In this episode of the Awakening Wonder chat, we discuss the recent populist victories in Argentina and the Netherlands, and the implications for the upcoming presidential election, as well as the growing influence of the far-right Geert Wilders and his party, the Freedom Party, the Vrienden Voorhees. We also take a look at the crisis in democracy in the USA, and explore the role of the media, which has become increasingly detached from the lives of ordinary people, and its impact on their ability to make sense of the world around them. And finally, we look at what it means to be a leftist in the post-pandemic period of neoliberalism, and why it s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between what's good and bad, and what s good and not so good, and whether it s time to re-imagine what it really means to live in a post- Keynesian, post-Marxist world, or whether it's time to get back to basics and focus on the things we really do have in common with the rest of the people we are supposed to care about, like food, shelter, schools, healthcare and the things that we should be prioritising in our daily lives. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode of The Awakening Wonder. Stay Free with Russell Brand, hosted by Russell Brand. Stay Free With Russell Brand! Stay Free, Stay Free: Stay Free! - the podcast that helps you be free, not just on the internet, but in the real world, and in your everyday life, and on your local life, too. . . . we'll be covering the things you need to know and care about in order to live up to your best in the most important things in your day to do your best to get the most out of your day, your daily dose of freedom, your best chance to be free in the world, your most authentic and most important day in the best possible way possible. , we hope you'll join us in the coming days, and stay free and get the best of what you can do what you're most grateful for it! . Thank you for listening, and Happy Thanksgiving! - Henry J. J. R.J. Ruzben, JP58, JP68, Henry R. & Claude, J.J., Henry, R.S., JP58 & Henry, and Henry, Henry, J-J.R. ( )
00:02:39.000Thanks for joining us for the first 15 minutes we'll be available on YouTube but then we drift into the exclusive free speech spaces that only Rumble can provide us with.
00:02:51.000So join us there because we're going to be talking about the new January the 6th footage and the crisis in democracy that maybe I suppose could be alluded to in the recent populist successes in Argentina and in the Netherlands.
00:03:08.000We ran a poll today asking you what you wanted to see us cover.
00:03:11.000Did you want us to cover Piers Morgan and Tate or did you want to see us cover the results of the Dutch elections?
00:03:18.000And extraordinarily, the Dutch elections, let's have a look at that.
00:03:21.000Well, can we see the poll results on screen?
00:03:37.000JP58, thank you all of us for joining.
00:03:41.000We're so happy to see you this Thanksgiving.
00:03:45.000Now, this crisis in democracy is something that we're continually covering because I suppose that's the central idea, isn't it?
00:03:50.000That we're living in a sort of an elitist, globalist establishment where national sovereignty is being eroded and individual freedom is being discarded.
00:04:00.000That we're living in a culture that's being increasingly desacralized so that we are Left as shivering denizens of the materialist realm, no access to the divine light that might otherwise guide us.
00:04:15.000Have a look at this sort of interesting framing on MSNBC that's perhaps contributed to the crisis of faith in our institutions, where an MSNBC pundit describes that the only democracy that's possible is the democracy where you vote for one party.
00:04:34.000It's a really interesting bit of framing.
00:04:37.000Cornel West is staying strong with his run as an independent.
00:04:40.000Jill Stein, whom you'll remember from 2016, announced her candidacy earlier this week under the Green Party.
00:04:47.000Now, I happen to believe anyone should be able to run for whatever office they choose, as is their American right, and in some cases, our responsibility.
00:04:55.000But we are living in perilous times right now.
00:04:57.000When it comes to this presidential race and this set of candidates, what you're really voting for or about is democracy.
00:05:03.000And anything that gives Donald Trump a better shot at winning the presidency might just be a vote against democracy.
00:05:09.000If you vote for any party or any candidate other than these prescribed ones, you are voting against democracy.
00:05:18.000So you can only vote for one thing in order to vote for democracy.
00:05:24.000That's the opposite of what democracy is.
00:05:26.000Yeah, indeed, Claude says in our Awakened Wonder chat.
00:05:29.000You can join that chat if you want to.
00:05:32.000No wonder when neoliberal politics, whether it's in the form of Party politics, or how it's conveyed through the media.
00:05:40.000No wonder when it's become as corrupt, as unilateral, as devoid of nuance, as devoid of feeling, as fatuous and as empty and phatic as it has become, with no connection to real people, just weird symbols and extraordinary ciphers broadcast without meaning.
00:05:58.000No wonder we're seeing this emergence of populist figures.
00:06:02.000We've seen Xavier Millet Another populist president now with extraordinary hair.
00:06:08.000And over in the Netherlands, there's been another victory for a politician that's regarded as being sort of far right, which I guess in this instance means, you know, sort of nationalist and probably anti-migration, I'm guessing.
00:06:21.000But one thing is for certain, he's another political leader with remarkable hair.
00:06:27.000Let's have a look at the celebrations in the Netherlands.
00:06:31.000Celebrations break out amongst supporters of Geert Wilders' Freedom Party, PVV.
00:06:37.000Its far-right leader are headed for a massive election victory.
00:06:42.000People expect our agenda of hope, tougher asylum and immigration policy, people getting more money to pay for their utilities and groceries.
00:06:53.000I suppose as we enter into a period of steep decline in the post-pandemic period, it's clear that people have basic concerns like resources.
00:07:06.000Let me know in the chat, is it like for you now, like concerns around fuel and energy prices and grocery prices?
00:07:15.000So, like, kind of like abstract politics of ideals that don't seem to be real to the very figures that espouse them.
00:07:21.000You know, like the kind of rhetoric around compassion that we've become accustomed to hearing from the neoliberal centre-left.
00:07:29.000They don't seem to have any value to people anymore.
00:07:32.000You know, and even in the, for example, if you just take the pre and post Biden election period, the kind of pledges that were made by Biden about whether it's Saudi Arabia or not building a wall or not being corrupt.
00:07:45.000And in this period, we've seen the hunt of Biden, laptop repression.
00:07:49.000We've had the Russiagate stuff described to us.
00:07:53.000We've seen the emergence of so many inconvenient truths that it's impossible not to look for some kind of alternative.
00:07:59.000Look at the way that the Occupy movement was crushed.
00:08:02.000If you're European you'll know that after 2008 there was a kind of populist leftist movement.
00:08:08.000Countries like Spain elected new populist left-wing parties like Podemos.
00:08:13.000In Greece there was the rise of Syriza.
00:08:16.000All those political movements were kind of snuffed out, stamped out, assimilated into the establishment, centrist, authoritarian, globalist regime.
00:08:24.000And people are going to go elsewhere and you're going to see these guys with extraordinary haircuts rise.
00:08:30.000We'll make sure that the Netherlands will be for the Dutch people again.
00:08:32.000We'll restrict the asylum tsunami and migration.
00:08:33.00057 out of 150 seats. Mr Wilders has vowed to halt all immigration.
00:08:40.000We'll make sure that the Netherlands will be for the Dutch people again. We'll restrict
00:08:46.000the asylum tsunami and migration. People will have more money in their wallet again.
00:08:51.000The party, at least 12 seats ahead of its closest rival, the left's Labor Green Alliance,
00:08:58.000Its leader, former EU Commissioner Frans Timmermans, has vowed to defend democracy.
00:09:45.000So join that rumble chat if you want to.
00:09:47.000A little bit later in the show we're going to be looking at some of the January 6th revelations and how that incident has been used to enhance protest laws, militarise the police, crush dissent.
00:10:01.000We'll be covering that in some depth in a little bit.
00:10:03.000Let's look at the end of this story around the election of Geert Wilders.
00:10:11.000Mr Wilders is expected to try and form a right-wing government with the conservative VVD party, that of outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte, but he might find it challenging.
00:10:23.000He has no stature in Brussels, in Europe, and he cannot work together with other prime ministers in Europe, so it would be a disaster for the Netherlands.
00:10:35.000It seems that democracy now is a sort of a contrast between these sort of populist figures that are widely described as right-wing that have peculiar hair whether that's Trump or your man over there in Argentina or this latest figure in the Netherlands who is like if you're at my age we've been aware of that dude since like the 90s he's been around for ages and ages or you can get the WEF kind of cookie cutter politicians like Trudeau or Rishi Sunak in our country or your Potential next president, if Biden shouldn't make it that far, Gavin Newsom.
00:11:10.000Is it interesting the way it's shaking down?
00:11:12.000And I believe it's precisely the failings of neoliberal democracy that's leading to the rise of these kind of figures.
00:11:21.000Let me know what you think in the chat.
00:12:11.000If you're watching us on YouTube, we're going to do a few more minutes here before migrating to our natural home over on Rumble.
00:12:19.000It seems these days to be an ordinary part of political rhetoric to compare your opponents to fascist dictators, Hitler, Mussolini and now the legacy media is comparing Trump to I think both Hitler and Mussolini but wait to the end because I think they're saying that Hitler and Mussolini were a bit better than Trump.
00:12:41.000A lot of people have tried to draw similarities between Mussolini and Hitler and the use of the terminology like vermin and the drive that those men had towards autocracy and dictatorship.
00:12:57.000The difference, though, I think makes Donald Trump even more dangerous, and that is he has no philosophy he believes in.
00:13:03.000He is not trying to expand the boundaries of the United States of America.
00:13:08.000He's not trying to overcome a neighboring country like Putin is in Ukraine.
00:13:12.000He is not going for some grandiose scheme of international dominance.
00:13:20.000It feels kind of hysterical that and I don't think that's contributing or creating the conditions for reasonable democracy.
00:13:27.000Do you notice everywhere heightened tension, heightened fear, less and less ability for ordinary proper open discourse.
00:13:35.000On the show tomorrow we'll be looking in more detail at Andrew Tait's conversation with Piers Morgan and one of the surprising things that emerges from that, most of you posting yes in the rumble chat by the way and over there in the locals chat, is a kind of a call for And the acknowledgement of nuance.
00:13:52.000Very surprising to hear that in a conversation between Andrew Tate and Piers Morgan.
00:13:56.000A cry for nuance which is clearly absent on MSNBC when Hitler and Mussolini are compared to Trump only to make the point that Hitler and Mussolini were nicer.
00:14:07.000All he wants is to look in the mirror and see a guy who's president.
00:14:13.000All he cares about A guy who's president.
00:14:16.000There he is, a guy who's president, and I am that guy.
00:14:21.000That's the only philosophy he has, which makes him even more dangerous, because he is actually... No, because I think what it was with Mussolini and Hitler is they were pretty militaristic, and in the case of Hitler, genocidal racists.
00:14:37.000Perhaps what's more indicative of a democracy and perhaps a planet in decline is the constant and ongoing failure of significant institutions.
00:14:43.000He said this. He actually said those words.
00:14:48.000Perhaps what's more indicative of a democracy and perhaps a planet in decline is the constant
00:14:55.000and ongoing failure of significant institutions. The Pentagon's just failed another audit.
00:15:02.000How can the Pentagon keep failing audits like this?
00:15:06.000The Secretary of Defence, Lloyd Austin, feels we need to be doing this better and faster.
00:15:12.000We need to get better and faster at doing audits.
00:15:17.000If the backbone of the American military, that have control of trillions of dollars, can't pass an audit, isn't it likely that people are going to look for alternatives outside of the mainstream?
00:17:59.000New footage appears to show that January the 6th was not an attempted insurrection and yet the legacy media and Hillary continue to refer to Trump as the new Hitler and that he will end democracy.
00:18:10.000But what's the real threat to democracy?
00:18:12.000Is it a return to Trump or is it the fact that the Democrats have betrayed the principles that they continually espouse in the pursuit of endless authoritarianism?
00:18:22.000Remember when January the 6th happened?
00:18:24.000It was presented as the worst kind of insurrection that could ever have happened.
00:18:27.000There's no question at this point that the event has been used to legitimise anti-protest laws, anti-Trump rhetoric, to legitimise surveillance and censorship.
00:18:36.000So what has gone on with January the 6th?
00:18:39.000And what's going on with all of the hysterical language around Trump and fascism?
00:18:47.000Or is the real threat to democracy the abandonment of the principles upon which republics, or democracies, whatever you want to call them, are founded?
00:18:56.000the ability to be individually free, the ability to pursue happiness, stuff that's in your constitution.
00:19:01.000So let's have a look at that in some detail.
00:19:04.000Firstly, let's look at the debunking of January the 6th as an attempted insurrection, and the numerous times that Trump is being compared to, equated to, and likened to, Adolf Hitler.
00:19:13.000Just into our newsroom, thousands of hours of Capitol video footage from the January 6th riots are being uploaded to a public website as we speak.
00:19:22.000Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson announced his plans to release them today as part of a campaign promise he made.
00:19:28.000Like an insurrection, to me, I don't know how I understand the word, is there's like a plan in place to like, right, you're gonna be Speaker of the House.
00:19:36.000You're gonna be in charge of the Pentagon.
00:20:35.000I think the real problem is that there's no viable alternative to nationalism.
00:20:39.000If you are opposed to globalism, where are you supposed to look?
00:20:42.000Because the centralist, authoritarian, neoliberal left are fully on board with the globalist project and a hell of a lot of people don't like it.
00:20:51.000People would get legitimately elected And then they would try to do away with elections, and do away with opposition, and do away with a free press.
00:21:02.000Because even just on those few seconds there, Hillary Clinton has said, do away with free press, Hunter Biden laptop, Russiagate.
00:21:08.000You could have a different conversation with Hillary Clinton where you could say, what went on with the Steele dossier that you guys funded?
00:21:14.000What about the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop?
00:21:16.000What about the fact that you don't want Free elections.
00:21:20.000That elections are being managed, that Donald Trump as a political opponent is being hounded and harangued, and I know what they are saying because he's legitimately and genuinely a criminal, but certainly you could take a perspective that that's the attempt to imprison a political opponent.
00:21:33.000What is broadly interesting is an inability and unwillingness to countenance their own failings and have transparent and open discourse about the failings of their party, of their trajectory, of the unpopularity of their policies.
00:21:45.000And you could see it in countries where, well, Hitler was duly elected.
00:22:36.000So I firmly believe, knowing Donald Trump, That if you said to Donald Trump...
00:22:42.000Mr. Trump, in order to become Putin, in order to stay in office forever, in order to loot this country, you have to do X. He is capable of doing wherever your mind can take you for X. A thousand percent.
00:22:52.000I think what we're witnessing is propaganda.
00:22:54.000What's peculiar is Trump is accused of hysteria and hyperbole, but that hysteria and hyperbole is easily matched by his detractors.
00:23:14.000Okay, the definition of fascism that most interests me is when you have corporations, legacy media, and the state in such coalescence, in such powerful alignment, that there is no way to penetrate the public discourse, there's no way to enter the public sphere, there's no way to oppose the trajectory of power.
00:23:29.000I think that kind of fascism has broadly been achieved already.
00:23:33.000Let's have a look at this article by Public.
00:23:34.000When Donald Trump became president, Democrats predicted the worst.
00:23:38.000Trump's shocking victory, his ascension to the presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy, David Remnick wrote in the New Yorker the day after the election.
00:23:48.000Trump, Remnick said, was an authoritarian who disdained civil liberties and whose election was surely the way fascism can begin.
00:23:56.000What kind of accusation would be more valuable if Julian Assange was not in prison?
00:24:00.000If we were not seeing further movements to endless surveillance?
00:24:03.000The continuation of the aspect of the Patriot Act that allows surveillance of American citizens?
00:24:08.000All these things are still happening if there wasn't the perpetuation of the forever wars.
00:24:12.000Whether you like Trump or not, he is a response to political and economic conditions that have been caused by decades of neoliberalism that don't provide meaningful alternatives.
00:24:21.000Trump had little respect for the First Amendment, Democrats claimed.
00:24:24.000He attacked freedom of speech and of the press, striking at our fundamental rights.
00:24:28.000On top of this, liberal media outlets alleged Trump used his office for personal gain and weaponised the justice system for his own benefit.
00:24:36.000After January the 6th, 2021, the liberals who had been sceptical about anti-Trump hysteria became convinced that the hysterics had been right all along.
00:24:44.000But Friday's release of the first tranche of January 6th tapes confirmed that Trump's actions paled in comparison to the steps Democrats have taken to defeat him and his supporters.
00:24:53.000The tapes corroborate Public's previous reporting and show that the Democrat-driven narrative of an insurrection was highly misleading.
00:25:00.000Democrats use this narrative to demonize tens of millions of voters, to justify their censorship efforts, and to weaponize the justice system against their political enemies.
00:25:09.000They've continually spoken about MAGA extremism.
00:25:12.000Hillary Clinton's even said about debugging and decoding Trump extremists.
00:25:16.000And to refer to those events of January the 6th as an attempt at insurrection is hysterical and it seems to me that like many crises in recent years was exploited to legitimise legislation to advance further control and condemnation of an opponent and the movement affiliated with that opponent.
00:25:32.000That seems more reasonable than that was an attempt to take over the country and run it differently in baseball caps while smiling, grinning nervously.
00:25:41.000It's true that the tapes show rioters forcefully entering the capital, and some scenes on the tape are not peaceful.
00:25:47.000It's also true that Trump's rhetoric has at times been inflammatory and illiberal.
00:25:51.000But inflammatory rhetoric has been present on both sides.
00:25:54.000If you're continually talking about Hitler, that's about the most incendiary thing you can say about anyone, isn't it?
00:26:00.000But what the tapes do not show is a coup attempt.
00:26:03.000Rather, they show many scenes that contradict this narrative, like January 6ers walking calmly down the hallway, Capitol Police appearing completely unfazed by these supposed insurrectionists, and Capitol Police giving the trespassers handshakes.
00:26:15.000Yeah, because they're broadly speaking pro-police, aren't they?
00:26:18.000That's the kind of one might assume their general stance.
00:26:21.000So it seems like there's not been an objective appraisal of those events.
00:26:25.000There's been a highly biased exploitation of those events, which is in keeping with what we understand about 9-11.
00:26:30.000Like, you know, in this moment, there's not question the origins and how 9-11 was carried out, but what was 9-11 In this conversation, let's not question the origins of the pandemic, but let's look at how the pandemic was used.
00:26:48.000Did it make things economically worse for the vast majority of people while improving the economic conditions of the elite?
00:26:54.000There's so many clear examples now of how crises of various kinds are exploited to legitimise the agenda of the powerful that it seems sort of almost redundant to keep pointing it out.
00:27:04.000Despite the evidence that law enforcement at best permitted this coup to take place and at worst facilitated it, January 6th judges have handed down extremely harsh sentences.
00:27:13.000They sentenced one defendant to 22 years in prison despite the fact that he wasn't even in Washington DC on January the 6th.
00:27:19.000You'd think that would be a pretty good alibi.
00:27:21.000Were you in Washington DC on January 6th?
00:27:27.000What's more, the January 6th tapes show scenes that are far less violent than Black Lives Matter riots, which were investigated and prosecuted with much greater lenience, even in cases of arson and assault.
00:27:38.000We've been able to show many times on our channel how both January 6th protesters and Black Lives Matter protesters were subject to the exploitation of the same surveillance laws Which should be illegal were it not for manipulation of particular clauses that section 702 permits.
00:27:52.000But there's no question that these protest movements have been used differently.
00:27:57.000In our country about 11 or 12 years ago there were a bunch of riots and they prosecuted the people that participate in that riot super fast.
00:28:03.000They expedited all of the cases because anything that seems like a threat to the system is often met with a response that shows the ability of authority to crush dissent.
00:28:13.000Above all, the newly released tapes demonstrate that the Democratic Party's claims to be fighting for democracy and staving off authoritarianism are a sham, and that it's the Democrats who, having their persecution of Trump and his followers, have done more to undermine democracy than Trump ever threatened to do.
00:28:29.000Elites in the Democratic Party and in the mainstream media, through their efforts to subdue a populist backlash, have eroded First Amendment rights and have politicized the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice.
00:28:41.000Democrats became everything they once said they feared in Trump.
00:28:47.000Their years-long clampdown on dissent and criminalization of political opposition was a systematic attack on liberal democracy.
00:28:53.000Worse, they became everything that liberals during the 20th century warned Americans about.
00:28:58.000The Twitter files, the Missouri v. Biden case, and the Facebook files have exposed the lengths to which Democrats went to quash opposition and prevent citizens from exercising the right to protected speech.
00:29:08.000At the same time as the federal government has pushed for censorship, the FBI under Biden has increasingly become a domestic spying agency, turning its efforts against regular Americans.
00:29:17.000When whistleblowers step forward to push back against the Bureau's partisan or unethical practices, the FBI retaliates against them.
00:29:23.000Meanwhile, the Biden's DOJ is inappropriately shielding him and his son from any accountability for their lucrative influence peddling operation.
00:29:31.000A growing body of evidence suggests that President Biden played a major role in his son's business and that the DOJ is protecting the president from repercussions.
00:29:39.000This is precisely the type of corruption Democrats warned Trump would bring to the office of the presidency.
00:29:44.000The Democratic Party and the Biden administration have become precisely what liberals said Trump would be, and they have attacked the foundational principles of our democracy in the name of protecting them.
00:29:55.000What is exposed is a complete lack of principles and a willingness to avoid having any set of values that can be applied to yourself in the same way as you would apply them to your opponent.
00:30:06.000It's clear that even the basic exercise of switching the names Trump for Biden exposes the fact that, exactly as this article points out, there is no clear application of principles that would be applied blindly, the way that justice is supposed to be blind, that it shouldn't matter who you're talking about.
00:30:21.000If this riot is bad, then that riot is bad.
00:30:24.000If that surveillance is bad, then all surveillance is bad.
00:30:27.000If this censorship is a problem, if this usurping of the principles of democracy would be a problem, then you have to be able to apply it universally.
00:30:34.000If you can't, what you have is just It's just a partisan agenda that is utilized in order to meet certain objectives and that's plainly what's being observed.
00:30:42.000The obvious reason for the authoritarian and even totalitarian turn among liberals was the internet in general and social media in particular.
00:30:49.000Elites since World War II had largely controlled the information that masses received through TV and big newspapers and wire services.
00:30:56.000That all changed with the rise of the internet.
00:32:03.000Internet freedom had worked for progressives until 2016.
00:32:07.000After Trump's win, Democratic Party leaders refused to accept blame and they redirected criticism towards themselves and their presidential candidate towards the internet.
00:32:15.000Social media got Trump elected, they argued.
00:32:18.000Political scientists disagreed, but it didn't matter.
00:32:20.000Democrats wanted to believe it because it justified their more primal desire to silence their enemies.
00:32:25.000We needed the government to regulate social media, argued the former intelligence community people, like Rene Direster, who Democrats put forward in their hunt for the Russian disinformation that supposedly resulted in Trump's election.
00:32:37.000But beyond the revolt of the public unleashed by social media, liberal elites have found it so easy to demonise Trump supporters because they rarely encounter them in person.
00:32:46.000The country is deeply divided, partly because of what author Bill Bishop called in The Big Sort in 2004.
00:32:52.000Americans, Bishop explained, are increasingly clustered into areas where everyone around them thinks the way they do.
00:32:58.000This social transformation goes far beyond red versus blue, leading to extreme polarisation.
00:33:04.000Wrote Bishop, And we're living with the consequences of this segregation by way of life.
00:33:06.000the neighbours and church and news shows most compatible with his or her lifestyle and beliefs.
00:33:11.000And we're living with the consequences of this segregation by way of life.
00:33:15.000Pockets of like-minded citizens have become so ideologically inbred that we don't know,
00:33:20.000can't understand, and can barely conceive of those people who live just a few miles away.
00:33:25.000It's extraordinary actually that fully immersive technology and the miracle of modern communications seems to have deposited us back in the condition we would have been in hundreds of thousands or at least tens of thousands of years ago where we live in tribes with cultures that seem unimaginable to and tribe just across the river that might have had a different totemic animal, a different System of worship, a different understanding of reality.
00:33:47.000It's extraordinary that this imprint has somehow been realized again at what is currently the apex of what's technologically possible.
00:33:54.000I think a deeper conclusion that can be drawn from that is, generally speaking, people need to have as much control over their community and as much authority in their own life as possible.
00:34:02.000What that suggests is minimum intervention by government Minimum control by global corporations.
00:34:07.000Minimum influence exerted on your individual life and your community life by globalist entities such as the ones I described at the beginning of this video.
00:34:16.000Because none of those things are possible with the agenda of the Democrat Party, they have to demonize their opponents.
00:34:21.000But it's ridiculous because you can't vilify in such an extreme way 50% or more of the population with Without inflating the significance of events like January the 6th, without using hyperbolic language like this is like a new form of Nazism and this is like a new form of Hitler, which can be exposed as untrue because of the very technology that we're describing.
00:34:42.000It seems to me this marched towards authoritarianism, control of media, ability to censor,
00:34:47.000is undergirded by a strong desire to control media and to control minds that was
00:34:52.000possible 50 years ago but is no longer possible without the kind of hysteria that's becoming
00:34:58.000normalised as in the clips we showed at the beginning of this video.
00:35:01.000In 2016, the profound ideological inbreeding among elite segments of the Democratic Party
00:35:07.000produced what many people have termed Trump Derangement Syndrome.
00:35:10.000This was a special combination of outrage, bewilderment and disgust aimed at Trump and his followers which consumed Democrats in 2016 and has warped their judgment ever since.
00:35:20.000Democrats conceived of themselves as resisting a greater evil and this gave them a rationale for censorship Weaponization of government and the punishing authoritarian culture that now underpins major institutions.
00:35:32.000The great evil, Trump, and the populist sentiment he represented needed to be vanquished by any means necessary.
00:35:38.000As a consequence of this moral righteousness and ideological inbreeding, Democrats began categorizing inconvenient facts and different points of view as disinformation, misinformation, or malinformation.
00:35:50.000At the heart of the censorship industrial complex is liberals' desire to shape people's thoughts and control the cognitive infrastructure.
00:35:57.000The narrative Democrats constructed about Trump posing a fascist threat to democracy was also an extension of a dirty campaign trick that originated from Hillary Clinton and her team.
00:36:07.000In an attempt to weaken support for Trump before the 2016 election, Clinton personally approved the plan to share allegations of Trump's ties to Russia with the press.
00:36:17.000After the election, Clinton's campaign ramped up the Russian collusion story to excuse her defeat.
00:36:22.000This narrative has only continued to snowball, with Democrats using the supposedly unique danger Trump posed as a proto-fascist and Mancurian candidate to justify the weaponization of government against his followers.
00:36:35.000At the same time that Democrats abandoned free speech, they also abandoned a commitment to equal justice under the law, giving Hunter Biden a free pass for federal crimes, while celebrating Trump's prosecution for alleged crimes for amounts of political speech and activities.
00:36:48.000Under Director Christopher Wray, Anyway, the FBI has abused its power by inflating domestic violent extremism statistics, using entrapment tactics, and suspending whistleblowers with the full support of liberal legacy media outlets.
00:37:01.000Progressives who claim to be against harsh punishments for criminals have consistently applauded long draconian sentences for non-violent January the 6th participants.
00:37:09.000What's being described is monumental hypocrisy.
00:37:11.000Do you remember, like, that Chelsea Manning was a hero for being a whistleblower, but when them FBI whistleblowers came forward and said, hey, we were manipulated a bit, we don't like the way that January 6th was handled, and there were FBI agents in that crowd.
00:37:22.000These are the sort of stories that the left used to care about.
00:37:26.000All those ideas have melted away now because partisan interests seem to be directing everything.
00:37:31.000And those partisan interests seem to be about accumulating authority that can be used to crush opponents.
00:37:37.000And if that is your modus operandi, then whatever principles you claim to have are irrelevant.
00:37:42.000All it amounts to is tactics to accrue power.
00:37:45.000The year 2016 and its aftermath have revealed that whatever principles Democrats and Liberals claim to hold, their politics are often reducible to a friend-enemy distinction.
00:37:55.000This is made evident by the left's sudden rediscovery of its support for free speech in the context of the Israel-Hamas war.
00:38:02.000Now that the left is experiencing censorship again, journalists and activists say that the kind of censorship they support for years is actually bad.
00:38:09.000This about-face can be explained as a friend-enemy calculation, in which the left simply wants to purge its enemies and promote its friends, with zero consideration for democratic principles.
00:38:19.000For most of the left, these principles now only exist to be weaponised when convenient, but can otherwise be denigrated and disparaged.
00:38:25.000Ultimately, the left believed in free speech and opposed the weaponisation of government when doing so benefited them and their allies.
00:38:32.000Once free speech and political dissent threatened the left's authority and influence, it had to be dismantled.
00:38:37.000The heavy darkness that has overtaken the Democratic Party today is countered by the bright lights of the First Amendment to the U.S.
00:38:45.000Supreme Court, and the alliance of true liberals on the right and on the left who support universal rights, not just ones for their friends.
00:38:53.000Those of us who come from the left view it as a genuine tragedy to see that the party that defended radical levels of free speech become a party of censors, authoritarians, and totalitarians.
00:39:03.000Last week, Trump suggested that he or another Republican president could use the DOJ to indict his opponents, just as Biden's DOJ has done to him.
00:39:12.000This threat to take revenge may seem to some like a good strategy.
00:39:16.000After all, some say the right should wield power the same way the left has, by rewarding its friends and punishing its enemies.
00:39:22.000But the Democrats' extremist power politics have robbed the party of any soul it may have once had.
00:39:27.000The cycle of illiberal revenge tactics that may ensue from their actions make it essential to defend liberal democracy and freedom of speech for all.
00:39:36.000Whatever the case, the last 20 years make clear that the most sickening moment for the US commitment to liberal democracy came not in the election of Trump, but in the left's betrayal of fundamental liberal principles.
00:39:46.000In a way, what's provided here is an argument that shows you that what preceded Trump was a decline in democracy, a loss in hope that became very pronounced, I would say, under Barack Obama, where the hope and change that he promised was never delivered.
00:40:00.000Instead, what was delivered was more war and an economic collapse in 2008 that demonstrated that the affiliation with the financial sector was as strong as it would have been under Cheney or Bush, that the appetite for war was as strong as it would have been.
00:40:13.000From that moment on, the election of a populist became a genuine possibility.
00:40:17.000In the post-Trump era, the authoritarianism, the appetite for censorship, the willingness to weaponise state infrastructure against opponents and the population has shown that all that's left is rhetoric.
00:40:30.000I think that even the term virtue signalling in itself suggests that the virtue that is displayed is the type of virtue that has no cost, that has no consequence.
00:40:39.000And when you're willing to support wars claiming it's for humanitarian reasons when plainly it benefits the military-industrial complex, It seems that there's very little truth, there's very little authenticity, there's very little to hold on to.
00:40:52.000And then when you have an event like January the 6th, which was rendered as an insurrection
00:40:56.000that was studied and analysed and utilised and exploited, when massive prison sentences
00:41:02.000were doled out to people that seem like they were, at worst, participating in a protest
00:41:07.000that was at points violent and at best, sort of on some kind of day trip to Sea World,
00:41:12.000it shows that the very thing that they're claiming to be afraid of, tyranny, fascism
00:41:17.000and dictatorship, is less likely to take the form that we're continually haunted with and
00:41:21.000offered Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, but is more likely to be the kind of technocracy
00:41:27.000where it's assumed that ordinary working people are idiots that need to be parented by their
00:41:32.000political leaders, that don't deserve free speech because they can't handle it, that
00:41:36.000can't discern misinformation and disinformation from truth, so therefore the media has to
00:41:41.000be censored, that there is a clear appetite to create a tiered society with centralised
00:41:46.000power where ordinary people's roles and...
00:41:48.000And for me, that seems like the bigger threat.
00:41:53.000That seems like the precondition for the rise of populism.
00:41:57.000For the rise of people that have an ease with discourse, that are able to communicate openly, that are able to refer to a recent past, even if it's through nostalgia and rhetoric that seems more appealing than this advance towards globalism.
00:42:10.000This advance towards a world that becomes glimpsed in language around pods and vaccine passports and centralised control and 15-minute cities and you will own nothing and the kind of general impression that's emerging in the post-pandemic era of a world where everyone speaks about compassion, speaks about convenience, speaks about safety, all the while amassing power for themselves, using authority in a way that seems a lot like tyranny, while speaking the language of kindness and inclusivity.
00:42:42.000I think that what we're seeing that is comparable to the tyranny of the last century is the emergence of technological dictatorships, globalist technocracies, politicians who speak about kindness while all the while practicing authoritarianism and exploiting crises to bring about further advantages for the elite establishment that they are part of and that I believe cause this problem.
00:44:38.000Here's Vladimir Putin saying that he's been open to peace from the get-go.
00:44:42.000Now, I'm not so naive as to think that Russia don't have propaganda too, although you wouldn't be able to see Russia today We must think about how to stop this tragedy.
00:44:51.000Here's Putin appearing to say that he's open to the idea of peace and that he considers
00:44:58.000Not naive again, but it's just curious that the only people that are talking about peace
00:45:02.000are our purported enemies, those we're supposed to loathe.
00:45:06.000We must think about how to stop this tragedy.
00:45:09.000Russia has never refused peace talks with Ukraine.
00:45:12.000It is not Russia but Ukraine that has publicly announced its withdrawing from the negotiation
00:45:18.000Moreover, a decree was signed prohibiting such negotiations with Russia.
00:45:22.000Meanwhile, the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, has visited Ukraine to announce another $100 million military aid package, which is sort of comparatively small, given the enormity of some of the others, in spite of the fact that Ukrainian soldiers, I think, I don't know what kind of support they're going to need, but look at this.
00:45:44.000I don't have to look at this comedically.
00:45:47.000Or tragically but the Ukrainian military is aging presumably because the younger Ukrainians are dying in this war and because there is no or at least a decreasing appetite to enlist among the Ukrainian population.
00:46:05.000We were told a few weeks ago that 43 years old was the average age for Ukrainian military personnel but now it looks like it's older than that and it's interesting isn't it because we're so used to Dealing in vast statistics, thousands of people dying, billions getting spent.
00:46:21.000You forget that at the end of this are human beings, like you or me, aging.
00:46:25.000This, look at this sort of weird military event and note the age of the soldiers.
00:46:57.000Have a look at this, you know, we've been talking a little lately about the recruitment drive in your country, the United States, and how it's failing, and indeed how even personnel who refuse to take the shot have been invited back.
00:47:12.000You'll be familiar with this US recruitment film.
00:47:15.000They're changing their recruitment tactics now, potentially because of the likelihood of proper, terrible boots on the ground wars.
00:47:23.000Let's have a quick look at this recruitment tool from the US government.
00:47:26.000This is the story of a soldier who operates your nation's Patriot Missile Defense Systems.
00:47:31.000This doesn't seem that the culture can accommodate that aesthetic at a time when there is genuine
00:47:44.000threat of real escalating violence, particularly when you look at how Russia does the same
00:48:14.000And I suppose the debate between the two cultures in the Cold War was that capitalism, commercialism and commodity was offering us a life of privilege.
00:48:23.000And as the war went down and communism collapsed, you know, give us your Levi's, give us your McDonald's, Now, now that it feels like consumerism is failing for all of us, I mean, you know, with the cost of living crisis, the inability, you know, paycheck to paycheck living, a sort of crisis in meaning in our kind of countries.
00:48:43.000I know this is Thanksgiving and we should be thankful, but wouldn't you be thankful for some purpose, for some meaning, for some leadership that felt connected?
00:48:50.000And I'm not advocating for this kind of subtle military, well not subtle militarism, it's an advert to join the military, but for this kind of over aggression but it does show you that this is a nation
00:49:04.000That kind of propagandist tool, that animated, spirited away kind of Pixar version of the
00:49:10.000military ain't gonna cut it in times of increasing tension.
00:49:14.000Let's have a look at a bit more of this Russian recruitment tool.
00:49:27.000If your role in the world is just to earn a living, just to support yourself in a way that
00:49:33.000doesn't connect you to spirit, doesn't connect you to meaning and that's atrophying in our nations.
00:49:40.000In the post-pandemic period, whether you were sort of a middle-class person or a working-class person, you saw your fortunes decline, I'm assuming, while there was a massive wealth transfer, and you know what direction it went in.
00:49:52.000So it's very difficult now to sort of oppose these kind of ideologically othered spaces and states like Russia, like China, both of whom are now involved, you know, potentially in, you know, it looks like there's going to be forthcoming tensions with both of them.
00:50:07.000I mean, obviously, we're involved in a proxy war with Russia.
00:50:09.000And if it seems like there's a likelihood of conflict with China.
00:50:13.000They've got a different kind of worldview.
00:50:15.000They've got a different type of perspective.
00:50:53.000This is a maligned and cancelled individual talking about this current conflict in the Middle East.
00:50:59.000With a degree of... I would say that he's acknowledging that there is nuance and grey areas in this conversation that are sort of not being acknowledged in many media spaces, certainly.
00:51:58.000Because you're the person who would have called Nelson Mandela a terrorist while he was still in jail, and one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter.
00:52:04.000For me to answer the question... Yes, you would have.
00:52:06.000For me to answer the question, I have to be very professional, Piers.
00:52:09.000For me to sit on the outside, in Romania, with no personal involvement in Israel-Palestine, it's easy for me to say, yes, it was an act of terror.
00:52:16.000However, If I was in Gaza, if I was in an open-air prison, if my family had been annihilated by bombs from the sky, if everybody I knew had suffered the loss of a loved one, if I had no chance of any kind of freedom or democracy or standard of life, would I believe it was an act of terror or would I believe it's an act of resistance against oppression?
00:52:34.000You have to be very careful how you answer these questions.
00:52:37.000I think I understand what happens when you take people and put them in such an inhumane condition.
00:52:43.000For anybody to sit and say that you're going to take people and put them in absolutely inhumane conditions and give them no standard of life and they're not allowed to ever fight back or they are terrorists.
00:52:55.000I can agree with you that the plight of the Palestinians for many decades has been absolutely shameful.
00:53:01.000So what did we think was going to happen, Piers?
00:53:04.000We'll be covering this story in more depth tomorrow and talking about some of the complexity that's kept out of the conversation, but mostly advocating for free speech spaces where you have the opportunity to directly engage with people that have a contrary view to you.
00:53:20.000And let me tell you, the rumble comment section is certainly such a space because you will see diverse opinions there, as well as the nefarious monster, often providing diverse opinions even to himself.
00:53:34.000Are you surprised by Andrew Tait's dexterity there or not at all?
00:53:36.000interesting practices. So there's certainly a range of views there. Is it
00:53:41.000right, do you think, that in pursuit of hegemonic spaces we cancel and
00:53:49.000annihilate free speech? Are you surprised by Andrew Tait's dexterity
00:53:54.000there or not at all? Let me know what you guys think. You certainly are. Yeah, I see.
00:55:18.000So what they do is they contribute to neurodegeneration and to quality decline during aging.
00:55:24.000So that explains the brain fog that some of us experience after catching COVID.
00:55:29.000What have you discovered to help fight those effects?
00:55:32.000Yeah, so the key discovery really is that SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus can induce these senescent cells.
00:55:41.000So would you say to avoid these zombie cells, is there anything we can do, any procedure, any measure we can unthinkingly obey in order to prevent ourselves turning into zombies?
00:55:51.000Well, I guess you could take the vaccine, although in a sense that is the...
00:55:56.000And that is an act of the living dead?
00:55:59.000And therefore elevate the numbers of senescent cells in our brain.
00:56:04.000And the good news is that we have found that therapies are effective at eliminating selectively these senescent cells induced by coronavirus.
00:56:13.000And these drugs are called senolytics.
00:56:15.000Again, clearing them out from the brain.
00:56:18.000So could this also change the way that we research and deal with Alzheimer's?
00:56:23.000And in fact, there is recent published data in clinical trials with promising hopes for treating Alzheimer's disease with these analytic therapies.
00:56:34.000Do you think in the way that we had that sort of Avengers campaign, there'll be zombie killers sponsored by Pfizer?
00:57:20.000Those of you watching in the UK or indeed Australia let me know where you're watching this in the world.
00:57:23.000But For me, this is a... Look at... What I find most surprising about this clip is the inhalation.
00:57:29.000The sharp and dramatic inhalation of breath that accompanies this lady's announcement that she's simply not willing to wait to use the bathroom.
00:57:38.000I think a lot of us have felt frustration on a plane, but few of us have been brave enough to make a protest there and then, on the spot, making a stand by taking a squat.
00:59:02.000The reason I say you cannot defend those who want to censor is because they will ultimately censor those who support free speech.
00:59:08.000This was the trick that worked to get to where we are now.
00:59:12.000Yep, censorship has certainly been normalized, and that forms a significant part of our conversation with Lee Fang tomorrow.
00:59:20.000We talk a lot about the Moderna story, where we found out that Moderna had files on Elon Musk, Novak Djokovic and me, and a peculiar relationship with the deep state, even employing former FBI employees within Moderna.
00:59:35.000You'll love that conversation with Lee Fang tomorrow.
00:59:37.000We talk also about Nikki Haley and her war millions and the possibility that 2024 might be the last free and easy elections in your great nation.