In this episode of the Awakened Wonder Podcast, we discuss the latest in the Trump-Tucker saga, and why we should all be worried about what s going on within the Democratic Party right now. We also discuss the recent mass shooting in Hawaii, and how we can all work together to help the people of that state, and the rest of the world, in the wake of the recent events. And we have a special guest, Briana Joy Grace, who joins us to talk about what's going on in the Democratic party right now, and whether or not it's time for a new generation to wake up to the fact that something is amiss within the party, and that something needs to be done about it. We also have a new segment called the Stay Free segment, where we re-unite with Russell Brand to discuss his new show, Stay Free With Russell Brand Live, which takes place on September 12th and 13th, at Wembley Park Theatre, London. Stay Free! Stay free! - Russell Brand - Stay Free, . Thank you so much for listening and supporting this podcast, and stay tuned for more episodes in the coming weeks and months. Stay free, you're amazing. - Thank you for being a friend of the show, and we'll see you next Tuesday! Stay woke! . . . Stay free. , Russell Brand - Stay free ! and stay free! - ( ) :) Love, R.S. - R.B. Brand - , R.J., & R. J., , and R. M. . . - SON R. BONUS CONTENT: Stay free? , SONGS! , BRIAN JOY Grace, , J.J. CRUISE , P. S. , , K. MONDAY, September 12/19th, 2019, September 15th, 2020, 2019 , 2019, 6/27, 8/27/2020, 7/8/2020 , 8/9/19, 9/8, 2020 , 6/9, & 8/6, - 7/6/19/19 , 7/7/8 , 9/7, 8/8 /8, 7/5, 6/6
00:00:01.000Over the month of September I'm doing a handful of live shows that are a combination of spirituality, breath work, individual awakening, community building and challenging authority.
00:00:11.000How do you bring down the system while bringing up children?
00:00:15.000Go and sleep! Go and f***ing sleep! Sleep while I have you set them all on fire now!
00:00:20.000How do you try to bring down Bear Grylls while you're on Running Wild with Bear Grylls?
00:00:24.000And Bear Grylls is much better at that stuff than you.
00:00:27.000How do we find new ways of challenging authority while trying to live normal lives?
00:00:33.000So I'll be doing stand-up, breathwork, meditation, as well as conducting polls and votes because I believe democracy works.
00:00:40.000Are you happy with your current government?
00:01:08.000Welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand, where deception and tyranny go to die because you kill them with your own awakening consciousness.
00:01:16.000Where spirituality fuse with political discourse and suddenly there is hope.
00:01:22.000You see the old institutions quake, rattle, and eventually roll like heads in a revolution, baby, for surely that is what's coming.
00:01:31.000We're going to be on YouTube for the first 15 minutes.
00:01:34.000Then we will slide glide and glide over to the other place where we can speak more freely to our fantastic guest, Brianna Joy Grace, who's going to be talking to us about what's going on within the Democrat Party right now.
00:01:46.000What's happening to its patriarchs, forefathers, icons and heroes?
00:01:50.000We'll be talking a little bit about the Obama-Tucker situation.
00:01:53.000We put a poll out and I know you guys want to see it.
00:01:56.000We're going to be talking about We've got your man there, Donald Trump, giving a pretty interesting speech.
00:02:00.000being Let me know if you agree in the comments.
00:02:22.000Obviously, at the time, Gareth Royer, on-screen assistant, friend, wonder man.
00:02:28.000At the time, Donald Trump was obviously pretty pro the vaccines, taking credit from numerous times.
00:02:35.000I don't think a comment on the vaccine is necessary at this point.
00:02:38.000We'll leave that to you guys, especially if you Press the red button and join us in our local's AwakendWonder community.
00:02:43.000You can speak freely in there right now with Book Wench and Neon Grammarian and Claus.
00:02:48.000They're chatting away right now even as we speak.
00:02:51.000Become part of that beautiful little community.
00:02:59.000Given he's a man who's been indicted Wrongly or rightly, let us know in the comments what you think for his role in what's being called an insurrection.
00:03:09.000This is a demand that people begin to disobey in the event of further lockdowns.
00:03:13.000But ask yourself this question, then answer it in your own mind.
00:03:17.000Do the whole conversation in your head if you want, then question yourself about whether or not you've been naive and really give yourself a hard time.
00:03:24.000Do you think it's ever possible that America can be united again after this? Do you think
00:03:29.000post-2024, whoever is in the White House that day, there can be true unity? And what patriotism can
00:03:36.000we offer when we see the people of Hawaii suffering in the way they are? Offered
00:03:41.000insignificant, insufficient help, no real infrastructure there when called upon. I'm not
00:03:45.000saying your country is any worse than mine.
00:03:47.000We learned a comparable thing in a similar disaster, though not of that scale, when a tower
00:03:53.000block burned down, Grenfell, lots of people died there. It was sort of demonstrably due
00:03:58.000to ineptitude, lack of safety measures, poor standards.
00:04:01.000And when the investigations began, they couldn't find anyone that was culpable.
00:04:05.000Your Hawaiian fires, I think, reveal similar things about deep state, ineptitude, and of course, the prioritization.
00:04:14.000So when you, you know, do you care about simply an ongoing sustained war, admittedly, apparently, to help the Ukrainian people who warrant help?
00:04:23.000Or do you want to see American citizens help, particularly when Hawaii, as many people believe, was sort of a colonized place?
00:04:30.000You know, what do you want from Hawaii?
00:04:31.000Do you want Americans that you're going to look after?
00:04:33.000after or do you want a mid-pacific missile base and air force base? Let me know in the
00:04:37.000comments what you think motivates it because I know what the Hawaiian people think right
00:04:40.000now. They think the help is not forthcoming. And to hear Donald Trump's rhetoric at this
00:04:45.000time, to hear former heroic presidents like Barack Obama subject to all manner of peculiar
00:04:51.000inquiry and we'll be talking about that at some depth because I'm of the personal opinion
00:04:55.000that people's private lives are sort of no one else's business barring, you know, real
00:05:01.000And I suppose drugs are a crime, although, to tell you the truth, as a recovering drug addict, I don't think that's anybody else's business.
00:05:06.000But we're not going to talk about that on YouTube because of the restrictive guidelines.
00:05:11.000We'll talk about it sensibly, freely, over in the home of free speech in a minute.
00:05:15.000But let's have a look at Donald Trump there.
00:05:19.000Some of you maybe don't think that lockdowns are a realistic possibility anyway.
00:05:24.000Certainly, though, after what's been revealed in Sweden, we should be cautious before kowtowing again because Sweden, with their much more laissez-faire approach, had a lot better results than the United States.
00:05:35.000Just hands down better results than the United States, isn't it, Cal?
00:05:54.000Did he look interesting in front of this painting?
00:05:56.000Remember, join us, press the red button, join us, and give us a rumble if you're watching on Rumble, and give us a comment if you're watching on YouTube.
00:06:02.000And if you're in the UK, I'm doing a handful of live shows.
00:06:04.000There's a link in the description telling you how you can come and see me live, should such a thing interest you.
00:06:26.000They want to restart the COVID hysteria.
00:06:28.000You know what, and I'm going to ask Brianna Joy Gray about this, because Brianna, you know, she's close to Bernie, she's close to a lot of Democrat insiders.
00:06:36.000Do you sort of like, this is what I want to know, is like, here what Trump is able to do, is he's able to diagnose and address problems that many American people believe are endemic.
00:06:45.000Oh yeah, just because there's an election coming up, they're doing stuff, oh they're using this.
00:06:49.000You know like, now they have not been able to actually actually address the problem of Trump, yes because of a
00:06:56.000lack of charismatic leadership, but above all else because I can't say, listen this isn't
00:07:01.000what we're like, we're not like that, they are like that, that is the problem, you know when you
00:07:08.000That's exactly what I just thought then Russ, well exactly you know when you say that the way
00:07:12.000that people respond to Trump versus the way that people see the Democrats at the moment,
00:07:16.000when you have Kamala Harris go and deliver a speech about how successful the Democrats have been,
00:07:21.000how historic this bill is that we're you know bringing down Medicare,
00:07:25.000we're allowing Medicare to negotiate prices, when you then find out that it's
00:07:29.000Ten drugs, four seniors, it's actually probably more like six of the ten, that you're paying a thousand times more as Americans than people in other countries for the same drugs.
00:07:38.000It's rubbish and that's why people gravitate to Donald Trump.
00:07:42.000And just on an interpersonal social level, the way that Kamala Harris makes that announcement, she's sort of smiling, super pleased, she refers to Joe Biden as a hero, she's chuckling gleefully.
00:07:54.000I'd like to almost say this, Like, from the most cynical perspective, if you were a Democrat Party insider, go, look, see this?
00:08:06.000Like, what Kamala Harris could have been saying is, look, we initially came out and said, well, you saw Joe Biden say we beat Big Pharma this year.
00:08:13.000I'm afraid because of Presumably all of the lobbying or the donation money because of the complex relationships with people in Congress and pharmaceutical companies investing in firms they regulate because the FDA accept money from the pharmaceutical companies that they are supposed to be regulating.
00:08:28.000What we've ended up with is not all drug prices capped far from it. Even some pretty egregious examples of
00:08:34.000exploitation, certain cancer medications that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that could
00:08:39.000have a white label alternative introduced. We've not done none of that. We've not done
00:08:42.000that. What you're going to end up with, I'm afraid to tell you, is six to ten drugs, as Gareth
00:08:45.000just said, as long as there's no generic competition and as long as they've been on the
00:08:49.000market nine years. This is, and it's only for seniors and it don't kick in until 2026.
00:09:06.000And you guys know, if you're a fan of our show, you know, we do not think voting in the Republican party, even under Trump, is going to make your life any better.
00:09:15.000There needs to be significant Systemic change.
00:11:37.000They can justify more lockdowns, more censorship, more illegal drop boxes, more mail-in ballots, and trillions of dollars in payoffs to their political allies heading into the 2024 election.
00:12:08.000We will not abide by your mask mandates.
00:12:11.000And we will not tolerate your vaccine mandates.
00:12:15.000They rigged the 2020 election, and now they're trying to do the same thing all over again by rigging the Most important election in the history of our country, the 2024 election, even if it means trying to bring back COVID.
00:12:30.000But they will fail because we will not let it happen.
00:12:34.000When I'm back in the White House, I will use every available authority to cut federal funding to any school, college, airline, or public transportation system that imposes a mask mandate or a vaccine mandate.
00:14:01.000As a matter of fact, I signed off this morning on a proposal we have to present to the Congress a request for additional funding for a new vaccine.
00:14:15.000Oh, well, the other ones, but I thought the other... We're on YouTube, Joe!
00:14:19.000We're on YouTube, because it sounds like what you're saying is that the other vaccine... I mean, they all, surely, I mean, like, jeez, I'm going to have to do this for Joe Biden.
00:14:44.000That kind of hokey folksy lying about the Hawaiian fires?
00:14:47.000And his own one isn't the Hawaiian fires, his own fires, which are pretty minor.
00:14:51.000Again, I think when you look at the speech that Trump just delivered, and you again say, why are people gravitating towards that?
00:14:58.000The Democrats at this point should be addressing, like with the Hawaii fires, yes, we send this amount of money to Ukraine, and only this amount of money to Hawaii.
00:15:08.000Yes, we're giving this amount of money to the makers of these vaccines, even though they're guilty of all these things in the past, but that's just the way it is.
00:15:19.000You know, give people the facts on this, that they're transparent, and address the issues that people have, and then just go on the telly and say, yeah, we're putting more money into a new vaccine.
00:15:53.000We are glad that you are with us on this journey to a mutual awakening.
00:15:57.000In a moment, though, we're going to slink off into the clandestine spaces where free speech truly does reign free.
00:16:04.000In fact, let's get over there now because I want to have a little conversation about this stuff.
00:16:07.000So click the link in your description, guys.
00:16:10.000If you're watching this on YouTube, get over Get over to the other place where we're going to talk freely about Tucker's latest interview, its connotations, and how do you frame the legacy of great leaders, okay?
00:16:23.000If you're watching us on Rumble, get into the chat.
00:16:25.000They're going crazy in there, these guys.
00:16:28.000Psychodrama and Maz64, all of this lot.
00:16:31.000Beth in Wonderland, oh yeah, you're talking about that stuff.
00:16:34.000Even I'm not willing to talk about some of that.
00:16:35.000You lot will love it in there, because they're going for it in that place, so it's really worth joining.
00:16:40.000And if you become an Awakened Wonder, you get all sorts of crazy advantages.
00:16:43.000You would have already seen the Sam Harris chat that we had that's gone viral.
00:16:48.000I see our friend on Rumble, Dave Rubin, was talking about that earlier, and talking about his own feelings.
00:16:55.000I like to have conversations where you engage with people with a different perspective.
00:16:59.000If you've not seen that on Locals yet, if you're not an awakened wonder, you can see it on Rumble tomorrow, uncut, unexpurgated, and in some cases, unforgivable.
00:18:05.000We'll just wait for the moment where we decentralise all authority and then we can work out actual true government by consent where you pay for the things you want to pay for and it'll make sense to you because it'll affect your own life and your own sense of community that you derive from the relationships you have, not some imposed top-down dystopian nightmare where you're surveilled from the sky.
00:18:22.000You know me, I'm a drug addict in recovery, and I lived a pretty crazy life, baby.
00:18:28.000So, like, you know, when it came to the Hunter Biden laptop, and when it comes to this story about Barack Obama, and this man who my wife consistently describes as her darling, what's he called?
00:19:00.000And being a heterosexual, as I've always thought of myself as being, perhaps due to a lack of spirit inquiry, I had to, in that case... You had to decline, didn't you?
00:20:28.000I guess maybe a way of looking at it, you could say, is that for many people, I think they feel like Obama was not what he was purported to be.
00:20:37.000That what Obama came in, hope and change, all the things he said he was going to do, those things didn't end up, you know, being done.
00:20:45.000And that maybe this is the kind of manifestation that people can now turn to to say, you see, it was a lie.
00:20:51.000He wasn't what he was purported to be, wasn't what he was saying he was.
00:20:54.000And maybe it's about something I mean that's always what's offered when people report on people's private life.
00:20:59.000Devin Watson in our chat says, ah so the people that Edward Snowden informed us was spying on us don't like it when it happens to them.
00:21:08.000TNS Base Girl says that's what matters about it, all the cover-ups.
00:21:13.000And it's also a curious moment to take the temperature of how the legacy media is squaring up against new emergent independent media.
00:21:22.000You can bet that legacy media ain't going to want to cover this story at all, even to disparage it and deny it, I would imagine, because they're not going to want to give it any air.
00:21:30.000They're not going to want to elevate it.
00:21:31.000And many people are saying that this story has been out there for a while.
00:21:33.000Well, also, Joe Biden at the moment needs Obama's help.
00:21:36.000I mean, Obama is kind of sweeping in there to save Joe Biden, to get the numbers back up, to get his popularity back up, so this coming out this time is not ideal at all.
00:21:44.000Well, I've not watched this yet because I'm always sort of like, as I say, it's not really my bag, but let's check it out.
00:21:49.000Well, we were talking about this earlier because we'll probably look at it in more depth over the coming weeks as we get a bit more of a handle on it all, so to speak.
00:21:56.000But what Gareth said, as Gareth always says in such times, is What about the fact that during Obama's presidency he carried on droning?
00:22:04.000Innocent people died as a result of drone strikes.
00:22:09.000The fact that the banks were bailed out instead of ordinary Americans when there was a perfect opportunity to reform and reshape America organically.
00:22:19.000Populism means ordinary people en masse come ahead of establishment elites.
00:22:25.000But because their model requires supremacy of government rather than consensus and governance by consent, they have to assume that people are somehow engaged in skullduggery, dirty, incapable of making decisions for themselves.
00:22:40.000Take a look at the pandemic approach by Sweden, Versus the pandemic approach in countries like ours, the UK and yours, the United States.
00:22:47.000They emulated China when it came to it.
00:22:50.000Unlike Sweden who went, look, let's just let people do what they're going to do.
00:22:54.000You know, this ultimately is meant to be motivated by the sanctity of life.
00:23:10.000But who believes that's the truth anymore?
00:23:12.000And with Fauci's recent acknowledgement that masks across populations were not effective but at the level of the individual they were effective, that's essentially saying the same thing.
00:23:32.000If you need a vaccine, get yourself a vaccine.
00:23:35.000Otherwise, crack on guys, live your own lives, be sensible, love one another.
00:23:39.000But because there is no love in the culture, because it's Built on hatred, condemnation, divisionism, divisiveness, cruelty, condemnation, materialism and individualism.
00:23:47.000They've got no recourse to that rhetoric.
00:23:50.000So we've got to see how this story fits into that landscape and acknowledge that it's unproven and it's ultimately allegations about a person's family life.
00:25:33.000Wait a minute, what if I... Look, I bet you lot, you will believe it anyway, innit, because you're just like, you're rabble rousers, innit?
00:25:53.000Remember to check your own sort of biases.
00:25:55.000Yeah, if someone goes meh, someone else says cringe, a lot of Well I think it'd be better that we're reminded about Obama's record in office.
00:27:42.000So listen, when they talk about disinformation, malinformation, misinformation, are they trying to protect you, or are they trying to protect you from pretty crazy, potentially seditious content like this?
00:27:55.000Because I guess, you know, it's all fair game now.
00:28:05.000You can't take independent media seriously.
00:28:07.000This will be used by the legacy media to kind of smear independent media, I would say.
00:28:11.000But like, again, kind of what's worse, like Obama used the Espionage Act More than any of the presidents before him.
00:28:19.000That's essentially silenced whistleblowers from revealing things about what the government is doing.
00:28:23.000The way they're spying on you, the use of drone warfare, all those kind of things.
00:28:28.000What is worse, Tucker revealing something like this, whether it's true or not, or those things, the way that Obama and his administration silenced whistleblowers.
00:28:49.000And that's an interesting thing because we live in this kind of nihilistic, materialistic, slanderous, salacious, ghastly, filthy place.
00:28:56.000All of this mud slinging, no access to the limitless light, to the principles of love and service and empathy and compassion.
00:29:03.000This kind of stuff, this is the way it's going to roll, this is the way it's going to go.
00:29:07.000Let's talk to a serious political contributor, co-host on The Heel, host of Bad Faith podcast, former press secretary to Bernie Sanders, it's Brianna Joy Gray.
00:29:17.000Welcome back Brianna, thank you so much for coming on our show again.
00:29:20.000Thank you so much for having me, Russell.
00:29:22.000Brianna, I wonder if you, I suppose you fundamentally would agree with Gareth's analysis that salacious stories of this nature are going to be the type of phenomena that emerges from a fragmented and fractured independent media space.
00:29:35.000But when it comes to Barack Obama's record in office, do you think it's fair to say that holding him up as a champion and as a patriarch of the Democrat movement feels Unreasonable and unfair in light of some of the facts that Gareth just cited.
00:29:51.000The drone strikes, the wars, the failures in 2008.
00:29:54.000And you as a Democrat Party insider, how do you feel about that aspect of Barack Obama's life?
00:30:01.000As well as touch upon this if you feel inclined.
00:30:05.000That is the point that we need to be nailing home.
00:30:08.000But the reality of the situation is that people do pay more attention to kind of salacious, personalized gossip than they do to a war crime from 10 years ago.
00:30:18.000And I do think it's been the struggle of a lot of very serious-minded independent media to try to figure out what kind of balance they can strike to get people to tune in once they've gotten tired of hearing about East Palestine, Ohio, or a homelessness crisis, or even Maui.
00:30:33.000Do you go ahead and engage with some of these stories, mix it in, do a spoonful of sugar?
00:30:37.000I think that approach largely works, but in this particular story, it's a little awkward because unlike 2008, the country's moved a really far way to the left in terms of how they perceive homosexuality, the idea that a president might be bisexual or have had this kind of interactions in the past.
00:30:58.000Don't seem as damning as they might have been at a time when the legacy media might have buried this kind of story in order to protect Barack Obama.
00:31:05.000So it does sort of feel like it diminishes the broader project of independent media in some ways to be talking about it.
00:31:12.000At the same time that I completely understand why if a story like this falls in your lap, you would want to cover it.
00:31:17.000I think the question is, what is Tucker Carlson's framing going to be?
00:31:21.000And why is he going to say that this story matters?
00:31:25.000Well Tucker Carlson has been on this show and had a significant interview at that.
00:31:31.000It was his first one since he left Fox.
00:31:34.000I feel he has a pretty unique ability to frame information and connect emotionally with his audience.
00:31:42.000Many people have noted that it was young people that were tuning into Fox to tune into Tucker.
00:31:48.000Now Fox is perhaps the most significant figure by Joe Rogan in the independent media space.
00:31:54.000It further highlights that there is this great uncrossable schism between the mainstream
00:31:59.000media who I imagine won't touch this story, or if they do, they will in the most euphemistic
00:32:15.000I was saying at the beginning of the show when we were covering Trump's bombastic speech, rallying and rallying cry to disobey any potential future lockdowns.
00:32:23.000I was thinking, you know, like this has more emotional calibre and and resonance than watching Kamala Harris and Joe Biden
00:32:34.000announcing a muted and watered down pharmaceutical bill that amounts to, and I'm citing mostly
00:32:40.000David Sirota's piece in the leather here, uh that amounts to a handful of medicines that haven't got
00:32:45.000generic competition. It's just such a lot of nonsense that that kind of rhetoric remains
00:32:51.000appealing. What are the Democrat party going to do to address this lack of resonance and possibly coming soon
00:32:58.000relevance? I mean frankly I would love to see Barack Obama not just hammered on his foreign
00:33:05.000policy but on having a trifecta with a filibuster proof majority in the senate and still making
00:33:12.000such horrible compromises with health care.
00:33:14.000Yes, was Obamacare a significant step forward?
00:33:18.000Sure, but only viewed in the context of all of our peer countries across the world.
00:33:25.000It's a sad state of affairs for the American healthcare system, but that's still heralded as the biggest advancement in our healthcare system since the 1940s.
00:33:32.000So, you know, I do think I would One of my critiques, I think, of the way the independent media is going, and I see this as someone who has her own podcast and is an independent media person who has all the critiques of legacy media, who has been personally blacklisted by Joanne Reed.
00:33:51.000Like, I say this as someone who is rooting for independent media.
00:33:55.000There is this frustrating need to kind of chase An algorithm.
00:33:59.000If you don't have a corporation that's forcing you onto somebody's TV screen, you've got to figure out how to make it work.
00:34:06.000And I've heard you dance around the kinds of sanctions.
00:34:11.000You know, if you say something about the vaccine, you might get censored on the social media.
00:34:14.000The Hill got taken down for, I believe, a week for simply playing a Trump speech, like C-SPAN style, in which he did, which he denied the election results.
00:34:23.000And then the channel, The Hill, got stung for it.
00:34:26.000So that is happening at the same time that you're trying to bring people the kind of news that benefits you in the algorithm.
00:34:32.000And that can lead you in one direction or the other.
00:34:34.000And I've realized that for myself, I don't just want to criticize Barack Obama for not going far enough on health care or Joe Biden for not going far enough on health care.
00:34:42.000Certainly, Donald Trump didn't do anything meaningful for health care in this regard as well.
00:34:47.000But I want to be applying pressure prospectively to the politicians that are fighting for our votes right now to be fighting with each other about how much more they can do than the politicians of yesteryear.
00:34:58.000And sometimes I think the balance of criticizing people for past actions versus pressuring people who are still in contention today to do better for us is a little out of I really do appreciate articles and outlets like The Lever for making very clear what the potential is in the current moment so that we can use that information to try to extract more prospectively.
00:35:21.000you know. Do you think that this new collision and fusion between radical, if that's the
00:35:28.000appropriate word, outsider candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy over there with the Republicans,
00:35:34.000who's been on our show and people dig him, and like Robert F. Kennedy, who also has been
00:35:40.000on and people love him, and actually I love him a bit as well. I like he's a man in recovery.
00:35:45.000He's about to beat me in a pull-up competition. Do you think that their ability to gain traction
00:35:50.000in spaces like this, bypassing legacy media, suggests that perhaps the Democrat Party,
00:35:58.000apparently as it is in thrall of a donor class and a kind of odd hereditary principle between
00:36:04.000Clintons and Obamas and Bidens and whatnot, or embrace as they perhaps ought to have done
00:36:09.000in the time of Bernie Sanders, a campaign that I know that you were significantly involved
00:36:23.000What prevents this kind of change and this kind of embrace happening, Brianna?
00:36:28.000Look, as heartening as it is that outsider candidates can get some traction and chart on the board as if you will, despite not being embraced by legacy media.
00:36:39.000At the end of the day, we see that the legacy media still has an enormous amount of power.
00:36:43.000So, you know, Bernie Sanders got pretty far.
00:36:49.000But at the end of the day, when there's double-digit millions of earned media for Barack Obama, sorry, for Joe Biden, for Joe Biden after he wins South Carolina, after he lost catastrophically the first three primary contests.
00:37:03.000Remember, I think he came fifth place in one of those first three primary contests.
00:37:07.000The media didn't a heap Negative media on him following that.
00:37:10.000In fact, when Bernie won Nevada, there was a flood of negative, negative media for Bernie Sanders.
00:37:17.000I think that was the moment where they started saying that he was in Putin's pocket and Chris Matthews did his whole screen about how we're going to have beheadings, socialist beheadings in Central Park if Bernie Sanders wins, you know?
00:37:29.000So they do have an effect to put their thumb on the scale still.
00:37:32.000And RFK Jr., despite having a kind of breakout moment, is kind of stalling, declining in the polls.
00:37:38.000I think that's largely because of the positions he's taken on Israel-Palestine, which feel very establishment,
00:37:43.000poll-tested, frankly, and completely out of step with the outsider image and outsider, I think, credibility
00:38:14.000platform multiple times in a way that it hasn't Marianne Williamson.
00:38:17.000So there, you know, I wouldn't say that he has not had the benefit of legacy media.
00:38:22.000I would say that he hasn't had the benefit of liberal legacy media.
00:38:25.000Bernie of course was an independent before he joined the Democrat party.
00:38:29.000Cornel West now is calling out figures like AOC and Bernie for becoming co-opted by the party that they were supposed to oppose and certainly improve.
00:38:40.000Do you think it's a time to recognise that the way that Independent media is changing media spaces and that legacy media, whilst as you have explained, still have influence, are ultimately atrophying and that new political movements could similarly emerge, particularly if there were alliances between independent media and new independent political parties.
00:39:03.000Or is the system just too rigged, Brianna?
00:39:06.000So I do think that independent media is useful and helpful.
00:39:09.000I don't think that, for example, Bernie would have gotten as far as he did if there hadn't been a kind of consensus among what at the time was just an emergent independent media system.
00:39:19.000Channels like The Young Turks, people like Kyle Kalinske of Secular Talks had big, nearly million, you know, million plus subscriber followings.
00:39:27.000And when Bernie came, it was at just that moment where they were able to flex their newfound power.
00:39:34.000And create a kind of public consensus and counter-programming to what we were hearing on the mainstream news.
00:40:47.000We're seeing all of those old groups that fell in behind Bernie immediately been the need to endorse Joe Biden, despite how anti-union he has demonstrated himself to have been in recent history.
00:40:59.000And to me, that's much more disappointing than, you know, Rachel Maddow going on some nonsense screed about Putin controlling whomever.
00:41:11.000Cornel West coming on next week, by the way, so make sure you have a little look at that.
00:41:18.000Brianna, how do you feel about this kind of evident gap between what is declared publicly and what is happening privately, whether it's around the coronavirus pandemic, whether it's the war between Russia and Ukraine, likely outcomes, predicted outcomes, nature of funding, the inability to connect with people, in Hawaii, the misstep around the East Palestine disaster
00:41:43.000that you've mentioned, but most notably this peculiar, and I mean this sort of literally, Orwellian
00:41:50.000inversion of terms like war and peace.
00:41:53.000Eastern European NATO countries are apparently scared of a peace deal in Ukraine. I'm sure there
00:41:58.000are political reasons for that, like, oh no, then Russia will come for them next, you know,
00:42:02.000propaganda. But where do we get off, so like, you know, like claiming that peace oughtn't be
00:42:08.000desirable, that the United States oughtn't be using their considerable influence to assert
00:42:16.000How have we ended up in this place of inversion, distinction and this lack of connection between ordinary people and those that govern?
00:42:25.000I mean, the American public has been the victim of a well-funded, harsh propaganda effort since before the end of the Cold War, obviously.
00:42:35.000And the terms have changed, but the effect has not in the least.
00:42:38.000And I'm so grateful, again, to have independent media outlets like, for example, The Grey Zone, who has been Covering these particular issues, sending reporters to South Africa to cover the BRICS conference and the induction of new members into that economic alliance.
00:42:53.000I just spoke to Anya Parampil on Bad Faith, my own podcast, recently.
00:42:58.000And I do think that we are finally breaking through in seeing that the United States,
00:43:03.000through its own militarism, has sowed the seeds of its own destruction.
00:43:07.000It has pushed other countries through sanctions and war to a point at which they're no longer willing
00:43:14.000to bend the knee to a unipolar, American-dominated economic system.
00:43:18.000And the war in Ukraine was that tipping point in many ways.
00:43:22.000The global South took the biggest brunt of the consequences of Ukraine,
00:43:26.000the breadbasket of Europe, no longer being able to provide goods to the global South.
00:43:31.000The Nord Stream pipeline, who knows who blew that one up,
00:43:35.000but the willingness to hurt a stated ally in Germany and a multimillion-dollar infrastructure project,
00:43:44.000multi-billion-dollar infrastructure project in order to force them into allegiances with us
00:43:49.000against the interests of their own people.
00:43:52.000All of this is being laid increasingly bare and the global South, the rest of the world is realizing that they no longer have to be in the United States.
00:43:59.000I do think Americans are going to have to unlearn so much of what we've learned about the idea that our personal prosperity and American prosperity is linked to our military might and dominance over the rest of the world.
00:44:13.000I think China has been modeling different ways to provide Benefit to other countries to secure favorable trade terms, building infrastructure instead of building bombs.
00:44:24.000And I do think there needs to be more global solidarity and understanding that my interest and the interest of the average Ukrainian citizen, the average Russian citizen and the average Somali citizen are much more aligned with the leadership of all of these countries who are invested in maintaining a system of power where they I'm optimistic about the mask coming off of what's been going on, but there needs to be a focus again on pushing our prospective and currently elected leaders on what they're going to do about it.
00:44:49.000I'm optimistic about the mask coming off of what's been going on,
00:44:55.000but there needs to be a focus again on pushing our prospective and currently elected leaders
00:45:23.000Because it is also being framed as Biden's war and it's a way to come off as anti-Biden.
00:45:27.000Are you sincerely anti-war regardless of who's president and support a cut to the military budget, the likes of which we basically never had?
00:45:34.000And she said, no, I like our military.
00:45:39.000So those are the kind of questions we need to be asking so that I think a good faith populist anti-war sentiment that is being shared on both the right and the left, the anti-establishment sentiment that's out there isn't going to be exploited by certain bad actors.
00:45:51.000I would argue Vivek Ramaswamy has similarly said things that would point to an escalation in a war with China despite being critical of the war in Ukraine.
00:46:00.000So we have to look at the bigger picture here and not allow our sincere desire to be anti-war, to be exploited by people who still take money from the same old people, still take money from the same old corporatists, or independently funded, but aren't getting small dollar donations, the likes of which would keep them accountable to the people.
00:46:17.000We've got to be really circumspect about what people are saying or whether or not they have the bona fides to back up that they're really going to fulfill our populist desires.
00:46:26.000Brianna, you do such a great work in presenting the nuanced approach that you suggest that all of us take when attempting to address these significant and intersecting issues.
00:46:40.000Even something as evidently salacious as the topic that we began our conversation with has to be understood, undertaken and analysed from that perspective.
00:46:51.000What are we talking about when we're talking about power?
00:46:53.000What are we talking about when we talk about media, independent or otherwise?
00:46:57.000And what do we mean when we talk about populism and a deliberate and authentic anti-war stance?
00:47:02.000Thank you so much for joining us, Brianna.
00:47:05.000It's always a great pleasure to speak with you.
00:47:09.000You can catch Brianna Joy Gray on The Hill pretty regular, plus her podcast Bad Faith is worth listening to if you want to hear a different perspective articulately conveyed.
00:47:19.000And I'm sure, and I can see that you're applauding Brianna in the comments there, you will do just that.
00:47:31.000It has already gone viral, which means that if you are a member of our locals community, you might already have seen it.
00:47:37.000All you have to do is press the red button and become an Awakened Wonder.
00:47:41.000Some of you might even get some underpants, or Wonderpants.
00:47:44.000Awakened Wonderpants, they're being called, is a phenomena in itself.
00:47:48.000That, along with Vile Slops, our new Designed to compete with prime drink can put you but with a difference don't put lead in your pencil mate.
00:47:57.000You better believe it That'll give you some a boost where it matters mate.
00:48:02.000I'll tell you that great interview with Brianna.
00:48:07.000She's amazing enjoyed it a lot One of the things we're trying to do, you lot, is we want people from the left and the right to come on and sort of, and you start to hear a kind of converging anti-establishment sentiment that gives you some hope instead of, like, when you watch the extremes of both parties as they're sort of known, you think, oh no, man, this is going to be crazy, this is going to be some sort of, well, there's no way of things ever being resolved.
00:48:29.000Yeah, I thought that was a great point at the end.
00:48:31.000You know, do we want a decrease in the military budget and spend the money on American people, not just to Ukraine?
00:48:37.000Or do we want to send it off to military in China?