Nazi”, and distance themselves from those smeared accordingly. I am a Catholic, who believes in the innate dignity of innocent human persons made imago dei; and abhors Hitler for, among other sins, betraying the Reichskonkordat and murdering Catholic priests among the millions of victims of the Holocaust. I am also an Englishman, who always loves an opportunity to get one up on the Germans. So this charge is absurd, defamatory, and baseless. I reject it, and there are thousands of hours of footage, and numerous articles I have written, which accurately explain my beliefs.)
With nobody rushing to condemn Liz Truss, a (then) Conservative MP, for talking to a (long-suffering) member of the Conservative Party, Hope Not Hate presumably briefed their unimpressive comrades in the press, and at least one (former) Labour MP: Jess Philips.
They did so before the interview was released, but neither stating that it was pre-recorded, or that I was the interviewer on my show. Had they done that, they perhaps would have saved their sympathetic mouthpieces on Sky News, Swindon Advertiser, in the Byline Times, or in the Labour Party from making some incorrect and libellous claims which require apologies and retractions — lest they face legal action.
After watching the interview, the most that Hope Not Hate could complain about was Liz Truss saying they are ‘evil’ and that ‘Our enemies will try and smear us and label us and we have to take them on… These people are not well-meaning, they want to destroy our society.’
They also claim that antisemitic messages were being posted in the live chat — hosted by a different software than is used for the paying members on the LotusEaters.com website, and which doesn’t require the creation of an account to participate in. Given Hope Not Hate spent a day sharing this interview among their cohort of ill-motivated activists, we have as much reason to believe these were attempts to manufacture bad press for the interview — despite neither I nor Liz saying anything untoward, and a live chat not able to affect the contents of a pre-recorded discussion.
They also complained that our website admin took the chat function offline, stating it had been ‘infiltrated’. Hope Not Hate appears to have wanted us to not moderate the chat when brigaded by outside forces, posting messages they deem to be antisemitic.
These are not trustworthy people. Not only do they attack Lee Anderson when he opposes the antisemitic, anti-White pro-Palestine marches — demonstrating their making noise about antisemitism is insincere — but Hope Not Hate employs a former National Front, now Communist Party member, who celebrated Stalin’s Red Army.
Not only have I never celebrated a genocidal dictatorship, and a military that massacred and raped millions; but I also shan’t be taking lessons on extremism from a man who traded one version of murderous socialism for another.
If you don’t want to misrepresent the contents of the interview, as Hope Not Hate did, then you can watch it for yourself here on LotusEaters.com.
Before and after the interview was released, Jess Philips attempted to pressure Prime Minister Rishi Sunak into deselecting Liz Truss as a candidate for South West Norfolk.
Despite claiming that my colleague Carl Benjamin, who has never met nor spoken to Jess Philips or Liz Truss, abused her, Philips then continued to spend the rest of the week giving interviews and tweeting Conservative candidates about Carl and this confected controversy.
This led to multiple outlets failing to check the facts of the case, and reporting that, somehow, Carl himself had interviewed Liz Truss, and even that he had repeated contentious jokes while on-air with the former PM.
None of those things are true — and yet, Carol Vorderman, Rachel Parris of the Mash Report, Beth Rigby on X (after interviewing Chancellor Jeremy Hunt on Sky News), Andrew Marr on LBC (speaking to Conservative Party Chairman, Richard Holden), LBC’s X account, the Byline Times’ X account, the Swindon Advertiser on X, and Labour MP/candidate Peter Kyle on BBC Radio 4, repeated part or all of these claims.
I have catalogued all of these posts here because they all constitute false and defamatory statements about myself and Liz Truss. I will be inquiring as to what my legal means of recourse are accordingly.
If you would like a comprehensive summary of all the events, you can watch me discuss them with my colleagues Carl and Harrison Pitt in this segment from Friday’s Podcast of the Lotus Eaters:
Thank you to all of those who have paid to support our work at LotusEaters.com so far. We appreciate an audience willing to support a fledgling conservative media outlet, which doesn’t mandate an editorial line among its hosts and writers, and takes chances on hosting important conversations like this.
And thank you to Liz Truss: not only for sparing the time to sit down and speak to me, a concerned Conservative party member, but also not for buckling and throwing us under the bus when our mutual enemies came for her. She showed more resolve when smeared by Hope Not Hate than self-styled alternatives at Reform UK, and she deserves our respect for this.