Stay Free - Russel Brand - Are The Democrats Now The War Party? - #056 - Stay Free With Russell Brand

00:00:00.000 So, we'll see you in a minute.

00:01:59.000 In this video, you're going to see the future.

00:02:07.000 Hello there, you Awakening Wonders, whether you're joining us on our home, Rumble, or on YouTube where we are currently, you are welcome here with us, whoever you are, whatever you believe in.

00:02:18.000 If you're interested in truth and awakening and coming together and truly challenging the systems of the powerful in order that we might build a better world, you are welcome here.

00:02:29.000 This show is sponsored by Raytheon, a lovely little organisation.

00:02:34.000 Mostly it's just missiles and that.

00:02:36.000 Good bunch of lads.

00:02:38.000 Well, they're very good missiles, aren't they?

00:02:40.000 If you need a missile, I say Raytheon.

00:02:42.000 They've got to be, because people keep ordering them, don't they?

00:02:45.000 I tell you what, they're flying off the shelves!

00:02:49.000 By the way, if you're thinking of investing in one of the weapons companies, there's Lockheed Martin.

00:02:53.000 Norfolk Grumman.

00:02:54.000 Norfolk Grumman sounds a bit old-fashioned, don't it?

00:02:57.000 There's BAE Systems.

00:02:59.000 I've never liked that, because I don't even like saying BAE.

00:03:02.000 No.

00:03:02.000 I don't like the diphthong, is what that is.

00:03:03.000 I don't like moving through that many vowel sounds without a consonant in there.

00:03:07.000 But I'd have to say, hands down, Raytheon, best missiles money can buy.

00:03:10.000 It's your money anyway, because you're paying for it if you're an American taxpayer.

00:03:14.000 Former directors are now Secretary of Defence now, aren't they, in the US?

00:03:18.000 Can you see how the people from Raytheon are the best people?

00:03:22.000 Over the course of the show, you're going to love this.

00:03:23.000 If you're watching this on YouTube, you've got to click over to YouTube when the 10 minutes is up, because we're going to be showing you how WHO are presenting the anti-vax movement.

00:03:33.000 It's more frightening and more of a threat than global terrorism.

00:03:36.000 Correct.

00:03:37.000 That's all of the terrorism on the globe, which might mean that there ain't no terrorism anymore, because, I don't know, don't need terrorism.

00:03:43.000 But terrorism, you used to have to talk about it all the time, didn't you?

00:03:45.000 It was a big thing.

00:03:46.000 They've gone away.

00:03:47.000 They just went away now.

00:03:48.000 They're on holiday.

00:03:49.000 They were very susceptible to COVID, those lads.

00:03:52.000 That's the thing.

00:03:53.000 And, you know, a lot of them wore masks, so you would have thought they'd be fine.

00:03:57.000 We're also going to be talking about, like, we're going to be showing you some details from an adverse vaccine reaction study that we just simply are not allowed to show you on YouTube because, by coincidence, YouTube take their directives from the WHO.

00:04:09.000 I mean, that's just a coincidence, though.

00:04:11.000 I'm sure there's nothing going on there.

00:04:13.000 Also, we're going to be looking at, well, let's have a look right now.

00:04:15.000 Joe Biden and his top secret documents continue to baffle people.

00:04:20.000 Michael Schellenberger is coming on the show later.

00:04:22.000 He's one of the Twitterphiles dudes.

00:04:24.000 That's how he likes to be called.

00:04:26.000 Michael Schellenberger is a Twitterphile dude.

00:04:26.000 That's who I call him.

00:04:28.000 What are we going to talk to him about?

00:04:30.000 WEF? 0.65

00:04:30.000 Trump? 0.65

00:04:31.000 All sorts of stuff like that.

00:04:32.000 When are we getting the Fauci files?

00:04:34.000 When are we getting the Fauci files?

00:04:35.000 They're on the way.

00:04:36.000 We'll be getting them.

00:04:37.000 And on our presentation, here's the news.

00:04:39.000 No, here's the effing news.

00:04:40.000 We're talking about Kevin McCarthy, Ukraine, who are the party of war now. 0.99

00:04:45.000 But should we start with... I like this.

00:04:48.000 This is something I created using my imagination.

00:04:50.000 It's news around Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada.

00:04:50.000 Oh, yeah.

00:04:53.000 I like his hair.

00:04:55.000 I call it Trudeau.

00:04:56.000 Is it true, though?

00:04:57.000 Let's have a look at that.

00:05:01.000 Oh, Canada!

00:05:06.000 I see what you've done there.

00:05:06.000 Because that's what I do.

00:05:07.000 Yeah, because it's like, is it true though?

00:05:09.000 Right, look at him saying this thing.

00:05:11.000 The new Liberal government won't buy the overpriced F-35 stealth fighter jet.

00:05:19.000 Good, very good.

00:05:20.000 Don't buy them, too expensive!

00:05:22.000 Raytheon are doing fighter jets, meanwhile, cut price, get you a special deal on them.

00:05:26.000 He's a good guy, this Trudeau.

00:05:27.000 Look at the hair, look at the youth.

00:05:28.000 Stealth fighter that can't defend our Arctic.

00:05:31.000 A stealth fighter that's not actually stealth.

00:05:35.000 The new Liberal government.

00:05:37.000 Mad stealth!

00:05:38.000 He's really like, well, let's have a little look at, uh, let's have a look at where this dude ends up, though.

00:05:45.000 The Liberal government has inked a deal to buy 88 F-35 fighter jets.

00:05:50.000 Oh, OK.

00:05:51.000 Was it true, though?

00:05:53.000 It weren't true, though, was it, though?

00:05:55.000 Oh, by the way, they don't work that well.

00:05:56.000 This is those ones.

00:05:57.000 You've probably seen those fire jets.

00:05:58.000 They're these bad bits.

00:06:03.000 Easy, easy.

00:06:06.000 Oh, that's embarrassing that its little snout sniffed down on the ground like that.

00:06:10.000 It fell on its own snout. 0.78

00:06:14.000 Oh, he just crashed!

00:06:16.000 Yep, that's no good, is it?

00:06:17.000 Why would a government buy a plane like that, though, Russ?

00:06:20.000 Why would a government spend public money?

00:06:21.000 I wonder if there's some sort of margin and relationships with... I suppose the only reason you would is if you had a relationship with organisations within the military-industrial complex, like, for example, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop.

00:06:33.000 And why would Trudeau say that before getting into power, but then be in power?

00:06:37.000 Hold on, wait a minute, because I've got these psychic abilities.

00:06:39.000 I don't understand it.

00:06:39.000 I've got psychic abilities.

00:06:40.000 I don't understand.

00:06:40.000 Something's coming through.

00:06:41.000 Maybe, before he was in power, he just said stuff that sounded good, then once he was in power, he realised that there were entrenched relationships that he had to be in the service of, almost like all politicians will, before they're elected, say one thing, then once in power, do something else.

00:06:57.000 Except for Claire Daly, MEP, Irish woman, firebrand, who was on the show yesterday.

00:07:03.000 Brilliant, wasn't she?

00:07:04.000 She kicked off proper leery.

00:07:06.000 Joe Biden, of course, we all remember the enthusiasm that preceded his elevation after some time in Congress to the presidency.

00:07:15.000 And now, of course, these controversial secret documents have been found in his office.

00:07:19.000 Biden says he don't know what documents were found in private office.

00:07:23.000 What documents were found in your office?

00:07:25.000 I don't know.

00:07:26.000 Do you know which direction to walk when you get off stage?

00:07:28.000 I don't know.

00:07:29.000 Do you know whether or not to sniff a child's head?

00:07:32.000 I don't know whether or not to do that.

00:07:33.000 Do you know what's on hunters?

00:07:36.000 Just to be clear, don't.

00:07:37.000 Don't sniff a child on it.

00:07:38.000 If it's your child, maybe.

00:07:40.000 Or if the child said, I'm worried that some yeast-based spread, Marmite, Bovril, something like that, has gotten into my scalp.

00:07:48.000 Would you tell me?

00:07:49.000 Yeah.

00:07:50.000 Oh yeah, there is a bit of marmite in it.

00:07:52.000 Those are the only possible reasons for doing it.

00:07:55.000 He says that he's taking it very seriously, but does Biden take classified information that seriously when he doesn't seem to know what a Secret Service operative looks like, or the difference between a Secret Service operative and a Salvation Army attendee?

00:08:14.000 What I like about this, I don't know if you've seen this lovely clip yet, of Joe Biden mistaking a Salvation Army volunteer or worker for a Secret Service agent.

00:08:23.000 It's lovely because Joe Biden, I reckon, really fancies his own small talk, you know, where he goes, Beck-a-my-way, Beck-a-my-tail, corn pup.

00:08:30.000 He really thinks he's got good chat.

00:08:31.000 Yeah.

00:08:31.000 And he starts laying loose with some chat on this guy.

00:08:33.000 And the thing I like, he's watching the guy's face as he realises that moment where he's talking to the President of the United States and the President of the United States thinks he's a Secret Service operative.

00:08:43.000 Yeah.

00:08:43.000 And you have to work out... He doesn't even look like one.

00:08:45.000 He's got like a little badge on him and stuff.

00:08:46.000 Have a look at this, you won't believe it.

00:08:48.000 And here we have the post of Salvation Army.

00:08:52.000 So look, the word Salvation Army is like everywhere.

00:08:57.000 He's got Salvation Army on his lapel.

00:08:59.000 There's so many cues that this is a Salvation Army person.

00:09:05.000 Next dude coming up, it's Mr. Incredible.

00:09:09.000 He's meeting next.

00:09:14.000 Oh no. 1.00

00:09:16.000 Oh shit. 1.00

00:09:18.000 Oh no. 1.00

00:09:18.000 Because that's what happened when my nan first went senile or Alzheimer's or whatever it was. 1.00

00:09:24.000 She just said a crazy thing and I went... 1.00

00:09:27.000 Oh, shit, no. 1.00

00:09:30.000 But what was good was my nan did not have nuclear capacity. 1.00

00:09:35.000 No one would sell... Secret documents?

00:09:38.000 If she had, she kept her mouth shut about it.

00:09:40.000 Oh, I don't know where them documents are, darling.

00:09:43.000 Do you want an omelette?

00:09:45.000 She's not suddenly trying to blow up a pipeline or get involved in some crazy global skullduggery. 1.00

00:09:51.000 One of the things, of course, you know why you come to us.

00:09:54.000 We're a media organisation to a degree.

00:09:56.000 We're a movement.

00:09:57.000 We're more than that.

00:09:58.000 We believe in your spirit.

00:09:58.000 We believe in your heart.

00:10:00.000 But we want to tell you the truth so you can decide for yourself what Look at what your version of reality and the truth is, given that we live in a limitless space and having an objective truth might be a difficult thing to arrive at.

00:10:09.000 Look at how the mainstream media report on Biden's secret documents versus Trump's secret documents.

00:10:15.000 This is from CNN, Enemy of Freedom.

00:10:18.000 Joe Biden, look at that.

00:10:20.000 Joe Biden, he only had 10 little documents and some of them, they weren't even all top secret.

00:10:26.000 He's cooperating with the system that he's the head of.

00:10:29.000 And lawyers found them.

00:10:30.000 Donald Trump, meanwhile, he had 325 documents, 60 of them were top secret.

00:10:36.000 They're such little nerfs, aren't they? 0.99

00:10:37.000 And by the way, I know that some of you lot love Donald Trump, and I presume some of you love Joe Biden, and I don't think that the answer to our problems is going to come from Either of these pillars of systemic power and you know let me know in the chat let me know in the comments what you think.

00:10:50.000 Look how they talked about the vaccine when it was Trump's vaccine can't be trusted under Biden this vaccine is good stuff and if you're watching us on YouTube stay with us because we've got a groundbreaking study on adverse reactions that we Literally can't talk about on YouTube, we would be banned.

00:11:04.000 We would be banned for talking about it because YouTube uses, did you know this?

00:11:08.000 They use the WHO's edicts, WHO which I think accepts funding from Bill Gates, to determine what their policy is.

00:11:17.000 So that's how power and influence operates.

00:11:19.000 It's not a conspiracy theory, you can just watch it, you can observe it.

00:11:23.000 Take place in real time.

00:11:25.000 Not on YouTube though.

00:11:25.000 You're going to have to come over onto Rumble and you can watch us doing it in real time.

00:11:29.000 Now it's our item.

00:11:32.000 The system is fine.

00:11:33.000 Don't collapse into existential despair.

00:11:40.000 Our friends are scientists, and by the way, I'm not an anti-science person, I think science, when it's not a subset of extreme corporatism, is a marvellous endeavour, the realm of many genii and mystics, the producer of the great technology that allows us to have the connection that we have right now.

00:11:58.000 But when they're all- Were you good at science at school?

00:12:00.000 Very good, one of the best!

00:12:01.000 You give me a bunch and burn a gal, and that's when I- Come into your own. 1.00

00:12:05.000 I come into my own, them little two thin lolly sticks, get them splints. 0.98

00:12:09.000 Get them burning.

00:12:10.000 Was that what you were meant to do?

00:12:12.000 You're not meant to do that.

00:12:13.000 Like that gas tap, turn that gas tap on and then light it so it goes

00:12:16.000 and then scare yourself a bit too much.

00:12:18.000 You're the enemy of science.

00:12:20.000 In a way, I'm a sort of a Luddite. 0.99

00:12:23.000 A bovine, retrograde, bloody Luddite.

00:12:27.000 But like, you know, I don't think that science should be entirely governed by the pursuit of profit.

00:12:31.000 And I suppose when the most powerful voices in particular aspects or scientific fields are for-profit companies, then that is going to bias it.

00:12:40.000 Let me know what you think in the chat and the comments.

00:12:40.000 I don't know.

00:12:41.000 And they keep, like, who's that guy, Peter Danza, or whatever his name is?

00:12:45.000 Peter Daszak.

00:12:46.000 Yeah.

00:12:46.000 Peter Daszak is one of the people that was, I believe, involved in the Wu-Tang Lab that may or may not have been.

00:12:52.000 Which he called it the Wu-Tang Lab.

00:12:54.000 It's actually happened.

00:12:55.000 I've actually made the... I think Peter... Now, correct me if I'm wrong.

00:12:59.000 Peter Daszak's in the Wu-Tang Clan.

00:13:01.000 Is that right?

00:13:02.000 Now, the Wu-Tang Clan are using gain-of-function research. 1.00

00:13:06.000 Oh, dirty bastard! 1.00

00:13:07.000 Oh, dirty bastard! 1.00

00:13:10.000 Got a Petri dish of viruses in it. 1.00

00:13:12.000 And he's fucking making him worse. 1.00

00:13:14.000 You can't trust him. 0.99

00:13:15.000 Daszak.

00:13:16.000 Dazzak Fauci, they're the Wu-Tang gang!

00:13:20.000 So, like the Wu-Hang gang, I call them. 1.00

00:13:23.000 Look, it's back in the Bat Caves, old Dazzak, look! 1.00

00:13:26.000 Haven't you learned anything?

00:13:27.000 Not that we're saying that that did originate in a lab, although are you allowed to even speculate on that anymore?

00:13:32.000 Are we still on YouTube?

00:13:34.000 Listen, in a minute we're going to show you the WHO's magnificent bit of propaganda.

00:13:34.000 We're still on YouTube.

00:13:38.000 Can we put it on just for a second so the people on YouTube see it?

00:13:40.000 Because they're going to love this.

00:13:41.000 I know they're going to love this, Gareth.

00:13:42.000 Put on the WHO bit of propaganda.

00:13:44.000 This is WHO propaganda, so of course we can show this on YouTube because they determine YouTube's policy.

00:13:50.000 Let's have a look at what WHO are saying about anti-vaxxers.

00:13:53.000 Check it.

00:13:54.000 We have to recognize that anti-vaccine activism, which I actually call anti-science aggression,

00:13:59.000 has not... Already changed its name.

00:14:01.000 Anti-science aggression, I've called it. That's what I'm calling it.

00:14:05.000 ...become a major killing force globally. Major killing force globally.

00:14:10.000 Oh, listen, you're gonna love this.

00:14:12.000 This is reductive, isn't it?

00:14:13.000 It's a bit reductive because there's so many reasons that people might not want to take certain medications, I think.

00:14:20.000 And in a free society, when I... Am I right in saying that the Pfizer executive, Janet Smalls, I'm guessing, baby.

00:14:29.000 Yeah, Jane Smalls, I think.

00:14:31.000 She said that they didn't test for transmission.

00:14:33.000 So how are you a killing force globally if... You've got to be careful here, Ross.

00:14:40.000 Listen, we've got so much to tell you.

00:14:42.000 If you're watching us on YouTube, click the link in your description right now and join us on Rumble, where the truth will be channeled, where the revolution will be born, where collective awakenings will occur, all sponsored by Raytheon.

00:14:55.000 They make a lovely missile, Gareth.

00:14:57.000 Before you criticise them, have you ever tried making a missile?

00:14:59.000 It's exhausting.

00:15:01.000 It's knackering.

00:15:02.000 They should have that money.

00:15:03.000 Give them the money from the taxpayers!

00:15:05.000 What are you going to do with it?

00:15:06.000 Feed your children? 1.00

00:15:08.000 Use the electricity?

00:15:09.000 Not for long, you're not.

00:15:10.000 They'll be banned on that before too long at all.

00:15:12.000 All right, let's have a look now.

00:15:13.000 So YouTube, goodbye, but join us.

00:15:16.000 Join us!

00:15:17.000 And let's have a look at a little bit more of this WHO propaganda.

00:15:21.000 During the COVID pandemic in the United States, 200,000 Americans needlessly lost their lives because they refused a COVID vaccine.

00:15:29.000 Is that true?

00:15:30.000 Is the data there?

00:15:31.000 So this is how this goes.

00:15:32.000 Do you want to see more of this propaganda or do you want to see the adverse reactions?

00:15:34.000 I think we keep watching.

00:15:36.000 I suppose when they say needlessly refused a vaccine we again like going back to the idea of it being reductive we know at the time when we started to look at the evidence that was published in mainstream media of people's reasons at the time for not getting vaccines and it was obvious it was often Oh, sometimes people in minorities, you had less trust of government for good reasons. 0.98

00:15:56.000 It was people who didn't trust that there wouldn't be adverse reactions and they had children to care for and they couldn't afford to take the time off.

00:16:03.000 I'll tell you why you can trust any vaccine, right?

00:16:06.000 I'll tell you why you can trust any vaccine because In the past, if ever there's been adverse reactions, even at a rate of something like one in 10,000, that vaccine is pulled off the market.

00:16:17.000 You can check that.

00:16:18.000 One in 10,000, they get that straight off the market.

00:16:21.000 So surely if there's anything like one in 10,000 adverse reactions to this new experimental vaccine, then that'll be right off the old market, won't it?

00:16:32.000 Let's have a look at, can we just have a quick look at that study?

00:16:34.000 And in particular, the ratios there, this is a study by Robert, M Kaplan, who's one of my favourite professors, I'd have to say, and is closely followed by Sandra Greenland, who I also love.

00:16:45.000 Let's have a look at their study.

00:16:47.000 Look at this.

00:16:47.000 It says, look, they found one serious adverse event for each eight of 800 vaccinees.

00:16:54.000 That translates to about 1,250 serious events for each million vaccine recipients.

00:16:59.000 OK, so that's their data there.

00:17:02.000 Consider a one in 800 risk of serious accident One in 100,000.

00:17:05.000 One in 100,000.

00:17:05.000 They pulled that thing.

00:17:06.000 And look at this one.

00:17:07.000 The 1976 swine flu vaccine was withdrawn after it was associated with Guillain-Barre syndrome

00:17:12.000 at a rate of approximately one in 100,000.

00:17:15.000 One in 100,000, they pulled that thing.

00:17:18.000 And look at this one.

00:17:20.000 The rotavirus vaccine, Rotashield, was withdrawn following reports of interception

00:17:24.000 in about one or two in 10,000.

00:17:27.000 So it shows you that if you don't grant vaccine manufacturers legal indemnity,

00:17:32.000 then get that thing off the shelves.

00:17:34.000 For some reason they wanted legal immunity.

00:17:37.000 Am I right in saying that?

00:17:38.000 Did they get granted legal immunity?

00:17:39.000 Did I make that up or is that an actual fact?

00:17:41.000 No, they did.

00:17:42.000 There was another element to that that was interesting that they were saying the DHHS reports the Yeah, we'll pull it back to the last slide, please.

00:17:50.000 So DHHS, Department of Health and Human Services, that is reported the rate for other vaccines is only one or two per million.

00:17:57.000 So there's a massive disparity in what these guys are saying that they've found.

00:18:00.000 Yeah, versus a million versus 800.

00:18:02.000 So broadly speaking, the good news is this.

00:18:05.000 Generally speaking, if you're taking a vaccine, they have studied it for adverse events.

00:18:10.000 The bad news is this particular vaccine according to this one study, it's me responsible I don't know

00:18:16.000 actually I was joking when I said they were my favorite scientists I've never heard of them

00:18:20.000 before but according to their study you know it's up to a one in 800. Let me know in the comments

00:18:24.000 let me know in the chat if you think that these figures are somehow being biased by an incentive

00:18:30.000 or an agenda or if there's sort of this conversation wants to be broadened out.

00:18:35.000 You know I think that is one of their points as well Russ like lower down in the article one

00:18:40.000 on those things that they say is regrettably our analysis was hindered by

00:18:43.000 an addressable problem.

00:18:44.000 The individual level data that could confirm or refute our analysis have not been made public.

00:18:49.000 So what they're saying is, these are the findings that we, based on the data we had access to that we found, and that we're presenting them to, they differ from what we've been told.

00:18:57.000 By the authorities but if you gave us access to the actual information we could do this properly but that's the problem that it's not.

00:19:03.000 In my experience when people are denied access to files that's always good news.

00:19:08.000 Whether it's JFK who as you know was killed by a lone gunman with no CIA involvement that's why still in 2023 the information has to be heavily redacted or Pfizer booting their information 75 years into the future, into a world of jetpacks and hovercrafts where we can finally know or get access to the information that these scientists would have liked to have used as part of the basis for their research.

00:19:34.000 So bearing that in mind, at least with regard to these particularly intrepid scientists, it's potentially as much as 1 in 800 adverse events.

00:19:45.000 Let's look at the rest of that WHO piece of propaganda.

00:19:48.000 The level of bombast And for me there's a correlation between those two things because the reason that there's a requirement for so much promo, legal indemnity, borderline mandating, crushing protest movements, censoring, as the Twitter files have revealed, any opposition or dissent to these arguments, for me that suggests that there is an alternative way of viewing this information.

00:20:15.000 Have a look at this.

00:20:16.000 The COVID vaccine, even after vaccines became widely available, and now the anti-vaccine activism is expanding across the world, even into low- and middle-income countries.

00:20:27.000 It's a killing force.

00:20:28.000 Well, that's a very interesting point, isn't it, about low- and middle-income countries, because one of the issues that pro-vaccine people said at the time is, OK, if these vaccines are so great, then let's get them to these low-income countries.

00:20:41.000 But people like Bill Gates said at the time, Right.

00:20:43.000 They won't know how to do it in their factories.

00:20:45.000 It's not just a simple matter of removing patents, Gareth.

00:20:48.000 Over there in, you know, poor countries, they're over there in their factories.

00:20:53.000 They'll be running around spilling stuff.

00:20:56.000 They're not going to achieve a rate as near to perfection as only one in 800 adverse events.

00:21:01.000 They can't do that!

00:21:02.000 They're too clumsy!

00:21:03.000 So again, are they good or are they not?

00:21:06.000 You have to make your mind up.

00:21:07.000 And you have to tell us in the chat what you think is behind this.

00:21:10.000 If you joined us from YouTube, I hope you're enjoying access to this kind of content.

00:21:14.000 Believe me, the reason that we are on this platform is simply because we trust in your ability to discern for yourselves what is true, what is right for you.

00:21:23.000 And for your loved ones, that we don't believe that you need to have a paternal relationship with the state and media organisations, that you're intelligent enough, intuitive enough and beautiful enough to determine for yourselves what you need to do for your own advancement, benefit and wellness.

00:21:39.000 Have a look at this propaganda.

00:21:40.000 Anti-science now kills more people than things like gun violence, global terrorism, nuclear proliferation, or cyber attacks.

00:21:48.000 And now it's become a political movement in the U.S.

00:21:51.000 It's linked to far-extremism on the far right.

00:21:53.000 Buy you!

00:21:54.000 Yeah, also, all these things that they're talking about, like global terrorism, why does terrorism happen?

00:21:59.000 Should we, like, go down the route of how terrorism happened?

00:22:01.000 How did ISIS happen?

00:22:03.000 What were the things that led up to that happening?

00:22:05.000 I'll fill this one.

00:22:06.000 There was these baddies over in, I believe it was Iraqi land. 1.00

00:22:10.000 They simply wouldn't give us their oil nicely.

00:22:13.000 So what we had to do, we pull over the statue, make a real point of it, put the bag over Saddam Hussein's head. 0.84

00:22:20.000 Right.

00:22:20.000 And now we can rebuild Iraq and Halliburton, I believe, made a quid or two.

00:22:24.000 Not a penny.

00:22:25.000 No, Halliburton!

00:22:26.000 You think Halliburton next year will be telling me that our sponsors Raytheon make those missiles to turn a few quid rather than just to provide lethal aid to the people who need it most.

00:22:35.000 The point about this is you've got a kind of social media savvy and friendly piece of propaganda here.

00:22:35.000 There they go.

00:22:42.000 You know it's done in that 4x3, it's on Instagram.

00:22:46.000 Really being extremely reductive about not just vaccine hesitancy.

00:22:49.000 Yeah, gun violence, terrorism.

00:22:51.000 They're hugely reductive about there's just these awful things and now this is the latest one.

00:22:51.000 But all of these things.

00:22:55.000 And then you've got scientists like the ones we've just read who are saying what we need is actual data to be able to give proper opinions on this so that we don't create this polarisation.

00:23:05.000 And what they're saying is we're not getting the data.

00:23:08.000 I'm going to have to ask you to cool down! 0.74

00:23:09.000 Sorry mate.

00:23:10.000 You're getting very passionate!

00:23:11.000 I'm passionate about it.

00:23:12.000 You're getting very passionate about the nature of this propaganda and reductivism, and I got a message here from Rick Rubin.

00:23:18.000 Rick Rubin, is it on Friday's show that we're doing Rick?

00:23:18.000 Lovely.

00:23:21.000 Yeah, on Friday I have a wonderful conversation with Rick Rubin.

00:23:23.000 You're gonna, absolutely, some people say they love the passion.

00:23:26.000 No!

00:23:26.000 Too much passion!

00:23:27.000 No, it's good passion, Gal.

00:23:28.000 Great.

00:23:29.000 Like, this is, listen to this, you'll love this.

00:23:31.000 20th century elites and institutions relied on having a much less chaotic and engulfing information environment.

00:23:36.000 Politicians, journalists and academics now are overwhelmed by A. What they don't know that others do know and they think of, for example, think of a citizen using a cell phone to cover events sooner and more completely than paid journalists and B. By the amount that others know about them that they used to be able to keep secret.

00:23:54.000 Think of President Kennedy, for example, trying to get away of his sexual escapades in today's environment.

00:23:59.000 The elites cannot accept the new reality that there is so much... This isn't by Rick Rubin, by the way.

00:24:03.000 Oh, it's very good.

00:24:04.000 It's good.

00:24:05.000 It's from a... I think we... I've looked at the book it's from, and I think we can get the person on as a guest unless they're, you know, dead or something.

00:24:12.000 The elites cannot accept the new reality there's so much information they cannot control.

00:24:16.000 They see new competitors as illegitimate, fake news, and they blame others for the elites' loss of status and respect.

00:24:22.000 The general public is frustrated by the arrogance of the elites and they have the means to assemble revolts.

00:24:27.000 This has happened everywhere from the Arab Spring to the Yellow Vests to the controversial January the 6th riot.

00:24:32.000 These results have no organisation so they end up not accomplishing much.

00:24:36.000 Society, it says here, requires authority but the existing authorities can seemingly do nothing other than hope for a return to the 20th century when they had closer to a monopoly on information and they seem to be completely incapable of dealing with the digital world.

00:24:49.000 They cannot operate at internet speed, It takes the bureaucracy too long to react to events on an internet scale, and it cites here the Obamacare website fiasco, and talks about the likelihood of an emergence of new elites in order that are adept at coping with the type of information age that we are living in now.

00:25:07.000 And what story better illustrates these changes than the Twitter file story?

00:25:12.000 I'm very excited to... Oh, are we doing... No, is it a hero vid now?

00:25:16.000 It's a presentation.

00:25:17.000 Put the thing in the right place, for Christ's sake.

00:25:20.000 So in a minute we're going to be talking to Michael Schellenberger.

00:25:25.000 Michael Schellenberger is coming on here to talk to us about revelations from the Twitter files.

00:25:30.000 It's going to be a fantastic conversation.

00:25:31.000 I'm going to ask him very specifically and particularly about the inability to control data within the new technological environment that we find ourselves in and how that's led to more surveillance, more censorship and demonization of dissenting voices.

00:25:44.000 You can see now that that's on the rise not just because of That polarity is part of social media spaces and appears to be required but also because that's how centralised authority can manage dissent, you know?

00:25:57.000 Okay, so listen, we've got a wonderful presentation for you now and I think you're going to like it.

00:26:02.000 It's very good.

00:26:04.000 It's a good presentation.

00:26:05.000 We worked on it together, didn't we, Gareth?

00:26:06.000 Yeah, you're very good in it.

00:26:08.000 Do I come across as amenable?

00:26:09.000 Funny?

00:26:10.000 Good.

00:26:11.000 Because as you are aware, if you're an American or even if you're Canadian or from some other country that I've not even heard of yet, where are you watching us?

00:26:18.000 Let me know in the chat.

00:26:19.000 Kevin McCarthy became the new Speaker of the House.

00:26:21.000 You know that already.

00:26:22.000 He had to do a bunch of deals with hardline Republicans, including lowering the massive recent Pentagon budget.

00:26:29.000 So what we're asking in this presentation, Are Republicans, and particularly the hard Republican right, now the anti-war party?

00:26:38.000 And what does that say about politics in general?

00:26:39.000 What does that say about liberalism?

00:26:41.000 And neo-liberalism?

00:26:42.000 And God!

00:26:43.000 The devil! 0.96

00:26:44.000 Hell! 0.84

00:26:44.000 See, I'm quite passionate. 0.84

00:26:44.000 Heaven! 0.84

00:26:46.000 Here's the news.

00:26:46.000 I'm a passionate man.

00:26:47.000 No, here's the effing news.

00:26:48.000 Kevin McCarthy has finally, after a number of deals, become the Speaker of the House, including reducing the

00:27:02.000 Pentagon budget.

00:27:03.000 But why is the Pentagon budget so high, twice as high as it was during an actual war?

00:27:08.000 What's going on in there?

00:27:12.000 If you're watching this in the United States of America, you'll be well aware that Kevin McCarthy has just become Speaker of the House, the third most powerful person within the US political system, and that it was a protracted and complex process to get him there.

00:27:24.000 They involved making deals with hardline Republicans, which means Trump-supporting Republicans, who advocated for a reduction in the Pentagon budget.

00:27:32.000 Why is it that the people that are regarded as the hard right, and I'm just talking about the mainstream perspective on these people, are the only anti-war voices?

00:27:40.000 Has the establishment become so co-opted?

00:27:42.000 Has the liberal establishment ultimately become part of the war machine?

00:27:46.000 And if so, what does liberalism mean?

00:27:48.000 What does democracy mean when these kind of deals are getting done?

00:27:51.000 And why are we not being offered genuine democracy where we're offered the opportunity to talk about the vast amount of money that's spent on a war machine in a country that, according to them, isn't even in a war?

00:28:02.000 His changing relationship with President Trump from frostiness to warmth has fueled accusations of a transactional and malleable leader driven by the pursuit of power more than any specific ideological goal.

00:28:17.000 That's all of them, isn't it?

00:28:18.000 Let's see what's going on.

00:28:19.000 Kevin McCarthy agreed to a series of concessions that have been criticised by both centrist Republicans and Democrats in order to win over hardline Republican dissenters in his House Speakership bid that took 15 rounds of voting.

00:28:30.000 McCarthy agreed to cap discretionary spending at the levels they were at the beginning of the Biden administration, which could reduce national defence spending by $75 billion.

00:28:39.000 Which could be regarded as a positive thing, and not that long ago would have been regarded as a left-wing talking point.

00:28:46.000 That would have been the purview of the Democrats.

00:28:48.000 You know, peaceniks.

00:28:49.000 You can't keep having all these crazy wars, man, going over foreign countries and telling them how to run their world just in order to prop up the military-industrial complex.

00:28:56.000 That's now the job of, like, Trump supporters.

00:28:59.000 The proposal will no doubt face serious headwinds from more hawkish members of Congress, especially given that this year's Pentagon budget boost easily passed both the House and the Senate.

00:29:07.000 Regardless of the outcome, the proposed deal highlights a significant shift in Republican politics that has taken place in recent years.

00:29:13.000 As Bill Hartung of the Quincy Institute told Responsible Statecraft, GOP lawmakers often gave the Pentagon a pass when they talked about curbing big government, but many Freedom Caucus members now seem determined to cut the military down to size.

00:29:25.000 Those of us that grew up concerned, for example, about the legitimacy of the Iraq war would never have imagined that it would be the Republican Party, let alone the right of the Republican Party, that was advocating for less military expenditure.

00:29:38.000 It shows you now that liberalism has become the new conservative elite, that they have been co-opted by the financial industry and the military-industrial complex, and that the renegade voices, peculiarly, are coming from the right.

00:29:51.000 Whether or not you agree with their social ideology, and I know that a lot of you will and a lot of you won't, It has to be said that the Democrats are now the party of the establishment.

00:30:00.000 This is by Chris Hedges, available on his substat.

00:30:02.000 The Democrats position themselves as the party of virtue, cloaking their support for the war industry in moral language, stretching back to Korea and Vietnam.

00:30:11.000 All the wars they support and fund are good wars.

00:30:14.000 All the enemies they fight, the latest being Russia's Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping, are incarnations of evil.

00:30:20.000 The photo of a beaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris holding up a signed Ukrainian battle flag behind Zelensky as he addressed Congress was another example of the Democratic Party's abject subservience to the war machine.

00:30:33.000 So I suppose that in order to serve a war machine, you have to justify the conflict,

00:30:38.000 you have to simplify the narrative and say that these people are egregious villains with

00:30:43.000 malfeasant agenda and this is like a benign benevolent kind, but you know usually life is 0.93

00:30:49.000 a little more complicated than that and the route to war is more complex and my suspicion is involves

00:30:53.000 capital and finance and profit. There once was a wing of the democratic party that questioned and

00:30:58.000 stood up to the war industry but that opposition evaporated along with the anti-war movement.

00:31:03.000 The opposition to the perpetual funding of the war in Ukraine has come primarily from Republicans, 11 in the Senate and 57 in the House, several such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, unhinged conspiracy theorists.

00:31:14.000 That's what it requires!

00:31:15.000 This lust for war is dangerous, pushing us into a potential war with Russia, and perhaps later with China, each in nuclear power.

00:31:21.000 It is also economically ruinous.

00:31:23.000 The monopolization of capital by the military has driven U.S.

00:31:26.000 debt to over $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the U.S.

00:31:29.000 GDP of $24 trillion.

00:31:31.000 Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year.

00:31:34.000 We spend more on the military than the next nine countries, including China and Russia combined.

00:31:38.000 Military spending next year is on track to reach its highest level in inflation-adjusted terms since the peaks in the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars between 2008 and 2011, and the second highest in inflation-adjusted terms since World War II, a level that is more than the budgets of the next ten largest cabinet agencies combined.

00:31:55.000 So I suppose that the power of the American war machine is more powerful than the next 10 countries combined and the next 10 departments within the US political system combined.

00:32:08.000 In a sense, it is fair, and you tell me in the comments if you agree with this, to regard America as essentially wrapped around a certain set of interests.

00:32:17.000 That can be tracked financially.

00:32:20.000 That all of the subsequent cultural artifacts and apparent political procedures seem to, regardless of who is in office, lead to this enhanced expenditure.

00:32:29.000 And I suppose that's why it's interesting that the right of the Republican Party is the only place where you would find anti-war radicalism.

00:32:37.000 Even if it isn't underwritten in the way we might previously have understood it by sort of long hairs and flowers down the barrel of a gun but more a kind of libertarian unwillingness to spend American tax dollars on foreign wars or perhaps even more precisely extract American tax dollars from ordinary people and put them into the hands of corporations and I as a person that would not that long ago have regarded myself as a sort of left-wing person now I don't think that either of those wings have any validity can See the rationale in that argument.

00:33:07.000 Let me know in the chat, let me know in the comments what you think.

00:33:28.000 That means that their ties to enterprises that transcend democratic procedure, like the financial industry, the military industrial complex, are so entrenched that ultimately they cannot operate at the service of ordinary people because they are owned.

00:33:43.000 They have been co-opted by transcendent interests.

00:33:45.000 On the eve of every congressional vote on the Pentagon budget, lobbyists from businesses tied to the war industry meet with Congress members and their staff to push them to vote for the budget to protect jobs in their district or state.

00:33:55.000 This pressure, coupled with the mantra amplified by the media that opposition to the profligate war funding is unpatriotic, keeps elected officials in bondage.

00:34:03.000 These politicians also depend on the lavish donations from the weapons manufacturers to fund their campaigns.

00:34:08.000 So in a sense, it is ultimately theatre.

00:34:10.000 What we participate in every four years, or at the midterms in your country, Amounts to just the sort of shuffling of personnel that will ultimately fulfill their will and interests of the organizations that fund them.

00:34:23.000 So even to call it a democracy at this point is kind of ridiculous because you can't meaningfully impact or manipulate how your money will ultimately be spent.

00:34:32.000 So you find yourself in a position where you have to think, well how can I extract myself from that system?

00:34:36.000 What do I do if neither of those parties suit me anymore?

00:34:39.000 If my interests are not represented on any level.

00:34:42.000 And of course none of us really have time to think like that, either because of financial and economic pressure, or because we're being continually agitated by what's commonly known as the culture war, forgetting that most people have more interests in common with one another than they do with these elite institutions that are vacuuming all of your resources into a centralised pool, and where their ability to prohibit that is being continually curtailed.

00:35:03.000 In a quirk of fate, the day's drama took place as the rest of America marked the anniversary of the 6th of January attack on the Capitol.

00:35:12.000 If the reality is that the movements and decisions that are made in Congress is ultimately determined by the expenditure of the lobbying industry and the financial interests of the people in Congress, which I would say is pretty clear that that's what's happening, why all the sanctimony and sentimentality?

00:35:26.000 Oh no, January the 6th!

00:35:28.000 Ta-da! 1.00

00:35:28.000 Putting up a new board for Kevin McCarthy. 1.00

00:35:30.000 Just leave up the old one for Nancy Pelosi! 1.00

00:35:33.000 It's gonna be the same sort of deals that go on.

00:35:35.000 Instead of Apple, it'll be Raytheon.

00:35:37.000 Instead of Facebook, it'll be Lockheed Martin.

00:35:39.000 Who cares?

00:35:40.000 Who do you think is ultimately benefiting?

00:35:42.000 How is your life going to be changed by what takes place?

00:35:45.000 We've just heard how it truly functions.

00:35:47.000 Oh January 6th, that was a terrible time.

00:35:49.000 That's where we do some of our best corruption in there! 0.90

00:35:52.000 Bridges, roads, levees, rail, port, electric grid, sewage treatment plants and drinking water infrastructures are structurally deficient and antiquated.

00:36:00.000 Schools are in disrepair and lack sufficient teachers and staff.

00:36:03.000 You sort of forget, don't you, that there are different ways to organise society.

00:36:06.000 There is different ways to spend money.

00:36:08.000 There are different ways of empowering communities and the individual.

00:36:10.000 All this is forgotten in a giddy blur of too much information, so much propaganda, so much of this impossible discern that, oh, actually, yeah, you could probably break these budgets down, empower states and communities within that state, elect democratically, spend that money, allow people to culturally live however they want to, whether that's right-wing or left-wing or religious or irreligious or whatever.

00:36:33.000 Unable to stem the Covid-19 pandemic, the for-profit healthcare industry forces families, including those with insurance, into bankruptcy.

00:36:40.000 Domestic manufacturing, especially with the offshoring of jobs to China, Vietnam, Mexico and other nations that you're supposed to hate, collapses.

00:36:48.000 Families are drowning in personal debt, with 63% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck.

00:36:53.000 These are all issues that could be altered and resolved in a true democracy.

00:36:58.000 There isn't nothing you can do about that.

00:36:59.000 There's a clear process of the extraction of wealth taking place and we just have to be distracted from that with bombast and bludgeoning and terrifying information and an inability to critically think.

00:37:10.000 Seymour Mellman, who coined the term permanent war economy, noted that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its discretionary budget on past, current and future military operations.

00:37:21.000 Half of all of its money.

00:37:22.000 So half of it goes on everything else and half of it goes on war.

00:37:26.000 But we're not in a war.

00:37:27.000 Yeah, but what about past wars?

00:37:28.000 And we are in a little war.

00:37:29.000 And what about future war?

00:37:31.000 Christmas carol?

00:37:31.000 What is this?

00:37:33.000 It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government.

00:37:35.000 Right, that is the business of government.

00:37:37.000 The military-industrial establishment is nothing more than gilded corporate welfare.

00:37:41.000 Military systems are sold before they're produced.

00:37:43.000 Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns.

00:37:47.000 Massive profits are guaranteed.

00:37:48.000 For example, this November, the army awarded Raytheon Technologies a loan, more than $2 billion in contracts, on top of over $190 million awarded in August to deliver missile systems to expand or replenish weapons sent to Ukraine.

00:38:00.000 You better believe that war's important, baby. 1.00

00:38:02.000 You better believe that Putin's evil and that Zelensky's like, might as well be Joey from Friends. 0.95

00:38:07.000 Because if you try and look for any more complexity than that, you might start thinking, could you build us a school or something?

00:38:12.000 Or at least half a school?

00:38:13.000 You can have none of a school and two weapons systems.

00:38:13.000 No.

00:38:19.000 Despite a depressed market for most other businesses, stock prices of Lockheed and Northrop Grumman have risen by more than 36% and 50% this year.

00:38:26.000 I wonder if any people in Congress have invested in them?

00:38:29.000 Tech giants including Amazon, which supplies surveillance and facial recognition software to the police and FBI, have been absorbed into the permanent war economy.

00:38:36.000 Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle were awarded multi-billion dollar cloud computing contracts for the joint warfighting cloud capability and are eligible to receive nine billion dollars in Pentagon contracts to provide the military with globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels from the strategic level to the tactical edge through mid-2028.

00:38:56.000 So we know roughly when that war will end.

00:38:58.000 Foreign aid is given to countries that require foreign governments to buy weapons systems from the US.

00:39:03.000 The US public funds the research, development and building of the weapons systems and purchases them for foreign governments.

00:39:10.000 Such a circular system mocks the idea of a free market economy.

00:39:13.000 You pay for it!

00:39:14.000 And you develop it.

00:39:15.000 But when it comes to the profit, that's the bit where it disappears.

00:39:18.000 You're with it all the way.

00:39:19.000 So we're going to be developing some missiles.

00:39:21.000 Oh god, that's good.

00:39:22.000 That's fascinating.

00:39:22.000 And now we're going to be selling those missiles.

00:39:24.000 Oh, great.

00:39:24.000 Good luck.

00:39:25.000 And now we're going to be dropping those missiles on, broadly speaking, innocent people.

00:39:28.000 Oh, nice.

00:39:29.000 Nice work.

00:39:30.000 And, uh, did you make any money on that?

00:39:30.000 Great.

00:39:32.000 Mind your own fucking goddamn business! 1.00

00:39:34.000 These weapons soon become obsolete and are replaced by updated and usually more costly weapons systems. 1.00

00:39:39.000 So even if they don't use them, they have to update them like an iPhone.

00:39:42.000 I don't think people care whether the bomb that was dropped on them was obsolete.

00:39:45.000 Oh my God!

00:39:46.000 That's like an iPhone 3!

00:39:47.000 This is barely gonna hurt at all!

00:39:49.000 It is, in economic terms, a dead end.

00:39:51.000 It sustains nothing but the permanent war economy. 0.61

00:39:54.000 So I suppose all you have to do is look at who benefits from this situation, and then that's who's determining the situation.

00:39:59.000 What we're told is, this is inevitable and unavoidable, there's all this evil going on, and then, oh, what a convenient side effect of this terrible pandemic, war, or whatever, is that these people are making loads of money.

00:40:10.000 Yeah, I know, it's a shame and a weird coincidence, isn't it?

00:40:13.000 And to point that out is, of course, a conspiracy.

00:40:15.000 In 2014, the US backed a coup in Ukraine that installed a government that included neo-Nazis and was antagonistic to Russia.

00:40:21.000 The coup triggered a civil war when the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, the Donbass, sought to secede from the country, resulting in over 14,000 people dead and nearly 150,000 people displaced before Russia invaded in February.

00:40:32.000 The Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to Jacques Balde, a former NATO Secretary Advisor who also worked for Swiss intelligence, was instigated by the escalation of Ukraine's war on the Donbass.

00:40:43.000 It also followed the Biden administration's rejection of proposals sent by the Kremlin in late 2021, which might have averted Russia's invasion the following year.

00:40:50.000 So I don't think anyone is saying that Putin is anything other than a warlord, a tyrant, a dictator.

00:40:55.000 I don't think anyone's saying that wouldn't it be great to live in Russia or that the Ukrainian people's suffering isn't real and horrific.

00:41:01.000 Just pointing out that there's all of this profiteering and there's all of this agitation.

00:41:07.000 And why aren't the mainstream media telling you?

00:41:09.000 Let me know in the chat.

00:41:10.000 Let me know in the comments why you think that might be.

00:41:12.000 The invasion has led to widespread US and EU sanctions on Russia, which have boomeranged onto Europe.

00:41:17.000 Inflation ravages Europe with the sharp curtailment of shipments of Russian oil and gas.

00:41:21.000 Industry, especially in Germany, is crippled.

00:41:23.000 In most of Europe, it's a winter of shortages, spiralling prices, and misery.

00:41:27.000 One might imagine when they were coming up with this strategy that extracts all of these public tax dollars from American people, puts them in the hands of private industry, that a likely outcome would be sanctions between Russia and Europe.

00:41:38.000 And of course, it would be quite quick to calculate that, well, that's not really going to Affect us much, is it?

00:41:42.000 Because I'm not impoverished and living in Europe unable to pay a gas bill.

00:41:46.000 When you have a stratified society where the most powerful people are not affected by the consequences of their actions, you are going to get actions that are negative to ordinary people.

00:41:55.000 That is what democracy is supposed to prevent.

00:41:58.000 But when you have a democracy that is already sewn up and stitched up by lobbying and vested interests and a convergence of interests, even where there isn't conspiracy, what you're going to end up with is one strata of society that's doing incredibly well and hundreds of millions of people that are suffering Does that sound familiar?

00:42:13.000 But that's just what I think.

00:42:14.000 Let me know what you think in the chat and the comments.

00:42:15.000 I'll see you in a minute.

00:42:25.000 Thanks for staying with us.

00:42:27.000 Thanks for joining us on Stay Free with Russell Brand.

00:42:29.000 I'm really excited about the next guest, Gareth, because along with Barry Weiss and Matt Taibbi, Elon Musk's chosen journalist, See where I'm going?

00:42:40.000 I do.

00:42:41.000 He is one of the, what I'm calling, the free musketeers.

00:42:43.000 As a pun, I've made it up myself.

00:42:45.000 Free musketeers. 0.89

00:42:46.000 It's Michael Schellenberger.

00:42:47.000 Journalist, author, significant writer and free thinker.

00:42:52.000 Michael, thank you so much for joining us.

00:42:54.000 We're so excited to have you.

00:42:55.000 Great to be with you.

00:42:57.000 You're lovely.

00:42:58.000 Now, first of all, Michael, I've got an important question.

00:43:02.000 If Donald Trump can be kicked off Twitter, I suppose it's an acknowledgement that his power came from this direct contact with, like, his audience, the public, the electorate.

00:43:12.000 If it's possible to do that, what level of power does that indicate that social media companies like Twitter have?

00:43:19.000 And having seen the operative footprint of that power, what can you deduce, mate?

00:43:27.000 Yeah, I mean, the short answer is too much power.

00:43:29.000 I mean, I think you obviously I was listening to your show and you're talking about the power that YouTube has in terms of censoring often accurate information.

00:43:38.000 We've seen this across different social media platforms.

00:43:41.000 You may have seen that.

00:43:41.000 In fact, one of the state attorneys general in the United States from Missouri just published an email a couple of days ago.

00:43:50.000 That is from a Facebook executive to the White House saying that they are censoring accurate information about COVID because they're worried that it will be misleading.

00:44:02.000 So we're seeing an absolute abuse of power, an absolute abuse of freedom of speech.

00:44:09.000 We saw behaviors by FBI agents that were chilling.

00:44:12.000 I mean, just to open these emails, Russell, and to read the kind of exchanges between the White House And supposedly an independent corporation and seeing the behaviors and the ways in which these behaviors changed over time and the way that these Twitter executives basically got with the FBI program.

00:44:30.000 And you saw him kind of getting worn away.

00:44:32.000 We also saw FBI deciding.

00:44:35.000 I'm sorry.

00:44:36.000 We also saw Twitter executives changing their policy and deciding to take money from the FBI three million dollars.

00:44:43.000 And this is a source of some controversy and some misinformation, but basically.

00:44:48.000 It's true that there is a law that allows social media companies to take money from FBI if they're working with FBI in a criminal investigation, but there was some apparent awareness within Twitter that this creates a conflict of interest.

00:45:01.000 So, the fact that the FBI is paying you to help them to maybe catch bad guys.

00:45:06.000 That I think we would all agree should be caught.

00:45:09.000 It also creates, I think, a conflict of interest for Twitter executives when working on FBI around requests that don't have anything to do with the criminal investigation and are, in fact, potential infringements on our freedom of speech.

00:45:22.000 I suppose primarily what these revelations have illustrated is just how close the connections between the deep state and social media organizations are.

00:45:35.000 And during the The argument that was offered prior at least to Musk's tenure is that this is a private organization, they're allowed to have whatever policy they want, but it seems that they were being to an astonishing and as you say chilling degree being directed by deep state interests and I suppose one can only assume that elsewhere in the social media space and even in the mainstream media

00:46:02.000 comparable directives are being issued. Does that mean, Michael, that we live in a kind of curated reality?

00:46:11.000 And when we sort of other the Chinese internet as this sort of heavily censored space,

00:46:16.000 we're being quite naive and perhaps ourselves live in a comparable reality.

00:46:21.000 Yes. Well, there's a lot there that you said, and there's a lot to unpack here.

00:46:27.000 But I mean, I think that, so first of all, when you see the relationship where people are working at the FBI in senior roles, including the Deputy Chief of Staff, which is a very powerful position, and the Chief Legal Counsel, the top lawyer at the FBI, these are two very senior, powerful positions, reporting to the Director or to the Chief of Staff.

00:46:46.000 Then going to Twitter the same month, June of 2020, Knowing that FBI has had the Hunter Biden laptop since December 2019, so for a full seven months, FBI was spying on Rudy Giuliani, including at the moment that he gave the Hunter Biden laptop

00:47:06.000 First of all, when he acquired the Hunter Biden laptop, and then when he gave it to the New York Post, and then you see these former FBI officials inside of Twitter demanding that the New York Post story about the Hunter Biden laptop be censored.

00:47:19.000 That's highly suspicious behavior.

00:47:21.000 I don't have proof that there was a conspiracy, meaning an organized secret effort by the FBI and former FBI Agents and executives.

00:47:34.000 I don't have that proof, but we do have evidence of a series of extremely troubling behaviors.

00:47:40.000 And it's because we brought those behaviors and that pattern to light through the Twitter files that the U.S.

00:47:46.000 Congress yesterday just voted to open up a special subcommittee to investigate The so-called weaponization of federal government agencies.

00:47:56.000 It's the front page of the New York Times, a big story here.

00:47:59.000 This is very serious.

00:48:00.000 This is we are potentially looking at what could be criminal activity by FBI agents and officials, both inside the government and potentially outside the government.

00:48:12.000 So this is not a kind of this is not just about like people at Twitter being biased.

00:48:17.000 We had that already.

00:48:19.000 This is about a serious A serious potential criminal activities and abuse of power by our highest law enforcement agency in the United States and doing so in a way that absolutely if these charges of this, this pattern is what it looks like.

00:48:34.000 Not only is it depriving Americans freedom of speech.

00:48:38.000 And restricting our choices, it's also potentially interfering in the election, which is, you can imagine is 1 of the most serious crimes in the United States.

00:48:47.000 Yes, it would appear that that would be an extraordinary revelation and it seems, Michael, given the nature of what we have learned in no small degree due to your reporting, that it would be naive to foreclose on the possibility of even more sensational truths becoming apparent.

00:49:10.000 Do you think, Michael, that the way that the information age has altered our ability to communicate and convey data and potentially organise has meant that there's had to be a radical escalation in censorship and demonisation of dissenting voices and it's inevitably led to a kind of clumsiness and overreach?

00:49:34.000 Yes.

00:49:34.000 I mean, I think that yesterday I published an article that's an interview with, I think, one of the best thinkers on this named Martin Goury, who wrote a book called The Revolt of the Public.

00:49:48.000 Martin is a former top CIA media analyst, and what he argues is that basically the internet allows anybody, it allows you and me, To freely speak our minds at length, produce evidence.

00:50:01.000 And we're not constricted by just the major TV stations or newspapers that the Internet has really changed everything in terms.

00:50:09.000 And so that what you're seeing is a backlash by the elite against these new freedoms that were allowed for by this technological revolution of the Internet in general and by social media in particular.

00:50:23.000 Which just kind of radicalizes what was already pretty amazing with websites and emails turn radicalizes it with YouTube and Twitter and other social media.

00:50:31.000 So, for sure, you're seeing an effort by elites to basically put the genie back in the bottle to try to get the kind of control over the news media that they have taken for granted in a lot of ways.

00:50:43.000 I mean, that was part of what.

00:50:44.000 I haven't really said yet, but basically we also discovered a real manipulation of journalists at the New York Times, Washington Post, other organizations through something called the Aspen Institute, which is like the it's like the original Davos of the United States.

00:51:00.000 I mean, it's it's in Aspen and it's basically except for they do during the summer, but it's basically they did a workshop to kind of.

00:51:10.000 If I'm being nice about it, to educate journalists about the potential of a Russian hack and leak operation, maybe less generously an effort to brainwash journalists into seeing a future story about the Hunter Biden laptop, As a result of Russian disinformation, as opposed to what it was, which was just a very, apparently an intoxicated Hunter Biden dropping off two waterlogged laptops at a computer repair store in Delaware.

00:51:40.000 That's the basic understanding by everybody at this point.

00:51:44.000 And yet the news media, when it came out, all covered it as though it was a result of Russian disinformation.

00:51:50.000 And then of course, a few days later, you had all these former intelligence officials saying it was probably Russian disinformation.

00:51:57.000 And that persuaded a lot of people, including I should say myself, my family, every progressive I know, at the time thought that the Hunter Biden laptop was fake, that it was a result of Russian disinformation.

00:52:10.000 And in fact, so that's why the censorship Was part of the story, but the censorship of the laptop ended, but the perception that it was the result of Russian disinformation remained.

00:52:21.000 And I think, honestly, if we were, I think when you survey the public, a significant percentage of people still believe that that's actually false.

00:52:29.000 That is actual disinformation.

00:52:31.000 And I think the only question now is, did that disinformation originate from within the FBI?

00:52:38.000 Bloody hell, Michael.

00:52:39.000 That's so sort of malignant and sort of desperately cunning.

00:52:43.000 I'm astonished to contemplate it.

00:52:45.000 As you said before, it was evident that there were biases within social media platforms that did a significant amount of the curation basically automatically.

00:52:56.000 But what you have just suggested for me is, as that claim is to Chomsky's observation that even by the time you arrive in a mainstream media organisation, you've already been funnelled into that position.

00:53:11.000 The idea that it's been more weaponised, that people have been coached, teased, presented with cues, much in the manner that you would associate with a hypnotic trick.

00:53:25.000 But you prepare people, you groom people to understand reality in a particular way, so that once the information appears, you've already made the deductions in advance.

00:53:37.000 This subject of misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, it's become quite...

00:53:42.000 Complex set of prefixes now.

00:53:46.000 I understand is to be one of the key subjects of the forthcoming WF.

00:53:52.000 It starts on Monday.

00:53:53.000 We're very excited.

00:53:54.000 We're doing the WF Royal Rumble special for three hours.

00:53:58.000 We're doing the best of Klaus Schwab.

00:54:00.000 I'd like you to join us.

00:54:01.000 As a matter of fact, if you're available, Michael, we're going to do it.

00:54:05.000 Will you?

00:54:05.000 Good.

00:54:05.000 Because I like to watch Davos with friends.

00:54:08.000 I see it a bit like the Superbowl or even Christmas as a time for people to come together in mutual joy and tolerance, love and understanding.

00:54:17.000 What I'm, I suppose what I'm asking is, do you imagine in the way that you just described that there was that sort of educational Aspen event that the WF perhaps functions in a similar way, set in the agenda Yeah, offering opportunities for people to collaborate.

00:54:34.000 Because I want to say this a bit more conversationally.

00:54:38.000 Like, we're not allowed to say certain stuff that we've said in this show on YouTube.

00:54:42.000 And I thought you're allowed to be wrong.

00:54:44.000 It's like, what's the big deal?

00:54:46.000 Even if you're like, wrong, I just think this, is this possible?

00:54:48.000 Like, this level of censorship is terrifying, the way that it's emerging.

00:54:52.000 So, you know, like, what do you imagine we're likely to see at WAF and Davos?

00:54:58.000 And what are the worst things about the WAF and Davos that people aren't talking about and people don't fully understand yet?

00:55:05.000 Well, this is very important.

00:55:06.000 Exactly what you said.

00:55:07.000 I mean, in other words, so on the one hand, we're actually seeing censorship of correct information, okay, by the social media platforms.

00:55:14.000 And we now have email proof from Facebook saying that they censor accurate information for fear that it will be used the wrong way, meaning not to get the vaccine.

00:55:24.000 But we've seen this on climate change.

00:55:25.000 We've seen it on a whole set of other issues where accurate information is being censored.

00:55:29.000 So, but you're right.

00:55:31.000 Even if information is wrong, and there's so much wrong information out there, including by the mainstream news media, including on the Hunter Biden laptop we were just talking about, but also on COVID and so many other issues.

00:55:42.000 On the other hand, though, you have this relentless propaganda from the WEF.

00:55:50.000 Which, by the way, so what's going on at the Davos, I'm sure, as you know, is it's not only a place where they all get together to get on message in terms of the propaganda they want the public to accept, whether it's about covert or climate change or renewables or eating insects.

00:56:06.000 It's also a place where they then are paying each other.

00:56:10.000 So you basically get, if you're making insects that you want people to eat, or you're making renewable solar panels, and you want people to think they're okay even though they're being made by Uighur Muslims in concentration camps, or whatever it is that you're selling, you go and pay WEF to get on stage with World leaders. 1.00

00:56:30.000 And so you basically get this public relations exercise where the newspapers that cover it are being paid by the same people who are a pain to go to Davos.

00:56:40.000 They then all go and promote these products as though they're good.

00:56:44.000 They're often bad products.

00:56:46.000 And then they get heads of state to basically provide that third party validation form.

00:56:50.000 And then what happens after the heads of state leave office, many of them go and work or take money in some way from those companies.

00:56:57.000 So it's basically It's just a kind of festival of corruption and misinformation that occurs every year in plain sight that we're all supposed to applaud and say, oh, thank God for you saving the planet.

00:57:08.000 So what did it tell us then, like, about, what can we glean from it by who is invited and who's not invited?

00:57:15.000 Say someone like Greta Thunberg, who I think, like, she's a, like, righteous person and cares about important issues. 0.95

00:57:23.000 If her voice can be platformed there, what does it indicate?

00:57:29.000 Similarly, with something as controversial as the You know, the pandemic.

00:57:36.000 If, like, you have, like, Albert Baller showcased in such an advantageous way at this event, what else, what might we assume about their intentions?

00:57:48.000 I'm not suggesting Greta Gunfenberg is anything other than a well-intentioned idealist who cares about the planet.

00:57:53.000 I'm talking specifically about the way that that voice is being used.

00:57:58.000 Yeah, I mean, it's like I said, that basically they're going to go get, you know, a charismatic child or heads of state to sell solar panels made by people in concentration camps in China. 0.94

00:58:11.000 That is a fact.

00:58:12.000 And to use them to sell eating insects, which, you know, I've eaten insects before.

00:58:17.000 I didn't care for them.

00:58:20.000 But what's amazing is when you go to the WEF website, they are relentless in selling you that we should all be eating insects.

00:58:28.000 You know, it's a little creepy and pushy.

00:58:31.000 And of course, once you understand there's a commercial motivation behind it, and they're just trying to dress up these pretty terrible products with the kind of glittering propaganda that it's all about saving the planet, it's obviously a manipulation.

00:58:47.000 So you have this relentless propaganda on the one hand from WEF, because people say, oh, it's a conspiracy theory.

00:58:53.000 No, it's happening every year.

00:58:55.000 They're shoving it down our throats.

00:58:58.000 And on the other hand, this very concerted effort by elites to censor accurate information through social media and the news media.

00:59:07.000 I suppose as well as the demonization of dissenters, the increase in censorship, another component appears to be the removal of nuanced discourse.

00:59:20.000 It seems to have created a kind of Conversational reductivism.

00:59:26.000 Why is this, Michael?

00:59:27.000 Why are we unable, why can this system not sustain detailed discourse, opposition?

00:59:36.000 Why is this escalating so quickly?

00:59:40.000 Well, precisely because we're no longer constrained by soundbites.

00:59:44.000 So we have people like you, we have Joe Rogan, you have a whole set of other folks who will do these regular, long-form podcasts and videocasts for hours at a time that allow for a nuanced conversation.

00:59:57.000 So then the relentless propaganda You know, we all must use Chinese solar panels.

01:00:02.000 We all must eat insects.

01:00:04.000 That's a reaction also by the elites.

01:00:07.000 It's a part of the revolts.

01:00:09.000 It's the counter revolution by the elites to the revolt of the public enabled by the Internet.

01:00:14.000 So it's exactly what you said.

01:00:16.000 The insistence on reductionism.

01:00:18.000 Everybody must get the VAX.

01:00:20.000 You know, even if, like, you've had COVID or even if you don't, even if you're, you know, young or you don't want it, I mean, that sort of thing, or everyone must use solar panels made in China. 0.97

01:00:30.000 I mean, this stuff, or eat insects, whatever it is, it's a reaction to people bringing more nuance and complexity and substantive discourse like you and Joe Rogan, people outside the elite channels.

01:00:44.000 You're obviously a threat to a variety of very powerful financial interests.

01:00:50.000 While I can see that this is a new kind of oddly sanitized authoritarianism, more akin to the dystopian depictions of Huxley than in Orwell, although there are in Orwell, you know, in the surveillance, the change of language, the forever war indicators.

01:01:12.000 In terms of the aesthetic, it appears like it's a very sanitary dystopia that we're creating, at least in terms of its aesthetic.

01:01:21.000 When people on the right refer to it as sort of communism, or even the left, I am confused because while I can see there's a lot of centralised power, it seems to be driven primarily by profit.

01:01:34.000 How do you think we can describe what is happening better in order to create new alliances from people that appear to be increasingly being separated and polarised by the cultural war?

01:01:47.000 Well, yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't think communism is a particularly accurate way to describe, you know, capitalist enterprises trying to sell Chinese solar panels and insects to large groups of people.

01:01:59.000 I don't think that really describes it.

01:02:01.000 It's certainly not post, not mid 20th century communism as we understood it.

01:02:06.000 I think that a lot of the environmental stuff is just Malthusianism.

01:02:10.000 It's really based on this idea that there's limited resources and that we all have to use less.

01:02:16.000 Of course, only referring to the public, not to the people who fly their jets into Davos and eat caviar and find foods there, not insects.

01:02:26.000 So I think that there's obvious.

01:02:27.000 So there's this is really, I think, better understood as a problem of elites trying to retain control over a kind of global order that's rapidly going away.

01:02:37.000 I mean, we are not in the post-war or the post-Cold War era anymore.

01:02:42.000 I think that obviously, yeah, as you said, Orwell could not have imagined that we would be actually awash in information, and that's part of what creates this anxiety and even mania among the elites to try to control people, you know, whether it's through identity politics or environmentalism Or through covid that we're seeing elite anxiety manifest as a kind of new authoritarianism.

01:03:08.000 I think the good news it's terrible to witness up close as we have and reading the Twitter files.

01:03:12.000 I think the good news is there's no way they can win because the numbers are against them and.

01:03:19.000 And the information ecosystem is just to it's just the cat's out of the bag at this point.

01:03:24.000 But I do think it's going to be a constant struggle and a lot of chaos.

01:03:28.000 I think what's exciting is that the traditional divides between right and left have been breaking down.

01:03:33.000 And we're now seeing that the big divide is really between the elite and the public.

01:03:39.000 Michael, we have to go now because the show has to end due to the constraints of what is regarded commonly as physical time.

01:03:46.000 It's been so fantastic to speak with you.

01:03:48.000 You can follow Michael at SchellenbergerMD on Twitter.

01:03:53.000 You can read his work on Substack, which I recommend you do, and check out his best-selling book, Apocalypse Never.

01:03:58.000 Michael, will you come and join us for our WEF Davos special if you're awake at that time?

01:04:05.000 What time is it?

01:04:05.000 Yeah, I'd love to.

01:04:07.000 It's gonna be like three hours.

01:04:08.000 We've been doing it for ages.

01:04:09.000 It's called the Royal Rumble.

01:04:10.000 We're gonna really get into it.

01:04:11.000 Yeah, if it's after 6am pacific time.

01:04:16.000 You can wear a dressing gown and everything.

01:04:18.000 It'll be cute.

01:04:20.000 Well, it's like a watch along.

01:04:21.000 Russell, can I also say I'm a huge fan of your outspoken and your very personal story around recovery.

01:04:31.000 That's another passion of mine.

01:04:32.000 I wrote a book on addiction, homelessness, and crime called San Francisco.

01:04:36.000 And we just literally a few days ago created a North American Coalition for Recovery from Homelessness and Addiction.

01:04:44.000 And so at some other point, I would love to talk to you about what we need to do to deal with the addiction crisis, which is really ravaging the United States and other developed economies.

01:04:54.000 I'll help you with that.

01:04:54.000 All right.

01:04:55.000 I'll get the producer that you were in touch with, I bet it was James, to send you my cell phone number and we can communicate and I'll help you in any way I can, which is my duty and my honor.

01:05:06.000 Thank you.

01:05:07.000 Thank you, Michael.

01:05:07.000 Thanks for joining us.

01:05:08.000 Thank you, Russell.

01:05:08.000 See you in your underpants for our Davos special.

01:05:11.000 Did I mention you have to in your underpants?

01:05:13.000 Yeah, it's part of it.

01:05:15.000 Hey, on the show tomorrow we've got Adam Andrzejewski from... Adam Andrzejewski.

01:05:21.000 Adam Andrzejewski.

01:05:22.000 Good.

01:05:23.000 Yeah.

01:05:24.000 You ain't gonna believe this.

01:05:24.000 Guess who's coming on tomorrow?

01:05:25.000 It's Adam Andrzejewski from Open The Books talking about America's public health secrets.

01:05:29.000 That'll be good.

01:05:30.000 Yeah, he's done some amazing work.

01:05:32.000 We've got to get this geezer on.

01:05:33.000 Martin, what's his name?

01:05:34.000 He's come up me twice in 24 hours.

01:05:35.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:05:36.000 We've got to get him on.

01:05:37.000 Yep.

01:05:38.000 And yeah, and on Friday, I've got an amazing conversation between me and Rick Rubin, which you're gonna love.

01:05:45.000 Remember, if you're not a member of our Stay Free AF community yet, join it because you get first access, you get everything first, you get so much proximity to me, it'll probably make you feel a bit sick in the end.

01:05:57.000 It does me.

01:05:57.000 Well, Gareth doesn't feel very well, do you darling?

01:05:59.000 What are you credited as today?

01:06:02.000 Who knows? 0.95

01:06:03.000 You're a lime green menace. 0.98

01:06:05.000 That's what I know you as. 1.00

01:06:06.000 Disruptor. 0.55

01:06:08.000 Actually, that was a nice shot.

01:06:11.000 Yeah, that's why they can't put me up on the monitor because I've just become spellbound.

01:06:14.000 I'm surprised you're literally like a blue screen now.

01:06:18.000 That's right.

01:06:18.000 I don't like any contrast.

01:06:20.000 I like to blend into the background.

01:06:22.000 Always have to.

01:06:22.000 I like to superimpose things.

01:06:25.000 Like Delaware and stuff on you.

01:06:28.000 All right, Gareth.

01:06:30.000 Yes.

01:06:30.000 All right, you lot.

01:06:31.000 Thanks for being with us.

01:06:33.000 We're doing another show tomorrow, aren't we?

01:06:34.000 We certainly are.

01:06:35.000 We'll be back then.

01:06:35.000 Join us then, don't worry.

01:06:36.000 We're always with you.

01:06:37.000 We love you.

01:06:38.000 Join us tomorrow, not for more of the same, but for more of the difference.

01:06:40.000 Stay free till then.

01:06:41.000 Love you.

01:06:42.000 Bye.

01:06:43.000 Many switching, switch on, switch off.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - January 11, 2023

Are The Democrats Now The War Party? - #056 - Stay Free With Russell Brand

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