Russell Brand is joined by Adam Andrzejewski and Gareth Barker to discuss the Trump impeachment trial and how the mainstream media failed to grasp the opportunity to delegitimize the opposition and delegitimise the opposition. They also discuss the role of social media and how it can be used as a weapon in the fight against the Trump administration, and how we can all learn from the lessons learned from the trial of Donald Trump. Stay tuned for the full interview with Gareth Barker after the trial with Russell Brand. Stay tuned to find out more about Adam and Gareth's work and how they stand up against the great war crimes of recent history, and why they think Trump should be tried the same way Biden, Obama, Bush and Clinton did. Stay free, and remember to tweet me if you like the show! with and if you have any thoughts or suggestions on what we should be focusing on in the next episode, tweet us to or about the show . and don t forget to leave us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts! and we'll read out your thoughts on the show on our next episode! ! Thank you so much for your support, your continued support is so appreciated, stay free, love and support is greatly appreciated! Timestamps: 5 stars and 5 stars is much appreciated, thank you, bye! - Stay Free, bye, bye - Your continued support will be much appreciated. - your support is very much appreciated! - Your support is really helping us make this podcast really does mean the world a lot more than you know what we can do, it helps us make a difference! - thank you! - your words are so much more than that we can help us make the world better than you can do us do it! - Thank you, you're amazing, you are a lot, we really appreciate it, we appreciate you, we're making a difference, thanks you, really really helps us, we make it, really appreciate you. - KAVA - GABE - - KEVY, KAVEY, AYO, KARPS, PRAYS, PENNY, JUICYANTHORMS, JAY & KELLY, MALAYES, PODCASTING, SONGS, JOSEPH, KEVIN MCCARTO
00:00:14.000His speech from Mar-a-Lago has been delivered We can now unpack the 34 charges and decide for ourselves whether they are misdemeanors or felonies and how they stand up against the great war crimes of recent history.
00:00:32.000We're going to be having a deep look at how the crimes of Trump stack up against the crimes of Biden, Obama, Bush and Clinton.
00:01:31.000There you go, the mainstream media unable to get Donald Trump's attention.
00:01:36.000You'll have noticed that every single detail is being amplified and magnified, essentially because there's very little to look at in reality.
00:01:45.000But now, we live in a world where at Jar Sosa 25 is able to extract an exclusive on the street.
00:01:55.000Donald Trump, tell them you're innocent, bro!
00:02:04.000It's a persecution, not a prosecution.
00:02:07.000In a way, I think you can see right there, Gareth, not in microcosm, but in that opposition, the problem that we have now.
00:02:19.000The mainstream media once had sole access to information.
00:02:25.000Now we all have access to information as well as the ability to communicate it.
00:02:29.000So what the mainstream media now requires is either authority and legitimacy, which it can no longer make claim to because of the way that it's funded, because of its biases.
00:02:41.000So now what it needs is to be able to delegitimize the opposition.
00:02:46.000The fact is, is that a kid on the street has extracted more information from Donald Trump than MSNBC, than CNN.
00:02:56.000And so, in a way, the theatre and the performance of media has become more valid than its actual access to facts.
00:03:08.000Yeah, I think one of the things that the mainstream media were really excited about with this case was that obviously cameras weren't allowed inside the courtroom.
00:03:15.000And so one of the comments, I think Robert Sherman, who's coming up later, was really excited.
00:03:19.000And a piece that we were looking at of his yesterday, where he was saying, you know, it's like the old days, it's because people can't use social media inside the courtroom, they're going to have to come straight out and report to the mainstream media.
00:03:31.000So this was a chance for the mainstream media to get it back, to get their power back.
00:03:35.000But as we see in this case, they tried and failed with Trump and a kid on the street using social media has got more access.
00:03:57.000Except that there are different ways of reporting, different ways of seeing reality.
00:04:01.000Or double down on authoritarianism by condemning and smearing peripheral figures, whether they are in media or in politics.
00:04:10.000Their legitimacy is, I think, being not only eroded, but almost completely vanquished.
00:04:16.000When you see them Criticizing and condemning Russia for the arrest using the Espionage Act of that Wall Street Journal journalist while Assange remains in prison in Belmar.
00:04:31.000She recognized that the hypocrisy is so pronounced that there's barely anything that you can trust them on.
00:04:40.000They must know that putting Trump in this position gives him the opportunity to do stuff like this.
00:04:51.000If you are one of the virulently anti-Trump folk that really are passionate about your hatred of Trump, that see him as the epitome of the problem, I wonder how you feel when you watch him at Mar-a-Lago and he is able to say there was the first impeachment hoax,
00:05:08.000there was the hunt a Biden laptop thing, there was the attempt to ally me with Russian disinformation.
00:05:24.000I don't know how you can legitimize your condemnation anymore,
00:05:28.000other than in the sort of vulgarity of Trump.
00:05:31.000Say I'm talking about how they condemn and criticize.
00:05:34.000Interesting what you're saying about the Hunter Biden, because obviously that was broken on.
00:05:39.000Twitter wasn't it and then repressed on Twitter and it's interesting at the moment with all the mainstream reaction to Trump and of course we saw Matt Taibbi recently in Congress and this issue of kind of mainstream versus social media or independent journalism He's really playing out with this and you really see in the Trump case the way in which the mainstream media focus on such minutiae like whether or not Donald Trump stares in a certain direction or you know moves from left to right and yet at the same time there's the kind of vilification of independent journalists like Matt Taibbi and you really feel that that's where truth is coming from now independent journalism even through like social media and we're seeing it play out in front of us the ridiculousness of the mainstream and its focus on the minutiae.
00:08:14.000What I want to ask you about primarily is, given the nature of the charges that Trump faces, it's worth investigating whether they are particularly unique or particularly pronounced or specifically and Obviously worse than the types of crimes that ordinarily take place within political campaigns and campaigning.
00:08:36.000Can you give us any sort of references that perhaps contextualise Trump's charges?
00:08:42.000Well, it's a sad day for the American people on a lot of levels, Mr. Brand, but specifically, you know, I'm from Illinois.
00:08:49.000It is the Super Bowl of corruption, and our governors are legendary for their corrupt practices.
00:08:55.000At a recent point, four out of our last nine governors served time in the federal penitentiary.
00:09:00.000And so, you know, we've got a unique perspective on this.
00:09:04.000It is a new era of brass knuckle politics across the entire country.
00:09:09.000So, for example, if you're Hillary Clinton, if you have the Clinton Foundation and it's based in Little Rock, Arkansas, Pulaski County, there's a prosecutor there.
00:09:19.000You better be able to justify your quarter billion dollar endowment.
00:09:23.000Or the 75% drop in your fundraising between the time you left Secretary of State's office and 2020.
00:09:32.000If you're Nancy Pelosi, and if there's a new Republican president, you'll probably get a knock from the Securities and Exchange Commission, and they're going to ask you to justify your stock market trades.
00:09:45.000If you're President Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, the entire family on a new Republican president, I mean, this opens up a whole Pandora's box.
00:09:54.000It is a troubling moment in the history of the country when a local prosecutor goes after a former U.S.
00:10:01.000president and leading contender in a major party and decides to arrest In Iranian.
00:10:09.000So what you're saying is, is you have to have a legitimate and transparent authority to conduct an investigation like this.
00:10:19.000And it's clear, even from the examples that you have cited, that there is no moral authority, that how would Nancy Pelosi and Paul Pelosi stand up to rigorous investigation?
00:10:31.000How would the Hillary and Bill Clinton Foundation look under scrutiny in their relationship
00:10:58.000And in fact, obviously, that's to some degree what led to the rise of Donald Trump, his anti-establishment rhetoric being what most people who love him find appealing about him.
00:11:09.000If you are going to start to address these types of issues legitimately, not as part of a political witch hunt to get rid of an obvious potential opponent, then you're going to have to dismantle the machine itself.
00:11:25.000Well, jailing your political opponents is no solution.
00:11:28.000And look, Trump never had a chance here.
00:12:31.000Now, I wanted to ask you a little more about earmarks, which I believe you're going to demonstrate to us is a great example of bipartisan corruption.
00:12:43.000At the moment, I don't even know what earmarks are.
00:12:46.000Will you please, as you have done ever since the moment I first clapped my hungry eyes upon you, educate us, Adam?
00:12:53.000Well, earmarks are the currency of corruption in Congress, Mr. Brand.
00:12:57.000So earmarks, they were dead for 10 years.
00:12:59.000There was a ban on them because they were so abused in the past.
00:13:03.000Earmarks is quite simply a legal bribe doled out to maximize the power of the House Speaker.
00:13:50.000You've got a million dollars doled out to the Great Blacks in Wax Museum by Kawame Nfume, a congressman from Baltimore, who actually has a wax statue in the museum!
00:14:06.000You've got a million dollars doled out for a new stairway, not to heaven, but to the beach in Mondo Beach, California, so the surfers can hit the waves faster.
00:14:15.000You've got a million dollars doled out for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio.
00:14:21.000You've got $3 million doled out for the Hip Hop Museum in New York.
00:14:25.000You've got $3.5 million doled out by the Republican U.S.
00:14:29.000Senator Susan Collins in Maine for the Irish Heritage Museum.
00:15:11.000So at $180,000, $190,000 a year for this prostate cancer drug, by the way, which is really effective, activists felt that this would be a great test case example for the National Institutes of Health to finally come in and use what's called their march-in powers to be able to knock down the price of that drug.
00:15:31.000The National Institutes of Health, they weighed in and they did not use their power.
00:15:36.000They did not use their regulatory power to knock it down.
00:15:39.000So on its face, This looked like a great textbook example.
00:15:45.000The National Institutes of Health, the U.S.
00:15:47.000Army, everyone agreed had helped fund the development of that drug.
00:15:52.000UCLA had received those federal grants, and they had pioneered the technologies to help that drug actually come to market.
00:15:59.000They had licensed it to the pharmaceutical company, a foreign one from Japan, so you have a foreign pharmaceutical company to boot.
00:16:06.000And so they felt this was a great, honest face.
00:16:08.000This would be a great textbook example to see if, for the first time in history, NIH would use its power to regulate and knock down the price of that drug.
00:16:16.000In Japan, for example, it's $30,000, not $190,000 a year.
00:16:20.000Well, the Biden administration decided not to use it.
00:16:24.000And look, I think it's because This ran right up against the Pfizer footprint, against the Pfizer fiefdom.
00:16:32.000So UCLA, which had licensed the technology to the pharmaceutical company, had collected a half billion dollars between 2012 and 2016 on royalties, but then they sold their future royalty stream out through 2027 for over a billion dollars to Royal Pharmacy, who was then quickly acquired by Pfizer.
00:16:53.000Even though the patent for the drug is held by the Japanese pharmaceutical company, the U.S.
00:17:02.000When they make a sale since 2016 in the United States, not only do they reap the profit from their sale of the pill, but they also reap on the back side a piece of the royalty payment as well.
00:17:14.000They're double-dipping every sale on that pill.
00:17:17.000So I don't think the Biden administration wanted to get in the way of Pfizer.
00:17:21.000Double dipping is unhygienic in any language, isn't it?
00:17:25.000It's disgusting to hear of the double dip going on at a time like this during a high-profile case involving a pornography actor.
00:17:36.000It's disgusting to hear that the double dip is being practiced so flagrantly.
00:17:40.000Adam called you Russell then for the first time.
00:18:16.000I mean, we need, I want to throw a gauntlet challenge down to President Biden, House Speaker McCarthy, To embrace the transparency revolution, declare war on waste.
00:18:27.000I think they'll find a target-rich environment at every level.
00:18:31.000This is a book that was done by Peter Grace at the behest of Ronald Reagan back in the mid-1980s.
00:18:38.000And what they found was, when they took a look at federal spending in the 1980s, that 30 percent, 30 cents on every dollar was wasteful spending.
00:18:47.000And nobody You mean nobody today believes that that situation is any better?
00:19:33.000We're going to say like we've been we've been dabbling in mainstream media for a little while now.
00:19:38.000We we spoke recently to an Australian journalist who was live at those Parisian riots.
00:19:43.000Well, you know, like all of the media actually outnumbered the public outside outside the courtroom where Donald Trump was about to be arraigned
00:19:52.000and he's now being arraigned and like you, I didn't use the word "arraigned" until about
00:19:56.00048 hours ago. Well, here we are co-opting and hijacking our own correspondent, Robert
00:20:03.000Sherman. Before we talk to him, let's see him in action on the mainstream media before seeing a
00:20:08.000different side to a man that I believe to be incredibly handsome and lucid. Let's look
00:21:16.000You had media outlets coming in from Germany, Japan, Australia.
00:21:20.000I mean, you see some of these images, people just crawling on top of one another to get the same photo that the person right next to them is going to get.
00:21:28.000I've never seen a scene like this before.
00:21:30.000Do you feel pressurized to amplify particular details?
00:21:35.000Because, let's face it, not much really happened.
00:21:38.000Donald Trump came, he waved a bit, he went into a courtroom.
00:21:42.000Do you feel under personal and professional pressure to create a narrative out of, in a sense, just ordinary details?
00:21:52.000No, not at all, especially over at Art Network, because this was something that we really talked about here is that, look, have you had this narrative coming in that there would be all of this activity happening here, you know, the potential for riots and things like that?
00:22:05.000And we said, look, unless the narrative actually happens, don't play into it at all.
00:22:12.000So we try to stay away from that as much as possible and just give you the facts.
00:22:15.000That's good, because we're trying to do that here.
00:22:17.000We sort of see ourselves as, I suppose, an anti-establishment news organization that looks to create alliances from across sectarian divides and infuse our content with the potential for spiritual awakening.
00:22:33.000We've got no one on the ground, and that's where we could collaborate.
00:22:37.000You, the Shermanator, could be regularly, essentially doing what you're doing anyway, but then doing a bit of it for us as well.
00:22:44.000Maybe for cred, and if it came to it, possibly for money.
00:22:56.000But as you said, you know, a whole lot for nothing.
00:22:59.000And I think one point to make here as well is that, I mean, you see all these scenes of the people who were outside as well.
00:23:05.000I feel compelled to tell your viewers that at least four out of five people who were out here yesterday were either members of law enforcement or members of the press.
00:23:14.000I mean, yeah, you had demonstrators who were out here, both for and against the president.
00:23:24.000In a way, it's like the spectacle is creating and consuming itself.
00:23:31.000It's almost like if there were no media and no law enforcement there, the event kind of wouldn't be happening.
00:23:39.000I'm sure that you're familiar with the writing of Jean Baudrillard, certainly if you watch this channel, we're always banging on about him, because he talks continually about how the media is creating a sort of synthetic reality that we're all existing in.
00:23:52.000When you look at the work of someone like Chris Hedges, you realise that you're not capable of fully understanding the horror of war, nor would we like to.
00:24:00.000So war is kind of simplified to a sort of game, justice is simplified to a kind of game, and All of us are in our own ways participating in it.
00:24:14.000Or do you feel like you're able to keep in alignment with your personal principles even when participating?
00:24:20.000As you know, I accept that we are also in the reporting of a sensational story that's doubtless being amplified for the purposes of entertainment rather than justice, say.
00:24:48.000You have to just call the balls and strikes as they happen out here, which is what we've been trying to do.
00:24:53.000But, I mean, of course, you know, there are some people who don't do that, and there are some people who do, you know, stoke the flames a little bit.
00:24:59.000I would push back, though, and say one thing, though, is that a large part of the reason that so much of this attention came down here was because of the former president putting so much of a limelight on this case with some of the things that he put on social media a couple of weeks ago.
00:25:13.000Of course, the indictment brought a lot more attention to that, but it's not as if the limelight just is created by the press.
00:25:22.000There is a starting point as well, and sometimes we just come out here.
00:27:16.000We're going to talk also about how one of the things that Trump said that was, I would say, somewhat iconoclastic and challenging was that you don't even need NATO.
00:27:29.000That's the kind of rabble-rousing stuff that Trump came out with that caused so many people to condemn him and so many people to adore him.
00:27:38.000If you want, you can sign up to Locals for weekly guided meditations, live podcast recordings.
00:27:43.000There's all sorts of stuff that we do here.
00:27:45.000We're going to be having a break We're going to have a break soon.
00:27:48.000Over the time of Easter, whether you consider it to be a pagan festival or a Christian festival, or simply something that's happening in your hemisphere, we're going to have a little break to regenerate and renew ourselves.
00:27:59.000So we're on on Thursday, we're on on Friday.
00:28:01.000Friday we're going to have a fantastic show.
00:28:03.000I think we're going to have an interview with Rainn Wilson from the office, talking about his new book, about spirituality and stuff.
00:28:11.000This book's coming out in a little while.
00:28:12.000So we've got some fantastic shows coming up this week.
00:28:16.000Join us tomorrow, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.